On the southern side of the wedge the chief French efforts have been made at the two extremities of the line, at the Bois d’Ailly and the Bois Brulé, in the Forest of Apremont, and, fourteen and twenty-one miles further east, at the Bois de Mort-Mare, directly south of Thiaucourt, and the Bois le Prêtre, a little to the west of Pont-à-Mousson. The approach to the Forest of Apremont from the Meuse is one of the many places on this part of the front where the French side of the low hills behind the trenches are for miles honeycombed with cave-dwellings. They have been there so long now that they have become part of the landscape and look as if they had always belonged to it. I suppose when the war is over they will still be left for the edification of the cheap trippers and tourists of the world. What will not be left for them to see, for it is gone already, is the Bois Brulé. In the height of summer you can walk for hours along the trenches, through acres of what was once a green forest, and see never a leaf. Nothing is left of the trees but shattered stumps, cut clean off by the shells close to the ground. That gives one some idea of the severity of the endless duel of the guns. At the east end of the wood the hill on which it stands drops down sharply into the plain, and through the loopholes in the front trenches (where you do not linger for more than a few seconds at a time) you look down on the brown roofs of the village of Apremont, three or four hundred feet below you. It is full of Germans, though they never show themselves. But their advanced trenches are much closer than that, on the top of the reverse slope of the hill, in some places at the regulation nearest distance of about fifteen yards. Behind the hill, that is to say, on the south or French side of it, and as far as one can see to the east, the plain stretches out flat and unbroken (except by the lines of French and German trenches cut across it), backed on the south by a series of long, straight, level-topped hills, écheloned one behind the other, and ending far away to the right in the blue haze where the heights of the Moselle begin. That is where Pont-à-Mousson lies, and Bois le Prêtre, the greater part of it another dreary forest of stumps, through which the battle raged backwards and forwards again and again for months—or is it centuries?—till at last the whole of it was won and kept for France by her splendid soldiers.