something also in Plate 104, which shows the last French front-line positions near the top of the southern slope of the ridge, where the final attack occurred on the 28th of May, 1916. But the French front still remained unbroken; they had never even been pushed back to their main positions of defence. The great counter-attack on the left of the Meuse came in August, 1917, when the Mort Homme and Cumières Wood were retaken on the first day, and the whole original front restored in a week. * * * * * The Argonne Forest, in which the Americans had such stiff fighting in pushing back the Germans in 1918, lies about twenty miles west of Verdun and covers an area of some 150 square miles up to the line where the Aire River cuts across it on its way to the Aisne. Its huge dimensions, and the fact that only a portion of it was the scene of actual fighting for any considerable time, have saved it from undergoing the total destruction of so many of the smaller woods. Plate 105 shows some of the southern portion between St. Menehould and Clermont, which is practically uninjured, although the village of Les Islettes (faintly seen in the valley, which here separates the forest into two sections) is in ruins. Along the road from St. Menehould to Verdun through the forest (from which the view was taken) there were in 1919 long lines of fruit-trees quite uninjured, an unusually cheerful sight. In September, 1914, after the first battle of the Marne, the Germans in their retreat held the northern part of the forest, practically on the cross-road from Varennes to Vienne-le-Château. From that time until the end of 1915 there was continuous and very severe fighting in the section of the forest between that road and the St. Menehould road. Fighting in the depths of the forest among thick trees, on wet and slippery ground traversed by endless ravines, was incessant by day and night, often hand to hand, and below ground as well as on the surface. The French did not succeed in dislodging the enemy, but they were successful in defeating two powerful attacks by the Crown Prince, in June and July, 1915, directed at the St. Menehould-Verdun road. The enemy got within five or six miles of Les Islettes, and the little town was destroyed, but they never got to the road, and were promptly driven back to their old lines. The town of Clermont, farther east on this road, had been sacked and then burnt by the Germans in their retreat in 1914. Varennes (Plate 106) is on the eastern edge of the forest, where it is crossed by the River Aire, which up to that point had been flowing northwards east of the Argonne, as the Aisne does on the west. It was the headquarters of the Crown Prince's army in 1915, and his attacks in that year started from it. It is only a few miles west of Avocourt and Malancourt, from which started the March attack on the Mort Homme Ridge from the west in 1916.