Forests and streams and ditches and railway culverts played their part in tactical surprises, as they did at Gettysburg; and cemetery walls, too.  In all my battlefield visits in Europe I have not seen a single cemetery wall that was not loopholed.  But the fences, which throughout the Civil War offered impediment to charges and screen to the troops which could reach them first, were missing.  The fields lay in bold stretches, because it is the business of young boys and girls in Lorraine to watch the cows and keep them out of the corn.

We stopped at a cross-roads where charges met and wrestled back and forth in and out of the ditches.  Fragments of shells appeared as steps scuffed away the thin coating of snow.  I picked up an old French cap, with a slash in the top that told how its owner came to his end, and near by a German helmet.  For there are souvenirs in plenty lying in the young wheat which was sown after the battle was over.  Millions of little nickel bullets are ploughed in with the blood of those who died to take the Kaiser to Paris and those who died to keep him out in this fighting across the fields and through the forests, in a tug-of-war of give-and-take, of men exhausted after nights and days under fire, men with bloodshot eyes sunk deep in the sockets, dust-laden, blood-spattered, with forty years of latent human powder breaking forth into hell when the war was only a month old and passion was at a white heat.

Hasty shelter-trenches gridiron the land; such trenches as breathless men, dropping after a charge, threw up hurriedly with the spades that they carry on their backs to give them a little cover.  And there is the trench that stopped the Germans—­the trench which they charged but could not take.  It lies among shell-holes so thick that you can step from one to another.  In places its crest is torn away, which means that half a dozen men were killed in a group.  But reserves filled their places.  They kept pouring out their stream of lead which German courage could not endure.  Thus far and no farther the invasion came in that wheat-field which will be ever memorable.

We went up a hill once crowned by one of those clusters of farm-buildings of stone and mortar, where house and stables and granaries are close together.  All around were bare fields.  Those farm-buildings stood up like a mountain peak.  The French had the hill and lost it and recovered it.  Whichever side had it, the other was bound to bathe it in shells because it commanded the country around.  The value of property meant nothing.  All that counted was military advantage.  Because churches are often on hill-tops, because they are bound to be used for lookouts, is why they get torn to pieces.  When two men are fighting for life they don’t bother about upsetting a table with a vase, or notice any “Keep off the grass” signs; no, not even if the family Bible be underfoot.