The Germans had been shelling a near-by 75 battery that very morning, and fresh bits of _warm_ shrapnel were lying all about as we twisted in and out of the _boyaux_. I brought away but a small bit with me, having early discovered that a small piece is as good a reminder as a big bit, and much easier to carry. We passed the grave of a soldier buried where he had fallen, a few hours before. His shallow grave, with its little cross, was running _red_, but he was mayhap already in his Father’s house of many mansions. In many places under the feet scarcely buried bodies gave an elastic sensation.... We first visited the emplacement of a great gun worked by the most complicated electric machinery, something that seemed built as strongly as the Pyramids, revolving on its great axis, at a touch fulfilling that which it was cast into being to perform. When we came out, we climbed some last white scarred heights that the colonel called “_Les Pyrénées_,” and there, stretched out, was the whole great and fateful panorama of Verdun—“_par où ils n’ont pas passé_.” I thought of the men I had known who had been engaged in those dreadful attacks, whose mothers and wives had looked upon them again, and of others still whose wives and mothers would behold them no more. And I had again a breaking of the heart over the vast tangle, and cried within myself, “Shall all the world be a valley of dry bones?” [Illustration: OUR PARTY ON THE BATTLE-FIELD AT VERDUN, JUNE 17, 1917] [Illustration: IN THE BOYAUX, VERDUN, JUNE 17, 1917] Then we hid ourselves in some _boyaux_ well out of sight, for we were nearing a camouflaged battery, two of whose guns had been silenced that very morning. In dark woods over beyond Tavannes the Germans were intrenched, and their shells were also falling thickly over Douaumont and Thiaumont. It was the front indeed. It was at Tavannes that in a dreadful moment, in a moment such as can happen anywhere, artillery fire had been trained on thousands of men who were rushing to the top in a great charge. And yet I kept thinking of the words of a dead hero, “Nothing but good can befall the soldier, so he plays his part well.”[6] At that moment the enemy began to send an unwonted number of shells, which were exploding just behind Thiaumont, so the colonel told the captain of artillery—who had joined our party at the gun emplacement—to answer, and he climbed down a steep decline to his masked battery. In a few minutes, as we lay hidden in the _boyau_, twenty discharges sounded; but shells that go up, come down, and on the other side of the hill we were watching, who shall say what agony? I am so constituted that I cannot think of the passage of any soul into the next life other than with awe.