After three extra bombs had come in the Germans turned their guns from the town, and we had our lunch at our ease.  And such a lunch!  A melon to begin with; a yellow melon that looks like the old-fashioned American muskmelon and tastes like a nectar of the gods, followed by onion soup.  Then followed an entree, a large thin slice of cold sausage which they afterward told us was made of horse meat, a pate of some kind, then roast veal sliced thin and slightly underdone with browned potatoes; then new beans served as a separate course; then fruit and cheese and coffee and cigars!  And that in a barn!

[Illustration:  “Come on!  Let’s go to the abri!”]

We had to go up to a first aid station after lunch so we piled into an ambulance, were buttoned in from the back by the driver, and went sailing up the hill and into the woods.  They told us that we were in the Avecourt Woods in the Forest of Hess.  We remembered that but a few weeks before when we were in our newspaper offices, that the Avecourt Woods had been the scene of some fierce and bloody fighting.  And as we rode up the hill we heard the French cannon roaring all about us.  We were told that four thousand cannon were planted in the Avecourt Woods, but only about a thousand of them were active that day.  Yet we could see none, so completely were they hidden by camouflage.  The woods were barren of leaves or branches though they should have been in foliage.  We gazed through the windows of the ambulance into the stark forest with its top off, and then rather gradually it occurred to me that the white objects carefully corded against the tree trunks were not sticks of cord wood at all, as they seemed, and as they should have been if the wood had been under the ax instead of under fire.  They were French seventy-five shells—­deadly brass cartridges two feet long, all nicely and peacefully corded against the trunks of the big trees!  We rode through them for several miles.  Beside the road always were the little heaps of road metal, little heaps of stone, and always the engineers stood ready to refill the holes that might be made by the incoming shells.  And occasionally they were coming in; though they seemed to be landing in a distant part of the forest.  The ear becomes curiously quick at telling the difference between what are known as arrives and departs.  The departs were going out that day at the ratio of 32 to one arrive.  For the Germans had wasted enough ammunition on the Verdun sector and were trying to economize!  Still the arrives were landing in the Avecourt wood every minute or so, and they were disquieting.  Only the chirping of our own broad-mouthed Canaries there in the roofless forest gave us cheer.  For some way the sound of the shells of our own guns shrieking over us is a deep comfort; it is something like the consolation of a great faith.