the muddy village-town full of men in uniforms of blue, old
uniforms of blue, muddy uniforms of blue, in blue that was blue-gray and
blue-green from wear and exposure to the weather, I realized that the
old days of beautiful, half-barbaric uniforms were gone forever, and
that, in place of the old romantic war of cavalry charges and great
battles in the open, a new, more terrible war had been created, a war
that had not the chivalric externals of the old.

After Dieulouard began the swathe of stillness.

Following the western bank of the canal of the Moselle the road made a
great curve round the base of a hill descending to the river, and then
mounted a little spur of the valley wall. Beyond the spur the road went
through lonely fields, in which were deserted farmhouses surrounded by
acres of neglected vines, now rank and Medusa-like in their weedy
profusion. Every once in a while, along a rise, stood great burlap
screens so arranged one behind the other as to give the effect of a
continuous line when seen from a certain angle.

"What are those for?"

"To hide the road from the Germans. Do you see that little village down
there on the crest? The Boches have an observatory there, and shell the
road whenever they see anything worth shelling."

A strange stillness pervaded the air; not a stillness of death and
decay, but the stillness of life that listens. The sun continued to
shine on the brown moorland hills across the gray-green river, the world
was quite the same, yet one sensed that something had changed. A village
lay ahead of us, disfigured by random shells and half deserted. Beyond
the still, shell-spattered houses, a great wood rose, about a mile and a
half away, on a ridge that stood boldly against the sky. Running from
the edge of the trees down across an open slope to the river was a
brownish line that stood in a little contrast to the yellower grass.
Suddenly, there slowly rose from this line a great puff of grayish-black
smoke which melted away in the clear, autumnal air.

"See," said our lieutenant calmly, with no more emotion than he would
have shown at a bonfire--"those are the German trenches. We have just
fired a shell into them."

Two minutes more took us into the dead, deserted city of Pont-a-Mousson.
The road was now everywhere screened carefully with lengths of
light-brown burlap, and there was not a single house that did not bear
witness to the power of a shell. The sense of "the front" began