o see before
we left the hill of Ste. Genevieve. It appealed to his Gallic sentiment,
this quadrilateral of stone on the highest point where legend tells that
"Jovin, a Christian and very faithful, vanquished the German
barbarians 366 A.D."

"We have to do as well in our day as Jovin in his," remarked the
colonel.

The church of Ste. Genevieve was badly smashed by shell. So was
the church in the village on the Plateau d'Amance, as are most
churches in this district of Lorraine. Framed through a great gap in
the wall of the church of Amance was an immense Christ on the
cross without a single abrasion, and a pile of debris at its feet. After
seeing as many ruined churches as I have, one becomes almost
superstitious at how often the figures of Christ escape. But I have
also seen effigies of Christ blown to bits.

Anyone who, from an eminence, has seen one battle fought
visualizes another readily when the positions lie at his feet. Looking
out on the field of Gettysburg from Round Top, I can always get the
same thrill that I had when, seated in a gallery above the Russian and
the Japanese armies, I saw the battle of Liao-yang. In sight of that
Plateau d'Amance, which rises like a great knuckle above the
surrounding country, a battle covering twenty times the extent of
Gettysburg raged, and one could have looked over a battle-line as far
as the eye may see from a steamer's mast.

An icy gale swept across the white crest of the plateau on this
January day, but it was nothing to the gale of shells that descended
on it in late August and early September. Forty thousand shells, it is
estimated, fell there. One kicked up fragments of steel on the field like
peanut-shells after a circus has gone. Here were the emplacements
of a battery of French soixante-quinze within a circle of holes torn by
its adversaries' replies to its fire; a little farther along, concealed by
shrubbery, the position of another battery which the enemy had not
located.

So that was it! The struggle on the immense landscape, where at
least a quarter of a million men were killed and wounded, became as
simple as some Brobdingnagian football match. Before the war
began the French would not move a man within five miles of the
frontier lest it be provocative; but once the issue was joined they
sprang for Alsace and Lorraine, their imagination magnetized by the
thought of the recovery of the lost provinces. Their Alpine chasseurs,
mountain men of the Alpine