within twenty paces of the
emplacements and the ground was strewn with splinters and shrapnel
cases. There were several very dead German artillerymen who had
evidently been working the guns when direct hits had been made upon
the material of the battery. No limbers or caissons had been with the
guns, but a caisson had been placed in a field about two hundred yards
behind, and men ran up and down across the field carrying ammunition
in wicker baskets, each of which holds three shells. We picked up four
of these shell baskets as curiosities and managed to find room for
them in our machine.

* * * * *

As we advanced we became more and more convinced of the correctness of
Capt. Parker's theory that there had been a big focal center of the
battle somewhere still to the east of us, and that the actions along
the rest of the line of contact from Paris to Lorraine had occurred
with reference to this vortex.

It is characteristic of the limited knowledge which troops in battle
have of what goes on outside of their immediate geographical vicinity,
that we ran almost into the great battle area for which we were
searching before anyone gave us a hint of its location. It was at
Vertus that we were told by a French officer that terrific fighting
had taken place in the upland plateau to the south of us, around a
place called Fere Champenoise; that the Germans had there made their
main attack with close to a quarter of a million men; that a frightful
battle had raged, a battle in which the Germans were at first, during
some thirty-six hours, victorious, but that, with the arrival of
reinforcements, the Ninth French Army under General Foch had turned
the tide and finally routed them. The officers said that the fighting
and slaughter had been frightful; that the combined casualties of the
two sides were close to two hundred thousand on a front of something
over twenty miles and a depth of about fifteen miles. They said that
the battle area was contained roughly within a circumference drawn
through the villages of Champaubert, Coligny, Pierre-Morains,
Clamanges, Sommesous, Gourgancon, Corroy, and Sezanne.

[Illustration: "THE DEAD WERE SCATTERED FAR AND WIDE"
[Our automobile on one of the battlefields of the Marne]]

As we conferred with the officers a constant stream of reinforcements
for the French army was passing, coming from Fere Champenoise and
marching toward Ay and Epernay; regiments of infa