this rise, dipped and disappeared.  Halfway between the edge of the forest of Puvenelle and this crest stood an abandoned inn, a commonplace building made of buff-brown moorland stone trimmed with red brick.  Close by this inn, at right angles to the Puvenelle road, another road turned to the north and likewise disappeared over the lift in the moor.  At the corner stood a government signpost of iron slightly bent back, bearing in gray-white letters on its clay-blue plaque the legend—­Thiaucourt, 12 kilometres Metz, 25 kilometres.

There was not a soul anywhere in sight; I was surrounded with evidences of terrific violence—­the shattered trees, the shell holes in the road, the brown-lipped craters in the earth of the fields, the battered inn; but there was not a sign of the creators of this devastation.  A northwest wind blew in great salvos across the mournful, lonely plateau, rippling the furze, and brought to my ears the pounding of shells from behind the rise.  When I got to this rim a soldier, a big, blond fellow of the true Gaulois type with drooping yellow mustaches, climbed slowly out of a hole in the ground.  The effect was startling.  I had arrived at the line where the earth of France completely swallows up the army.  This disappearance of life in a decor of intense action is one of the most striking things of the war.  All about in the surface of the earth were little, square, sooty holes that served as chimneys, and here and there rectangular, grave-like openings in the soil showing three or four big steps descending to a subterranean hut.  Fifty feet away not a sign of human life could be distinguished.  Six feet under the ground, framed in the doorway of a hut, a young, black-haired fellow in a dark-brown jersey stood smiling pleasantly up at us; it was he who was to be my guide to the various postes and trenches that I had need to know.  He came up to greet me.

“Better bring him down here,” growled a voice from somewhere in the earth.  “There have been bullets crossing the road all afternoon.”

“I am going to show him the Quart-en-Reserve first.”

The Quart-en-Reserve (Reserved Quarter) was the section of the Bois-le-Pretre which, because of its situation on the crest of the great ridge, had been the most fiercely contested.  We crept up on the edge of the ridge and looked over.  An open, level field some three hundred yards wide swept from the Thiaucourt road to the edges of the Bois-le-Pretre; across this field ran in the most confused manner a strange pattern of brown lines that disappeared among the stumps and poles of the haggard wood to the east.  To the northwest of this plateau, on the road ahead of us, stood a ruined village caught in the torment of the lines.  Here and there, in some twenty or thirty places scattered over the scarred plateau, the smoke of trench shells rose in little curling puffs of gray-black that quickly dissolved in the wind.

“The Quart is never quiet,” said my guide.  “It is now half ours, half theirs.”