almost like a natural ridge in the earth.

All about it was an entanglement of barbed wire; the strands were woven
and interwoven, tangled and twined together, until they suggested
nothing so much as a great patch of blackberry briers after the leaves
have dropped from the vines in the fall of the year. To take the works
the Germans had to cut through these trochas. It seemed impossible to
believe human beings could penetrate them, especially when one was told
that the Belgians charged some of the wires with high electricity, so
that those of the advancing party who touched them were frightfully
burned and fell, with their garments blazing, into the jagged wire
brambles, and were held there until they died.

Before the charge and the final hand-to-hand fight, however, there was
shelling. There was much shelling. Shells from the German guns that
fell short or overshot the mark descended in the fields, and for a mile
round these fields were plowed as though hundreds of plowshares had
sheared the sod this way and that, until hardly a blade of grass was
left to grow in its ordained place. Where shells had burst after they
struck were holes in the earth five or six feet across and five or six
feet deep. Shells from the German guns and from the Belgian guns had
made a most hideous hash of a cluster of small cottages flanking a small
smelting plant which stood directly in the line of fire. Some of these
houses--workmen's homes, I suppose they had been--were of frame,
sheathed over with squares of tin put on in a diamond pattern; and you
could see places where a shell, striking such a wall a glancing blow,
had scaled it as a fish is scaled with a knife, leaving the bare wooden
ribs showing below. The next house, and the next, had been hit squarely
and plumply amidships, and they were gutted as fishes are gutted. One
house in twenty, perhaps, would be quite whole, except for broken