On one side, a half mile distant, was a hill heavily wooded. At regular intervals the trees had been cut down and uprooted and, like a wood-road, a cleared space showed. These were the nests of the "seventy-fives." They could sweep the approaches to the fort as a fire-hose flushes a gutter. That a human being should be ordered to advance against such pitfalls and obstructions, and under the fire from the trenches and batteries, seemed sheer murder. Not even a cat with nine lives could survive. [Illustration: A valley in Argonne showing a forest destroyed by shells. Owing to the attack on the Verdun sector, it is again under fire.] The German papers tell that before the drive upon Verdun was launched the German Emperor reproduced the attack in miniature. The whereabouts and approaches to the positions they were to take were explained to the men. Their officers were rehearsed in the part each was to play. But no rehearsal would teach a man to avoid the pitfalls that surround Verdun. The open places are as treacherous as quicksands, the forests that seem to him to offer shelter are a succession of traps. And if he captures one fort he but brings himself under the fire of two others. From what I saw of the defenses of Verdun from a "certain place" three miles outside the city to a "certain place" fifteen miles farther south, from what the general commanding the Verdun sector told me, and from what I know of the French, I believe the Crown Prince will find this second attack upon Verdun a hundred per cent more costly than the first, and equally unsuccessful. CHAPTER X WAR IN THE VOSGES PARIS, January, 1916. When speaking of their five hundred miles of front, the French General Staff divide it into twelve sectors. The names of these do not appear on maps. They are family names and titles, not of certain places, but of districts with imaginary boundaries. These nicknames seem to thrive best in countries where the same race of people have lived for many centuries. With us, it is usually when we speak of mountains, as "in the Rockies," "in the Adirondacks," that under one name we merge rivers, valleys, and villages. To know the French names for the twelve official fronts may help in deciphering the communiques. They are these: Flanders, the first sector, stretches from the North Sea to beyond Ypres; the Artois sector surrounds Arras; the centre of Picardie is Amiens; Santerre follows the valley of the Oise; Soissonais is the sector that extends from Soissons on the Aisne to the Champagne sector, which begins with Rheims and extends southwest to include Chalons; Argonne is the forest of Argonne; the Hauts de Meuse, the district around Verdun; Woevre lies between the heights of the Meuse and the River Moselle; then come Lorraine, the Vosges, all hills and forests, and last, Alsace, the territory won back from the enemy.