rt. In the trenches behind the slaty
trunks of the great ash trees, Bavarian peasants, Saxons, and
round-headed Wurttem-burgers, the olive-green, jack-booted Boches,
awaited their coming, determined to hold the wood, the salient, and the
city.

A year later the Bois-le-Pretre (the Priest Wood), with its perfume of
ecclesiastical names that reminds one of the odor of incense in an old
church, had become the Bois de la Mort (the Wood of Death).

The house in which our bureau was located was once the summer residence
of a rich ironmaster who had fled to Paris at the beginning of the war.
If there is an architectural style of German origin known as the
"Neo-Classic," which affects large, windowless spaces framed in
pilasters of tile, and decorations and insets of omelet-yellow and
bottle-green glazed brick, "Wisteria Villa" is of that school. It stood
behind a high wall of iron spikes on the road leading from Maidieres to
the trenches, a high, Germano-Pompeian country house, topped by a roof
rich in angles, absurd windows, and unexpected gables. There are huge,
square, French-roofed houses in New England villages built by local
richessimes of Grant's time, and still called by neighbors "the Jinks
place" or the "Levi Oates place"; Wisteria Villa had something of the
same social relation to the commune of Maidieres. Grotesque and ugly, it
was not to be despised; it had character in its way.

Our social center was the dining-room of the villa. Exclusive of the
kitchen range, it boasted the only stove in the house, a queerly shaped
"Salamandre," a kind of Franklin stove with mica doors. The walls were
papered an ugly chocolate brown with a good deal of red in it, and the
borders, doors, and fireplace frame were stained a color trembling
between mission green and oak brown. The room was rectangular and too
high for its width. There were pictures. On each side of the fireplace,
profiles toward the chimney, hung concave plaques of Dutch girls. To the
left of the door was a yellowed etching of the tower of the chateau of
Heidelberg, and to the right a very small oil painting, in an ornate
gilt frame three inches deep, of a beach by moonlight. About two or
three hundred books, bound in boards and red leather, stood behind the
cracked glass of a bookcase in the corner; they were very "jeune fille,"
and only the romances of Georges Ohnet appeared to have been read. The
thousand cupboards of the house were full of dusty knickknacks,