drive along forty miles of the Siegfried Line. On several places we—i.e., two American journalists and myself—were so near the frontier that we could hear the German soldiers talk and could have thrown stones into the mouths of howitzers and machineguns. Host of the fortifications that we. saw were stilt sender construclion. These were by far the most interesting ones as the camouflage of the finished ones is (.rtr( Ind y clever.
Feverish Building
Our travelling was done along the banks of the Moselle, the Sure and the Our on Luxemburg territory. The Remich we reached the Scheuerberg, about four hundred feet above the Moselle, from which we were only one mile away.
First Battlefield
Here we had a very fine view of the German and French frontier districts. We saw the villages of Pert, Sehndorf, Borg, Nennig, Tettingen, and so on; the Borg forest, where the first battle in this war had been fought, between French and German armoured ears; a number of field fortifications and trenches.
Both the Maginot and the Siegfried lines are here rather far behind the frontier.
There was violent artillery fire in the hills en the opposite side of the river. We saw smoke rising here and there and could distinguish a certain number of machine-gun nests. We were, however, rather surprised that
which the Luxemburger really liked— because one could be sure that they would not stay long.
Everything was Quiet
Everything was almost completely quiet. Only every few minutes some detonation could be heard far away. It hs.d been reported that Perl had suffered several heavy bombardments. With one or two exceptions the houses looked quite normal.
Just on the entrance of Schengen we saw some primitive air raid shelters. There were quite a few civilians on the village streets, besides a dozen or no of gendarmes and Luxemburg soldiers.
Schengen had been evacuated in the early days of September, but about half the population has come back. So far nobody has been killed or seriously injured. There were half a dozen minor accidents caused by dynamite explosions beyond the river and by shells which