hree inches thick and
so dense that you can hardly see forty yards even now when the leaves
have fallen. Among these is a scattering of big trees, the trunks of
which are veritable mines of bullets.

"Irregular lines of deep yellow clay trenches zigzag for miles.
Other trenches run back from these to what looks like a huge Kansas
'prairie-dog town'--human burrows, where thousands of soldiers are
literally living underground. From the lines of trenches running
parallel to one another comes a constant, spitting, sputtering, popping
of rifles, making the woods resound like a Chinese New Year in San
Francisco or an old-time Fourth of July. Field guns and hand grenades
furnish the 'cannon-cracker' effect. Through the woods the high-noted
'zing zing' of bullets sounds like a swarm of angry bees, while high
overhead shrapnel and shell go shrieking on their way. Here and there
you may see spades full of earth being thrown up as if by invisible
hands, marking the onward work of the German gopher-like pioneers in
their subterranean warfare. That is the Argonne forest.

"As the trench I am in was still in the hands of the French three days
ago and as the crown prince is advancing steadily, the trenches are
temporary and contain little in the way of comforts. In deep niches cut
in the side the soldiers rest, play cards or even sleep on damp ledges
between fights.

"The trenches also serve as a cemetery. When the enemy's fire is so hot
that it is impossible to stick your head out or to take the dead out to
bury them, the grave is made in a niche or a ledge cut into the side of
the trench."

GERMAN ADVANCE HALTED

The western operations in December made it clear that the German advance
to the Channel ports of France had been definitely halted. In the
terrible battle of Ypres in Flanders, following the prolonged
engagements along the Yser river, the Allies succeeded in repulsing the
desperate German onslaught, and the German offensive was brought to
a full stop. Towns and villages in Flanders, in Artois and in Champagne,
that had been captured in the early German rush, were retaken one by
one by the Belgians, French and British, slowly but surely, until
the Germans were forced to act upon the defensive along a line of
entrenchments prepared to enable them to keep open their communications
through Belgium with their great base at Aix-la-Chapelle.

An incident of the desperate fighting at Ypres, in which British and
French troop