We met a young doctor coming across the Place, and fell into conversation with him. He had been at the front since the beginning, and he was sad-eyed in spite of his youth. When I spoke of the near-by tenth-century tower toppling and half-demolished, all that was left of the ancient church, and the celebrated abbey of Saint-Vannes, and said what a pity it was that the beautiful things of the old days had to go, he answered, with a gesture of complete indifference: “_Qu’est-ce que celà fait? A nous qui restons de faire de nouvelles choses, et mieux, que n’en out fait nos aïeux._ All the comrades I loved in the beginning are gone—and what remains, or perishes, of brick and mortar is of little account beside the sum of living things that is lost.” Just at this moment M. de S. appeared with the colonel, and the young philosopher touched his cap. We were then introduced to Colonel Dehaye, a brilliant officer and delightful _homme du monde_, loving the arts of peace, as I afterward discovered, as well as practising those of war. In his hands now lie the destinies of Verdun. He presented us each then and there with the famous medal of Verdun and an accompanying paper with his signature, and furthermore gave us an invitation to lunch, which we accepted with delight after delicate references to sandwiches and wine in the motor. We spent half an hour walking about the citadel, and he showed us the most recent damage—of yesterday—when a very especially precise aim of the Germans had destroyed nearly everything that had been left. Then we descended really into the bowels of the earth, cemented, white-tiled, electric-lighted, artificially aired bowels, to the very depths of the great fortress. To get to the mess-room of the colonel and his staff we had to pass through a long room where perhaps a hundred officers were sitting at dinner. There was something deeply impressive about the dim, long, low length of it, and those groups of men prepared for battle. Thoughts of Knights Templar and Crusaders came to me, and there seemed something of consecration about it all. Behind the tables on the walls were hung helmets and arms. [Illustration] [Illustration] A young officer said to me once, “We don’t tell _all_ our stories there and we don’t often laugh very loud.” From it we got into the small, well-lighted mess-room, where kings and presidents and premiers and generalissime, too, have dined in the past few months.