The village nestles among the hills in the shadow of Mount Sec, Mount Sec before which and on which so many thousands of gallant Frenchmen have laid down their lives, and within which now mass the German batteries that overlook the immediate plain where our forces lie intrenched. It rests, or did rest, well within our first line, a kilometer beyond the last battery of "75's," and at the same distance from the great camouflaged military road that the papers have announced was the objective of the recent attack. One catches occasional glimpses of it as he approaches it through the deep connecting trench, a picture of desolation framed with crumbling walls. From it the trenches lead on again, but not far, for Seicheprey is close to the German barbed wire. The officers and the men who hold it are constantly on the alert. German guns always command it, and perhaps a dozen times a day drop shells into it. No men are billeted there beyond the capacity of the bomb-proofs. These shelters, aside from the direct hits of high-power shells, give practically complete protection. There are no villagers in Seicheprey; those who lived there and who tilled the fields round about are gone. It is a community without a woman, and from morning until night it does not hear the small voice of a child. It is a city of ruin, a place of most melancholy memories. Seicheprey is holy ground; lying midway between Toul and Metz, it is in the heart of the salient that next to Verdun has witnessed the bloodiest fighting on the French front. It is an honor and a high trust for an army just to be there. It stands before one of the two gateways to the heart of France. It has seen the tide of war surge back and forth many times among its houses and up and down its street. Again and again it has been captured and surrendered and recaptured. Out from it, or hard by, twenty thousand glorious Frenchmen have been buried by the hands of their comrades or the shells of their foe. I have seen the war planes high above it, German planes with shrapnel bursts about them, hurrying home from observation-trips behind our lines, and the silver planes of France in hot pursuit. From a blackened hill behind it I saw an air duel above the German lines, and a German flyer brought down in smoke and flames. I have seen our wounded carried out from it, German wounded brought into it; and stumbling through its single street I have watched the passing of our first prisoners of war. From it I have watched the chill winds of February driving through the shredded orchard trees on the hillside that dips into the open field where the poison gas has found so many victims and where it lies in ambush in the noisome shell-holes. Beyond the field is what was once a forest; the shattered tree-trunks now remind one of the broken columns in a cemetery.