The church of Ste. Geneviève was badly smashed by shell. So was the church in the village on the Plateau d'Amance, as are most churches in this district of Lorraine. Framed through a great gap in the wall of the church of Amance was an immense Christ on the cross without a single abrasion, and a pile of debris at its feet. After seeing as many ruined churches as I have, one becomes almost superstitious at how often the figures of Christ escape. But I have also seen effigies of Christ blown to bits. Anyone who, from an eminence, has seen one battle fought visualizes another readily when the positions lie at his feet. Looking out on the field of Gettysburg from Round Top, I can always get the same thrill that I had when, seated in a gallery above the Russian and the Japanese armies, I saw the battle of Liao-yang. In sight of that Plateau d'Amance, which rises like a great knuckle above the surrounding country, a battle covering twenty times the extent of Gettysburg raged, and one could have looked over a battle-line as far as the eye may see from a steamer's mast. An icy gale swept across the white crest of the plateau on this January day, but it was nothing to the gale of shells that descended on it in late August and early September. Forty thousand shells, it is estimated, fell there. One kicked up fragments of steel on the field like peanut-shells after a circus has gone. Here were the emplacements of a battery of French soixante-quinze within a circle of holes torn by its adversaries' replies to its fire; a little farther along, concealed by shrubbery, the position of another battery which the enemy had not located. So that was it! The struggle on the immense landscape, where at least a quarter of a million men were killed and wounded, became as simple as some Brobdingnagian football match. Before the war began the French would not move a man within five miles of the frontier lest it be provocative; but once the issue was joined they sprang for Alsace and Lorraine, their imagination magnetized by the thought of the recovery of the lost provinces. Their Alpine chasseurs, mountain men of the Alpine and the Pyrenees districts, were concentrated for the purpose. I recalled a remark I had heard: "What a pitiful little offensive that was!" It was made by one of those armchair "military experts" who look at a map and jump at a conclusion. They appear very wise in their wordiness when real military experts are silent for want of knowledge. Pitiful, was it? Ask the Germans who faced it what they think. Pitiful, that sweep over those mountain walls and through the passes? Pitiful, perhaps, because it failed, though not until it had taken Château-Salins in the north and Mulhouse in the south. Ask the Germans if they think that it was pitiful! The Confederates also failed at Antietam and at Gettysburg, but the Union army never thought of their efforts as pitiful.