He turned affectionately to the bearded fellows in scarfs who had come out of the shelter. They smiled back. Now, as we all chatted together, officer-and-man distinction disappeared. We were in a family party. It was all very simple to mes poilus, that first fight. They had been told to hold. If Ste. Geneviève were lost, the Amance plateau was in danger, and the loss of the Amance plateau meant the fall of Nancy. Some military martinets say that the soldiers of France think too much. In this case thinking may have taught them responsibility. So they held; they lay tight, these reserves, and kept on firing as the Germans swarmed out of the woods. "And the Germans stopped there, monsieur. They hadn't very far to go, had they? But the last fifty yards, monsieur, are the hardest travelling when you are trying to take a trench." They knew, these poilus, these veterans. Every soldier who serves in Lorraine knows. They themselves have tried to rush out of the edge of a woods across an open space against intrenched Germans and found the shoe on the other foot. Now the fields in the foreground down to the woods' edge were bare of any living thing. You had to take mon capitaine's word for it that there were any soldiers in front of us. "The Boches are a good distance away at this point," he said. "They are in the next woods." A broad stretch of snow lay between the two clumps of woods. It was not worth while for either side to try to get possession of the intervening space. At the first movement by either French or Germans the woods opposite would hum with rifle fire and echo with cannonading. So, like rival parties of Arctic explorers waiting out the Arctic winter, they watched each other. But if one force or the other napped and the other caught him at it, then winter would not stay a brigade commander's ambition. Three days later in this region the French, by a quick movement, got a good bag of prisoners to make a welcome item for the daily French official bulletin. "We wait and the Germans wait on spring for any big movement," said the colonel. "Men can't lie out all night in the advance in weather like this. In that direction------" He indicated a part of the line where the two armies were facing each other across the old frontier. Back and forth they had fought, only to arrive where they had begun. There was something else which the colonel wished us to see before we left the hill of Ste. Geneviève. It appealed to his Gallic sentiment, this quadrilateral of stone on the highest point where legend tells that "Jovin, a Christian and very faithful, vanquished the German barbarians 366 A.D." "We have to do as well in our day as Jovin in his," remarked the colonel.