From a high hill between B------and Verdun I got my first good look at
the bombardment.  From the edge of earth and sky, far across the
moorlands, ray after ray of violet-white fire made a swift stab at the
stars.  Mingled with the rays, now seen here, now there, the
reddish-violet semicircle of the great mortars flared for the briefest
instant above the horizon.  From the direction of this inferno came a
loud roaring, a rumbling and roaring, increasing in volume—­the sound of
a great river tossing huge rocks through subterranean abysses.  Every
little while a great shell, falling in the city, would blow a great hole
of white in the night, and so thundering was the crash of arrival that
we almost expected to see the city sink into the earth.

Terrible in the desolation of the night, on fire, haunted by specters of wounded men who crept along the narrow lanes by the city walls, Verdun was once more undergoing the destinies of war.  The shells were falling along rue Mazel and on the citadel.  A group of old houses by the Meuse had burnt to rafters of flickering flame, and as I passed them, one collapsed into the flooded river in a cloud of hissing steam.

In order to escape shells, the wounded were taking the obscure by-ways of the town.  Our wounded had started to walk to the ambulance station with the others, but, being weak and exhausted, had collapsed on the way.  They were waiting for us at a little house just beyond the walls.  Said one to the other, “As-tu-vu Maurice?” and the other answered without any emotion, “II est mort.”

The 24th was the most dreadful day.  The wind and snow swept the heights of the desolate moor, seriously interfering with the running of the automobiles.  Here and there, on a slope, a lorry was stuck in the slush, though the soldier passengers were out of it and doing their best to push it along.  The cannonade was still so intense that, in intervals between the heavier snow-flurries, I could see the stabs of fire in the brownish sky.  Wrapped in sheepskins and muffled to the ears in knitted scarves that might have come from New England, the territorials who had charge of the road were filling the ruts with crushed rock.  Exhaustion had begun to tell on the horses; many lay dead and snowy in the frozen fields.  A detachment of khaki-clad, red-fezzed colonial troops passed by, bent to the storm.  The news was of the most depressing sort.  The wounded could give you only the story of their part of the line, and you heard over and over again, “Nous avons recules.”  A detachment of cavalry was at hand; their casques and dark-blue mantles gave them a crusading air.  And through the increasing cold and darkness of late afternoon, troops, cannons, horsemen, and motor-trucks vanished toward the edge of the moor where flashed with increasing brilliance the rays of the artillery.

I saw some German prisoners for the first time at T—–­, below Verdun.  They had been marched down from the firing-line.  Young men in the twenties for the most part, they seemed even more war-worn than the French.  The hideous, helot-like uniform of the German private hung loosely on their shoulders, and the color of their skin was unhealthy and greenish.  They were far from appearing starved; I noticed two or three who looked particularly sound and hearty.  Nevertheless, they were by no means as sound-looking as the ruddier French.