[Sidenote:  The field once the most beautiful country.]

This field of death, bristling with ruins still smouldering, was formerly, and will soon be once more, a beautiful stretch of country.  Here we are in the heart of the Ile de France, and the countryside displays all the gracious charm of a typical French landscape.  With its undulating plateaus, pleasant vales, broad green valleys, forests and greensward, chateaux and villas, small towns, and dear old villages thronged with souvenirs of the past, the district between the Marne and the Aisne was peculiarly representative of France—­the France of the Merovingians and Capets as well as of the twentieth century.

There is no manufacturing and little commercial activity; but a skillful, varied, and persistent culture of the soil, with special attention to those most exacting of crops, the vine and vegetables, which are successfully raised only by dint of hard labor, and to the production of vast quantities of sugar-beets and cereals.

[Sidenote:  The villages are built of stone.]

The villages, built of the beautiful stone of the district, have, one and all, an air of dignity and prosperity which gives animation to the landscape.  The very names are among the most pleasant to the ear, and often among the most illustrious in the language.  Our great men of letters, La Fontaine and Racine, Pope Urban II, who preached the First Crusade, and other statesmen and princes, all born in the province, had already made it a genuinely historic spot; and the memory of the battles fought by Napoleon at Chateau-Thierry and Soissons, against the invaders of 1814, has not yet faded.  When they turned the enemy back from Paris, the Americans were fighting in the most truly French of all the districts of France, and their gallantry has imparted to it a new charm, a more resplendent glory.

[Sidenote:  Topography from the Marne to the Vesle.]

But this attractive region does not exhibit everywhere the same features.  The topography of the Ile de France is so varied that one can distinguish several families, or groups, of landscapes between the Marne and the Vesle.  Let us follow them, in the order followed by the different stages of the battle.

The southern portion is the most elevated and most picturesque; it includes the shores of the Marne, from Epernay to Chateau-Thierry, as well as the hills and valleys to the eastward, grouped about the Ardre River in the district called the Tardenois.  In the centre the battlefield embraces plateaus studded with low hills, half hidden by broad patches of forest, and cut by deep, narrow valleys—­those of the Ourcq and its affluents; whence the region is known as the district of the Ourq, or the Orxois.  Lastly, to the north this undulating ground gives place to a practically level plateau, a vast table-land of cultivated fields, through which flow the deep ravines of the Aisne, the Vesle, and their affluents.  This is the Soissonnais.