side and still full of the dead who fell in the last combat,—­shell holes, and fortified craters.  Such was something of the situation in that wind-swept plain at the edge of the Bois-le-Pretre.  I leave for other chapters the account of an average day in the trenches and the story of the great German attack, preferring to tell here of the general impressions made by the appearance of the trenches themselves.  Two pictures stand out, particularly, the dead on the barbed wire, and the village called “Fey au Rats” at night.

“The next line is the first line.  Speak in whispers now, for if the Boches hear us we shall get a shower of hand-grenades.”

I turned into a deep, wide trench whose floor had been trodden into a slop of cheesy, brown mire which clung to the big hobnailed boots of the soldiers.  Every foot or so along the parapet there was a rifle slit, made by the insertion of a wedge-shaped wooden box into the wall of brownish sandbags, and the sentries stood about six feet apart.  The trench had the hushed quiet of a sickroom.

“Do you want to see the Boches?  Here; come, put your eye to this rifle slit.”

A horizontal tangle of barbed wire lay before me, the shapeless gully of an empty trench, and, thirty-five feet away, another blue-gray tangle of barbed wire and a low ripple of the brownish earth.  As I looked, one of the random silences of the front stole swiftly into the air.  French trench and German trench were perfectly silent; you could have heard the ticking of a watch.

“You never see them?”

“Only when we attack them or they attack us.”

An old poilu, with a friendly smile revealing a jagged reef of yellow teeth, whispered to me amiably:—­

“See them?  Good Lord, it’s bad enough to smell them.  You ought to thank the good God, young man, that the wind is carrying it over our heads.”

“Any wounded to-day?”

“Yes; a corporal had his leg ripped up about half an hour ago.”

At a point a mile or so farther down the moor I looked again out of a rifle box.  No Man’s Land had widened to some three hundred feet of waving furze, over whose surface gusts of wind passed as over the surface of the sea.  About fifty feet from the German trenches was a swathe of barbed wire supported on a row of five stout, wooden posts.  So thickly was the wire strung that the eye failed to distinguish the individual filaments and saw only the rows of brown-black posts filled with a steely purple mist.  Upon this mist hung masses of weather-beaten blue rags whose edges waved in the wind.

“Des camarades” (comrades), said my guide very quietly.

A month later I saw the ruined village of Fey-en-Haye by the light of the full golden shield of the Hunters’ Moon.  The village had been taken from the Germans in the spring, and was now in the French lines, which crossed the village street and continued right on through the houses.  “The first village on the road to Metz” had tumbled, in piles and mounds of rubbish, out on a street grown high with grass.  Moonlight poured into the roofless cottages, escaping by shattered walls and jagged rents, and the mounds of debris took on fantastic outlines and cast strange shadows.  In the middle of the village street stood two wooden crosses marking the graves of soldiers.  It was the Biblical “Abomination of Desolation.”