Paris, rain, and darkness—The Gardens of the Tuileries—The dormitory—The hospital at night—Beginning of the Champagne offensive—The Gare de la Chapelle at two in the morning—The wounded—The Zouave stretcher-bearers—The Arabs in the abandoned school—Suburban Paris at dawn—The home of the deaconesses....

Nancy—The porter's story—Getting to the front—What the phrase "the front" really means—The sense of the front—The shell zone—The zone of quiet—My quarters in the shelled house—The fire shells—Bombarded at night—Death of the soldier fireman....

Le Bois-le-Prêtre—Description—History—Les Glycines, "Wisteria Villa"—The Road to the trenches—At the trenches—The painter's idea of "le sinistre dans l'art"—The sign post—The zone of violence—The Quart-en-Réserve—The village caught in the torment of the lines—The dead on the barbed wire—"The Road to Metz."...

The Trenches—Organization—Nature of the war—Food, shelters, clothing, ammunition, etc.—A typical day in the trenches—Trench shells or "crapouilots"—In the abri—The tunnel—The doctrinaire lieutenant of engineers....

The piano at Montauville—An interrupted concert—At the Quart—The battle for the ridge of the Wood—Fall of the German aeroplane—Psychology of the men in the trenches—Religion in the trenches—...

Poor old "Pont"—Description of the town—A civilian's story—The house of the Captain of the Papal Zouaves—Church of St. Laurent—The Cemetery and its guardian....

En repos—A village of troops—Manners and morals—The concert—journal of the Bois-le-Prêtre—Various poilus....

En permission—State of France—The France of 1905 and the France of 1915—The class of 1917—Bar-le-Duc—The air raid—Called to Verdun....

Verdun in 1912—Verdun on the night of the first great attack—The hospital—The shelled cross road—The air shell—The pastry cook's story—The cultivateur of the Valois and the crater at Douaumont—The pompiers of Verdun—"Do you want to see an odd sight?"—Verdun in storm and desolation. A Volunteer Poilu The Rochambeau S'en Va-t-en Guerre Moored alongside a great two-storied pier, with her bow to the land, the cargo and passenger boat, Rochambeau, of the Compagnie Générale was being loaded with Ameri

An Unknown Paris in the Night and Rain It was Sunday morning, the bells were ringing to church, and I was strolling in the gardens of the Tuileries. A bright morning sun was drying the dewy lawns and the wet marble bodies of the gods and athletes, the leaves on the trees were falling, and the French autumn, so slow, so golden, and so melancholy, had begun. At the end of the mighty vista of the Champs Élysées, the Arc de Triomphe rose, brown and vaporous in the exhalations of the quiet city, and

The Great Swathe of the Lines The time was coming when I was to see the mysterious region whence came the wounded of La Chapelle, and, a militaire myself, share the life of the French soldier. Late one evening in October, I arrived in Nancy and went to a hotel I had known well before the war. An old porter, a man of sixty, with big, bowed shoulders, gray hair, and a florid face almost devoid of expression, carried up my luggage, and as I looked at him, standing in the doorway, a simple figure in

La Forêt De Bois-Le-Pretre Beginning at the right bank of the Meuse, a vast plateau of bare, desolate moorland sweeps eastward to the Moselle, and descends to the river in a number of great, wooded ridges perpendicular to the northward-flowing stream. The town of Pont-à-Mousson lies an apron of meadowland spread between two of these ridges, the ridge of Puvenelle and the ridge of the Bois-le-Prêtre. The latter is the highest of all the spurs of the valley. Rising from the river about half a mile

The Trenches In The "Wood Of Death" So great has been the interest in the purely military side of the struggle that one is apt to forget that the war is worth study as the supreme occupation of many great nations, whose every energy, physical, moral, and economic, has been put to its service, and relentlessly tested in its fiery furnace. A future historian may find the war more interesting, when considered as the supreme achievement of the industrial civilization of the nineteenth and twentieth

The Germans Attack The schoolmaster (instituteur) and the schoolmistress (institutrice) of Montauville were a married couple, and had a flat of four rooms on the second story of the schoolhouse. The kitchen of this fiat had been struck by a shell, and was still a mess of plaster, bits of stone, and glass, and a fragment had torn clear through the sooty bottom of a copper saucepan still hanging on the wall. In one of the rooms, else quite bare of furniture, was an upright piano. Sometimes while s

The Town In The Trenches At the beginning of the war the German plan of campaign was to take France on the flank by marching through Belgium, and once the success of this northern venture assured, strike at the Verdun-Belfort line which had baffled them in the first instance. Had they not lost the battle of the Marne, this second venture might have proved successful, for the body of the French army was fighting in the north, and the remaining troops would have been discouraged by the capture of

Messieurs Les Poilus De La Grande Guerre The word "poilu," now applied to a French soldier, means literally "a hairy one," but the term is understood metaphorically. Since time immemorial the possession of plenty of bodily hair has served to indicate a certain sturdy, male bearishness, and thus the French, long before the war, called any good, powerful fellow—"un véritable poilu." The term has been found applied to soldiers of the Napoleonic wars. The French soldier of to-day, coming from the tr

Preparing The Defense Of Verdun Every three months, if the military situation will allow of it and every other man in his group has likewise been away, the French soldier gets a six days' furlough. The slips of paper which are then given out are called feuilles de permission, and the lucky soldier is called a permissionnaire. When the combats that gave the Bois-le-Prêtre its sinister nickname began to peter out, the poilus who had done the fighting were accorded these little vacations, and almos

The Great Days of Verdun The Verdun I saw in April, 1913, was an out-of-the-way provincial city of little importance outside of its situation as the nucleus of a great fortress. There were two cities—an old one, la ville des évêques, on a kind of acropolis rising from the left bank of the Meuse, and a newer one built on the meadows of the river. Round the acropolis Vauban had built a citadel whose steep, green-black walls struck root in the mean streets and narrow lanes on the slopes. Sunless by