They came, young and old, slum-dweller and country schoolmaster, rich young noble and Corsican peasant, to the storming of the wood, upheld by one vision, the unbroken, grassy slope that stretched from behind the German lines to the town of Thiaucourt.  In the trenches behind the slaty trunks of the great ash trees, Bavarian peasants, Saxons, and round-headed Wurttem-burgers, the olive-green, jack-booted Boches, awaited their coming, determined to hold the wood, the salient, and the city.

A year later the Bois-le-Pretre (the Priest Wood), with its perfume of ecclesiastical names that reminds one of the odor of incense in an old church, had become the Bois de la Mort (the Wood of Death).

The house in which our bureau was located was once the summer residence of a rich ironmaster who had fled to Paris at the beginning of the war.  If there is an architectural style of German origin known as the “Neo-Classic,” which affects large, windowless spaces framed in pilasters of tile, and decorations and insets of omelet-yellow and bottle-green glazed brick, “Wisteria Villa” is of that school.  It stood behind a high wall of iron spikes on the road leading from Maidieres to the trenches, a high, Germano-Pompeian country house, topped by a roof rich in angles, absurd windows, and unexpected gables.  There are huge, square, French-roofed houses in New England villages built by local richessimes of Grant’s time, and still called by neighbors “the Jinks place” or the “Levi Oates place”; Wisteria Villa had something of the same social relation to the commune of Maidieres.  Grotesque and ugly, it was not to be despised; it had character in its way.

Our social center was the dining-room of the villa.  Exclusive of the kitchen range, it boasted the only stove in the house, a queerly shaped “Salamandre,” a kind of Franklin stove with mica doors.  The walls were papered an ugly chocolate brown with a good deal of red in it, and the borders, doors, and fireplace frame were stained a color trembling between mission green and oak brown.  The room was rectangular and too high for its width.  There were pictures.  On each side of the fireplace, profiles toward the chimney, hung concave plaques of Dutch girls.  To the left of the door was a yellowed etching of the tower of the chateau of Heidelberg, and to the right a very small oil painting, in an ornate gilt frame three inches deep, of a beach by moonlight.  About two or three hundred books, bound in boards and red leather, stood behind the cracked glass of a bookcase in the corner; they were very “jeune fille,” and only the romances of Georges Ohnet appeared to have been read.  The thousand cupboards of the house were full of dusty knickknacks, old umbrellas, hats, account-books, and huge boxes holding the debris of sets of checkers, dominoes, and ivory chessmen.  An enlarged photograph of the family hung on the walls of a bedroom; it had been taken at somebody’s marriage, and showed the group standing on the front steps, the same steps that were later to be blown to pieces by a shell.  One saw the bride, the groom, and about twenty relatives, including a boy in short trousers, a wide, white collar, and an old-fashioned, fluffy bow tie.  Anxious to be included in the picture, the driver of the bridal barouche has craned his neck forward.  On the evidence of the costumes, the picture had been taken about 1902.