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s on which the French at this writing obstinately hold an intrenched position, checking the point of the German wedge, while the French forces from north and south beat upon the sides of the triangle, trying to force it back across the Meuse and out from the vitals of the French fortress line. Bursting shells threw up their columns of white or black fog around the edge of the panorama. Cloudlets of white smoke here and there showed where a position was being brought under shrapnel fire. An occasional aeroplane could be picked out hovering over the lines, but the infantry and the field battery positions could not be discerned even with a high-power field glass, so cleverly had the armies taken cover. The uninitiated observer would have believed this a deserted landscape rather than the scene of a great battle, which, if successful for the Germans, would force the main French Army to retreat from its intrenched positions along the Aisne River. About three miles away, across the Meuse, a quadrangular mound of black, plowed-up earth on the hillside marked the location of Fort Les Paroches, which had been silenced by the German mortars the night before. Fort Camp des Romains, so named because the Roman legions had centuries ago selected this site for a strategic encampment, had been stormed by Bavarian infantry two days earlier after its heavy guns had been put out of action, and artillery officers said that Fort Lionville, fifteen miles to the south and out of the range of vision, was then practically silenced, only one of its armored turrets continuing to answer the bombardment. The correspondent had spent the previous night at the fortress town of Metz, sleeping under the same roof with Prince Oscar of Prussia, invalided from the field in a state of physical breakdown; Prince William of Hohenzollern, father-in-law of ex-King Manuel, and other officers, either watching or engaged in the operations in the field, and had traveled by automobile to the battlefront thirty-five miles to the west. For the first part of the distance the road led through the hills on which are located the chain of forts comprising the fortress of Metz; but, although the General Staff officer in the car pointed now and then to a hill as the site of this or that fort, traces of the fortifications could only occasionally be made out. Usually they were so skillfully masked and concealed by woods or blended with the hillsides that nothing out of t
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