The Aisne winds along a flat valley bottom in great bends, always bounded on the north by high ground, which rises some 400 to 450 feet above the river, and is traversed by steep and narrow wooded ravines very much like Surrey combes, which were occupied and fully utilised by the enemy. Along the top of the plateau runs from west to east the road which became so familiar to us as the "Chemin des Dames," although this picturesque name did not appear on the maps. The main road from Soissons to Laon crosses the western end of the plateau close to the Malmaison Fort; its eastern end passes through Craonne, and the ground falls quickly down to the level of the Rheims-Laon road at Corbeny. Every foot of the "Ladies' Road" has been fought over; the whole plateau is shell-pocked almost as badly as ground beside the Amiens-Péronne road on the Somme, and the road itself is in many places no longer distinguishable, the whole area being thickly overgrown with rank herbage. Plate 91 gives some idea of what the once well-marked road now looks like where it crosses the Troyon road, the route by which Haig's troops tried in vain to reach and hold the high ground. The village of Cerny, close to the crossing, is wiped out, some hint only of its former position being indicated by the remains of what has probably been a sugar factory (Plate 92).
In many places on the slopes above the Aisne there are quarries and natural caves, greatly enlarged and very fully utilised in the German defence. Plate 93 shows one of these caves at Crouy, a now ruined village a couple of miles above Soissons on the side of the valley in which runs the little stream that descends from Laffaux on the north to the Aisne at Soissons. Beside and across this stream our artillery had hard fighting in 1914, in the vain attempt to dislodge the enemy from the high ground above and to the west, at a time when the Germans could fire twenty shells to one of ours.
The Aisne valley remained in general fairly quiescent from 1914 until April, 1917, when General Nivelle, after his great success at Verdun, planned the gigantic blow at the German front from Soissons to the Argonne, which, in spite of its ultimate success in carrying nearly the whole of the Chemin des Dames, failed to relieve Rheims,[38] and by falling so far short of the hoped-for and too optimistically predicted success helped to cause considerable, although happily only temporary, discontent in parts of the French Army, which was only cleared away by the magnificent way in which Pétain showed his men a few months later, both on the Aisne and at Verdun, that they still remained more than a match for their opponents.