n pasture land
bordering the town, round flecks of brown indicate the shell
holes. You cross the Meuse.

Immediately east and north of Verdun there lies a broad, brown
band. From the Woevre plain it runs westward to the "S" bend in
the Meuse, and on the left bank of that famous stream continues
on into the Argonne Forest. Peaceful fields and farms and
villages adorned that landscape a few months ago--when there was
no Battle of Verdun. Now there is only that sinister brown belt,
a strip of murdered Nature. It seems to belong to another world.
Every sign of humanity has been swept away. The woods and roads
have vanished like chalk wiped from a blackboard; of the villages
nothing remains but grey smears where stone walls have tumbled
together. The great forts of Douaumont and Vaux are outlined
faintly, like the tracings of a finger in wet sand. One cannot
distinguish any one shell crater, as one can on the pockmarked
fields on either side. On the brown band the indentations are so
closely interlocked that they blend into a confused mass of
troubled earth. Of the trenches only broken, half-obliterated
links are visible.

Columns of muddy smoke spurt up continually as high explosives
tear deeper into this ulcered area. During heavy bombardment and
attacks I have seen shells falling like rain. The countless
towers of smoke remind one of Gustave Dore's picture of the fiery
tombs of the arch-heretics in Dante's "Hell." A smoky pall covers
the sector under fire, rising so high that at a height of one
thousand feet one is enveloped in its mist-like fumes. Now and
then monster projectiles hurtling through the air close by leave
one's plane rocking violently in their wake. Airplanes have been
cut in two by them.

For us the battle passes in silence, the noise of one's motor
deadening all other sounds. In the green patches behind the brown
belt myriads of tiny flashes tell where the guns are hidden; and
those flashes, and the smoke of bursting shells, are all we see
of the fighting. It is a weird combination of stillness and
havoc, the Verdun conflict viewed from the sky.

Far below us, the observation and range-finding planes circle
over the trenches like gliding gulls. At a feeble altitude they
follow the attacking infantrymen and flash b