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Show PINE-CLAD FUNKS CLDSELYGUARDED Chasseurs Alpins in Vos-ges Vos-ges Are Wiry, Active and Extremely Vigilant WARRING IS TYPICAL Watching on Trenches of Enemy Is Racking on Nerves of Soldiers. j 6)NDOX( Feb. 1". An English corre- epondent with the French armies In the r Vosgea tells an interesting story of the little-known operations on that front Speaking of the apparent lull in the fighting there he says: For a long time past the references In the official communiques to the Vosges and Alsace have been few and far between. But there Is constant activity to he seen on the crests and steep, pine-clad flanks of the mountains moun-tains from La Chapelotte to Hart-mannsweilerkopf, Hart-mannsweilerkopf, in the valleys between be-tween them through which the Bruche and the Thur and the Doller hurry down on the first stage of their course to the Rhine, and In the flat etrip of reoccupied territory on the , plain farther to the south. The Chasseurs Alpins and the generals gen-erals who command them are not the men to 1st the snow melt under their fet. Wiry, active, and for the most part lightly built, they are always on the go. always on the alert. That is, T suppose, the symbolical meaning of the silver bugle-brooch which they wear on their black berets. Make Mine Galleries. It is typical, at all events, of the way in which they go a-warring, and not only they, but the engineers and sappers and miners and territorials who have first made these difficult, steep mountains accessible by constructing con-structing a series of excellent roads, not as straight as those of the Romans Ro-mans or General Wade, for that is impossible, im-possible, but fully as practical, and then hare turned the mountain tops . into camps and mountain fastnesses, " and carried the war into the enemy's country by means of cunningly disposed dis-posed observatories and trenches and mine galleries hewn out of the solid rock. In these observatories and trenches jthey wait patiently, day after day and night after night, watching the bare Ehot-S':arred strip of ground, broken y only by the usual chevaux de frise of shattered tree stumps, constantly driving their mine galleries farther nd farther into the stony bowels of ihe slopes In front of them, and occasionally occa-sionally dashing out of the trenches, exactly as they do on the Somme or in front of Verdun, partly in order to drive the enemy a little farther back, but principally, for the present, to feel how the pulse of his morale Is beating from the state of mind of the prisoners that they always bring home with them. Trenches Entangled. I saw last week a lieutenant who had been looking through the narrow silt in the rock wall of his observatory observa-tory at the trenches opposite for two months on end. 1 saw a piece of ground where the opposing trenches almost touch each other, where so many mines have been exploded that the compass-drawn circles representing represent-ing them on the map are more inextricably inex-tricably tangled and criss-crossed than the meshes of a spider's web. I saw a battalion of chasseurs waiting during the afternoon for one of these prisoner-hunting .raids which they were to indulge in that evening as cheerfully and as confidently as If they were about to take part in a football match and sure to win it. Tet of all this the patient watcher, the indefatigable miners, the slapdash slap-dash raiders the official communiques have nothing as a rule to say. And they are right. The time when the troops in the Vosges will do work that the communiques must needa record, that will make the world glow with admiration, is not here yet. They are all within about twenty miles of the Rhine, with their faces toward it, waiting for the moment when they will descend on the flank and rear of the retreating German army as It falls back on the Rhine and Strass-burg. Strass-burg. That Is not what they told me. It Is what I imagine for myself from what I have seen. |