They knew, these poilus, these veterans.  Every soldier who serves in Lorraine knows.  They themselves have tried to rush out of the edge of a woods across an open space against intrenched Germans and found the shoe on the other foot.

Now the fields in the foreground down to the woods’ edge were bare of any living thing.  You had to take mon capitaine’s word for it that there were any soldiers in front of us.

“The Boches are a good distance away at this point,” he said.  “They are in the next woods.”

A broad stretch of snow lay between the two clumps of woods.  It was not worth while for either side to try to get possession of the intervening space.  At the first movement by either French or Germans the woods opposite would hum with rifle fire and echo with cannonading.  So, like rival parties of Arctic explorers waiting out the Arctic winter, they watched each other.  But if one force or the other napped and the other caught him at it, then winter would not stay a brigade commander’s ambition.  Three days later in this region the French, by a quick movement, got a good bag of prisoners to make a welcome item for the daily French official bulletin.

“We wait and the Germans wait on spring for any big movement,” said the colonel.  “Men can’t lie out all night in the advance in weather like this.  In that direction------” He indicated a part of the line where the two armies were facing each other across the old frontier.  Back and forth they had fought, only to arrive where they had begun.

There was something else which the colonel wished us to see before we left the hill of Ste. Genevieve.  It appealed to his Gallic sentiment, this quadrilateral of stone on the highest point where legend tells that “Jovin, a Christian and very faithful, vanquished the German barbarians 366 A.D.”

“We have to do as well in our day as Jovin in his,” remarked the colonel.

The church of Ste. Genevieve was badly smashed by shell.  So was the church in the village on the Plateau d’Amance, as are most churches in this district of Lorraine.  Framed through a great gap in the wall of the church of Amance was an immense Christ on the cross without a single abrasion, and a pile of debris at its feet.  After seeing as many ruined churches as I have, one becomes almost superstitious at how often the figures of Christ escape.  But I have also seen effigies of Christ blown to bits.

Anyone who, from an eminence, has seen one battle fought visualizes another readily when the positions lie at his feet.  Looking out on the field of Gettysburg from Round Top, I can always get the same thrill that I had when, seated in a gallery above the Russian and the Japanese armies, I saw the battle of Liao-yang.  In sight of that Plateau d’Amance, which rises like a great knuckle above the surrounding country, a battle covering twenty times the extent of Gettysburg raged, and one could have looked over a battle-line as far as the eye may see from a steamer’s mast.