the stumps and poles of the haggard
wood to the east. To the northwest of this plateau, on the road ahead of
us, stood a ruined village caught in the torment of the lines. Here and
there, in some twenty or thirty places scattered over the scarred
plateau, the smoke of trench shells rose in little curling puffs of
gray-black that quickly dissolved in the wind.

"The Quart is never quiet," said my guide. "It is now half ours, half
theirs."

Close to the ground, a blot of light flashed swifter than a stroke of
lightning, and a heavier, thicker smoke rolled away.

"That is one of ours. We are answering their trench shells with an
occasional 'one hundred and twenty."

"How on earth is it that everybody is not killed?"

"Because the regiment has occupied the Quart so long that we know every
foot, every turn, every shelter of it. When we see a trench shell
coming, we know just where to go. It is only the newcomers who get
killed. Two months past, when a new regiment occupied the Quart during
our absence en repos, it lost twenty-five men in one day."

The first trench that I entered was a simple trench about seven feet
deep, with no trimmings whatsoever, just such a trench as might have
been dug for the accommodation of a large water conduit. We walked on a
narrow board walk very slippery with cheesy, red-brown mire. From time
to time the hammer crash of a shell sounded uncomfortably near, and bits
of dirt and pebbles, dislodged by the concussion, fell from the wall of
the passage. The only vista was the curving wall of the long
communication trench and the soft sky of Lorraine, lit with the pleasant
sunlight of middle afternoon, and islanded with great golden-white cloud
masses. My guide and I might have been the last persons left in a world
of strange and terrible noises. The boyau (communication trench) began
to turn and wind about in the most perplexing manner, and we entered a
veritable labyrinth. This extraordinary, baffling complexity is due
primarily to the fact that the trenches advance and retreat, rise and
fall, in order to take advantage of the opportunities for defense
afforded by every change in the topography of the region. I remember one
area along the front consisting of two round, grassy hills divided by a
small, grassy valley whose floor rose gently to a low ridge connecting
the two heights. In this terrain the defensive line began on the first
hill as a semicircle edging the grassy slopes presented to