One had
the long hair of a woman flapping about his ears.
They reached Etain, and turned the sharp corner in the street lined with
hollow houses, passed under a tunnel of thick camouflage, leafy as an
arbour, mouldy as the rags upon a corpse, and came on the first
pill-boxes of the Hindenburg line.
Another twelve miles and the twin towers of Verdun appeared over the
brow of a hill.
"I thought it but dust!" exclaimed the Russian. "I thought it a ruin; it
is a town!"
"Wait, wait till you get nearer...."
Then down the last long hill and over the paved Route d'Etain into the
suburbs of Verdun. As they neared it the town began to show its awful
frailty--its appearance of preservation was a mockery. Verdun stood
upright as by a miracle, a coarse lace of masonry--not one house
was whole.
"Stop!" ordered the Russian, and at the foot of the steep, conical hill
which wore Verdun upon its crest they stopped and stared. The town was
poured over the slopes of the hill as though a titanic tipcart had let
out its rubbish upon the summit. Houses, shops and churches, still
upright, still formed Verdun, kept its shape intact, unwilling that it
should fall to dust while these deadly skeletons could keep their feet.
Light glared through the walls, and upon the topmost point of all the
palace of the bishop was balanced, its bones laced against the sky.
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