La Forêt De Bois-Le-Pretre



Beginning at the right bank of the Meuse, a vast plateau of bare,
desolate moorland sweeps eastward to the Moselle, and descends to the
river in a number of great, wooded ridges perpendicular to the
northward-flowing stream. The town of Pont-à-Mousson lies an apron of
meadowland spread between two of these ridges, the ridge of Puvenelle
and the ridge of the Bois-le-Prêtre. The latter is the highest of all
the spurs of the valley. Rising from the river about half a mile to the
north of the city, it ascends swiftly to the level of the plateau, and
was seen from our headquarters as a long, wooded ridge blocking the
sky-line to the northwest. The hamlet of Maidières, in which our
headquarters were located, lies just at the foot of Puvenelle, at a
point where the amphitheater of Pont-à-Mousson, crowding between the two
ridges, becomes a steep-walled valley sharply tilted to the west.

The Bois-le-Prêtre dominated at once the landscape and our minds. Its
existence was the one great fact in the lives of some fifty thousand
Frenchmen, Germans, and a handful of exiled Americans; it had dominated
and ended the lives of the dead; it would dominate the imagination of
the future. Yet, looking across the brown walls and claret roofs of the
hamlet of Maidières, there was nothing to be seen but a grassy slope,
open fields, a reddish ribbon of road, a wreck of a villa burned by a
fire shell, and a wood. The autumn had turned the leaves of the trees,
seemingly without exception, to a leathery brown, and in almost all
lights the trunks of the trees were a cold, purplish slate. Such was the
forest which, battle-areas excepted, has cost more lives than any other
point along the line. The wood had been contested trench by trench,