More efficiently than the enemy, the sunshine climbs the slopes of the fort. It is light and airy, like a bearer of good tidings. Smiling, it shows me, in front, two or three hundred yards beyond the counterscarp, on the sloping turf, several greenish lumps almost dressed in line. They are the bodies of Germans mown down in the onslaughts of March 9. They have fallen in front of the barbed wire. One could count them. Already their numbers are diminished. At night their comrades draw them into their lines by means of hooks or ropes. The sun has left the rim of the earth and is speedily mounting the horizon. The morning is of an exquisite softness that contrasts strangely with the tragic scene. Behind me is chaos, in front a charnel-heap. Yet up above a lark is singing. His wings flap and his claws quiver, but he does not change his place in the rose-tinted heavens. I watch this sweet songster fluttering overhead, as if it were pecking at the light. A look-out man raises his eyes to catch sight of it. He looks at it tenderly for a moment, then resumes his watching. The passing shells do not disturb it in the slightest. What is happening down there, among the corpses in green uniforms? One of them has made a movement; he glides through the grass like a snake. The enemy uses his dead as a screen or a blind, and is coming in this way to spy out the land. A look-out man has also observed this uncanny resurrection. He fires. Nothing moves. We must have been mistaken. A long time afterwards, a little below the suspected point, a body jumps up and abruptly disappears at a spot where the gradient is very steep and forms dead ground. As in the mountains, I sweep the horizon with my gaze and give names to the valleys and hills. Douaumont, on my right, is the loftiest summit (1200 feet); only Souville, at the back, makes any approach to this. It seems like some incubus weighing upon the whole surrounding country. I am separated from it by the wooded slopes of Vaux-Chapître, by the ravine of Le Bazil, whose existence I guess at, and by the rising wood of La Caillette. Above the Woevre, Hardaumont rears its head like a cliff. The Woevre stretches out as far as the eye can see, broken up with undergrowth and villages and streaked with roads. In broad daylight I get a better idea of its bareness, which was veiled by the kindly dawn. Its untilled soil resembles a vast marsh. On the right my eyes rest on the dark blur of Herméville Wood. The outlying spurs of the Meuse Heights hide a portion of it from view. It is there, towards the village, over against those hillsides, over against Damloup, that the enemy’s onslaught was shattered. And the fort, on its plateau, with its superstructure half crushed, with breaches in its double wall, seems like the formidable hulk of an ironclad which still floats upon the waters, not yet abandoned by its crew. The storm thought to overwhelm it, and it has vanquished the storm.