We then descended into the Fort of Souville, down 850 feet, where men live and breathe and have their being in dimly lighted, damp, narrow spaces. But it seemed temporarily like heaven to be out of the glare and the heat. Preceded by lanterns, an officer in front of each one of us, we crept or felt our way up and down, stumbling through vault-like passages, where we would come upon men lying asleep in damp, dim places, or writing by the light of lanterns, or preparing meals in their kitchen, or waiting at the little dispensary, and then we stumbled up again into the heat, reverberating from the white hills. On the way back we passed a little chapel installed in an old cemented dugout. On the altar were many flowers. I bent and peered into the dimness, and, as I knelt, it seemed to me that never had I so understood the words _Introibo ad Altare Dei_. I thought of the Lamb of God, and martyrs new and old, and the catacombs and the primitive Church.... Again men in stress were worshiping in the bowels of the earth. We were photographed against a particularly sinister group of blackened trees, and we picked up some helmets and bits of _obus_. As I write, the _couronne_ of one, quite evenly exploded, lies on the little table by my side. Just before getting into town the colonel ordered the motor to stop, and we got out, and, walking through a field of deep, waving grass, found ourselves in the largest of the cemeteries with its long, even lines of broad graves where lie, in a last co-mingling, the brothers of France, and I repeated to myself in a quiver of feeling, “_Scio quod Redemptor meus vivit et in novissime die resurrecturus sum et in carne mea videbo Deum Salvatorum meum_.” All was in beautiful order. The crosses bore sometimes a name, but oftener a number only: _140 soldats_, or _85 soldats_. The round tricolor badge hung from every cross. There were a few graves of officers who could be identified, their bodies having been brought in by friends or faithful orderlies. How anything could live on those fire-swept hills is the wonder, not that any one died. Suddenly, again, a great sadness fell upon me, and as the colonel pointed out the grave of an especially dear comrade—Colonel Dubois, I think his name was—dead in some heroic manner, I could look no more. We finally got back into the green freshness of Verdun, whose normal state, I see, is to be vine-bowered, tree-shaded, grass-carpeted. After the scarred and blazing battle-field, and in spite of the ruined streets, the roofless houses, I had a feeling of refreshment, coming from those heights where “all the round world is indeed a sepulcher” ... and near the station is the monument to the heroes fallen at Verdun, in 1870.