lieutenant replied humbly:

"Pardon me, I lost a lot of time on the way."

* * * * *

Those men I saw for months fighting and dying to the south of Verdun,
at the Butte des Eparges, knew how to suffer.

The Butte des Eparges dominates the great plain of the Woevre, and
from the very beginning it has been the theater of a frightful and
long drawn out battle of the kind one seldom sees in this war. The
Germans have been entrenched on the left side of the Butte, the French
on the right. And day and night for four years there has been an
incessant battle over its summit of grenades, bombs and shells; a
terrible hand-to-hand fight in which neither one of the contestants
yields an inch of ground. A brook of blood runs its interrupted course
on each slope. On the south slope it is red with German blood; with
French blood on the north.

The two slopes of the Butte have been so raked by firing that they
have not a single tree, bush, or blades of grass on them; they stand
out sinister and frightful in their nakedness, seeming to cry out to
the men of the plain:

"See, all of you, the scourge of God has passed over this place."

They are dented, furrowed and blown into crevasses by the explosions
of mines; they are sown over with the enormous funnels in which the
fighters take shelter; they are covered with an incessant smoke from
the projectiles that plow them up.

As for the summit, it is a no man's land, that belongs to the dead men
whose bodies cover it. The summit stopped being a battle field to
become a charnel house. The number of men who have fallen there will
never be known. The most fantastic figures come from the lips of those
who come down ... 5,000, 8,000, 10,000 ... it will never be known. But
what is known is that the dead are always there. They form a parapet
above which the living fight on. These dead rot in the sunshine and in
the rain. In accordance with the wind's being from the east or the
west, the frightful odor of all this rotten flesh strikes the Germans
or the French. They lie there, an indistinguishable mass on the
ground, and the men are unlucky who watch by night in the listening
posts or the trenches. They think they are stumbling against a stone,
and it is a skull their feet are touching; they think they are picking
up the branch of a tree, and they have hold of the arm of a corpse.

However, in the shadow of this human charnel house, at the edge of
this bloo