A courteous Commandant, telephoned to from below, came from some upper region to greet us and to show us something of the endless labyrinth of rooms, passages and dormitories, which during the siege often sheltered thousands of men. The veteran Colonel Duhay, who was in command of the citadel during the greater part of the year-long battle--a splendid, square-built tower of a man--I saw later in Paris. It was ill-luck not to have been able to walk with him over the tragic battle-field itself, for few men can have memories of it at once so comprehensive and so close. From the few words I had with him I retain a shuddering impression as of a slaughter-house; yet nothing could be cheerfuller or humaner than the broad soldier-face. But our talk turned on the losses of Verdun, and although these losses--_i.e._, the proportion of death to the square yard--were probably exceeded in several later battles, in none, it seems to me, has the massacre of men on both sides left so terrible a mark on the survivors. There came a time when the French were sick of slaying, and the German dead were piled mètres high on the slopes of Mort Homme and Cumières; in those weeks at the end of May, when the Germans, conscious that their prestige had suffered irreparably in the hundred days--which were to have been four!--of desperate and indecisive fighting, were at the opening of that fierce last effort which gave them Fort Vaux and its hero-commander, Commandant Raynal, on June 7th--put them in short-lived possession of Thiaumont and Fleury later--and was then interrupted at the end of the month by the thunder of the Allied attack on the Somme.