ing has been touched
in these houses since the owners had to go. When they return from their
places of refuge far away, they will find everything as they left
it--that is, as the Boche guns have left it."

Only too easy was it to see! In some of the streets whole rows of houses
had had their fronts torn off. The rooms within were like stage-settings
for some tragic play. Sheets and blankets trailed from beds where
sleepers had waked in fright. Doors of wardrobes gaped to show dresses
dangling forlornly, like Bluebeard's murdered brides. Dinner-tables were
set out for meals never to be finished, save by rats. Family portraits
of comfortable old faces smiling under broken glass hung awry on pink or
blue papered walls. Half-made shirts and petticoats were still caught by
the needle in broken sewing-machines. Dropped books and baskets of
knitting lay on bright carpets snowed under by fallen plaster. Vases of
dead flowers stood on mantelpieces, ghostly stems and shrivelled brown
leaves reflected in gilt-framed mirrors. I could hardly bear to look! It
was like being shown by a hard-hearted surgeon the beating of a brain
through the sawed hole in a man's skull. If one could have crawled
through the crust of lava at Pompeii, a year after the eruption, one
might have felt somewhat as at Verdun now!

On a broken terrace, once a beloved evening promenade, our two cars
paused. We got out and gazed down, down over the River Meuse, from a
high vantage-point where a few months ago, we should have been blown to
bits, in five minutes. Our two officers pointed out in the misty autumn
landscape spots where some of the fiercest and most famous fights had
been. How the names they rattled off brought back anxious nights and
mornings when our first and only thoughts had been the _communiques_!
"Desperate battle on the Meuse." "Splendid stand at Douaumont." "New
attack on Morthomme." But nothing we saw helped out our imaginings.
There was just a vast stretch of desolation where vinelands once had
poured their perfume to the sun. The forts protecting Verdun were as
invisible as fairyland, I said. "As invisible as hell!" one of our
guides amended. And then to me, in a low voice unheard by pale and
trembling Mother Beckett, he added, "If Nature did not work to make ugly
things invisible, we could not let you come here, Mademoiselle. See how
high the grass has grown in the plain down there! In summer it is full
of poppies, red as the blood that f