s on which the French at this writing obstinately hold an intrenched
position, checking the point of the German wedge, while the French
forces from north and south beat upon the sides of the triangle, trying
to force it back across the Meuse and out from the vitals of the French
fortress line.

Bursting shells threw up their columns of white or black fog around the
edge of the panorama. Cloudlets of white smoke here and there showed
where a position was being brought under shrapnel fire. An occasional
aeroplane could be picked out hovering over the lines, but the infantry
and the field battery positions could not be discerned even with a
high-power field glass, so cleverly had the armies taken cover. The
uninitiated observer would have believed this a deserted landscape
rather than the scene of a great battle, which, if successful for the
Germans, would force the main French Army to retreat from its intrenched
positions along the Aisne River.

About three miles away, across the Meuse, a quadrangular mound of black,
plowed-up earth on the hillside marked the location of Fort Les
Paroches, which had been silenced by the German mortars the night
before. Fort Camp des Romains, so named because the Roman legions had
centuries ago selected this site for a strategic encampment, had been
stormed by Bavarian infantry two days earlier after its heavy guns had
been put out of action, and artillery officers said that Fort Lionville,
fifteen miles to the south and out of the range of vision, was then
practically silenced, only one of its armored turrets continuing to
answer the bombardment.

The correspondent had spent the previous night at the fortress town of
Metz, sleeping under the same roof with Prince Oscar of Prussia,
invalided from the field in a state of physical breakdown; Prince
William of Hohenzollern, father-in-law of ex-King Manuel, and other
officers, either watching or engaged in the operations in the field, and
had traveled by automobile to the battlefront thirty-five miles to the
west. For the first part of the distance the road led through the hills
on which are located the chain of forts comprising the fortress of Metz;
but, although the General Staff officer in the car pointed now and then
to a hill as the site of this or that fort, traces of the fortifications
could only occasionally be made out. Usually they were so skillfully
masked and concealed by woods or blended with the hillsides that nothing
out of t