I

THE dawn came very reluctantly through the clouds, bringing no sun with it, although the drizzle stopped. The battalion rose from its soggy blankets, kneading stiffened muscles to restore circulation, and gathered in disconsolate shivering groups around the galleys. These had come up in the night, and from them, standing under the dripping pines, came a promising smell of hot coffee. Something hot was the main consideration in life just now. But the fires were feeble, and something hot was long in coming. The cooks swore because dry wood couldn't be found, and wet wood couldn't be risked, because it would draw shell-fire. The men swore at the weather and the slowness of the kitchen force, and the war in general, and they all growled together. "Quite right-entirely fitting and proper!" said the second-in-command of the 49th Company, coming up to where his captain gloomed beside the galley. "We wouldn't know what to do with Marines who didn't growl. But, El Capitan, if you'll go over to that ditch yonder, you'll find some Frog artillerymen with a lovely cooking-fire. They gave me hot coffee with much rum in it. A great people, the Frogs-" But the captain was already gone, and the second-in-command, who was a lean first lieutenant in a mouse-colored raincoat, had to run to catch up with him.

They returned in time to see their company and the other companies of the battalion lining up for chow. This matter being disposed of, the men cast incurious eyes about them.

The French artillerymen called the place "the Wood of the Seven Pigeons." There were no pigeons here now. Only hidden batteries of 105s, with their blueclad attendants huddled in shelters around them. The wood was a sparse growth of scrubby pines that persisted somehow on the long slope of one of the low hills of Suippes, in the sinister Champagne country. Many of the pines were blackened and torn by shellfire, and the chalky soil was pockmarked with shell craters from Boche counter-battery work, searching for the French guns camouflaged there. Trenches zigzagged through the pines, old and new, with belts of rusty wire. There were graves.

North from the edge of the pines the battalion looked out on desolation where the once grassy, rolling slopes of the Champagne stretched away like a great white sea that had been dead and accursed through all time. Near at hand was Souain, a town of the dead, a shattered skeleton of a place, with shells breaking over it. Beyond and northward was Somme-Py, nearly blotted out by four years of war. From there to the horizon, east and west and north and south, was all a stricken land. The rich top-soil that formerly made the Champagne one

of the fat provinces of France, was gone, blown away and buried under by four years of incessant shellfire. Areas that had been forested showed only blackened, branchless stumps, upthrust through the churned earth. What was left was naked, leprous chalk. It was a wilderness of craters, large and small, wherein no yard of earth lay untouched. Interminable mazes of trench work threaded this waste, discernible from a distance by the belts of rusty wire entanglements that stood before them. Of the great national highway that had once marched across the Champagne between rows of stately poplars, no vestige remained.

"So this, Slover, is the Champagne," said the second-in-command to one of his non-coms who stood beside him. The sergeant spat. "It looks like hell, sir!" he said.

The lieutenant strolled over to where a French staff captain stood with a knot of officers in the edge of the pines, pointing out features of this extended field, made memorable by bitter fighting.

"Since 1914 we have fought hard here," he was saying. "Oh, the French know this Champagne well, and the Boche knows it too. Yonder "-he pointed to

the southwest-"is the Butte de Souain, where our Foreign Legion met in the first year that Guard Division that the Prussians call the 'Cockchafers.' They took the Butte, but most of the Legion are lying there now. And yonder"-the Frenchman extended his arm with a gesture that had something of the salute in it-"stands the Mountain of Rheims. If you lookthe air is clearing a little-you can perhaps see the towers of Rheims itself."

A long grayish hill lay against the gray sky at the horizon, and over it a good glass showed, very far and faint, the spires of the great cathedral, with a cloud of shell-fire hanging over them.

"All this terrain, as far as Rheims, is dominated by Blanc Mont Ridge yonder to the north. As long as the Boche holds Blanc Mont, he can throw his shells into Rheims; he can dominate the whole Champagne Sector, as far as the Marne. Indeed, they say that the Kaiser watched from Blanc Mont the battle that he launched here in July. And the Boche means to hang on there. So far, we have failed to dislodge him. I expect"-he broke off and smiled gravely on the circle of officers "you will see some very hard fighting in the next few days, gentlemen!"

It was the last day of September, and as the forenoon went by an intermittent drizzle sent the battalion to such miserable shelters as the men could improvise. Company commanders and seconds-incommand went up toward ruined SommePy for reconnaissance, and returned to profane the prospect to their platoon leaders.

"I do not like this place," declared the captain of the 49th Company to his juniors. "It looks like it was just built for calamities to happen in."

"Yep, and all the division is around here for calamities to happen to.... A sight more of us will go in than will ever come out of it!"

Meantime it was wet and cold in the dripping shelters. Winter clothing had not been issued, and the battalion shivered and was not cheerful.

"Wish to God we could go up an' get this fight over with!"

"Yes, an' then go back somewhere for the winter. Let some of these here noble National Army outfits we've been hearin' about do some of the fightin'! There's us, and there's the First Division, and the Thirty-second-Hell! we ain't hogs! Let some of them other fellows have the glo

"Hear your young men talk, El Capitan? They're goin' to take it out on the Boche-they will, too. Don't you take any more of this than your rank entitles you to! I'm gettin' wet."

The second-in-command and the captain were huddled under a small sheet of corrugated iron, stolen by an enterprising orderly from the French gunners. The captain was very large, and the other very lean, and they were both about the same length. They fitted under the sheet by a sort of dovetailing process that made it complicated for either to move. A second-in-command is sort of an understudy to the company commander. In some of the outfits the captain does everything, and his understudy can only mope around and wait for his senior to become a casualty. In others, it is the junior who gets things done, and the captain is just a figurehead. In the 49th, however, the relation was at its happiest. The big captain and his lieutenant functioned together as smoothly as parts of a sweetrunning engine, and there was between them the undemonstrative affection of men who have faced much peril together.

"As for me," rejoined the captain, drawing up one soaked knee and putting the other out in the wet, "I want to get wounded in this fight. A bon blighty, in the arm or the leg, I think. Something that will keep me in a nice dry hospital