Of these twelve fronts, I was on ten. The remaining two I missed through leaving France to visit the French fronts in Serbia and Salonika. According to which front you are on, the trench is of mud, clay, chalk, sand-bags, or cement; it is ambushed in gardens and orchards, it winds through flooded mud flats, is hidden behind the ruins of wrecked villages, and is paved and reinforced with the stones and bricks from the smashed houses. Of all the trenches the most curious were those of the Vosges. They were the most curious because, to use the last word one associates with trenches, they are the most beautiful. We started for the trenches of the Vosges from a certain place close to the German border. It was so close that in the inn a rifle-bullet from across the border had bored a hole in the cafe mirror. The car climbed steadily. The swollen rivers flowed far below us, and then disappeared, and the slopes that fell away on one side of the road and rose on the other became smothered under giant pines. Above us they reached to the clouds, below us swept grandly across great valleys. There was no sign of human habitation, not even the hut of a charcoal-burner. Except for the road we might have been the first explorers of a primeval forest. We seemed as far removed from the France of cities, cultivated acres, stone bridges, and chateaux as Rip Van Winkle lost in the Catskills. The silence was the silence of the ocean. We halted at what might have been a lumberman's camp. There were cabins of huge green logs with the moss still fresh and clinging, and smoke poured from mud chimneys. In the air was an enchanting odor of balsam and boiling coffee. It needed only a man in a Mackinaw coat with an axe to persuade us we had motored from a French village ten hundred years old into a perfectly new trading-post on the Saskatchewan. But from the lumber camp the colonel appeared, and with him in the lead we started up a hill as sheer as a church roof. The freshly cut path reached upward in short, zigzag lengths. Its outer edge was shored with the trunks of the trees cut down to make way for it. They were fastened with stakes, and against rain and snow helped to hold it in place. The soil, as the path showed, was of a pink stone. It cuts easily, and is the stone from which cathedrals have been built. That suggests that to an ambitious young sapling it offers little nutriment, but the pines, at least, seem to thrive on it. For centuries they have thrived on it. They towered over us to the height of eight stories. The ground beneath was hidden by the most exquisite moss, and moss climbed far up the tree trunks and covered the branches. They looked, as though to guard them from the cold, they had been swathed in green velvet. Except for the pink path we were in a world of green--green moss, green ferns, green tree trunks, green shadows. The little light that reached from above was like that which filters through the glass sides of an aquarium.