She no longer felt defiant towards the spoken and unspoken criticism she
met everywhere: "What kind of women can these be whose men allow them to
drive alone with us for hours, and sometimes days?" but had begun to
apologise for it even to herself, while it sometimes caused her
bewilderment.

She drove them back through the waking town and out by the Verdun gates,
and soon up on to the steep heights above the town among frozen fields
and grasslands white with frost. The big stone tombs of 1870 stuck out
of a light ground fog like sails upon a grey sea, and it was not long,
at Jeandelize, before the 1914 graves began, small isolated wooden
crosses. They touched the brink of the battlefields; a rain of dead
gunfire began along the sides of the road, shell-holes with hairy edges
of dried thistles and, at the bottom of each, green moss stiffened with
ice. The road grew wilder and wilder and took on the air of a burnt-out
moor, mile after mile of grey, stricken grass, old iron, and large
upturned stones. Wherever a pair of blasted trees was left at the road's
side a notice hung in mid-air, on wires slung from tree to tree
across the road.

"Halt--Autos!" shouted the square, black, German orders from the boards
which swung and creaked in the wind.

"Nach Verdun," said the monster black arrows painted on trees and stone,
pointing, thick, black and steady, till it seemed that the ghost of the
German endeavour still flung itself along the road. "Nach Verdun! Nach
Verdun!" without a pause, with head down. "Nach Verdun," so that no one
might go wrong, go aside, go astray, turn back against the order of the
arrow. Not an arrow anywhere answered "Nach Metz."