hing soldiers from their shelters. A small, semicircular table is set
up before the lookout, like his compass before a mariner. Here run
blue pencil lines of direction pointing to Pont-a-Mousson, to Chateau-
Salins, and other towns. Before us to the east rose the tree-clad
crests of the famous Grand Couronne of Nancy, and faintly in the
distance we could see Metz.

"Those guns that I hear, are they firing across the frontier?" I asked.
For some French batteries command one of the outer forts of Metz.

"No, they are near Pont-a-Mousson."

To the north the little town of Pont-a-Mousson lay in the lap of the
river bottom, and across the valley, to the west, the famous Bois le
Pretre. More guns were speaking from the forest depths, which
showed great scars where the trees had been cut to give fields of fire.
This was well to the rear of our position, marking the boundaries of
the wedge that the Germans drove into the French lines, with its point
at St. Mihiel, in trying to isolate the forts of Verdun and Toul.
Doubtless you have noticed that wedge on the snake maps and have
wondered about it, as I have. It looks so narrow that the French ought
to be able to shoot across it from both sides. If so, why don't the
Germans widen it?

Well, for one thing, a quarter of an inch on a map is a good many
miles of ground. The Germans cannot spread their wedge because
they would have to climb the walls of an alley. That was a fact as
clear to the eye as the valley of the Hudson from West Point. The
Germans occupy an alley within an alley, as it were. They have their
own natural defences for the edges of their wedge; or, where they do
not, they lie cheek by jowl with the French in such thick woods as the
Bois le Pretre.

At our feet, looking toward Metz, an apron of cultivated land swept
down for a mile or more to a forest edge. This was cut by lines of
trenches, whose barbed-wire protection pricked a blanket of snow.

"Our front is in those woods," explained the colonel who was in
command of the point.

"A major when the war began and an officer of reserves," mon
capitaine, who had brought us out from Paris, explained about the
colonel. We were soon used to hearing that a colonel had been a
major or a major a captain before the Kaiser had tried to get Nancy.
There was quick death and speedy promotion at the great battle of
Lorraine, as there was at Gettysburg and Antietam.

"They charged out of the woods, and we had a battalio