It is now sixty years since the surrender of Marshal Bazaine’s army in Metz, and only the very old can have a personal recollection of that fateful war, and only the extremely aged can have taken any active part in it, if indeed any such are still alive.

I was in Metz as a boy when we were as near to the war of 1870 as we are now to the war of 1914, and it so happened that owing to certain circumstances the events of that all important drama were early impressed on my mind to an unusual extent. I soon became fascinated by it and as I grew older read anything that bore on the subject and eagerly listened to any stories from those who had taken part in it. ‘The war,’ as we always called it, was the one outstanding event in Europe to my mind, and it has haunted me ever since.

Since that day I never re-entered Metz or Strasbourg until the year 1929, but twenty years ago I went over the battlefields round Metz, walking over the then frontier from Pagny-sur-Moselle. A dislike of seeing the German uniforms in those provinces had grown up with me, though I was not, and never have been, antiGerman as such. Indeed, the recovery of the lost provinces ought to go far to end the Franco-German hostility, just as in the sixteenth century Sir F. Walsingham said of Calais : ‘That was the great obstacle to any Anglo-French friendship, but now that it has gone (ie., the French have it), where is the difficulty?’