ing there is just nothing.
Men with bright but plainly weary faces, not young men, but men of
thirty and above, hard bitten by their experience, patently fit, fed,
but somehow related to the ruins and the destruction around them, they
are all about you, and wherever now you see a grave you will discover
a knot of men standing before it talking soberly. Wherever you see the
vestiges of an old trench, a hill that was fought for at this time
twenty months ago, you will see new practice trenches and probably the
recruits, the "Class of 1917," the boys that are waiting for the call,
listening to an officer explaining to them what has been done here,
the mistake or the good judgment revealed by the event. For France is
training the youth that remains to her on the still recent
battlefields and in the presence of those who died to keep the ground.

Just as the darkness came we passed St. Dizier and entered at last
upon the road to Verdun, the one road that is the life line of the
city. For to understand the real problem of the defence of Verdun you
must realize that there is lacking to the city any railroad. In
September, 1914, the Germans took St. Mihiel and cut the railway
coming north along the Meuse. On their retreat from the Marne the
soldiers of the Crown Prince halted at Montfaucon and Varennes, and
their cannon have commanded the Paris-Verdun-Metz Railroad ever since.
Save for a crazy narrow-gauge line wandering along the hill slopes,
climbing by impossible grades, Verdun is without rail communication.

It was this that made the defence of the town next to impossible.
Partially to remedy the defect the French had reconstructed a local
highway running from St. Dizier by Bar-le-Duc to Verdun beyond the
reach of German artillery. To-day an army of a quarter of a million of
men, the enormous parks of heavy artillery and field guns--everything
is supplied by this one road and by motor transport.

Coming north from St. Dizier we entered this vast procession. Mile
after mile the caravan stretched on, fifty miles with hardly a break
of a hundred feet between trucks. Paris 'buses, turned into vehicles
to bear fresh meat; new motor trucks built to carry thirty-five men
and travelling in companies, regiments, brigades; wagons from the hood
of which soldiers, bound to replace the killed and wounded of
yesterday, looked down upon you, calmly but unsmilingly. From St.
Dizier to Verdun the impression was of that of the machinery by