at the American people will be glad to become acquainted
with the battlefield made glorious by their sons, with the soil which
will some day be a consecrated goal of pilgrimage for the entire nation.

[Sidenote: The field once the most beautiful country.]

This field of death, bristling with ruins still smouldering, was
formerly, and will soon be once more, a beautiful stretch of country.
Here we are in the heart of the Ile de France, and the countryside
displays all the gracious charm of a typical French landscape. With its
undulating plateaus, pleasant vales, broad green valleys, forests and
greensward, chateaux and villas, small towns, and dear old villages
thronged with souvenirs of the past, the district between the Marne and
the Aisne was peculiarly representative of France--the France of the
Merovingians and Capets as well as of the twentieth century.

There is no manufacturing and little commercial activity; but a
skillful, varied, and persistent culture of the soil, with special
attention to those most exacting of crops, the vine and vegetables,
which are successfully raised only by dint of hard labor, and to the
production of vast quantities of sugar-beets and cereals.

[Sidenote: The villages are built of stone.]

The villages, built of the beautiful stone of the district, have, one
and all, an air of dignity and prosperity which gives animation to the
landscape. The very names are among the most pleasant to the ear, and
often among the most illustrious in the language. Our great men of
letters, La Fontaine and Racine, Pope Urban II, who preached the First
Crusade, and other statesmen and princes, all born in the province, had
already made it a genuinely historic spot; and the memory of the battles
fought by Napoleon at Chateau-Thierry and Soissons, against the invaders
of 1814, has not yet faded. When they turned the enemy back from Paris,
the Americans were fighting in the most truly French of all the
districts of France, and their gallantry has imparted to it a new charm,
a more resplendent glory.

[Sidenote: Topography from the Marne to the Vesle.]

But this attractive region does not exhibit everywhere the same
features. The topography of the Ile de France is so varied that one can
distinguish several families, or groups, of landscapes between the Marne
and the Vesle. Let us follow them, in the order followed by the
different stages of the battle.

The southern portion is the most elevated and mo