The first duty of the traveller who has successfully passed the challenge of the sentinel at the gates is to climb the steep hill to the citadel at the top of the town.  Here the military authorities inspect one’s papers, and deliver a “permis de sejour” which must be verified by the police before lodgings can be obtained.  We found the principal hotel much less crowded than the Haute Mere-Dieu at Chalons, though many of the officers of the garrison mess there.  The whole atmosphere of the place was different:  silent, concentrated, passive.  To the chance observer, Verdun appears to live only in its hospitals; and of these there are fourteen within the walls alone.  As darkness fell, the streets became completely deserted, and the cannonade seemed to grow nearer and more incessant.  That first night the hush was so intense that every reverberation from the dark hills beyond the walls brought out in the mind its separate vision of destruction; and then, just as the strained imagination could bear no more, the thunder ceased.  A moment later, in a court below my windows, a pigeon began to coo; and all night long the two sounds strangely alternated...

On entering the gates, the first sight to attract us had been a colony of roughly-built bungalows scattered over the miry slopes of a little park adjoining the railway station, and surmounted by the sign:  “Evacuation Hospital No. 6.”  The next morning we went to visit it.  A part of the station buildings has been adapted to hospital use, and among them a great roofless hall, which the surgeon in charge has covered in with canvas and divided down its length into a double row of tents.  Each tent contains two wooden cots, scrupulously clean and raised high above the floor; and the immense ward is warmed by a row of stoves down the central passage.  In the bungalows across the road are beds for the patients who are to be kept for a time before being transferred to the hospitals in the town.  In one bungalow an operating-room has been installed, in another are the bathing arrangements for the newcomers from the trenches.  Every possible device for the relief of the wounded has been carefully thought out and intelligently applied by the surgeon in charge and the infirmiere major who indefatigably seconds him.  Evacuation Hospital No. 6 sprang up in an hour, almost, on the dreadful August day when four thousand wounded lay on stretchers between the railway station and the gate of the little park across the way; and it has gradually grown into the model of what such a hospital may become in skilful and devoted hands.

Verdun has other excellent hospitals for the care of the severely wounded who cannot be sent farther from the front.  Among them St. Nicolas, in a big airy building on the Meuse, is an example of a great French Military Hospital at its best; but I visited few others, for the main object of my journey was to get to some of the second-line ambulances beyond the town.  The first we went to was in a small