[17] "To Verdun! After Verdun—Eclipse."
[18] "To Verdun! After Verdun—Paris!"
(AN IDYLL BETWEEN THE TRENCHES, 1914)
(Note.—This story is founded upon an actual occurrence narrated by Paul Grabein, "Im Auto durch Feindesland," Berlin, 1916.)
The sun set while a regiment of Zouaves was marching across the plateau. The after-glow yet illumined the sky when its leading files turned obliquely off to the right along a rough track that presently dropped abruptly into a deep ravine, sculped by one of the streamlet tributaries of the Oise. Bare for a little way below the lip, save for some scattered juniper bushes stiffly perpendicular from the close-cropped slope, the sides of the ravine were dark with a dense growth of tree and thorn. The road plunged into it.
Down and down went the road in a gloomy tunnel of arching boughs that scarce left an interstice for the twilight sky. It reached the floor of the little valley, followed it to the right in a more gentle descent. On its left a brook fell swiftly through a plantation of silver birch in a channel that brimmed to the long, rank, water-flattened grass and anon plashed over boulders in a miniature cascade. Save for the steady tramp of the marching troops and the occasional squawk of a frightened jay, there was no sound in the valley.