LAND AND .W, A T E R. 
April 17, 1915. 
paged first and las£ in lerritory the size of South 
Jx)ndon resulted in no conspicuous advance, 
though advance there was. The Germans saved 
the railway line behind their trenches. They lost 
the crest of the watershed and some hundreds of 
yards of ground. But they came out of the 
struggle much weaker in proportion to the French 
than they went in, and that was the object of our 
Allies in initiating the actions they thus took 
between Souain and Ville-sur-Tourbe. 
It is the same story along the whole front 
from Altkirch to the North Sea, and it is a story 
that can have but one ending unless civilian 
opinion is misl<?tl and fails the armies. 
Let us turn next to the details of the attack 
on the St. Mihiel wedge. 
The ground upon which this struggle for the 
.wedge of St. Mihiel is being decided is singularly 
simple. It consists in two clearly-marked dis- 
tricts : The rolling plain, called the Woevre, on 
the East (an average height of some 700 feet above 
the sea), and tb.e range of hills, called the 
" Heights of the Meuse," on the West. These 
latter consist in a ridge which slopes up from the 
Meuse River to an average height of over 300 feet 
and an average width eastward of about eight 
miles. It then falls extremely rapidly in a sort 
of wall— 500 to 600 feet high at the northern end 
and nearly 1,000 at the southern — down on to 
the plain. And the plain, the Woevre proper, 
stretches to the Moselle, and is a district of 
numerous woods, meres, and small watercourses 
amid large open ploughed fields. The whole dis- 
trict is, therefore, the belt between Meuse and 
Moselle. 
looks along that chain of heights from some village 
at the foot, such as Hattonville, it presents an 
almost artificial appearance of regularity. 
This conspicuous feature in the ground of the 
present effort is transverse to the fronts of both 
armies. The wedge or buckle of which the apex 
is at St. Mihiel cuts the escarpment of the heights 
of the Meuse in two points — the northern one near 
Les Eparges, the other on the south near Apre- 
uiont. 
But even if there were no hills here at all 
the problem would be much the same. It simply, 
consists in the effort of the French to reach the 
single line of communication upon which the hold- 
ing of St. Mihiel depends, and the efforts of the 
Germans to prevent their reaching it. 
That single line of communication is, as has 
been pointed out in past articles, the old single- 
line railway which runs from Metz up the ravine 
of the little River Mad to Thiaucourt, and the con- 
tinuation which the Germans are reported to havo 
built on to it in the last six months from Thiau- 
court to St. Mihiel. I believe it will be found, 
when the thing can be examined in detail, that 
this continuation has been run (as I show it upon 
the accompanying sketch) up out of the Mad vaUey; 
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This wall forms one of the very sharply- 
defined landscapes of Europe, and may be com- 
pared to the escarpment of the North or South 
Downs or of the Cotswold in this country. While 
the summits of the hills along this escarpment 
dominate the plain, even in the north, by 600 feet, 
the saddles often fall to less than 400 ; but as one 
to Vigneulles, and then over the comparatively 
low saddle to the village of Creue, and so down 
the ravine called the Rupt de Creue to the Meuse, 
and so to St. Mihiel. The last part of this guess 
may be wrong, because it would bring the railway, 
rather close to the French lines, and it is possible 
that the new rails are laid over the higher wooded 
country to the south and more directly towards 
St. Mihiel, as at A — B on the sketch. At any 
rate, the piercing of this line at any point would 
make the position at St. Mihiel impossible. 
Now, the place where it is most immediately 
threatened is Thiaucourt, where it comes nearest 
to the French advance, v/hich has thrust trenches 
out north of Regnieville, as we know. And it 
may therefore be asked why the position of tho 
spur of Les Eparges on the north is of such 
importance. 
The A'alue of a special effort at this latter 
point consists in this : That so long as the French 
remain in possession of the spur of I^s Eparges 
they can from behind the ridge and on its western 
slopes in wooded country establish positions for 
their heavy guns which will command at known 
and fixed ranges all the nearer part of the plain 
now open to their complete observation. 
The position to be captured at Les Eparges 
was the rounded boss of a summit upon a plate-au 
which stands out curiously from the mass of the 
hills parallel to their main axis, and is separate^ 
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