Thanks to the use of a flame machine, the Germans succeeded in regaining the part of the ridge they had lost, but the French made it so hot for them that they abandoned it, and the contested trenches now lie in No Man’s Land.  All that night the whole Wood was illuminated, trench light after trench light rising over the dark branches.  There would be a rocket like the trail of bronze-red powder sparks hanging for an instant in the sky, then a loud Plop! and the French light would spread out its parachute and sail slowly down the sky toward the river.  The German lights (fusees eclairantes), cartridges of magnesium fired from a gun resembling a shotgun, burned only during their dazzling trajectory.  At midnight the sky darkened with low, black rain clouds, upon whose surface the constant cannon fire flashed in pools of violet-white light.  Coming down from the plateau at two in the morning, I could see sharp jabs of cannon fire for thirty miles along the front on the other side of the Moselle.

Just after this attack a doctor of the army service was walking through the trenches in which the French had made their stand.  He noticed something oddly skewered to a tree.  He knocked it down with a stone, and a human heart fell at his feet.

The most interesting question of the whole business is, “How do the soldiers stand it?” At the beginning of my own service, I thought Pont-a-Mousson, with its ruins, its danger, and its darkness, the most awful place on the face of the earth.  After a little while, I grew accustomed to the decor, and when the time came for me to leave it, I went with as much regret as if I were leaving the friendliest, most peaceful of towns.  First the decor, growing familiar, lost the keener edges of its horror, and then the life of the front—­the violence, the destruction, the dying and the dead—­all became casual, part of the day’s work.  A human being is profoundly affected by those about him; thus, when a new soldier finds himself for the first time in a trench, he is sustained by the attitude of the veterans.  Violence becomes the commonplace; shells, gases, and flames are the things that life is made of.  The war is another lesson in the power of the species to adapt itself to circumstances.  When this power of adaptability has been reinforced by a tenacious national will “to see the thing through,” men will stand hell itself.  The slow, dogged determination of the British cannot be more powerful than the resolution of the French.  Their decision to continue at all costs has been reached by a purely intellectual process, and to enforce it, they have called upon those ancient foundations of the French character, the sober reasonableness and unbending will they inherit from Rome.