s of motor-lorries lumbered by. The narrow trenches were
coated with ice. The hillside trails were slippery as glass. In the deep
dugouts small sheet-iron stoves were burning, giving out a little heat
and a great deal of choking smoke. The soldiers sat around them playing
cards or telling stories.

But there! What I saw in that shell-pitted, snow-covered, hard-frozen
amphitheatre of heroism cannot be described in these brief paragraphs.
The serenity, cheerfulness, courtesy, and indomitable courage of the
French poilus defending their own land; the scenes in the trenches with
the German shells breaking around us and the wounded men being carried
past us; the luncheon in the citadel with the commandant and officers in
a subterranean room where the motto on the wall, above the
world-renowned escutcheon of Verdun, was "On ne passe pas"--"They don't
get by"; the dinner with the general and staff of the Verdun army, in a
little village "somewhere in France," and their last words to me, "On
les aura! Ca peut etre long, mais on les aura!"--"It may take long, but
we shall get them!"--all these and a thousand more things are vivid in
my memory but cannot be told now.

One scene sticks in my mind and asks to be recorded.

The hospital was just back of the Verdun lines. Its roofs were marked
with the Red Cross. Twenty-four hundred beds, all clean and quiet. Wards
full of German wounded, cared for as tenderly as the French. "Will you
see an operation?" said the proud little commandant who was showing me
through his domain. "Certainly." A big, husky fellow was on the
operating-table, unconscious, under ether. One of the best surgeons in
France was performing the operation of trepanning. I could see the
patient's brain, bare and beating, while the surgeon did his skilful
work. Other doctors stood around, and three nurses, one an American
girl, Miss Cowen, of Pittsburgh. "Will the man get well?" I asked the
surgeon. "I hope so," he answered. "At all events, we shall do our best
for him. You know, he is a German--c'est un Boche!"

On August 20, 1917, that very hospital, marked with the Red Cross, was
bombed by German aeroplanes. One wing was set on fire. While the nurses
and helpers were trying to rescue the patients, the bloody Potsdam
vultures flew back and forth three times over the place, raking it with
machine guns. More than thirty persons were killed, including doctors,
German wounded, and one woman nurse. God grant it was not