There the open graves are always waiting. The wooden black crosses have spread far out over the hill-side, climbing up and across till no one dare estimate their number. Five thousand, a grave-digger told us long, long ago. Since then Verdun has written her name in blood across the sky, Verdun impregnable because her rampart was the heart of the manhood of France, Verdun supreme because the flower of that manhood laid down their lives in order to keep her so.
Yes, the chanting of the priests brings an odd lump into one's throat, but one day we saw a little ceremony that moved us more deeply still.
It was early morning, a strain of martial music rose on the air. We hurried to the windows and saw a company of soldiers coming down the boulevard. They passed our house, marched to the far end, halted, and then turning, ranged themselves in a great semicircle beyond the window. To say that their movements lacked the cleanness and precision which an English regiment would have shown is to put the matter mildly. Their business was to form three sides of a square. They formed it, shuffling and dodging, elbowing, scraping their feet, falling into their places by the Grace of God while a fat fussy officer skirmished about for all the world like an agitated curate at a Sunday School treat.
The fourth side of the square consisted of the pavement and a crowd of women, children and lads, a crowd with a gap in the middle where, like a rock rising above the waters of sympathy, stood two chairs on which two soldiers, mutilés de la guerre, were sitting. Brave men both. They had distinguished themselves in fight, and this morning France was to do them honour.
An officer read aloud something we could not hear, and then a general stepped forward and pinned the Croix de Guerre upon their breasts, and colonels and staff officers shook them by the hand, and the band broke into the Marseillaise and the watching crowd tried to raise a cheer. But their voice died in their throat, no sound would come, for the Song of the Guns was in their ears and out across the hills their own men were fighting, to come home to them, perhaps, one day as these men had come, or it might be never to come home at all. The cheer became a sob, the voice of a stricken nation, of suffering heart-sick womanhood waiting ... waiting.
So the band played a lively tune and the soldiers marched away, the crowd melted silently about its daily work and for a time the boulevard was deserted, deserted save for him who sat huddled into his deep arm-chair, the Croix de Guerre upon his breast and the pitiless sunlight streaming down upon the pavements he would never tread again.
A few weeks later the bands march by again. It is evening, and the shadows are lengthening. We mingle with the crowd and see a tall, stern man with aloof, inflexible, unsmiling face pass up and down the lines of the guard of honour drawn up to receive him. A shorter, stouter man is at his side.
"Vive Kitchenaire!"
The densely packed crowds take up the cry. "Vive l'Angleterre!" Ah, it is God Save the King that the band is playing now. "Vive Kitchenaire." Again the shout goes up. The short, stout man greets the crowd, and a mighty roar responds. "Vive Joffre." He smiles, but his companion never unbends. As the glorious Marseillaise thunders on the air, with unseeing eyes and ears that surely do not hear he turns away, and the dark passage of the house swallows him up.