rain-water. You slid and skidded, and to hold yourself erect pressed
with each hand against the wet walls of the endless grave.

We came out upon the "hauts de Meuse." They are called also the "Shores
of Lorraine," because to that province, as are the cliffs of Dover to
the county of Kent, they form a natural barrier. We were in the quarry
that had been cut into the top of the heights on the side that now faces
other heights held by the enemy. Behind us rose a sheer wall of chalk as
high as a five-story building. The face of it had been pounded by
shells. It was as undismayed as the whitewashed wall of a schoolroom at
which generations of small boys have flung impertinent spit-balls. At
the edge of the quarry the floor was dug deeper, leaving a wall between
it and the enemy, and behind this wall were the posts of observation,
the nests of the machine-guns, the raised step to which the men spring
when repulsing an attack. Below and back of them were the shelters into
which, during a bombardment, they disappear. They were roofed with great
beams, on top of which were bags of cement piled three and four yards
high.

Not on account of the sleet and fog, but in spite of them, the aspect of
the place was grim and forbidding. You did not see, as at some of the
other fronts, on the sign-boards that guide the men through the maze,
jokes and nicknames. The mess-huts and sleeping-caves bore no such
ironic titles as the Petit Cafe, the Anti-Boche, Chez Maxim. They were
designated only by numerals, businesslike and brief. It was no place
for humor. The monuments to the dead were too much in evidence. On every
front the men rise and lie down with death, but on no other front had I
found them living so close to the graves of their former comrades. Where
a man had fallen, there had he been buried, and on every hand you saw
between the chalk huts, at the mouths of the pits or raised high in a
niche, a pile of stones, a cross, and a soldier's cap. Where one officer
had fallen his men had built to his memory a mausoleum. It is also a
shelter into which, when the shells come, they dive for safety. So that
even in death he protects them.

I was invited into a post of observation, and told to make my entrance
quickly. In order to exist, a post of observation must continue to look
to the enemy only like part of the wall of earth that faces him. If
through its apparently solid front there flashes, even for an instant, a
ray of sunlight, he