The poilus crowded round to see them, staring into their faces without the least malevolence.  At last—­at last—­voila enfin des Boches!  A little to the side stood a strange pair, two big men wearing an odd kind of grayish protector and apron over their bodies.  Against a near-by wall stood a kind of flattish tank to which a long metallic hose was attached.  The French soldiers eyed them with contempt and disgust.  I caught the words, “Flame-throwers!”

I do not know what we should have done at Verdun without Lieutenant Roeder, our mechanical officer.  All the boys behaved splendidly, but Lieutenant Roeder had the tremendously difficult task of keeping the Section going when the rolling-stock was none too good, and fearful weather and too constant usage had reduced some of the wagons to wrecks.  It was all the finer of him because he was by profession a bacteriologist.  Still very young, he had done distinguished work.  Simply because there was no one else to attend to the mechanical department, he had volunteered for this most tiresome and disagreeable task.  There is not a single driver in Section II who does not owe much to the friendly counsel, splendid courage, and keen mind of George Roeder.

A few miles below Verdun, on a narrow strip of meadowland between the river and the northern bluffs, stood an eighteenth-century chateau and the half-dozen houses of its dependents.  The hurrying river had flooded the low fields and then retreated, turning the meadows and pasturages to bright green, puddly marshes, malodorous with swampy exhalations.  Beyond the swirls and currents of the river and its vanishing islands of pale-green pebbles, rose the brown, deserted hills of the Hauts de Meuse.  The top of one height had been pinched into the rectangle of a fortress; little forests ran along the sky-line of the heights, and a narrow road, slanting across a spur of the valley, climbed and disappeared.

The chateau itself was a huge, three-story box of gray-white stone with a slate roof, a little turret en poivriere at each corner, and a graceless classic doorway in the principal facade.  A wide double gate, with a coronet in a tarnished gold medallion set in the iron arch-piece, gave entrance to this place through a kind of courtyard formed by the rear of the chateau and the walls of two low wings devoted to the stables and the servants’ quarters.  Within, a high clump of dark- green myrtle, ringed with muddy, rut-scarred turf, marked the theoretical limits of a driveway.  Along the right-hand wall stood the rifles of the wounded, and in a corner, a great snarled pile of bayonets, belts, cartridge-boxes, gas-mask satchels, greasy tin boxes of anti-lice ointment, and dented helmets.  A bright winter sunlight fell on walls dank from the river mists, and heightened the austerity of the landscape.  Beyond a bend in the river lay the smoke of the battle of Douaumont; shells broke, pin-points of light, in the upper fringes of the haze.