een, half hidden, but speaking mutely of the withering
storm of shell that had, in 1914, burst from them and swept the land.

Much can be seen of that chain of damaged fortresses, and the details of
most of them are now known. Of those great ugly fortifications at
Moulainville--the Belrupt Fort, which overlooks the Meuse; the
Daumaumont, commanding the road from Conflans to Azannes; the Paroches,
which stands directly over the highway from the Moselle at Moussin--we
have heard valiant stories, how the brave French defended them against
the armies of the Crown Prince.

It was not upon these, however, that the French Army relied when, in
August, 1914, the clash of war resounded along that pleasant fertile
valley, where the sun seems ever to shine and the crops never fail.
Hidden away from the sight of passers-by upon the roads, protected from
sight by lines of sentries night and day, and unapproachable, save by
those immediately connected with them, were the secret defences, huge
forts with long-range ordnance, which rose, fired, and disappeared again,
offering no mark for the enemy. Constructed in strictest secrecy, there
were a dozen of such fortresses, the true details of which the Huns
vainly endeavoured to learn while they were war-plotting. Many a spy of
the Kaiser had tried to pry there and had been arrested and sentenced to
a long term of imprisonment.

Those defences, placed at intervals along the chain of hills right from
Apremont away to Bezonvaux, had been the greatest secret which France
possessed.

Within three kilometres of the mouth of the pass at Haudiomont, at a
short distance from the road and at the edge of a wood, stood the ancient
Chateau de Lerouville, a small picturesque place of the days of Louis
XIV., with pretty lawns and old-world gardens--a chateau only in the
sense of being a country house and the residence of Paul Le Pontois,
once a captain in the French Army, but now retired.

Shut off from the road by a high old wall, with great iron gates, it was
approached by a wide carriage-drive through a well-kept flower-garden to
a long _terrasse_ which ran the whole length of the house, and whereon,
in summer, it was the habit of the family to take their meals.

Upon this veranda, one morning about ten days after the dinner party at
Hill Street, Sir Hugh, in a suit of light grey tweed, was standing
chatting with his son-in-law, a tall, brown-bearded, soldierly-looking
man.

The autumn sun sh