The position of the wood, to the right of Douaumont, was important as part of the French line.  It was carried by the Germans on Sunday morning, April 2, after a bombardment of twelve hours, which seemed to break even the record of Verdun for intensity.  The French curtain of fire had checked their further advance, according to a special correspondent of the Chicago Herald, and a savage countercharge in the afternoon had gained for the defenders a corpse-strewn welter of splintered trees and shell-shattered ground that had been the southern corner of the wood.  Further charges had broken against a massive barricade, the value of which as a defense paid good interest on the expenditure of German lives which its construction demanded.  A wonderful work had been accomplished that Sunday morning in the livid, London-like fog and twilight produced by the lowering clouds and battle smoke.

FORMED A HUMAN CHAIN UNDER FIRE.

While the German assaulting columns in the van fought the French hand to hand, picked corps of workers behind them formed an amazing human chain from the woods to the east over the shoulder of the center of the Douaumont slope to the crossroads of a network of communicating trenches 600 yards in the rear.

Four deep was this human chain, and along its line nearly 3,000 men passed an unending stream of wooden billets, sandbags, chevaux-de-frise, steel shelters, and light mitrailleuses—­in a word, all the material for defensive fortifications passed from hand to hand, like buckets at a country fire.

Despite the hurricane of French artillery fire, the German commander had adopted the only possible means of rapid transport over the shell-torn ground covered with debris, over which neither horse nor cart could go.  Every moment counted.  Unless barriers rose swiftly, the French counter-attacks, already massing, would sweep the assailants back into the wood.

Cover was disdained.  The workers stood at full height, and the chain stretched openly across the hillocks, a fair target for the French gunners.  The latter missed no chance.  Again and again great holes were torn in the line by the bursting melinite, but as coolly as at maneuvers the iron-disciplined soldiers of Germany sprang forward from shelters to take the places of the fallen, and the work went on apace.

USE THE DEAD AS A SHELTER.

Gradually another line doubled the chain of the workers, as the upheaved corpses formed a continuous embankment, each additional dead man giving greater protection to his comrades, until the barrier began to form shape along the diameter of the wood.  There others were digging and burying logs deep in the earth, installing shelters and mitrailleuses or feverishly building fortifications.

At last the work was ended at fearful cost; but as the vanguard sullenly withdrew behind it, from the whole length burst a havoc of flame upon the advancing Frenchmen.  Vainly the latter dashed forward.  They couldn’t pass, and as the evening fell the barrier still held, covering the German working parties, burrowed like moles in the mass of trenches and boyeaux.