Evening star., 1932-11-13
LEST WE FORGET
BY ELIZABETH WAsHBURNE WRIGHT.

all faded away In their place the
silence had come, and the gloom and
the paralyzing languor One could at
last pass this way. The gate to France
was open-mutilated France-mayred
beyond recognition, utterly benumbed.
We crept away once more in silence
down the long dark street. We passed
over the drawbridge and beyond the
walls of the town. There was not a
soul to be seen. We spent the night in
an empty railway carriage in the sta
ton. Verdun lies high, guarding the
passes in the hills. The air grew chill
and very thin, with the freshness of
mountain air An old lopsided moon
rose late and shone into the windows
of the car. The world outside lay
bathed in a great luminousneSs. The
familiar dipper mounted high in the
sky swinging over that silent, but in
domitable fortress, and over the great
battlefield where lay the unmarked
graves of thousands and hundreds of
thousands of men. The cold silence
was all-surrounding, silence cutting
like knives. They were sleeping about
us and forever-those men. So near
they were and so recent the sleep that
it seemed almost that one could hear
them breathe and stir. And from their
immense distance the stars shone down
upon them in silent and silver bene-
diction.
In the morning we saw the German
prisoners marching in squads about the
town-amaZingly blond, very young,
with raw, cold faces. They were clad
in old French uniforms dyed bottle
green, and on their heads were the
little boche caps with faded red band;
They looked sturdy and ruddy and WeH
fed They stared with an unrestrained
and curious insolence. 1t was their
business to clean up the ruin they had
wrought. They were piling fallen
bricks In rows-thouSandS Of bricks
and shoveling motar and digging at the
mountain heaps of destruction.
We passed out of the town in a
heavy lorry, and there gradually un-
folded before us that colossal grave
yard or battlefield of Verdun. 1t
stretched before us first an empty plain,
and then it became as a great sea OF
lava, cooled of suddenly and gray and
irregular. The look of it was leprouS
and unhealthy. full of extraordinary
indentations and sudden craters. At
first were trees, but withered to the
roots and standing at preposterouS
angles, the dry gray splinters OF them
making sharp silhouetteS against the
sky. Then there were no trees at all.
Everything that was green had van
ished, and there lay before US great
stretches like the alkaline deserts OF
the Far West. Rude crosses appeared
in the bitches by the roadside, In the
hollows and sudden upheavals. Burst
bombs and sleek heavy shells still un-
spent were in the fields where they had
| fallen. Hand grenades, round and
black, lay together in the hollows like
eggs in a nest.
BY degrees the setting Of this colos-
sal stage began to take shape. The
amazing camoufaging-the roads that
were not roads. the infinite labor OF
! screens and curtains fashioned of
boughs and branches that hid the end
less trail of life flowing from the fort
ress to the distant trenches. The cum
ming and the tireleSs effort-rocks that
were men, and men that were rocks.
Cannon that were spattered and
splashed to lie like fallow deer hidden
CONTINUED on Fifth Page.)