hy meadow, were the slope and the ridge of the
Bois-le-Pretre. The dirty, mud-spattered village was caught between the
leathery sweeps of two wooded ridges. Three winding roads, tramped into
a pie of mire, crossed the grassy slope of The Wood, and disappeared
into the trees at the top. Though less than a mile from the first German
line, the village, because of its protection from shells by a spur of
the Bois-le-Pretre, was in remarkably good condition; the only building
to show conspicuous damage being the church, whose steeple had been
twice struck. It was curious to see pigeons flying in and out of the
belfry through the shell rents in the roof. Here and there, among the
uncultivated fields of those who had fled, were the green fields of some
one who had stayed. A woman of seventy still kept open her grocery shop;
it was extraordinarily dirty, full of buzzing flies, and smelled of
spilled wine.

"Why did you stay?" I asked her.

"Because I did not want to leave the village. Of course my daughter
wanted me to come to Dijon. Imagine me in Dijon, I, who have been to
Nancy only once! A fine figure I should make in Dijon in my sabots!"

"And you are not afraid of the shells?"

"Oh, I should be afraid of them if I ever went out in the street. But I
never leave my shop."

And so she stayed, selling the three staples of the French front,
Camembert cheese, Norwegian sardines, and cakes of chocolate. But
Montauville was far from safe. It was there that I first saw a man
killed. I had been talking to a sentry, a small young fellow of
twenty-one or two, with yellow hair and gray-blue eyes full of
weariness. He complained of a touch of jaundice, and wished heartily
that the whole affaire--meaning the war in general--was finished. He was
very anxious to know if the Americans thought the Boches were going to
win. Some vague idea of winning the war just to get even with the Boches
seemed to be in his mind. I assured him that American opinion was
optimistic in regard to the chances of the Allies, and strolled away.
Hardly had I gone ten feet, when a "seventy-seven" shell, arriving
without warning, went Zip-bang, and, turning to crouch to the wall, I
saw the sentry crumple up in the mud. It was as if he were a rubber
effigy of a man blown up with air, and some one had suddenly ripped the
envelope. His rifle fell from him, and he, bending from the waist,
leaned face down into the mud. I was the first to get to him. The young,
disc