As I hurried along, two shells came over, one sliding into the river with a Hip! and the other landing in a house about two hundred yards away.  A vast cloud of grayish-black smoke befogged the cottage, and a section of splintered timber came buzzing through the air and fell into a puddle.  From the house next to the one struck, a black cat came slinking, paused for an indecisive second in the middle of the street, and ran back again.  Through the canvas partition of the ambulance, I heard the voices of my convalescents.  “No more marmites!” I cried to them as I swung down a road out of shell reach.  I little knew what was waiting for us beyond the next village.

A regiment of Zouaves going up to the line was resting at the crossroad, and the regimental wagons, drawn up in waiting line, blocked the narrow road completely.  At the angle between the two highways, under the four trees planted by pious custom of the Meuse, stood a cross of thick planks.  From each arm of the cross, on wine-soaked straps, dangled, like a bunch of grapes, a cluster of dark-blue canteens; rifles were stacked round its base, and under the trees stood half a dozen clipped-headed, bull-necked Zouaves.  A rather rough-looking adjutant, with a bullet head disfigured by a frightful scar at the corner of his mouth, rode up and down the line to see if all was well.  Little groups were handing round a half loaf of army bread, and washing it down with gulps of wine.

“Hello, sport!” they cried at me; and the favorite “All right,” and “Tommy!”

The air was heavy with the musty smell of street mud that never dries during winter time, mixed with the odor of the tired horses, who stood, scarcely moving, backed away from their harnesses against the mire-gripped wagons.  Suddenly the order to go on again was given; the carters snapped their whips, the horses pulled, the noisy, lumbering, creaky line moved on, and the men fell in behind, in any order.

I started my car again and looked for an opening through the melee.

Beyond the cross, the road narrowed and flanked one of the southeastern forts of the city.  A meadow, which sloped gently upward from the road to the abrupt hillside of the fortress, had been used as a place of encampment and had been trodden into a surface of thick cheesy mire.  Here and there were the ashes of fires.  There were hundreds of such places round the moorland villages between Verdun and Bar-le-Duc.  The fort looked squarely down on Verdun, and over its grassy height came the drumming of the battle, and the frequent crash of big shells falling into the city.

In a corner lay the anatomical relics of some horses killed by an air-bomb the day before.  And even as I noted them, I heard the muffled Pom!  Pom!  Pom! of anti-aircraft guns.  My back was to the river and I could not see what was going on.

“What is it?” I said to a Zouave who was plodding along beside the ambulance.