The streets were quite deserted; horses and wagons abandoned to their fate were, however, quietly holding their places.  Faces, emotionally divided between fear and strong interest, peered at us as we ran by, disappearing at the first whistle of a bomb, for all the world like hermit-crabs into their shells.  A whistle sent us both scurrying into a passageway; the shell fell with a wicked hiss, and, scattering the paving-stones to the four winds, blew a shallow crater in the roadway.  A big cart horse, hit in the neck and forelegs by fragments of the shell, screamed hideously.  Right at the bridge, the sentry, an old territorial, was watching the whole scene from his flimsy box with every appearance of unconcern.

Not the station itself, but a kind of baggage-shed was on fire.  A hose fed by an old-fashioned seesaw pump was being played on the flames.  Officials of the railroad company ran to and fro shouting unintelligible orders.  For five minutes more the German aeroplanes hovered overhead, then slowly melted away into the sky to the south-east.  The raid had lasted, I imagine, just about twenty minutes.

That night, fearing another raid, all lights were extinguished in the town and at the barracks.  Before rolling up in my blankets, I went out into the yard to get a few breaths of fresh air.  Through the night air, rising and falling with the wind, I heard in one of the random silences of the night a low, distant drumming of artillery.

Chapter X

The Great Days of Verdun

The Verdun I saw in April, 1913, was an out-of-the-way provincial city of little importance outside of its situation as the nucleus of a great fortress.  There were two cities—­an old one, la ville des eveques, on a kind of acropolis rising from the left bank of the Meuse, and a newer one built on the meadows of the river.  Round the acropolis Vauban had built a citadel whose steep, green-black walls struck root in the mean streets and narrow lanes on the slopes.  Sunless by-ways, ill-paved and sour with the odor of surface drainage, led to it.  Always picturesque, the old town now and then took on a real beauty.  There were fine, shield-bearing doorways of the Renaissance to be seen, Gothic windows in greasy walls, and here and there at a street corner a huddle of half-timbered houses in a high contrast of invading sunlight and retreating shade.  From the cathedral parapet, there was a view of the distant forts, and a horizontal sweep of the unharvested, buff-brown moorlands.

“Un peu morte,” say the French who knew Verdun before the war.  The new town was without distinction.  It was out of date.  It had none of the glories that the province copies from Paris, no boulevards, no grandes aerteres.  Such life as there was, was military.  Rue Mazel was bright with the gold braid and scarlet of the fournisseurs militaires, and in the late afternoon chic young officers enlivened the provincial dinginess with a brave show of handsome uniforms.  All day long squads of soldiers went flick! flack! up and down the street and bugle-calls sounded piercingly from the citadel.  The soldiery submerged the civil population.