It was two o’clock, and a white, burning sun was shining on a white, burning earth as we drove through the crumbling streets, through houses in every stage of ruin, to the great plain of La Woèvre, toward the dreadful, scarred battle-field, where the chariot of God rides the ridges. Verdun is built to reinforce the natural rampart of the Côtes de Meuse, to bar the passage of the river’s valley, and cover the Argonne. As we passed out of the town on one side was a cemetery where sleep four thousand, on another side sleep twenty thousand—and these are but a handful to the numbers that lie everywhere in the white, scarred earth around Verdun. The colonel named various battered places as we passed—Fleury, Tavannes, etc., and finally we climbed a steep hillside near the celebrated Fort de Souville, where we left the motors. The abomination of desolation over which we passed once had been a green, smiling, wooded, gently rolling hillside. The village of Tavannes was but a spot of white horror, even with the ground. The hills of Douaumont and Thiaumont had on their blanched sides only a few blackened stumps of trees that will not leaf again. To the left as we looked about were the fateful summits of Le Mort Homme and Hill 304 with a white ribbon of road running between. We walked along, stumbling over heaps of water-bottles, haversacks, helmets, cartridge-belts, belonging alike to the invader and the invaded—bones, skulls, rusty rolls of barbed wire, remains of _obus_, and mixed with what lies in the earth of fair and brave and dear are myriads of unexploded shells. The country round Verdun, despite the rich blood that could render it so fertile, can’t be cultivated for years on account of the vast quantities of shells buried in it. A man pulls a piece of wire, and he loses his hand, another tries to clear away bits of something round, and his head is blown off. One of the officers told us of societies for the demineralization of battle-fields, but the work is slow and costly. Yet a winter’s snows had lain upon it all and spring had breathed over it since the first awful combats of February, 1916. I knew suddenly some complete “heartbreak over fallen things” as I stumbled, and, looking down, saw at my feet a helmet, and by it a skull with insects crawling in and out the eyes, and a broken gun-stock. Great and gorgeous patches of scarlet poppies in a profusion never seen before splash themselves like something else red against the white earth, or fill great shell hollows and spill and slop over the fields....