wn mouth.

Thus it came about that all my difficulties vanished when I had been
permitted to express to the President my desire to see Verdun and to
go back to America--I was sailing within the week--able to report what
I had seen with my own eyes of the decisive battle still going forward
around the Lorraine city. Without further delay, discussion, it was
promised that I should go to Verdun by motor, that I should go cared
for by the French military authorities and that I should be permitted
to see all that one could see at the moment of the contest.

We left Paris in the early afternoon; my companions were M. Henri
Ponsot, chief of the Press Service of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs,
and M. Hugues le Roux, a distinguished Frenchman of letters well known
to many Americans. To start for the battlefield from a busy, peaceful
city, to run for miles through suburbs as quiet and lacking in martial
aspect as the regions beyond the Harlem, at home, was a thing that
seemed almost unreal; but only for a brief moment, for war has come
very near to Paris, and one may not travel far in Eastern France
without seeing its signs.

In less than an hour we were passing the rear of the line held by the
British at the Battle of the Marne, and barely sixty minutes after we
had passed out through the Vincennes gate we met at Courtacon the
first of the ruined villages that for two hundred miles line the
roadways that lead from the capital to Lorraine and Champagne.
Suddenly in the midst of a peaceful countryside, after passing a
score of undisturbed villages, villages so like one to another, you
come to one upon which the storm has burst, and instead of snug
houses, smiling faces, the air of contentment and happiness that was
France, there is only a heap of ruins, houses with their roofs gone,
their walls torn by shell fire, villages abandoned partially or
wholly, contemporary Pompeiis, overtaken by the Vesuvius of Krupp.

Coincidentally there appear along the roadside, in the fields, among
the plough furrows, on every side, the crosses that mark the graves of
those who died for France--or for Germany. Along the slope you may
mark the passage of a charge by these crosses; those who fell were
buried as they lay, French and Germans with equal care. Indeed, there
is a certain pride visible in all that the French do for their dead
foes. Alongside a hamlet wantonly burned, burned by careful labor and
with German thoroughness; in villages whe