in which brands were burning furiously, and a jet of vapor from somewhere, gave it quite the appearance of an odd steam engine.  Beside the contre-torpilleur stood the two cooks, both unusually small in stature.  One was about thirty-two or three years old, chunky, and gifted with short, strong, hairy arms; the other was much slighter, younger, and so juvenile of face that his downy mustache was almost invisible.  I knew these men very well; one, the older, was a farmhand in a village of Touraine, and the other, an errand boy in a bookbinding works at Saint-Denis.  The war had turned them into regimental cooks, though it was the older man who did most of the cooking, while the boy occupied himself with gathering wood and distributing the food.  The latter once confessed to me that when he heard that Americans were coming to the Bois-le-Pretre, he had expected to see Indians, and that he and his comrades had joked, half in jest, half in earnest, about the Boches going to lose their scalps.  The other was famous for an episode of the July attacks:  cornered in the trench by a Boche, he had emptied his kettle of hot soup over the man’s head and finished him off with a knife.  They waved friendlily at me.  The farmhand, in particular, was one of the pleasantest fellows who ever breathed; and still fond, like a true good man of Touraine, of a Rabelaisian jest.

The road now entered the wood, and continued straight ahead down a pleasant vista of young ash trees.  Suddenly a trench, bearing its name in little black, dauby letters on a piece of yellow board the size of a shingle, began by the side of the forest road, and I went down into it as I might have gone down cellar.  The Boyau Poincare—­such was its title—­began to curve and twist in the manner of trenches, and I came upon a corner in the first line known as “Three Dead Men,” because after the capture of the wood, three dead Germans were found there in mysterious, lifelike attitudes.  The names of trenches on the French front often reflect that deep, native instinct to poetry possessed by simple peoples—­the instinct that created the English ballads and the exquisite mediaeval French legends of the saints.  Other trench names were symbolic, or patriotic, or political; we had the “Trench of the Great Revenge,” the “Trench of France,” the “Trench of Aristide” (meaning Briand), and the “Boulevard Joffre.”

Beyond “Les Trois Morts,” began the real lines of the position, and as I wound my way through them to the first lines, the pleasant forest of autumnal branches thinned to a wood of trees bare as telegraph poles.  It had taken me half an hour to get from the cook’s shelters to the first lines, and during that time I had not heard one single explosion.  In the first trench the men stood casually by their posts at the parapet, their bluish coats in an interesting contrast to the brown wall of the trench.  Behind the sentries, who peered through the rifle slits every once in a while, flowed the usual populace of the