“Those guns that I hear, are they firing across the frontier?” I asked.  For some French batteries command one of the outer forts of Metz.

“No, they are near Pont-a-Mousson.”

To the north the little town of Pont-a-Mousson lay in the lap of the river bottom, and across the valley, to the west, the famous Bois le Pretre.  More guns were speaking from the forest depths, which showed great scars where the trees had been cut to give fields of fire.  This was well to the rear of our position, marking the boundaries of the wedge that the Germans drove into the French lines, with its point at St. Mihiel, in trying to isolate the forts of Verdun and Toul.  Doubtless you have noticed that wedge on the snake maps and have wondered about it, as I have.  It looks so narrow that the French ought to be able to shoot across it from both sides.  If so, why don’t the Germans widen it?

Well, for one thing, a quarter of an inch on a map is a good many miles of ground.  The Germans cannot spread their wedge because they would have to climb the walls of an alley.  That was a fact as clear to the eye as the valley of the Hudson from West Point.  The Germans occupy an alley within an alley, as it were.  They have their own natural defences for the edges of their wedge; or, where they do not, they lie cheek by jowl with the French in such thick woods as the Bois le Pretre.

At our feet, looking toward Metz, an apron of cultivated land swept down for a mile or more to a forest edge.  This was cut by lines of trenches, whose barbed-wire protection pricked a blanket of snow.

“Our front is in those woods,” explained the colonel who was in command of the point.

“A major when the war began and an officer of reserves,” mon capitaine, who had brought us out from Paris, explained about the colonel.  We were soon used to hearing that a colonel had been a major or a major a captain before the Kaiser had tried to get Nancy.  There was quick death and speedy promotion at the great battle of Lorraine, as there was at Gettysburg and Antietam.

“They charged out of the woods, and we had a battalion of reserves—­ here are some of them—­mes poilus!”

He turned affectionately to the bearded fellows in scarfs who had come out of the shelter.  They smiled back.  Now, as we all chatted together, officer-and-man distinction disappeared.  We were in a family party.

It was all very simple to mes poilus, that first fight.  They had been told to hold.  If Ste. Genevieve were lost, the Amance plateau was in danger, and the loss of the Amance plateau meant the fall of Nancy.  Some military martinets say that the soldiers of France think too much.  In this case thinking may have taught them responsibility.  So they held; they lay tight, these reserves, and kept on firing as the Germans swarmed out of the woods.

“And the Germans stopped there, monsieur.  They hadn’t very far to go, had they?  But the last fifty yards, monsieur, are the hardest travelling when you are trying to take a trench.”