re were smoking fires. Two
days ago, at just this time, your guides told you, men had been
working here; making bread, I think. At the same time we had come to
the ruins--the same time of day, that is--the Germans had dropped a
half-dozen incendiary shells into the building and it had burned in
ten minutes. Most of the men who had been there then were still there,
under the smoking mass of wreckage; the smell of burned human flesh
was in the air.

A few steps away there was a little house standing intact. On the
floor there were stretched four rolls of white cloth. The General and
those with him took off their hats as they entered. He opened one of
the packages and you saw only a charred black mass, something that
looked like a half-burned log taken from the fireplace. But two days
ago it had been a man, and the metal disk of identification had
already been found and had served to disclose the victim's name. These
were the first bodies that had been removed from the ruins.

Taking our cars again we drove back and stopped before the Mairie, and
passing under the arch entered the courtyard. The building had fared
better than most, but there were many shell marks. In the courtyard
were four guns. Forty-six years before another German army had come
down from the North, another whirlwind of artillery had struck the
town and laid it in ashes, but even under the ashes the town had held
out for three weeks. Afterward the Republic of France had given these
guns to the people of Verdun in recognition of their heroism.

In the courtyard I was presented to a man wearing the uniform and
helmet of a fireman. He was the chief of the Verdun fire department.
His mission, his perilous duty, it was to help extinguish the fires
that flamed up after every shell. In all my life I have never seen a
man at once so crushed and so patently courageous. He was not young,
but his blue Lorraine eyes were still clear. Yet he looked at you, he
looked out upon the world with undisguised amazement. For a generation
his business had been to fight fires. He had protected his little town
from conflagrations that might sometimes, perhaps once, possibly
twice, have risen to the dignity of a "three alarm." For the rest he
had dealt with blazes.

Now out of the skies and the darkness and out of the daylight, too,
fire had descended upon his town. Under an avalanche of incendiary
shells, under a landslide of fire, his city was melting visibly into
ashes. H