riosity as to what kind of a place we had landed in. The first thing we noticed was that we were in plain sight of the German lines, where pale blue "wursts", or observation balloons, hung in a graceful curve seemingly almost within rifle-range. At first it was highly irritating to think that every slightest act of ours was submitted to the hostile scrutiny of these pale blue eyes on their slender stalks, but we got used to it and soon forgot it. Herbeuville was an area of stone ruins about 200 yards square, lying, with many other villages now destroyed, under the shadow of a steep hill leading up to a plateau on which were the heights of the Woevre. Like other towns it had its main street, its little square with a few shade trees, its church whose tower, by some freak of fate, was still standing, though the roof and walls had fallen in across the altar and piled the flagged floor high with rubbish. It also had its little red-roofed railroad station, now a machine-gun strong point, some 300 yards from the edge of the town. Our four guns were cleverly concealed under apple trees, hedges, and behind tumbled-down garden walls, which also afforded some protection to the cannoneers. This was on the very edge of the town. From our gun-pits we could look out towards the Boche lines over a flat, green plain ending twenty kilometers away in the rolling country around Conflans and Briey. From Herbeuville the road ran two kilometers straight out to a mangled little heap of ruins which seemed to be smoking from a continuous bombardment—Wadonville. To the right a poplar-lined road led to Hannonville, almost as heavily shelled as its neighbor, and

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