isturbed; pictures--possibly even a looking
glass--hung as the inhabitants had left it, hung as perhaps it had
hung when the last woman had taken her ultimate hurried glance at her
hat before she departed into the outer darkness.

But the next house had lost only the front walls; it stood before you
as if it had been opened for your inspection by the removal of the
facade. Chairs, beds--all the domestic economy of the house--sagged
visibly outward toward the street, or stood still firm, but open to
the four winds. It was as if the scene were prepared for a stage and
you sat before the footlights looking into the interior. Again, the
next house and that beyond were utterly gone--side walls, front walls,
everything swallowed up and vanished--the iron work twisted into
heaps, the stone work crumbled to dust; the whole mass of ruin still
smoked, for it was a shell of yesterday that had done this work.

Down on the Riviera, where the mistral blows--all the pine trees lean
away from the invariable track of this storm wind--you have the sense,
even in the summer months, of a whole countryside bent by the gales.
In the same fashion you felt in Verdun, felt rather than saw, a whole
town not bent, but crumbled, crushed--and the line of fall was always
apparent; you could tell the direction from which each storm of shells
had come, you could almost feel that the storm was but suspended, not
over, that at any moment it might begin again.

Yet even in the midst of destruction there were enclaves of unshaken
structures. On the Rue Mazel, "Main Street," the chief clothing store
rose immune amid ashes on all sides. Its huge plate-glass window was
not even cracked. And behind the window a little mannikin, one of the
familiar images that wear clothes to tempt the purchaser, stood erect.
A French soldier had crept in and raised the stiff arm of the mannikin
to the salute, pushed back the hat to a rakish angle. The mannikin
seemed alive and more than alive, the embodiment of the spirit of the
place. Facing northward toward the German guns it seemed to respond to
them with a "_morituri salutamus_." "The last civilian in Verdun," the
soldiers called him, but his manner was rather that of the Poilu.

We crossed the river and the canal and stopped by the ruin of what had
once been a big factory or warehouse. We crawled through an open
shell-made breach in the brick wall and stood in the interior. The
ashes were still hot, and in corners the