he victor and acted accordingly. Often the
merest remnant of will and nerves was the factor that influenced the
decision.

"War, which only smoldered here and there during the endless trench
fighting, like damp wood, burns here with such all-consuming fire that
divisions have to be called up after days and hours in the trenches, and
are ground to pieces and burned up into so many cinders and ashes.

"Such intensity of battle as is here before Verdun is unheard of.
No picture, no comparison, can give the remotest conception of the
concentration of guns and shells with which the two antagonists are
raging against each other. I have seen troops who had held out in the
fire for days and weeks, to whom in exposed positions food could hardly
be brought, on whose bodies the clothes were not dry, who, yet reeking
with dirt and dampness, had the nerve for new storming operations."

BATTLE OF CAILLETTE WOOD.

Among the fiercer struggles before Verdun, the battle of Caillette Wood,
east of the fortress city, will have a place in history as one of the
most bloody and thrilling.

The position of the wood, to the right of Douaumont, was important
as part of the French line. It was carried by the Germans on Sunday
morning, April 2, after a bombardment of twelve hours, which seemed to
break even the record of Verdun for intensity. The French curtain
of fire had checked their further advance, according to a special
correspondent of the Chicago Herald, and a savage countercharge in
the afternoon had gained for the defenders a corpse-strewn welter of
splintered trees and shell-shattered ground that had been the southern
corner of the wood. Further charges had broken against a massive
barricade, the value of which as a defense paid good interest on the
expenditure of German lives which its construction demanded. A wonderful
work had been accomplished that Sunday morning in the livid, London-like
fog and twilight produced by the lowering clouds and battle smoke.

FORMED A HUMAN CHAIN UNDER FIRE.

While the German assaulting columns in the van fought the French hand to
hand, picked corps of workers behind them formed an amazing human chain
from the woods to the east over the shoulder of the center of the
Douaumont slope to the crossroads of a network of communicating trenches
600 yards in the rear.

Four deep was this human chain, and along its line nearly 3,000 men
passed an unending stream of wooden billets, sandbags, chevaux-de-f