some old and interesting Gothic ecclesiastical buildings—­a cloister, a bishop’s residence, a school—­or what not—­that, even crumbled and shattered by the shells, still show in ruins grace and charm and dignity.  And battered as these mute stones were, it seemed marvellous that mere stone could translate so delicately the highest groping of men’s hearts toward God, their most unutterable longing.  And the broken stones of the Gothic ruin, in the freshness and rawness of their ruin, seemed to be bleeding out human aspiration, spilling it footlessly upon the dead earth.  And of course all about these ecclesiastical ruins were the ruins of homes, and shops and stores—­places just as pitifully appealing in their appalling wreck—­where men had lived and loved and striven and failed and risen again and gone on slowly climbing through the weary centuries to the heights of grace toward which the tendrils of their hearts, pictured in the cloister and the apse and the tower, were so blindly groping.  A dust covered chromo on a tottering wall; a little round-about hanging beside a broken bed, a lamp revealed on a table, a work bench deserted, a store smashed and turned to debris and left to petrify as the shell wrecked it—­a thousand little details of a life that had gone, the soul vanished from a town, leaving it stark and dead, mere wood and stone and iron—­this was the Verdun that we saw in the twilight after the Germans had finished their evening strafe.

From Verdun we hurried through the night, past half a dozen ruined villages to a big base hospital.  We came there in the dark before moonrise, and met our ambulance men—­mostly young college boys joyously flirting with death under the German guns.  They were stationed in a tent well outside the big hospital building.  They gave us a dinner worth while—­onion soup, thick rare steak with peas and carrots, some sort of pasta—­perhaps macaroni or raviolli, a jelly omelet soused in rum, and served burning blue blazes, and cheese and coffee—­and this from a camp kitchen from a French cook on five minutes’ notice, an hour after the regular dinner.  The ambulance men were under the direct command of a French lieutenant—­a Frenchman of a quiet, gentle, serious type, who welcomed us beautifully, played host graciously and told us many interesting things about the work of the army around him; and told it so simply—­yet withal so sadly, that it impressed his face and manner upon us long after we had left him.  Three or four times a day we were meeting French lieutenants who had charge of our ambulance men at the front.  But this one was different.  He was so gentle and so serious without being at all solemn.  He had been in the war for three years, and said quite incidentally, that under the law of averages his time was long past due and he expected to go soon.  It didn’t seem to bother him.  He passed the rum omelet with a steady hand.  But his serious mien had attracted the ambulance boys and upon the room of his office in the big brick hospital they had scrawled in chalk, “Defense absolutement de rire!” “It’s absolutely forbidden to laugh.”  Evidently American humour got on his nerves.  As we dined in the tent, the boys outside sang trench songs, and college songs with trench words, and gave other demonstrations of their youth.