Here was a little shattered village; its name, I believe, was Brimont.

And here, also, commanding the road, stood a ruined fortress of an obsolete last-century pattern.

Shellfire had battered it into a gruel of shattered red masonry; but German officers were camped within its more habitable parts, and light guns were mounted in the moat.
The trees thereabout had been mowed down by the French artillery from within the city, so that the highway was littered with their tops.
Also, the explosives had dug big gouges in the earth.

Wherever you looked you saw that the soil was full of small, raggedy craters.
Shrapnel was dropping intermittently in the vicinity; therefore we left our cars behind the shelter of the ancient fort and proceeded cautiously afoot until we reached the frontmost trenches.
Evidently the Germans counted on staying there a good while.

The men had dug out caves in the walls of the trenches, bedding them with straw and fitting them with doors taken from the wreckage of the houses of the village.