s
one fort he but brings himself under the fire of two others.

From what I saw of the defenses of Verdun from a "certain place" three
miles outside the city to a "certain place" fifteen miles farther south,
from what the general commanding the Verdun sector told me, and from
what I know of the French, I believe the Crown Prince will find this
second attack upon Verdun a hundred per cent more costly than the first,
and equally unsuccessful.

CHAPTER X

WAR IN THE VOSGES

PARIS, January, 1916.

When speaking of their five hundred miles of front, the French General
Staff divide it into twelve sectors. The names of these do not appear on
maps. They are family names and titles, not of certain places, but of
districts with imaginary boundaries. These nicknames seem to thrive
best in countries where the same race of people have lived for many
centuries. With us, it is usually when we speak of mountains, as "in the
Rockies," "in the Adirondacks," that under one name we merge rivers,
valleys, and villages. To know the French names for the twelve official
fronts may help in deciphering the communiques. They are these:

Flanders, the first sector, stretches from the North Sea to beyond
Ypres; the Artois sector surrounds Arras; the centre of Picardie is
Amiens; Santerre follows the valley of the Oise; Soissonais is the
sector that extends from Soissons on the Aisne to the Champagne sector,
which begins with Rheims and extends southwest to include Chalons;
Argonne is the forest of Argonne; the Hauts de Meuse, the district
around Verdun; Woevre lies between the heights of the Meuse and the
River Moselle; then come Lorraine, the Vosges, all hills and forests,
and last, Alsace, the territory won back from the enemy.

Of these twelve fronts, I was on ten. The remaining two I missed through
leaving France to visit the French fronts in Serbia and Salonika.
According to which front you are on, the trench is of mud, clay, chalk,
sand-bags, or cement; it is ambushed in gardens and orchards, it winds
through flooded mud flats, is hidden behind the ruins of wrecked
villages, and is paved and reinforced with the stones and bricks from
the smashed houses.

Of all the trenches the most curious were those of the Vosges. They were
the most curious because, to use the last word one associates with
trenches, they are the most beautiful.

We started for the trenches of the Vosges from a