Only too easy was it to see! In some of the streets whole rows of houses had had their fronts torn off. The rooms within were like stage-settings for some tragic play. Sheets and blankets trailed from beds where sleepers had waked in fright. Doors of wardrobes gaped to show dresses dangling forlornly, like Bluebeard's murdered brides. Dinner-tables were set out for meals never to be finished, save by rats. Family portraits of comfortable old faces smiling under broken glass hung awry on pink or blue papered walls. Half-made shirts and petticoats were still caught by the needle in broken sewing-machines. Dropped books and baskets of knitting lay on bright carpets snowed under by fallen plaster. Vases of dead flowers stood on mantelpieces, ghostly stems and shrivelled brown leaves reflected in gilt-framed mirrors. I could hardly bear to look! It was like being shown by a hard-hearted surgeon the beating of a brain through the sawed hole in a man's skull. If one could have crawled through the crust of lava at Pompeii, a year after the eruption, one might have felt somewhat as at Verdun now!
On a broken terrace, once a beloved evening promenade, our two cars paused. We got out and gazed down, down over the River Meuse, from a high vantage-point where a few months ago, we should have been blown to bits, in five minutes. Our two officers pointed out in the misty autumn landscape spots where some of the fiercest and most famous fights had been. How the names they rattled off brought back anxious nights and mornings when our first and only thoughts had been the communiqués! "Desperate battle on the Meuse." "Splendid stand at Douaumont." "New attack on Morthomme." But nothing we saw helped out our imaginings. There was just a vast stretch of desolation where vinelands once had poured their perfume to the sun. The forts protecting Verdun were as invisible as fairyland, I said. "As invisible as hell!" one of our guides amended. And then to me, in a low voice unheard by pale and trembling Mother Beckett, he added, "If Nature did not work to make ugly things invisible, we could not let you come here, Mademoiselle. See how high the grass has grown in the plain down there! In summer it is full of poppies, red as the blood that feeds their roots. And it is only the grasses and the poppies that hide the bones of men we've never yet put underground. Nature has been one of our chief sextons, here at Verdun. I wish you could have seen the poppies a few months ago, mixed with blue marguerites and cornflowers—that we call 'bluets.' We used to say that our dead were lying in state under the tricolour flag of France. But I have made you sad, Mademoiselle. Je regrette! We must take you quickly to the citadel. Our general will not let you be sad there."
We turned from the view over the Meuse and walked away in silence. I thought I had never heard so loud, so thunderously echoing, a silence in my life.
Oh, no, it was not sad in the citadel! It was, on the contrary, very gay, of a gaiety so gallant and so pathetic that it brought a lump to the throat when there should have been a laugh on the lips. But the lump had to be swallowed, or our hosts' feelings would be hurt. They didn't want watery-eyed, full-throated guests at a luncheon worthy of bright smiles and keen appetites!
The first thing that happened to Mother Beckett and me in the famous fortress was to be shown into a room decorated as a ladies' boudoir. All had been done, we were told almost timidly, in our honour, even the frescoes on the walls, painted in record time by a young lieutenant, who was an artist; and the officers hoped that they had forgotten nothing we might need. 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.
The lieutenant who met us at Bar-le-Duc had rushed there in advance of us, in order to shop with frantic haste. A long list must have been compiled after "mature deliberation"—as they say in courts-martial—otherwise any normal young man would have missed out something. In the tiny, subterranean room (not much larger than a cell) a stick of incense burned. The cot-bed of some hospitable captain or major disguised itself as a couch, under a brand-new silk table-cover with the price-mark still attached, and several small sofa cushions, also ticketed. A deal table had been painted green and spread with a lace-edged tea-cloth, on which were proudly displayed a galaxy of fittings from a dressing-bag, the best, no doubt, that poor bombarded Bar-le-Duc could produce in war time. There were ivory-backed hair and clothes brushes; a comb; bottles filled with white face-wash and perfume; a manicure-set, with pink salve and nail-powder; a tray decked out with every size of hairpin; a cushion bristling with pins of many-coloured heads; boxes of rouge, a hare's-foot to put it on with; face-powder in several tints; swan's-down puffs; black pencils for the eyebrows and blue for the eyelids; sweet-smelling soap—a dazzling and heavily fragrant collection.
"Oh, my dear, what did they think of us?" gasped Mother Beckett. "What a shame the poor lambs should have wasted all their money and trouble!"
"It mustn't be wasted!" said I. "Think how disappointed they'd be if they came in here afterward and found we hadn't touched a thing!"
"But——" she protested.