“Moi, je n’ai plus jambes,” he repeated in French; “pitie, tuez-moi.”

He managed to make the lieutenant see that if he went away and left them, they would all die in the agonies of thirst and open wounds.  A little flickering life still lingered in a few; there were vague rales in the darkness.  A rafale of shells fell on the slope; the violet glares outlined the mouth of the crater.

“Ferme tes yeux” (shut your eyes), said the lieutenant to the German.  The Frenchmen scrambled over the edge of the crater with their unconscious burden, and then, from a little distance, threw hand-grenades into the pit till all the moaning died away.

Two weeks later, when the back of the attack had been broken and the organization of the defense had developed into a trusted routine, I went again to Verdun.  The snow was falling heavily, covering the piles of debris and sifting into the black skeletons of the burned houses.  Untrodden in the narrow streets lay the white snow.  Above the Meuse, above the ugly burned areas in the old town on the slope, rose the shell-spattered walls of the citadel and the cathedral towers of the still, tragic town.  The drumming of the bombardment had died away.  The river was again in flood.  In a deserted wine-shop on a side street well protected from shells by a wall of sandbags was a post of territorials.

To the tragedy of Verdun, these men were the chorus; there was something Sophoclean in this group of older men alone in the silence and ruin of the beleaguered city.  A stove filled with wood from the wrecked houses gave out a comfortable heat, and in an alley-way, under cover, stood a two-wheeled hose cart, and an old-fashioned seesaw fire pump.  There were old clerks and bookkeepers among the soldier firemen—­retired gendarmes who had volunteered, a country schoolmaster, and a shrewd peasant from the Lyonnais.  Watch was kept from the heights of the citadel, and the outbreak of fire in any part of the city was telephoned to the shop.  On that day only a few explosive shells had fallen.

“Do you want to see something odd, mon vieux?” said one of the pompiers to me; and he led me through a labyrinth of cellars to a cold, deserted house.  The snow had blown through the shell-splintered window-panes.  In the dining-room stood a table, the cloth was laid and the silver spread; but a green feathery fungus had grown in a dish of food and broken straws of dust floated on the wine in the glasses.  The territorial took my arm, his eyes showing the pleasure of my responding curiosity, and whispered,—­

“There were officers quartered here who were called very suddenly.  I saw the servant of one of them yesterday; they have all been killed.”

Outside there was not a flash from the batteries on the moor.  The snow continued to fall, and darkness, coming on the swift wings of the storm, fell like a mantle over the desolation of the city.

The End