For once in my life--and doubtlessly only once--I saw now
understandingly a battle front.

It was spread before me--lines and dots and dashes on a big green and
brown and yellow map. Why, the whole thing was as plain as a chart. I
had a reserved seat for the biggest show on earth.

To be sure it was a gallery seat, for the terrace from which we started
stood fully five hundred feet above the bottom of the valley, and we had
ascended approximately seven hundred feet above that, giving us an
altitude of, say, twelve hundred feet in all above the level of the
river; but a gallery seat suited me. It suited me perfectly. The great
plateau, stretching from the high hill behind us, to the river in front
of us, portrayed itself, when viewed from aloft, as a shallow bowl,
alternately grooved by small depressions and corrugated by small ridges.
Here and there were thin woodlands, looking exactly like scrubby
clothesbrushes. The fields were checkered squares and oblongs, and a
ruined village in the distance seemed a jumbled handful of children's
gray and red blocks.

The German batteries appeared now to be directly beneath us--some of
them, though in reality I imagine the nearest one must have been nearly
a mile away on a bee line. They formed an irregular horseshoe, with the
open end of it toward us. There was a gap in the horseshoe where the
calk should have been. The German trenches, for the most part, lay
inside the encircling lines of batteries. In shape they rather
suggested a U turned upside down; yet it was hard to ascribe to them any
real shape, since they zigzagged so crazily. I could tell, though,
there was sanity in this seeming madness, for nearly every trench was
joined at an acute angle with its neighbor; so that a man, or a body of