the little hotel shook with the jar of
the heavy trucks, for neither by day nor by night is there a halt in
the motor transport, and the sound of this grinding is never low.

It was little more than daylight when we took the road again, with a
thirty-mile drive to Verdun before us. Almost immediately we turned
into the Verdun route we met again the caravan of automobiles, of
camions, as the French say. It still flowed on without break. Now,
too, we entered the main road, the one road to Verdun, the road that
had been built by the French army against just such an attack as was
now in progress. The road was as wide as Fifth Avenue, as smooth as
asphalt--a road that, when peace comes, if it ever does, will delight
the motorist. Despite the traffic it had to bear, it was in perfect
repair, and soldiers in uniform sat by the side breaking stone and
preparing metal to keep it so.

The character of the country had now changed. We were entering the
region of the hills, between the Aisne and the Meuse, a country
reminiscent of New England. Those hills are the barrier which beyond
the Meuse, under the names of the Cote de Meuse, have been the scene
of so much desperate fighting. The roads that sidled off to the east
bore battle names, St. Mihiel, Troyon, and the road that we followed
was still marked at every turn with the magic word "Verdun." Our
immediate objective was Souilly, the obscure hill town twenty miles,
perhaps, south of the front, from which Sarrail had defended Verdun in
the Marne days and from which Petain was now defending Verdun against
a still more terrible attack.

And in France to-day one speaks only of Verdun and Petain. Soldiers
have their day; Joffre, Castelnau, Foch, all retain much of the
affection and admiration they have deserved, but at the moment it is
the man who has held Verdun that France thinks of, and there was the
promise for us that at Souilly we should see the man whose fame had
filled the world in the recent great and terrible weeks. Upward and
downward over the hills, through more ruined villages, more hospitals,
more camps, our march took us until after a short hour we came to
Souilly, general headquarters of the Army of Verdun, of Petain, the
centre of the world for the moment.

Few towns have done less to prepare for greatness than Souilly. It
boasts a single street three inches deep in the clay mud of the
spring--a single street through which the Verdun route marches almost
contempt