wreck--where men had lived and loved and striven and failed and
risen again and gone on slowly climbing through the weary centuries
to the heights of grace toward which the tendrils of their hearts,
pictured in the cloister and the apse and the tower, were so blindly
groping. A dust covered chromo on a tottering wall; a little
round-about hanging beside a broken bed, a lamp revealed on a
table, a work bench deserted, a store smashed and turned to debris
and left to petrify as the shell wrecked it--a thousand little
details of a life that had gone, the soul vanished from a town,
leaving it stark and dead, mere wood and stone and iron--this was
the Verdun that we saw in the twilight after the Germans had finished
their evening strafe.

From Verdun we hurried through the night, past half a dozen ruined
villages to a big base hospital. We came there in the dark before
moonrise, and met our ambulance men--mostly young college boys joyously
flirting with death under the German guns. They were stationed in
a tent well outside the big hospital building. They gave us a dinner
worth while--onion soup, thick rare steak with peas and carrots,
some sort of pasta--perhaps macaroni or raviolli, a jelly omelet
soused in rum, and served burning blue blazes, and cheese and
coffee--and this from a camp kitchen from a French cook on five
minutes' notice, an hour after the regular dinner. The ambulance men
were under the direct command of a French lieutenant--a Frenchman
of a quiet, gentle, serious type, who welcomed us beautifully,
played host graciously and told us many interesting things about
the work of the army around him; and told it so simply--yet withal
so sadly, that it impressed his face and manner upon us long after
we had left him. Three or four times a day we were meeting French
lieutenants who had charge of our ambulance men at the front. But