That day’s attack was an attempt by the Germans to take back from the French the eastern third of the Quart-en-Reserve and the rest of the adjoining ridge half hidden in the shattered trees.  At the top of the plateau, by the rise in the moorland I described in the preceding chapter, I had an instant’s view of the near-by battle, for the focus was hardly more than four hundred yards away.  There was a glimpse of human beings in the Quart—­soldiers in green, soldiers in blue—­the very fact that anybody was to be seen there was profoundly stirring.  They were fighting in No Man’s Land.  Tyler and I watched for a second, wondering what scenes of agony, of heroism, of despair were being enacted in that dreadful field by the ruined wood.

We hurried our wounded to the hospital, passing on our way detachments of soldiers rushing toward The Wood from the villages of the region.  Three or four big shells had just fallen in Dieulouard, and the village was deserted and horribly still.  The wind carried the roar of the attack to our ears.  In three quarters of an hour, I was back again at the same moorland poste, to which an order of our commander had attached me.  Montauville was full of wounded.  I had three on stretchers inside, one beside me on the seat, and two others on the front mudguards.  And The Wood continued to sing.  From Montauville I could hear the savage yells and cries which accompanied the fighting.

Half an hour after the beginning of the attack, the war invaded the sky, with the coming of the German reconnoitering aeroplanes.  One went to watch the roads leading to The Wood along the plateau, one went to watch the Dieulouard road, and the other hovered over the scene of the combat.  The sky was soon dotted with the puffs of smoke left by the exploding shells of the special anti-aircraft “seventy- fives.”  These puffs blossomed from a pin-point of light to a vaporous, gray-white puff-ball about the size of the full moon, and then dissolved in the air or blew about in streaks and wisps.  These cloudlets, fired at an aviator flying along a certain line, often were gathered by the eye into arrangements resembling constellations.  The three machines were very high, and had a likeness to little brown and silver insects.

The Boche watching the conflict appeared to hang almost immobile over the Quart.  With a striking suddenness, another machine appeared behind him and above him.  So unexpected was the approach of this second aeroplane that its appearance had a touch of the miraculous.  It might have been created at that very moment in the sky.  The Frenchman—­for it was an aviator from the parc at Toul, since killed at Verdun, poor fellow—­swooped beneath his antagonist and fired his machine gun at him.  The German answered with two shots of a carbine.  The Frenchman fired again.  Suddenly the German machine flopped to the right and swooped down; it then flopped to the left, the tail of the machine flew up, and the apparatus fell, not so swiftly as one might expect, down a thousand feet into The Wood.  When I saw the wreckage, a few days afterwards, it looked like the spilt contents of a waste-paper basket, and the aviators, a pilot and an observer, had had to be collected from all over the landscape.  The French buried them with full military honors.