mocracy, and if you grant
that this point of view is the right one, these thinkers have a right to
despise us. But the Frenchman knows that the Allies represent something
more than "virtue-on-a-rampage."

In Lyons I saw a sight at once ludicrous and pathetic. Two little
dragoons of the class of 1917, stripling boys of eighteen or nineteen at
the most, walked across the public square; their uniforms were too large
for them, the skirts of their great blue mantles barely hung above the
dust of the street, and their enormous warlike helmets and flowing
horse-tails were ill-suited to their boyish heads. As I looked at them,
I thought of the blue bundles I had seen drying upon the barbed wire,
and felt sick at the brutality of the whole awful business. The sun was
shining over the bluish mists of Lyons, and the bell of old Saint-Jean
was ringing. Two Zouaves, stone blind, went by guided by a little, fat
infirmier. At the frontier, the General Staff was preparing the defense
of Verdun.

One great nation, for the sake of a city valueless from a military point
of view, was preparing to kill several hundred thousand of its citizens,
and another great nation, anxious to retain the city, was preparing
calmly for a parallel hecatomb. There is something awful and dreadful
about the orderliness of a great offensive, for while one's imagination
is grasped by the grandeur and the organization of the thing, all one's
faculties of intellect are revolted by the stark brutality of death en
masse.

Early in February we were called to Bar-le-Duc, a pleasant old city some
distance behind Verdun. Several hundred thousand men were soon going to
be killed and wounded, and the city was in a feverish haste of
preparation. So many thousand cans of ether, so many thousand pounds of
lint, so many million shells, so many ambulances, so many hundred
thousand litres of gasoline. Nobody knew when the Germans were going to
strike.

During the winter great activity in the German trenches near Verdun had
led the French to expect an attack, but it was not till the end of
January that aeroplane reconnoitering made certain the imminence of an
offensive. As a first step in countering it, the French authorities
prepared in the villages surrounding Bar-le-Duc a number of depots for
troops, army supplies, and ammunition. Of this organization, Bar-le-Duc
was the key. The preparations for the counter-attack were there
centralized. Day after day convoys of motor-