During the first days of the attack, the roads were filled with refugees from the town of Verdun and the country north of it. As soon as the bombardment started, civilians were given five hours to leave, and we saw them--old men, women, and children--struggling along through the snow on their way south. It was but another of those sad migrations that occur so often in the _zone des armées_. The journey was made difficult and often dangerous for them by the columns of skidding trucks, so the more timid took to the fields or the ditches at the roadside. They were for the most part the _petits bourgeois_ who had kept their shops open until the last minute, to make the town gay for the troops, who filed through the Promenade de la Digue in an endless queue on their way to and from the trenches. Most of them had saved nothing but the clothes on their backs, though I saw one old woman courageously trundling a barrow overflowing with laces, post-cards, bonbons (doubtless the famous _Dragées verdunoises_), and other similar things which had been part of her stock-in-trade, and with which she would establish a Verdun souvenir shop when she found her new home. There were many peasant carts loaded with every imaginable article of household goods from stoves to bird cages; but no matter what else a cart might contain, there was always a mattress with the members of the family, old and young, bouncing along on top. So ubiquitous was this mattress that I asked about it, and was told that the French peasant considers it the most important of his Lares, for it is there his babies are born and his old people die--there, too, is the family bank, the hiding-place for the _bas de laine_. All the people, no matter what their class or station, were excited. Some were resigned, some weeping, some quarrelling, but every face reflected terror and suffering, for these derelicts had been suddenly torn from the ruins of their old homes and their old lives after passing through two days of the heaviest bombardment the world has ever seen. I did not wonder at their grief or terror when I had seen the town from which they fled. Sometimes it is quiet, with no shells and no excitement; at others it is a raging hell, a modern Pompeii in the ruining. Often I passed through the town, hearing and seeing nothing to suggest that any enemy artillery was within range. But one morning I went up to take a doctor to a near-by hospital, and had just passed under one of the lovely old twelfth-century gates, with its moat and towers, when the Germans began their morning hate. I counted one hundred and fifty shells, _arrivées_, in the first quarter of an hour.