lodging in
the trees of Puvenelle behind us with a vicious tspt; shells broke here
and there on the stretch leading to the Quart-en-Reserve, throwing the
small rocks of the road surfacing wildly in every direction. The French
batteries to our left were firing at the Germans, the German batteries
were firing at the French trenches and the roads, and the machine guns
rattled ceaselessly. I saw the poilus hurrying up the muddy roads of the
slope of the Bois-le-Pretre--vague masses of moving blue on the brown
ways. A storm of shells was breaking round certain points in the road
and particularly at the entrance to The Wood. I wondered what had become
of the audience at the concert. Various sounds, transit of shells,
bursting of shells, crashing of near-by cannon, and rat-tat-tat-tat! of
mitrailleuses played the treble to a roar formed of echoes and
cadences--the roar of battle. The Wood of Death (Le Bois de la Mort) was
singing again.

That day's attack was an attempt by the Germans to take back from the
French the eastern third of the Quart-en-Reserve and the rest of the
adjoining ridge half hidden in the shattered trees. At the top of the
plateau, by the rise in the moorland I described in the preceding
chapter, I had an instant's view of the near-by battle, for the focus
was hardly more than four hundred yards away. There was a glimpse of
human beings in the Quart--soldiers in green, soldiers in blue--the very
fact that anybody was to be seen there was profoundly stirring. They
were fighting in No Man's Land. Tyler and I watched for a second,
wondering what scenes of agony, of heroism, of despair were being
enacted in that dreadful field by the ruined wood.

We hurried our wounded to the hospital, passing on our way detachments
of soldiers rushing toward The Wood from the villages of the region.
Three or four big shells had just fallen in Dieulouard, and the village
was deserted and horribly still. The wind carried the roar of the attack
to our ears. In three quarters of an hour, I was back again at the same
moorland poste, to which an order of our commander had attached me.
Montauville was full of wounded. I had three on stretchers inside, one
beside me on the seat, and two others on the front mudguards. And The
Wood continued to sing. From Montauville I could hear the savage yells
and cries which accompanied the fighting.

Half an hour after the beginning of the attack, the war invaded the sky,
with the coming of th