had been declassed long before the war, but had been of use to the enemy as an observatory. Against an attack its glacis had been cleared, its shells reconstructed and furnished with machine-gun posts and connected with a labyrinth of caves and tunnels running back to the northern end of the plateau and so to the German rear. This underground system of defenses illustrated a characteristic of the field, which distinguished it from that of other offensives. The hills were honeycombed with limestone caves, grottoes, and tunnels. Nature began the work and engineers extended it. Once masters of the Malmaison plateau, which was the key of the ridge between the Aisne and Ailette valleys, the French secured not only an unrivaled observation-point over the Laon plain, but turned the Chemin-des-Dames ridge on the northern slopes to which the Germans had hitherto held fast.5

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Pétain was aiming to evict the enemy from the western half of the Chemin-des-Dames. His operations culminated in victory at Malmaison, as won by General Maistre, a couple of months after General Guillaumat terminated his offensive by the capture of Hill 304. The battle of Malmaison, which synchronized with the German successes at Riga and the growth of the Bolshevik conspiracy in Russia, began a day before the opening of the AustroGerman October offensive which was so disastrous to Italians at Caporetto, and three days before Haig and Antoine delivered their considerable attack in the third battle of Ypres. It finished off successfully the battle of Craonne-Reims, which had begun on April 16, and proved to be the penultimate offensive of the Allies in 1917 against the German fortified zone between the Jura and the North Sea. This powerful fort, one of those huge entrenched camps designed by Rivière, had been built in 1875. But in 1913, with its masonry and concrete, it was sold to a Laon contractor, who used the material in building new barracks in Laon.

For centuries stone-cutters had been hewing their way into the bowels of this hog's back, the Chemin-des-Dames, whose sides were studded with artificial or natural tunnels, often 30 or 40 feet below the surface, and many, like the

5 Cable dispatch from G. H. Perris to The New York Times.

Dragon's Cave beneath the Hurtebise Farm, were connected with the surface by hidden galleries. The majority of the underground chambers were still occupied by the Germans. The longest, the Montparnasse quarry, near the SoissonsLaon road on the northern slope below Fort Malmaison, blocked the way to the village of Chavignon, which lay at its feet. This quarry had an area of several acres; it was two-storied and could afford shelter to a whole brigade.

Above the Montparnasse quarry, and northwest of it on the summit of the wide plateau at the western end of the ridge, was Malmaison, surrounded by a muddy moat, the water from which had been drained off, its subterranean galleries strongly garrisoned by the enemy who, since September, 1914, had reconstructed it and furnished the environs and interior with several ferroconcrete machinegun emplacements. From the ramparts the Germans could watch any French movements between the Ailette and the Aisne, or on the spurs running down to the Aisne. On the left, to the northwest, was a clear view over the Ailette along the lower edge of the west side of the Forest of Coucy, past the village of Brancourt. In front was Laon, eight miles away, perched on its strange isolated hill. Malmaison rose in the center of the plateau. Before it and nearer the French was another huge excavation, the Bohery quarry. German engineers at the date of the battle were still engaged in connecting this, the Montparnasse and other subterranean works, with the galleries under the fort; but had not completed their scheme when the French attacked.

Montparnasse and Bohery like the Fruty quarry on the edge of the Soissons-Laon line were specimens of the numerous subterranean obstacles in the way of General Maistre. The heaviest siege-artillery was required to pierce solid roofs. Pétain had provided several batteries of 15-inch and 16-inch guns which fired heavy shells with armor-piercing points enabling them to penetrate the roofs. Where the thickness was too great for the first shell to penetrate, a salvo of shells, falling about the same spot, reduced the layer of rock until it was thin enough to be penetrated. In this process the galleries of Malmaison were completely wrecked, as were the

interiors of caves. The Montparnasse quarry was made to resemble from above a slice of Gruyère cheese. In spite of its extraordinary thickness, at least two 16-inch shells broke through to the double gallery beneath, causing terrible casualties among the garrison. The holes made into the interior became funnels down which poured torrents of gas and bullets from shrapnel-shell. Caves and tunnels had been utilized by the enemy as secure hiding-places for

reserves, who at the moment of the French attack were to come to the surface and reinforce the garrisons of the elaborately organized lines. The garrisons before had been in a condition of security, but now they lived lives of constant danger. Ceaseless explosions above their heads warned them that at any moment shells might enter and explode in their abodes. Projectiles exploding at the mouths of caverns brought down detached fragments of rock from

sides and roof creating an atmosphere of dust difficult to see through or to breathe in. The garrisons from time to time shifted their quarters, but so great was the volume of projectiles that seldom could they find any spot unhammered by guns. Most of them had to be resigned to their fate. They as well as their comrades in trenches and in "pillboxes" above became isolated, and were deluged with gasshells to an extent never before experienced. Roads and paths by which food, cartridges, and grenades could be brought up, or down which wounded and shell-shocked could reach the rear, were rendered impassable by curtains of shrapnel-shell. From October 20 to October 23 the Ailette Valley, and the sides and summits of the spurs projecting into it from the ridge, lay under an almost unbroken cloud of gas. During that time it was hardly possible for gunners to remove gas masks in order to drink or eat.

So far as guns could win a victory, French artillery had won it by October 22. Every tree near or on the Malmaison plateau had been shattered. The plateau had become a dreary expanse of monotonous mud, blown into craters, with a few twisted shreds of broken wire, here and there a mass of concrete, and broken, ragged ramparts which were all that remained of vast expenditures before and since the war in money, time, and labor on a once beautiful but now forbidding spot. The victory was complete. The whole of the Malmaison plateau was in Maistre's possession. Pershing observed t.. fighting from a favorable post some distance to the rear of the French front line, and went through shell-fire into the first and second lines of captured trenches. At Pétain's headquarters he was present when d'Espérey, the future successful general on the Macedonian front, gave a detailed report of the attack.

On October 25 bad news came from Italy. The Caporetto sector had been pierced by a German corps, and the Italians were preparing to abandon the Bainsizza plateau and the Carso, and retreat into the Fruilian plain. To relieve the situation it was only too probable that French and British troops would have to be railed through the Mt. Cenis tunnel and by the Riviera line to Lombardy. Therefore, in order to prevent Ludendorff from transferring more

troops to the Julian Alps and the Tyrol, it was necessary that Maistre should exploit the victory of Malmaison to the utmost, and that French and British, supported by the Belgian right wing, should once more vigorously assault Arnim's defensive zone in Flanders. Since October 23, Maistre had secured 11,157 prisoners and 180 guns, besides 222 trench-mortars and 720 machine-guns. As a crown to the victory at Verdun, Malmaison and its aftermath terminated the French offensive in 1917. Except in the last-named battles the French had, perhaps, won no successes on this front which quite justified their expenditure of men and munitions, but they had driven back the enemy in every engagement fought on a considerable scale. If the Allied offensives in 1917 had failed to accomplish the objects sought, the causes were beyond the control of Pétain and Haig, who could not have saved Russia from internecine war, nor from the wild schemes of German agents. Five days after the Germans evacuated the Chemin-des-Dames, Lenine and Trotzky effected their coup d'état, and Kerensky fled. The elements which had usurped power in Russia promptly decided for an "immediate democratic peace,' so that Russia became thenceforth a negligible quantity to the Entente.

Before the French could hope to reach Laon they had still to reduce German lines on the plateau north of the Ailette, facing French positions along the Chemin-desDames, all of which was now in French hands. If the French could take this plateau the German center would be broken. From this highland the ground slopes downward to the north and does not begin to rise again until the frontier is approached. The French were fighting to regain control of the last portion of the second line in the defenses of Paris. They had been fighting to regain this territory ever since the beginning of the battle of the Aisne in 1914. If they could now take the plateau, the Germans in the St. Gobain Forest would be outflanked and would have to retire from a position which could not be carried by any frontal attack, because of its great natural strength. While the French had got a step nearer Laon a general engagement, and a very considerable one, would have to precede any considerable further push toward it.