Some of those trenches on either side are still filled with men leaning forward with their rifles pointing to the enemy—­quite dead, in spite of their lifelike posture.

Along the German Lines Near Metz

[Correspondence of The Associated Press.]

WITH THE GERMAN ARMY BEFORE METZ, Sept. 30, (by Courier to Holland and Mail to New York.)—­A five-day trip to the front has taken the correspondent of The Associated Press through the German fortresses of Mainz, Saarbruecken, and Metz, through the frontier regions between Metz and the French fortress line from Verdun to Toul, into the actual battery positions from which German and Austrian heavy artillery were pounding their eight and twelve-inch shells into the French barrier forts and into the ranks of the French field army which has replaced the crumbling fortifications of steel and cement with ramparts of flesh and blood.

Impressions at the end are those of some great industrial undertaking with powerful machinery in full operation and endless supply trains bringing up the raw materials for manufacture rather than of war as pictured.

From a point of observation on a hillside above St. Mihiel the great battlefield on which a German army endeavoring to break through the line of barrier forts between Verdun and Toul and the opposing French forces could be surveyed in its entirety.  In the foreground lay the level valley of the Meuse, with the towns of St. Mihiel and Banoncour nestling upon the green landscape.  Beyond and behind the valley rose a tier of hills on which the French at this writing obstinately hold an intrenched position, checking the point of the German wedge, while the French forces from north and south beat upon the sides of the triangle, trying to force it back across the Meuse and out from the vitals of the French fortress line.

Bursting shells threw up their columns of white or black fog around the edge of the panorama.  Cloudlets of white smoke here and there showed where a position was being brought under shrapnel fire.  An occasional aeroplane could be picked out hovering over the lines, but the infantry and the field battery positions could not be discerned even with a high-power field glass, so cleverly had the armies taken cover.  The uninitiated observer would have believed this a deserted landscape rather than the scene of a great battle, which, if successful for the Germans, would force the main French Army to retreat from its intrenched positions along the Aisne River.

About three miles away, across the Meuse, a quadrangular mound of black, plowed-up earth on the hillside marked the location of Fort Les Paroches, which had been silenced by the German mortars the night before.  Fort Camp des Romains, so named because the Roman legions had centuries ago selected this site for a strategic encampment, had been stormed by Bavarian infantry two days earlier after its heavy guns had been put out of action, and artillery officers said that Fort Lionville, fifteen miles to the south and out of the range of vision, was then practically silenced, only one of its armored turrets continuing to answer the bombardment.