still holding, there will soon be no more Metz. The French guns will
destroy the city as the German cannon destroyed Verdun.

When the Germans, therefore, retired to the trenches after the battles
of September and October, 1914, they took to the ground on the heights
of the Bois-le-Prêtre, a terrain far enough ahead of Thiaucourt and Metz
to preserve these centers from the danger of being shelled. On the crest
of the highest ridge along the valley, admirably ambushed in a thick
forest, they waited for the coming of the French. And the French came.

They came, young and old, slum-dweller and country schoolmaster, rich
young noble and Corsican peasant, to the storming of the wood, upheld by
one vision, the unbroken, grassy slope that stretched from behind the
German lines to the town of Thiaucourt. In the trenches behind the slaty
trunks of the great ash trees, Bavarian peasants, Saxons, and
round-headed Wurttem-burgers, the olive-green, jack-booted Boches,
awaited their coming, determined to hold the wood, the salient, and the
city.

A year later the Bois-le-Prêtre (the Priest Wood), with its perfume of
ecclesiastical names that reminds one of the odor of incense in an old
church, had become the Bois de la Mort (the Wood of Death).

The house in which our bureau was located was once the summer residence
of a rich ironmaster who had fled to Paris at the beginning of the war.
If there is an architectural style of German origin known as the
"Neo-Classic," which affects large, windowless spaces framed in
pilasters of tile, and decorations and insets of omelet-yellow and
bottle-green glazed brick, "Wisteria Villa" is of that school. It stood
behind a high wall of iron spikes on the road leading from Maidières to