uously, the same nest of stone and plaster houses, one story
high, houses from which the owners had departed to make room for
generals and staff officers. This and one thing more, the Mairie, the
town hall, as usual the one pretentious edifice of the French hamlet,
and before the stairway of this we stopped and got out.

We were at headquarters. From this little building, devoted for
perhaps a century to the business of governing the commune of Souilly,
with its scant thousand of people, Petain was defending Verdun and the
fate of an army of 250,000 men at the least. In the upstairs room,
where the town councillors had once debated parochial questions,
Joffre and Castelnau and Petain in the terrible days of the opening
conflict had consulted, argued, decided--decided the fate of France,
so the Germans had said, for they had made the fall of Verdun the
assurance of French collapse.

Unconsciously, too, you felt the change in the character of the
population of this village. There were still the soldiers, the
eternal gray-blue uniforms, but there were also men of a different
type, men of authority. In the street your guides pointed out to you
General Herr, the man who had designed and planned and accomplished
the miracle of the motor transport that had saved Verdun--with the aid
of the brave men fighting somewhere not far beyond the nearest hills.
He had commanded at Verdun when the attack came, and without
hesitation he had turned over his command to Petain, his junior in
service and rank before the war, given up the glory and become the
superintendent of transport. Men spoke to you of the fine loyalty of
that action with unconcealed admiration.

And then out of the remoteness of Souilly there came a voice familiar
to an American. Bunau-Varilla, the man of Panama, wearing the uniform
of a commandant and the Croix de Guerre newly bestowed for some
wonderful engineering achievement, stepped forward to ask for his
friends and yours of the old "_Sun_ paper." I had seen him last in the
_Sun_ office in the days when the war had just broken out and he was
about to sail for home; in the days when the Marne was still unfought
and he had breathed hope then as he spoke with confidence now.

Presently there arrived the two officers whose duty it was to take me
to Verdun, Captain Henri Bourdeaux, a man of letters known to all
Frenchmen; Captain Madelin, an historian, already documented in the
history of the war making under his ow