their rifles tight between their knees. At midnight we arrived at
B------, four miles and a half west of Verdun. The night was clear and
bitter cold; the ice-blue winter stars were westering. Refugees tramped
past in the darkness. By the sputtering light of a match, I saw a woman
go by with a cat in a canary cage; the animal moved uneasily, its eyes
shone with fear. A middle-aged soldier went by accompanying an old woman
and a young girl. Many pushed baby carriages ahead of them full of
knick-knacks and packages.

The crossroad where the ambulances turned off was a maze of beams of
light from the autos. There was shouting of orders which nobody could
carry out. Wounded, able to walk, passed through the beams of the lamps,
the red of their bloodstains, detached against the white of the
bandages, presenting the sharpest of contrasts in the silvery glare. At
the station, men who had died in the ambulances were dumped hurriedly in
a plot of grass by the side of the roadway and covered with a blanket.
Never was there seen such a bedlam! But on the main road the great
convoys moved smoothly on as if held together by an invisible chain. A
smouldering in the sky told of fires in Verdun.

From a high hill between B------and Verdun I got my first good look at
the bombardment. From the edge of earth and sky, far across the
moorlands, ray after ray of violet-white fire made a swift stab at the
stars. Mingled with the rays, now seen here, now there, the
reddish-violet semicircle of the great mortars flared for the briefest
instant above the horizon. From the direction of this inferno came a
loud roaring, a rumbling and roaring, increasing in volume--the sound of
a great river tossing huge rocks through subterranean abysses. Every
little while a great shell, falling in the city, would blow a great hole
of white in the night, and so thundering was the crash of arrival that