character. The gate of the zone of violence, every foot of it bore some
scar of the war, now trivial, now gigantic--always awesome in the power
and volition it revealed. One passed from the sight of a brown puddle,
scooped in the surface of the street by an exploding shell, to a view of
a magnificent ash tree splintered by some projectile. It is a very rare
thing to see a sinister landscape, but this whole road was sinister. I
used to discuss this sinister quality with a distinguished French artist
who as a poilu was the infirmier, or medical service man, attached to a
squad of engineers working in a quarry frequently shelled. In this
frightful place we discussed la qualite du sinistre dans l'art (the
sinister in art) as calmly as if we were two Parisian critics sitting on
the benches of the Luxembourg Gardens. As the road advanced into the
wood, there was hardly a wayside tree that had not been struck by a
shell. Branches hung dead from trees, twigs had been lopped off by stray
fragments, great trunks were split apart as if by lightning. "Nature as
Nature is never sinister," said the artist; "it is when there is a
disturbance of the relations between Nature and human life that you have
the sinister. Have you ever seen the villages beyond Ravenna overwhelmed
by the bogs? There you see the sinister. Here Man is making Nature
unlivable for Man." He stroked his fine silky beard meditatively--"This
will all end when the peasants plant again." As we talked, a shell,
intended for the batteries behind, burst high above us.

Skirting the ravine, now wooded, between Puvenelle and the
Bois-le-Pretre, the road continued westward till it emerged upon the
high plateau of La Woevre; the last kilometre being in full view of the
Germans entrenched on the ridge across the rapidly narrowing, rising
ravine. Along this visible space the trees and bushes by the roadside
were matted by shell fire into an inextricable confusion of destruction,
and through the wisps and splinters of this ruin was seen the ridge of
the Bois-le-Pretre rapidly attaining the level of the moor. At length
the forest of Puvenelle, the ravine, and the Bois-le-Pretre ended
together in a rolling sweep of furzy fields cut off to the west and
north by a vast billow of the moor which, like the rim of a saucer,
closed the wide horizon. Continuing straight ahead, the Puvenelle road
mounted this rise, dipped and disappeared. Halfway between the edge of
the forest of Puvenelle