"Let me pass…." she stammered to this member of the great "monastery."
He wavered and stood aside, and she went on up the corridor vaguely ashamed of her refusal.
* * * * *
"We go now," said the Russian, rising from the luncheon table. "Are you satisfied with your experience, mademoiselle?"
"My experience?"
"Verdun. This life is strange to you. I have seen you reflective. Now, if you will go out to the car you shall go back to your civilised town where the Governor so dislikes me, and you shall see your women friends again! But we are not coming all the way with you."
"No?"
"No, we stay at Briey. You return from Briey alone."
They set out once more upon the roads which ran between the dead violence of the plains—between trenches that wandered down from the side of a sandy hillock, by villages which appeared like an illusion upon the hillside, fading as they passed and reforming into the semblance of houses in the distance behind them.
The clouds above their heads were built up to a great height, rocky and cavernous; crows swung on outspread wings, dived and alighted heavily on the earth like fowls. They came behind the old German lines, and the road changing led them through short patches of covering woods filled with instruments. Depôt after depôt was piled between the trees and the notices hanging from the branches chattered antique directions at them. "The drinking trough—the drinking trough!" cried one, but they had no horse to water. "Take this path!" urged another, "for the…." but they flew by too fast to read the end of the message, while the path pursued them a little way among the pines, then turned abruptly away. "Do not smoke here … Nicht rauchen," "NICHT RAUCHEN," "Rauchen streng verboten," cried the notices, in furious impotent voices. The wood chattered and spat with cries, with commands for which the men who made them cared no longer. The hungry noses of old guns snuffed at the car as it rolled by, guns dragging still upon their flanks the torn cloak of camouflage—small squat guns which stared idly into the air, or with wider mouths still, like petrified dogs for ever baying at the moon—long slim guns which lay along the grass and pushing undergrowth—and one gun which had dipped forward and, fallen upon its knees, howled silenced imprecations at the devil in the centre of the earth.