"Ferme tes yeux" (shut your eyes), said the lieutenant to the German.
The Frenchmen scrambled over the edge of the crater with their
unconscious burden, and then, from a little distance, threw
hand-grenades into the pit till all the moaning died away.

Two weeks later, when the back of the attack had been broken and the
organization of the defense had developed into a trusted routine, I went
again to Verdun. The snow was falling heavily, covering the piles of
débris and sifting into the black skeletons of the burned houses.
Untrodden in the narrow streets lay the white snow. Above the Meuse,
above the ugly burned areas in the old town on the slope, rose the
shell-spattered walls of the citadel and the cathedral towers of the
still, tragic town. The drumming of the bombardment had died away. The
river was again in flood. In a deserted wine-shop on a side street well
protected from shells by a wall of sandbags was a post of territorials.

To the tragedy of Verdun, these men were the chorus; there was something
Sophoclean in this group of older men alone in the silence and ruin of
the beleaguered city. A stove filled with wood from the wrecked houses
gave out a comfortable heat, and in an alley-way, under cover, stood a
two-wheeled hose cart, and an old-fashioned seesaw fire pump. There were
old clerks and bookkeepers among the soldier firemen--retired gendarmes
who had volunteered, a country schoolmaster, and a shrewd peasant from
the Lyonnais. Watch was kept from the heights of the citadel, and the
outbreak of fire in any part of the city was telephoned to the shop. On
that day only a few explosive shells had fallen.

"Do you want to see something odd, mon vieux?" said one of the pompiers
to me; and he led me through a labyrinth of cellars to a cold, deserted