door opening, like our own,
on to an area below the level of the street. Suddenly, a gate opening on
a back lane swung back, and two soldiers entered, one carrying the feet
and the other the shoulders of a third. The body hung clumsily between
them like a piece of old sacking.

"Tiens--someone is wounded," said the Burgundian. "Go, thou, Badel, and
see who it is."

The dwarf plodded off obediently.

"It is Palester," he announced on his return, "the type that had the
swollen jaw last month."

"What's the matter with him?"

"He's been killed."

Chapter IV

La Foret De Bois-Le-Pretre

Beginning at the right bank of the Meuse, a vast plateau of bare,
desolate moorland sweeps eastward to the Moselle, and descends to the
river in a number of great, wooded ridges perpendicular to the
northward-flowing stream. The town of Pont-a-Mousson lies an apron of
meadowland spread between two of these ridges, the ridge of Puvenelle
and the ridge of the Bois-le-Pretre. The latter is the highest of all
the spurs of the valley. Rising from the river about half a mile to the
north of the city, it ascends swiftly to the level of the plateau, and
was seen from our headquarters as a long, wooded ridge blocking the
sky-line to the northwest. The hamlet of Maidieres, in which our
headquarters were located, lies just at the foot of Puvenelle, at a
point where the amphitheater of Pont-a-Mousson, crowding between the two
ridges, becomes a steep-walled valley sharply tilted to the west.

The Bois-le-Pretre dominated at once the landscape and our minds. Its
existence was the one great fact in the lives of some fifty thousand
Frenchmen, Germans, and a handful of exiled Americans; it had dominated
and ended the lives of the dead; it would dominate the imagination of
the future. Yet, looking across the brown walls and claret roofs of the
hamlet of Maidieres, there was nothing to be seen but a grassy slope,
open fields, a reddish ribbon of road, a wreck of a villa burned by a
fire shell, and a wood. The autumn had turned the leaves of the trees,
seemingly without exception, to a leathery brown, and in almost all
lights the trunks of the trees were a cold, purplish slate. Such was the
forest which, battle-areas excepted, has cost more lives than any other
point along the line. The wood had been contested trench by trench,
literally foot by foot. It was at once the key to the Saint-Mihiel
salient and the city of Metz.

The Saint-M