The Doctor of Pimlico by William le Queux — Read

THERE is in the far north-west of France a broad, white highway which runs from Chalons, crosses the green Meuse valley, mounts the steep, high, tree-fringed lands of the Cotes Lorraines, and goes almost straight as an arrow across what was, before the war, the German frontier at Mars-la-Tour into quaint old Metz, that town with ancient streets, musical chimes, and sad monument to Frenchmen who fell in the disastrous never-to-be-forgotten war of '70.

This road has ever been one of the most strongly guarded highways in the world, for, between the Moselle, at Metz, and the Meuse, the country is a flat plain smiling under cultivation, with vines and cornfields everywhere, and comfortable little homesteads of the peasantry. This was once the great battlefield whereon Gravelotte was fought long ago, and where the Prussians swept back the French like chaff before the wind, and where France, later on, defeated the Crown Prince's army. The peasants, in ploughing, daily turn up a rusty bayonet, a rotting gun-stock, a skull, a thigh-bone, or some other hideous relic of those black days; while the old men in their blouses sit of nights smoking and telling thrilling stories of the ferocity of that helmeted enemy from yonder across the winding Moselle. In recent days it has been again devastated by the great world war, as its gaunt ruins mutely tell.