grinning, some laughing outright-evidently the company humorist has cracked a joke. Once more the same vitality, the same lusty color of lip and cheek.

Here you pass a large number of soldiers equipped in a manner you had not observed before. Some have spades, some axes, several carry boards, a number have picks, all kinds of tools and implements for digging and building are in the hands of these men. They belong to the engineering corps, you are informed; they are what the veterans of our Civil War would call "sappers and miners." They are trudging rapidly onward. Their faces are grave. You note this with surprise, for all the other soldiers you have seen or will see in the next two days are of pleasant countenance. You remark upon the serious look these men

wear.

"A good thing, too," responds the officer in the seat beside you. "For they have serious work before them. They are to do the severest labor perhaps under heavy fire and can do no firing themselves. Most of them are trained engineers and all are high-spirited men. I would be glum myself if I had to toil while being shot at and could not answer shot for shot."

There is a grating rumble just ahead, and in a moment you overtake and are passing a procession of little square wagons, all but two drawn by six big horses. On each off horse sits a soldier, his rifle slung across his back ready for use. There are twenty of these wagons. It is an ammunition train, going where it is needed.

The end of the day has come, and you turn into an open space by the side of the road.

"Let us have some cheese and crackers," remarks the corps commander's aide. While you are standing, eating, darkness falls upon you like a black cloak. Although you have not been out of the sound of small arms or cannon the whole day long, yet you turn your head sharply as just behind you, beyond some trees, the crackle of heavy infantry fire breaks out.

You are in no danger, however, for although only a few yards away, it is the German rifles that are speaking, and the French lead will not come in your direction. Still there is enough shooting to give interest— several hundred men are pulling triggers just across a small field on the other side of the road.

Then, quite as suddenly, you wheel about at an unfamiliar series of explosions of a regularity you have not heard before, and you see at no great distance little spurts of fire so rapid that they seem almost a continuous flame, darting out like the red tongues of legendary serpents. Machine guns these, but directed at an angle from where you stand; so again there is no danger, and again nothing really happens.

Through the darkness now the rushing auto makes top speed. "Armee Oberkommando!" shouts the major-adjutant to the frequent sentries, and on you plunge again. Through a large town you pass, and on inquiry learn that it is one of the two biggest mining towns of France; and this leads to the discovery that the Germans occupy much the greater part of France's coal-mining district.

Here is another physical resource which that part of the republic occupied by the Germans is yielding the conquerors. Important items, these, and you reflect

that these French fields are, to a considerable extent, feeding the German army now in France.

You have sampled a portion of the line where the French oppose the Germans, and now you would have a look at another region, where the English front the German guns. Next day, then, you go to Comines, France, and beyond on the road to Ypres. Just across the Belgian border are battery headquarters for this artillery section. The vast noise of the cannon saturates the atmosphere with a steady and mighty sound. "Will you have a look at Messines before going to the batteries?" asks a young artillery captain.

Of course you will! You are standing in a little space surrounded on all sides save one by quaint old buildings. At an order, some soldiers begin throwing brush from a great contrivance on wheels standing in a corner, and push it forward. The brush is to hide this object from the enemy's aeroplanes and their impertinent bombs.

This mechanism looks like a heavy field piece of unusual length, and you imagine that it is. But the muzzle is elevated until the instrument is perpendicular; and you think that they are going to shoot at a foe of the skies. A wheel is turned and the curious creation elongates itself many feet in the air. There is a quick adjustment at the base, and: "Look, please!"

Stooping to put your eye to the lens, before you is the Belgian town for which the English and Germans are struggling. The supposed big gun turns out to be the most modern and powerful of those field telescopes used by the Germans in this war!

Toward the batteries pouring their mammoth hail

at the English position you make your way. You pass a great circular pit in the earth like an inverted cone, twenty feet across and half as deep. A British shell did that the day before. Alongside the road one of the double row of bordering trees, perhaps fourteen inches in diameter, is broken, its upper half hanging to the earth. The break is a shatter of splinters. Yonder is another tree riven exactly like the first, and a little farther on, still another. The rending in the body of these trees seems almost at the same height from the ground. Work of the English shells.

And so you walk on to a German battery, whose guns are precisely like those you examined yesterday, but not nearly so well concealed. This battery is not in action for some reason-perhaps the guns are "resting." Great piles of shells are under a covering, well concealed from the side toward the enemy-they are ready for use at a moment's notice, as are the guns and indeed the men themselves, who are standing about, in easy preparedness, waiting for the telephone command. What if a shell were to fall in that store But you do not think of this until

of ammunition! afterward.

A little way to your right, and in plain view, another battery is in rapid action. The English guns are answering shot for shot. Farther off, perhaps a mile away, a house bursts into flames. "That is an English shell," explains one of the officers. And almost as he speaks, another house, near the first one, begins to burn, also fired by a British naval gun, for these are warship ordnance, you learn, doing shore duty.

And so the labor of war goes on. Above and about you sound the prolonged w-h-i-n-n-n-g-g-g of the flying messengers of death. The sound of them is not unpleasant; indeed, their voices are distinctly musical. You wonder why some great composer has not written the song of the shell.

Such are average examples of the battle front in this part of France in January of 1915. Not many charges or rushes across open spaces, although there are a few of these, here and there, along the hundreds of miles extending from the sea southward into France. The steady rains, the overflowing streams, the flooded low places, the deep and sticky mud—all discourage infantry attack or cavalry operations.

You have felt that downpour, you have seen that surplus water, you have walked a great deal through that mud yourself, and you understand the physical difficulty leadening the feet of soldiers rushing a hostile trench. But when the rains let up and the overflow recedes, and the ground becomes firm, there will be another story.

"It looks to an uninformed civilian as though it will be hard for the Allies to oust you from your position," you observe.

"Oust us! They will never dislodge us! Oust us! Oust us!! We shall advance!" snaps back a German officer, one of the best informed soldiers of a certain famous corps. And when he explains how this can be done without great loss it seems simple enough. Suffice it to say that the major premise of this syllogism of expected victory is temperament and the physical basis. On these the rain and snow and