plateau, stretching from the high hill behind us, to the river in front
of us, portrayed itself, when viewed from aloft, as a shallow bowl,
alternately grooved by small depressions and corrugated by small ridges.
Here and there were thin woodlands, looking exactly like scrubby
clothesbrushes. The fields were checkered squares and oblongs, and a
ruined village in the distance seemed a jumbled handful of children's
gray and red blocks.

The German batteries appeared now to be directly beneath us--some of
them, though in reality I imagine the nearest one must have been nearly
a mile away on a bee line. They formed an irregular horseshoe, with the
open end of it toward us. There was a gap in the horseshoe where the
calk should have been. The German trenches, for the most part, lay
inside the encircling lines of batteries. In shape they rather
suggested a U turned upside down; yet it was hard to ascribe to them any
real shape, since they zigzagged so crazily. I could tell, though,
there was sanity in this seeming madness, for nearly every trench was
joined at an acute angle with its neighbor; so that a man, or a body of
men, starting at the rear, out of danger, might move to the very front
of the fighting zone and all the time be well sheltered. So far as I
could make out there were but few breaks in the sequence of
communications. One of these breaks was almost directly in front of me
as I stood facing the south.

The batteries of the Allies and their infantry trenches, being so much
farther away, were less plainly visible. I could discern their location
without being able to grasp their general arrangement. Between the
nearer infantry trenches of the two opposing forces were tiny dots in
the ground, each defined by an infinitesimal hillock of yellow earth
heaped before it--observation pits these, where certain picked men, who
do not expect to live very long anyway, hide themselves away to keep
tally on the effect of the shells, which go singing past just over their
heads to fall among the enemy, who may be only a few hundred feet or a
few hundred yards away from the observers.

It was an excessively busy afternoon among the guns. They spoke
continually--now this battery going, now that; now two or three or a
dozen together--and the sound of them came up to us in claps and roars
like summer thunder. Sometimes, when a battery close by let go, I could
watch the thin, shreddy trail of fine smoke that marked the ar