the regiment went
on. In a very short time I got to the hospital and delivered my
convalescents.

My way home ran through the town of S------, an ugly, overgrown village
of the Verdunois, given up to the activities of the staff directing the
battle. The headquarters building was the hotel de ville, a large
eighteenth-century edifice, in an acre of trampled mud a little distance
from the street. Before the building flowed the great highway from
Bar-le-Duc to Verdun; relays of motor lorries went by, and gendarmes,
organized into a kind of traffic squad, stood every hundred feet or so.
The atmosphere of S------at the height of the battle was one of calm
organization; it would not have been hard to believe that the
motor-lorries and unemotional men were at the service of some great
master-work of engineering. There was something of the holiday in the
attitude of the inhabitants of the place; they watched the motor show
exactly as they might have watched a circus parade.

"Les voila," said somebody.

A little bemedaled group appeared on the steps of the hotel de ville.
Dominating it was Joffre. Above middle height, silver-haired, elderly,
he has a certain paternal look which his eye belies; Joffre's eye is the
hard eye of a commander-in-chief, the military eye, the eye of an Old
Testament father if you will. De Castelnau was speaking, making no
gestures--an old man with an ashen skin, deep-set eye and great hooked
nose, a long cape concealed the thick, age-settled body. Poincare stood
listening, with a look at once worried and brave, the ghost of a sad
smile lingering on a sensitive mouth. Last of all came Petain, the
protege of De Castelnau, who commanded at Verdun--a tall, square-built
man, not un-English in his appearance, with grizzled hair and the sober
face of a thinker. But his mouth and jaw are those of a man of action,
and the look in his gray eyes is always changing. Now it is speculative
and analytic, now steely and cold.

In the shelter of a doorway stood a group of territorials, getting their
first real news of the battle from a Paris newspaper. I heard "Nous
avons recule--huit kilometres--le general Petain--" A motor-lorry
drowned out the rest.

That night we were given orders to be ready to evacuate the chateau in
case the Boches advanced. The drivers slept in the ambulances, rising at
intervals through the night to warm their engines. The buzz of the
motors sounded through the tall pines of the chateau