The cure, meanwhile, passing around to the sacristy, had come out before the altar in his vestments, followed by a little white acolyte.  A handful of women, probably the only “civil” inhabitants left, and some of the soldiers we had seen about the village, had entered the church and stood together between the rows of cots; and the service began.  It was a sunless afternoon, and the picture was all in monastic shades of black and white and ashen grey:  the sick under their earth-coloured blankets, their livid faces against the pillows, the black dresses of the women (they seemed all to be in mourning) and the silver haze floating out from the little acolyte’s censer.  The only light in the scene—­the candle-gleams on the altar, and their reflection in the embroideries of the cure’s chasuble—­were like a faint streak of sunset on the winter dusk.

For a while the long Latin cadences sounded on through the church; but presently the cure took up in French the Canticle of the Sacred Heart, composed during the war of 1870, and the little congregation joined their trembling voices in the refrain: 

“Sauvez, sauvez la France, Ne l’abandonnez pas!”

The reiterated appeal rose in a sob above the rows of bodies in the nave:  “Sauvez, sauvez la France,” the women wailed it near the altar, the soldiers took it up from the door in stronger tones; but the bodies in the cots never stirred, and more and more, as the day faded, the church looked like a quiet grave-yard in a battle-field.

After we had left Sainte Menehould the sense of the nearness and all-pervadingness of the war became even more vivid.  Every road branching away to our left was a finger touching a red wound:  Varennes, le Four de Paris, le Bois de la Grurie, were not more than eight or ten miles to the north.  Along our own road the stream of motor-vans and the trains of ammunition grew longer and more frequent.  Once we passed a long line of “Seventy-fives” going single file up a hillside, farther on we watched a big detachment of artillery galloping across a stretch of open country.  The movement of supplies was continuous, and every village through which we passed swarmed with soldiers busy loading or unloading the big vans, or clustered about the commissariat motors while hams and quarters of beef were handed out.  As we approached Verdun the cannonade had grown louder again; and when we reached the walls of the town and passed under the iron teeth of the portcullis we felt ourselves in one of the last outposts of a mighty line of defense.  The desolation of Verdun is as impressive as the feverish activity of Chalons.  The civil population was evacuated in September, and only a small percentage have returned.  Nine-tenths of the shops are closed, and as the troops are nearly all in the trenches there is hardly any movement in the streets.