Everywhere one sees the ineffaceable scars of struggle, the aftermath of destruction. The stately trees bordering the roadside, the trees that Napoleon ordered planted along the highways of France, are barked with great ugly gashes where mines had been placed, the exploding of which would have felled the great trees across the road, blocking the pursuer’s way. Others bear platforms high up in the branches where machine-guns were placed. Rotting camouflages of every sort, paper strips woven like lattice, curtains of branches woven through wire which once screened the road for miles from the enemy’s observation, now lie disintegrating in the ditches. Shell holes pit the fields, concrete “pill-boxes” lurk in unsuspected places, every mound is shelter for a dugout, walls are riddled with ragged holes cut for machine-guns. Further on, one comes to the trenches zigzagging in what seems erratic and aimless patterns and the interminable barbed-wire entanglements, like the devil’s brier patches. Half across the open plain that lies before the hills of Verdun you come upon a German tank defence, a long line of heavy concrete pillars with enormous cables, once highly electrified, looped between. A little farther and the road crosses an impromptu bridge thrown hastily over the great gaping crater torn by an exploding mine. And always here and there over the plain, little heaps of glimmering whitish stones which mark the places where once were villages. Starting to ascend the hills, one looks down upon a ghost city, a city where many of the walls still stand, making you think of nothing but a huddled host of tombstones, a city chalk-white, naked, as if the flesh were all picked away from its dead bones; the most haunted, the most wraith-like, the most desolate of any. Climbing the hills, sweeping around one slow curve after another, one beholds suddenly before him, a lesser hill ringed by higher ones, Verdun, scarred, wounded, but victorious, like the Winged Victory of Samothrace, mutilated yet triumphant!