a garden; we
studied the angle at which they dropped; we measured the miniature
avalanche that they brought with them. But always, so far, there was
the subconscious sense of the rock between us and the enemy. I never
before understood the full meaning of that phrase "a rock in a weary
land."

All this was but preliminary, however. Other automobiles arrived; the
General entered one. I followed in the next and we set out to visit
Verdun, to visit the ruins, or, rather, to see not a city that was
dead, but a city that was visibly, hourly dying--a city that was
vanishing by blocks and by squares--but was not yet fallen to the
estate of Ypres or Arras; a city that in corners, where there were
gardens behind the walls, still smiled; a city where some few brave
old buildings still stood four square and solid, but only waiting what
was to come.

Before I visited Verdun I had seen many cities and towns which had
been wholly or partially destroyed, either by shell fire or by the
German soldiers in their great invasion before the Marne. One shelled
town is much like another, and there is no thrill quite like that you
experience when you see the first. But these towns had died nearly two
years ago; indeed, in most the resurrection had begun: little red
roofs were beginning to shine through the brown trees and stark
ruins. Children played again in the squares. It was like the sense you
have when you see an old peasant ploughing among the cross-marked
graves of a hard-fought battle corner--the sense of a beginning as
well as of death and destruction.

But at Verdun it was utterly different. Of life, or people, of
activity beginning again or surviving there was nothing. Some time in
the recent past all the little people who lived in these houses had
put upon wagons what could be quickly moved and had slipped out of
their home, that was already under sentence of death. They were gone
into the distance, and they had left behind them no stragglers. The
city was empty save for a few soldiers who passed rapidly along the
streets, as one marches in a heavy snowstorm.

Yet Verdun was not wholly dead. Shell fire is the most inexplicable of
all things that carry destruction. As you passed down one street the
mark of destruction varied with each house. Here the blast had come
and cut the building squarely; it had carried with it into ruin behind
in the courtyard all that the house contained, but against the wall
the telephone rested und