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It was probably the only funeral that the hospital yard ever had seen, for the soldiers and orderlies and attendants turned and gaped at the wonder, and nurses peered from the windows. Four days later we were sitting in the courtyard of a little tavern in St. Dizier. A young French soldier came up, and tried his English on us. He found that we had been to Verdun.

We could both have cried, if we hadn't feared to spoil our eyes and redden our noses! But even if we'd not been strong enough to stifle our tears, there was everything at hand to repair their ravages. And all this in a place where the Revolution had sent fourteen lovely ladies to the guillotine for servilely begging the King of Prussia to spare Verdun.

Verdun was the nut to be cracked, but Sarrail had been extending its defences so as to put the city beyond the reach of the German howitzers and surrounding it with miles of trenches and wire-entanglements; and the Germans preferred to attempt another method than frontal attack.

The women who were usually present comprised the Marquise de Grollier, Mme. de Verdun, the Marquise de Sabran, who afterward married the Chevalier de Boufflers, Mme. le Couteux du Molay my best friends, all four of them the Marquise de Rougé, Mme. de Pezé, her friend, whom I painted in the same picture with her, and a host of other French ladies, whom, owing to the smallness of my rooms, I could receive but rarely, and all sorts of distinguished foreign ladies.

He then telephoned to General Nivelle the necessary permission for us to enter Verdun. I doubt whether General Pétain realises the respect in which he is held in all the civilised countries of the world.

Although spring weather does not set in in any part of the country through which the eastern front ran until considerable time after that date, events along the western front, where the Germans were then hammering away at the gates of Verdun, had shaped themselves in such a manner that they were bound to influence the plans of the Russian General Staff.

The French politicians recognized that to lose Verdun was to suffer a moral defeat which would almost infallibly bring down the Ministry, might call into existence a new Committee of Public Safety, and would fire the German heart and depress the French.

With these facts in mind, the German Crown Prince opened with his big guns, first upon the fortresses guarding Verdun itself. These approaches shattered, the Crown Prince ordered his infantry and cavalry to the attack. But where the onrushing Germans, according to the reasoning of the Crown Prince, should have found no resistance, they encountered strenuous opposition.

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.

"Young soldiers in garrison towns have a deuced poor time of it is that not so?... And they do not know how to amuse themselves when they have leave.... But, no doubt you have friends here, Corporal?" "I do not know a soul in Verdun." "Ah, well, since you have been so obliging, it would give me pleasure to introduce you to some people, if you would care for it?... You would find them amusing."