XI
Winter In Lorraine



Only a winding black streak, that four hundred and fifty miles of
trenches on a flat map. It is difficult to visualize the whole as you see
it in your morning paper, or to realize the labour it represents in its
course through the mire and over mountain slopes, through villages
and thick forests and across open fields.

Every mile of it was located by the struggle of guns and rifles and
men coming to a stalemate of effort, when both dug into the earth
and neither could budge the other. It is a line of countless battles and
broken hopes; of charges as brave as men ever made; a symbol of
skill and dogged patience and eternal vigilance of striving foe against
striving foe.

From the first, the sector from Rheims to Flanders was most familiar
to the public. The world still thinks of the battle of the Marne as an
affair at the door of Paris, though the heaviest fighting was from Vitry-
le-François eastward and the fate of Paris was no less decided on the
fields of Lorraine than on the fields of Champagne. The storming of
Rheims Cathedral became the theme of thousands of words of print
to one word for the defence of the Plateau d'Amance or the struggle
around Lunéville. Our knowledge of the war is from glimpses through
the curtain of military secrecy which was drawn tight over Lorraine