We thanked a thousand times the colonel and his group of officers standing by the auto at the entrance to the subterranean passage, and though I had a consciousness of the uncertainty of their lives, I thought again “Nothing but good can befall the soldier, so he plays his part well.” Now comes to mind a conversation I had before I ever dreamed of going to Verdun, when I talked for three hours of battles and scars with a young hero wounded on Hill 304, June 9, 1916. He is a flashing-eyed, straight-featured, tall, slim-waisted young hero who knows what it is to have made, and with astounding ease, the sacrifice of the life that he loves so, and drinks in full bumpers. And this is part of what we said, one of a thousand, of ten thousand, of a hundred thousand happenings, of which Verdun is the golden frame: De G.—“There was something hanging about Verdun; ‘_Ils ne passeront pas, et ils ne sont pas passés_.’ If the enemy could have but known how thinly, poorly, in so many places it was defended! It was seemingly the will of Heaven rather than the strength of mortals that they were not to pass, not man, not artillery, but the high destiny of nations. “When I lay during those hours at the _poste d’observation_ on Hill 304, in front of the French army, signaling ‘shell square 17,’ or 16, or whatever it might be, I could see clearly the havoc in the German ranks as the shells would fall. Great groups of men would be blown to atoms and new formations would press in to take their place. The whole horror was there before me, mapped out in numbered squares. “I dismissed all my men except my orderly of the fourth Zouaves, who wouldn’t have gone, anyway. It was a work I could do alone, lying with a sand-bag against my head, my field-glasses in my hand, and before me my field map held down by four sticks. We lay there just under the crest of the hill from two o’clock in the morning until the next afternoon, watching seven attacks. Toward three o’clock I was wounded, and I knew it was only a question of time and chance when I would lie like the dead man at my side, that Dueso had been pressing his feet against, and whose place I had been sent to take. Almost at the same moment I caught sight of Dueso spinning around, holding his elbows to his side, and crying out: ‘_Nom de Dieu! Nom de Dieu!_ I’ve got it in the arm!’—but trying with the other hand to undo his _cravate_.