A panorama unfolds as our car takes a rising grade to the village of Ste. Geneviève. We alight and walk along a bridge, where the sentry of a lookout is on watch. He seems quite alone, but at our approach a dozen of his comrades come out of their "home" dug in the hillside. Wherever you go about the frozen country of Lorraine it is a case of flushing soldiers from their shelters. A small, semicircular table is set up before the lookout, like his compass before a mariner. Here run blue pencil lines of direction pointing to Pont-à-Mousson, to Château- Salins, and other towns. Before us to the east rose the tree-clad crests of the famous Grand Couronné of Nancy, and faintly in the distance we could see Metz. "Those guns that I hear, are they firing across the frontier?" I asked. For some French batteries command one of the outer forts of Metz. "No, they are near Pont-à-Mousson." To the north the little town of Pont-à-Mousson lay in the lap of the river bottom, and across the valley, to the west, the famous Bois le Prêtre. More guns were speaking from the forest depths, which showed great scars where the trees had been cut to give fields of fire. This was well to the rear of our position, marking the boundaries of the wedge that the Germans drove into the French lines, with its point at St. Mihiel, in trying to isolate the forts of Verdun and Toul. Doubtless you have noticed that wedge on the snake maps and have wondered about it, as I have. It looks so narrow that the French ought to be able to shoot across it from both sides. If so, why don't the Germans widen it? Well, for one thing, a quarter of an inch on a map is a good many miles of ground. The Germans cannot spread their wedge because they would have to climb the walls of an alley. That was a fact as clear to the eye as the valley of the Hudson from West Point. The Germans occupy an alley within an alley, as it were. They have their own natural defences for the edges of their wedge; or, where they do not, they lie cheek by jowl with the French in such thick woods as the Bois le Prêtre. At our feet, looking toward Metz, an apron of cultivated land swept down for a mile or more to a forest edge. This was cut by lines of trenches, whose barbed-wire protection pricked a blanket of snow. "Our front is in those woods," explained the colonel who was in command of the point. "A major when the war began and an officer of reserves," mon capitaine, who had brought us out from Paris, explained about the colonel. We were soon used to hearing that a colonel had been a major or a major a captain before the Kaiser had tried to get Nancy. There was quick death and speedy promotion at the great battle of Lorraine, as there was at Gettysburg and Antietam. "They charged out of the woods, and we had a battalion of reserves-- here are some of them--mes poilus!"