n of reserves--
here are some of them--mes poilus!"

He turned affectionately to the bearded fellows in scarfs who had
come out of the shelter. They smiled back. Now, as we all chatted
together, officer-and-man distinction disappeared. We were in a
family party.

It was all very simple to mes poilus, that first fight. They had been told
to hold. If Ste. Genevieve were lost, the Amance plateau was in
danger, and the loss of the Amance plateau meant the fall of Nancy.
Some military martinets say that the soldiers of France think too
much. In this case thinking may have taught them responsibility. So
they held; they lay tight, these reserves, and kept on firing as the
Germans swarmed out of the woods.

"And the Germans stopped there, monsieur. They hadn't very far to
go, had they? But the last fifty yards, monsieur, are the hardest
travelling when you are trying to take a trench."

They knew, these poilus, these veterans. Every soldier who serves in
Lorraine knows. They themselves have tried to rush out of the edge
of a woods across an open space against intrenched Germans and
found the shoe on the other foot.

Now the fields in the foreground down to the woods' edge were bare
of any living thing. You had to take mon capitaine's word for it that
there were any soldiers in front of us.

"The Boches are a good distance away at this point," he said. "They
are in the next woods."

A broad stretch of snow lay between the two clumps of woods. It was
not worth while for either side to try to get possession of the
intervening space. At the first movement by either French or
Germans the woods opposite would hum with rifle fire and echo with
cannonading. So, like rival parties of Arctic explorers waiting out the
Arctic winter, they watched each other. But if one force or the other
napped and the other caught him at it, then winter would not stay a
brigade commander's ambition. Three days later in this region the
French, by a quick movement, got a good bag of prisoners to make a
welcome item for the daily French official bulletin.

"We wait and the Germans wait on spring for any big movement,"
said the colonel. "Men can't lie out all night in the advance in weather
like this. In that direction------" He indicated a part of the line where
the two armies were facing each other across the old frontier. Back
and forth they had fought, only to arrive where they had begun.

There was something else which the colonel wished us t