ge--little touched, to all appearance. And presently, as one
passes along the streets, one sees that here is not a town, but only
the ghost, the skeleton of a town. The roofless, windowless houses, of
which the streets still keep, as in Rheims, their ancient lines, stare
at you like so many eyeless skulls--the bare bones of a city. Only the
famous citadel, with its miles of underground passages and rooms, is
just as it was before the battle, and as it will be, one may hope,
through the long years to come; preserved, not for any active purpose
of war, but as the shrine of immortal memories. Itself, it played a
great part in the struggle. For here, in these dormitories and
mess-rooms and passages so far underground that even the noise of the
fierce struggle outside never reached them, it was possible for troops
worn out by the superhuman ordeal of the battle, to find complete
rest--_to sleep_--without fear.

We entered through a large mess-room full of soldiers, with, at its
further end, a kitchen, with a busy array of cooks and orderlies. Then
someone opened a door, and we found ourselves in a small room, very
famous in the history of the war. During the siege, scores of visitors
from Allied and neutral countries--statesmen, generals, crowned
heads--took luncheon under its canopy of flags, buried deep
underground, while the storm of shell raged outside. There, in the
visitors' book, one might turn to the two signatures--one of them then
only a fortnight old--that all France knows:

"March, 1916--_On les aura! Petain_"

"January, 1918--_On les a! Petain_"

A courteous Commandant, telephoned to from below, came from some upper
region to greet us and to show us something of the endless labyrinth
of rooms, passages and dormitories, which during the siege often
sheltered thousands of men. The veteran Colonel Duhay, who was in
command of the citadel during the greater part of the year-long
battle--a splendid, square-built tower of a man--I saw later in Paris.
It was ill-luck not to have been able to walk with him over the tragic
battle-field itself, for few men can have memories of it at once so
comprehensive and so close. From the few words I had with him I retain
a shuddering impression as of a slaughter-house; yet nothing could be
cheerfuller or humaner than the broad soldier-face. But our talk
turned on the losses of Verdun, and although these losses--_i.e._, the
proportion of death to the square yard--were pro