way up the hill; below us lay a weedy piece of bottom land, all kneaded and pock-marked by shells, stretching away to another range of hills perhaps five miles, perhaps ten miles away, as the valley widened or narrowed.  The white clay of the soil erupting under shell fire glimmered nakedly and indecently through the weeds.  It was hard to realize that three years before the valley before us had been one of the great fertile valleys of France, dotted with little grey towns with glowing red roofs.  For as we looked it seemed to be “that ominous tract, which all agree hides the Dark Tower!” There it all lay; the “ragged thistle stalk,” with its head chopped off; “the dock’s harsh swart leaves bruised as to balk all hope of greenness.”  “As for the grass, it grew scantier than hair in leprosy; thin dry leaves pricked the mud, which underneath looked kneaded up with blood!” It was the self-same field that Roland crossed!  In the midst of the waste zigzagged two lines—­two white gashes in the soil, with a scab of horrible brown rust scratched between them—­the French and German trenches and the barbed wire entanglements.  At some places the trenches ran close together, a few hundred feet or a few hundred yards marked their distance apart.  At other times they backed fearfully away from one another with the gashed, stark, weed-smeared earth gaping between them.  We paused to rest in our climb at a little shrine by the wayside.  A communication trench slipped deviously up to it, and through this trench were brought the wounded; for the shrine, a dugout in the hillside, had been converted into a first aid station.  A doctor and two stretcher bearers and two ambulance men were waiting there.  Yet the little shrine, rather than the trenches that crept up to it, dominated the scene and the war seemed far away.  Occasionally we heard a distant boom and saw a tan cone of dirt rise in the bottom land among the trenches, and we felt that some poor creature might be in his death agony.  But that was remote, too, and Major Murphy of our party climbed to the roof of the dugout and began turning his glasses toward the German lines.  Then the trenches about us suddenly grew alive.  The Frenchmen were waving their hands and running about excitedly.  Major Murphy was a Major—­a regular United States Army major in a regular United States army uniform so grand that compared with our cheap cotton khaki it looked like a five thousand dollar outfit.  The highest officer near us was a French second-lieutenant, who had no right to boss a Major!  But something had to be done.  So the second lieutenant did it.  He called down the Major; showed him that he was in direct range of the German guns, and made it clear that a big six-foot American in uniform standing silhouetted against the sky-line would bring down a whole wagon-load of German hardware on our part of the line.  The fact that the German trenches were two miles away did not make the situation any less dangerous.  Afterwards we left the shrine and the trenches and went on up the hill.