The Bois-le-Pretre dominated at once the landscape and our minds.  Its existence was the one great fact in the lives of some fifty thousand Frenchmen, Germans, and a handful of exiled Americans; it had dominated and ended the lives of the dead; it would dominate the imagination of the future.  Yet, looking across the brown walls and claret roofs of the hamlet of Maidieres, there was nothing to be seen but a grassy slope, open fields, a reddish ribbon of road, a wreck of a villa burned by a fire shell, and a wood.  The autumn had turned the leaves of the trees, seemingly without exception, to a leathery brown, and in almost all lights the trunks of the trees were a cold, purplish slate.  Such was the forest which, battle-areas excepted, has cost more lives than any other point along the line.  The wood had been contested trench by trench, literally foot by foot.  It was at once the key to the Saint-Mihiel salient and the city of Metz.

The Saint-Mihiel salient—­“the hernia,” as the French call it—­begins at the Bois-le-Pretre.  Pivoting on The Wood, the lines turn sharply inland, cross the desolate plateau of La Woevre, attain the Meuse at Saint-Mihiel, turn again, and ascend the river to the Verdunois.  The salient, as dangerous for the Germans as it is troublesome for the French, represents the limit of a German offensive directed against Toul in October, 1914.  That the French retreated was due to the fact that the plateau was insufficiently protected, many of the regiments having been rushed north to the great battle then raging on the Aisne.

Only one railroad center lies in the territory of the salient, Thiaucourt in Woevre.  This pleasant little moorland town, locally famous for its wine, is connected with Metz by two single-track railroad lines, one coming via Conflans, and the other by Arnaville on the Moselle.  At Vilcey-sur-Mad, these lines unite, and follow to Thiaucourt the only practicable railroad route, the valley of the Rupt (brook) de Mad.

Thus the domination of Thiaucourt, or the valley of the Rupt de Mad, by French artillery would break the railroad communications between the troops keeping the salient and their base of supplies, Metz.  And the fate of Metz itself hangs on the control of the Bois-le-Pretre.

Metz is the heart of the German organization on the western front:  the railroad center, the supply station, the troop depot.  A blow at Metz would affect the security of every German soldier between Alsace and the Belgian frontier.  But if the French can drive the Germans out of the Bois-le-Pretre and establish big howitzers on the crest the Germans are still holding, there will soon be no more Metz.  The French guns will destroy the city as the German cannon destroyed Verdun.

When the Germans, therefore, retired to the trenches after the battles of September and October, 1914, they took to the ground on the heights of the Bois-le-Pretre, a terrain far enough ahead of Thiaucourt and Metz to preserve these centers from the danger of being shelled.  On the crest of the highest ridge along the valley, admirably ambushed in a thick forest, they waited for the coming of the French.  And the French came.