CHAPTER VIII

VERDUN

_Verdun! The sound is like a clarion call. Verdun! It is shorty but gravely harmonious. It is satisfying to the ear, it is quickening to the soul. Verdun! It is for France the word of words; in it lies the whole beauty of her language and of her martial glory as well._

_Who shall say it is but a fortuitous collection of letters, this word Verdun, beautiful as a chalice, that holds the dearest blood of France? It would not have been the same mystically, perhaps not actually, had it been Toul or Epinal or even that other melodic sound, Belfort. Verdun! It is the call through red days and nights, and everywhere the sons of France rallying to it with great hurryings lest mayhap one be there before the other, to dye with deeper color the crimson of high deeds. Verdun, ear and tongue relinquish you regretfully._

_Verdun, glory and sorrow of France, I salute you, Verdun! Verdun!_

Night, silence, and memory turning over the events of the day.

I stopped writing this morning as a gentleman of supreme personal distinction entered the little sandy-floored café, a gentleman who should always be arriving in a dark-red, sixty-horse-power Panhard, or receiving on a terrace with a castle behind him, or sitting in a library of first editions only, in soft but gorgeous bindings. It was M. de S., and we shortly all got into the big auto, we three women on the broad back seat, M. de S. in front with the military chauffeur. Even the bend of his long back was _l’élégance suprême_. He said the motor had seen three years of war-service, but certainly there was something unfatigued about it as it started out through the ancient streets of Bar-le-Duc, on the white road to the fateful fortress. The arrow on the first Verdun sign-post gave a feeling of having shot itself into one’s heart, as well as pointing the way.

Almost immediately we met a long convoy bringing men back from the front, ourselves and everything else enveloped in a white plaster-of-Paris-like cloud of dust. It seemed an endless line, with their camouflaged canvas tops and sides, painted in great splashes of green and brown. In some of them the men were singing the _chansons de route_ that soldiers so love, and many of them had green branches stuck in the sides as a slight protection against the sun and the shifting white dust. The grass and flowers of the wayside were as if dipped in whitewash, but the road, like all the roads of France—those veins of her body of death _and_ life—was in excellent condition. Next we met a great line of Red Cross convoys, and all the time we were swinging through ruined villages.

At the entrance to X. the guard stopped us with his bayonet. Our papers being in _archi_ condition, we passed through the little village of the _Quartier-Général_ without further hindrance. In front of the Mairie there is a quaint old fountain with its statue of three women holding up a _motif_ of flowers in a basket; near by there is an old hostelry, _Le Raisin Blanc_, in front of which soldiers were sitting, drinking their _bocks_ and reading newspapers. Turning out again on the white road, we pass settlements of Red Cross barracks and munition parks, looking for all the world like mining camps in Western towns at home.

We arrived at Dugny at ten o’clock and descended to look about for a suitable place for the installing of a canteen, which was partly our reason for being where we were. There is an old country house in the middle of the little town, with a coat of arms above the door and lions crouching on its gates; behind is a lovely ancient park with linden and elder trees in full blossom, and under them quiet, shady walks. It is used as an ambulance station, and convalescing men were sitting or lying about on the ground. We met the _médecin-chef_, who, however, like all doctors, didn’t care twopence for well soldiers, and was but platonically interested in the canteen matter—just as the military count out the sick and wounded soldiers. It’s all in the point of view.

As we stood talking a German aeroplane flew high above Dugny outlined in a perfect sky. Little white clouds of shrapnel from the vertical guns began to burst about it in the clear blue, and there was a louder sound of cannonading as the _avion_ disappeared in some far and upper ether. E. M.’s brother had been once stationed here for months, and she told the story of his meeting unexpectedly his cousin Casimir. They were going different ways with different detachments, and they “held up the war” while they embraced! Smart officers, ahorse and afoot, convoys going to the trenches with rations, great carts full of bread, and ambulating soup-kitchens filled the little street. Verdun was but seven kilometers distant, and the road lay straight before us as we left Dugny. On the horizon the outline of the citadel and the towers of the cathedral showed against the sky. Another endless convoy of ambulances and _camions_ enveloped us in a choking white dust. This is the lining of the front, and it is quite easy to see where the war billions go.

We passed into Verdun under the Porte de France, and then went immediately up to the citadel through the old drawbridge, all dating from the days of Louis XIV and Vauban, and it was at Verdun that the sons of Louis the Debonair met to divide the empire of Charlemagne.[4]

We got out by the demolished barracks, and M. de S. went to pay his respects to the colonel, who was expecting him. As I descended I saw at my feet a beautiful tiny bird’s nest, which I picked up with a clutching at the heart. The birds went away that first terrible spring of 1916, the colonel afterward told me, but they had come back in great numbers in 1917, and were everywhere building their nests, in spite of the continual bombardments. The citadel was a desolate mass of mortar, stones, rusty barbed-wire entanglements, blackened and broken tree stumps, but everywhere, too, were quantities of undiscourageable new green.

We met a young doctor coming across the Place, and fell into conversation with him. He had been at the front since the beginning, and he was sad-eyed in spite of his youth. When I spoke of the near-by tenth-century tower toppling and half-demolished, all that was left of the ancient church, and the celebrated abbey of Saint-Vannes, and said what a pity it was that the beautiful things of the old days had to go, he answered, with a gesture of complete indifference:

“_Qu’est-ce que celà fait? A nous qui restons de faire de nouvelles choses, et mieux, que n’en out fait nos aïeux._ All the comrades I loved in the beginning are gone—and what remains, or perishes, of brick and mortar is of little account beside the sum of living things that is lost.”

Just at this moment M. de S. appeared with the colonel, and the young philosopher touched his cap. We were then introduced to Colonel Dehaye, a brilliant officer and delightful _homme du monde_, loving the arts of peace, as I afterward discovered, as well as practising those of war. In his hands now lie the destinies of Verdun. He presented us each then and there with the famous medal of Verdun and an accompanying paper with his signature, and furthermore gave us an invitation to lunch, which we accepted with delight after delicate references to sandwiches and wine in the motor. We spent half an hour walking about the citadel, and he showed us the most recent damage—of yesterday—when a very especially precise aim of the Germans had destroyed nearly everything that had been left.

Then we descended really into the bowels of the earth, cemented, white-tiled, electric-lighted, artificially aired bowels, to the very depths of the great fortress. To get to the mess-room of the colonel and his staff we had to pass through a long room where perhaps a hundred officers were sitting at dinner. There was something deeply impressive about the dim, long, low length of it, and those groups of men prepared for battle. Thoughts of Knights Templar and Crusaders came to me, and there seemed something of consecration about it all. Behind the tables on the walls were hung helmets and arms.

[Illustration]

[Illustration]

A young officer said to me once, “We don’t tell _all_ our stories there and we don’t often laugh very loud.” From it we got into the small, well-lighted mess-room, where kings and presidents and premiers and generalissime, too, have dined in the past few months.

The staff and Paul Renouard, the painter, were waiting, and we sat down immediately to an excellent dinner, though the colonel said it was entirely _à l’improviste_. There were flowers on the table, too, but these I did suspect were specially for us. The colonel remarked, with the _hors-d’œuvre_, that he would take us to the battle-field after dinner, to the famous Fort de Souville, and the repast, instead of a meal, became the prelude to a supreme climax. The arrival of General Pershing was the first subject of conversation, accompanied by the most courteous and appreciative remarks; one of the officers told of the first day when the Stars and Stripes had appeared in the field with the other flags, and of the cheers that went up. And they drank to the United States, and we drank to France; they praised the work of women, and spoke of the immense moral and practical aid of the entry into the war of the United States. Whether it would shorten the conflict was another question. To the captain sitting opposite I said:

“If the soul of the war has a special dwelling-place it is Verdun,” and told him how the thought of America turned about it those days of February and March of 1916. “But,” I added, “there was a time when I thought they might get through.”

The commandant answered quickly from the other end of the table: “Ah, madame, there was a time when we thought they might get through, _mais ‘ils n’ont pas passé—ils ne passeront pas.’_”

And then I quoted the beautiful phrase of the _Commentaires de Polybe_:[5]

“_Et Verdun y en ruines, avec ses soldats, debouts, toujours dans la tempête, comme il n’y en a jamais eu de plus beaux ... avec Nivelle, et avec Pétain, avec l’image de Raynal qui vient roder la nuit dans les décombres de Vaux et avec le paraphe de Castelnau sur cet autre Couronné...._”

We ended a most pleasant repast, with its great under throb, by coffee and tilleul and a little glass of cassis (black-currant cordial), the native liqueur.

Then, on into a room where we pulled up our coat-collars so no white would show, slung the bags containing the gas-masks across our chests, left our flowers, parasols, and other impedimenta, and went out through the long, dim now empty hall to get into the autos. We waited half an hour for ours, which had performed the seemingly impossible feat of getting lost in Verdun. The officers began to get impatient, and M. de S. to make bitter remarks about his chauffeur; the colonel to walk up and down. The commandant said, “_Du calme_,” and the colonel answered that only sous-lieutenants _savent avoir du calme_. “_Ils sont étonnants_,” said another officer with four stripes on his arm.

Finally our man appeared, with a story no one listened to, Colonel Dehaye getting in with us, the other officers leading the way in his auto.

It was two o’clock, and a white, burning sun was shining on a white, burning earth as we drove through the crumbling streets, through houses in every stage of ruin, to the great plain of La Woèvre, toward the dreadful, scarred battle-field, where the chariot of God rides the ridges.

Verdun is built to reinforce the natural rampart of the Côtes de Meuse, to bar the passage of the river’s valley, and cover the Argonne.

As we passed out of the town on one side was a cemetery where sleep four thousand, on another side sleep twenty thousand—and these are but a handful to the numbers that lie everywhere in the white, scarred earth around Verdun. The colonel named various battered places as we passed—Fleury, Tavannes, etc., and finally we climbed a steep hillside near the celebrated Fort de Souville, where we left the motors. The abomination of desolation over which we passed once had been a green, smiling, wooded, gently rolling hillside. The village of Tavannes was but a spot of white horror, even with the ground. The hills of Douaumont and Thiaumont had on their blanched sides only a few blackened stumps of trees that will not leaf again. To the left as we looked about were the fateful summits of Le Mort Homme and Hill 304 with a white ribbon of road running between. We walked along, stumbling over heaps of water-bottles, haversacks, helmets, cartridge-belts, belonging alike to the invader and the invaded—bones, skulls, rusty rolls of barbed wire, remains of _obus_, and mixed with what lies in the earth of fair and brave and dear are myriads of unexploded shells. The country round Verdun, despite the rich blood that could render it so fertile, can’t be cultivated for years on account of the vast quantities of shells buried in it. A man pulls a piece of wire, and he loses his hand, another tries to clear away bits of something round, and his head is blown off. One of the officers told us of societies for the demineralization of battle-fields, but the work is slow and costly.

Yet a winter’s snows had lain upon it all and spring had breathed over it since the first awful combats of February, 1916. I knew suddenly some complete “heartbreak over fallen things” as I stumbled, and, looking down, saw at my feet a helmet, and by it a skull with insects crawling in and out the eyes, and a broken gun-stock.

Great and gorgeous patches of scarlet poppies in a profusion never seen before splash themselves like something else red against the white earth, or fill great shell hollows and spill and slop over the fields....

The Germans had been shelling a near-by 75 battery that very morning, and fresh bits of _warm_ shrapnel were lying all about as we twisted in and out of the _boyaux_. I brought away but a small bit with me, having early discovered that a small piece is as good a reminder as a big bit, and much easier to carry. We passed the grave of a soldier buried where he had fallen, a few hours before. His shallow grave, with its little cross, was running _red_, but he was mayhap already in his Father’s house of many mansions.

In many places under the feet scarcely buried bodies gave an elastic sensation....

We first visited the emplacement of a great gun worked by the most complicated electric machinery, something that seemed built as strongly as the Pyramids, revolving on its great axis, at a touch fulfilling that which it was cast into being to perform. When we came out, we climbed some last white scarred heights that the colonel called “_Les Pyrénées_,” and there, stretched out, was the whole great and fateful panorama of Verdun—“_par où ils n’ont pas passé_.” I thought of the men I had known who had been engaged in those dreadful attacks, whose mothers and wives had looked upon them again, and of others still whose wives and mothers would behold them no more. And I had again a breaking of the heart over the vast tangle, and cried within myself, “Shall all the world be a valley of dry bones?”

[Illustration: OUR PARTY ON THE BATTLE-FIELD AT VERDUN, JUNE 17, 1917]

[Illustration: IN THE BOYAUX, VERDUN, JUNE 17, 1917]

Then we hid ourselves in some _boyaux_ well out of sight, for we were nearing a camouflaged battery, two of whose guns had been silenced that very morning. In dark woods over beyond Tavannes the Germans were intrenched, and their shells were also falling thickly over Douaumont and Thiaumont. It was the front indeed. It was at Tavannes that in a dreadful moment, in a moment such as can happen anywhere, artillery fire had been trained on thousands of men who were rushing to the top in a great charge. And yet I kept thinking of the words of a dead hero, “Nothing but good can befall the soldier, so he plays his part well.”[6]

At that moment the enemy began to send an unwonted number of shells, which were exploding just behind Thiaumont, so the colonel told the captain of artillery—who had joined our party at the gun emplacement—to answer, and he climbed down a steep decline to his masked battery. In a few minutes, as we lay hidden in the _boyau_, twenty discharges sounded; but shells that go up, come down, and on the other side of the hill we were watching, who shall say what agony? I am so constituted that I cannot think of the passage of any soul into the next life other than with awe.

We then descended into the Fort of Souville, down 850 feet, where men live and breathe and have their being in dimly lighted, damp, narrow spaces. But it seemed temporarily like heaven to be out of the glare and the heat. Preceded by lanterns, an officer in front of each one of us, we crept or felt our way up and down, stumbling through vault-like passages, where we would come upon men lying asleep in damp, dim places, or writing by the light of lanterns, or preparing meals in their kitchen, or waiting at the little dispensary, and then we stumbled up again into the heat, reverberating from the white hills.

On the way back we passed a little chapel installed in an old cemented dugout. On the altar were many flowers. I bent and peered into the dimness, and, as I knelt, it seemed to me that never had I so understood the words _Introibo ad Altare Dei_. I thought of the Lamb of God, and martyrs new and old, and the catacombs and the primitive Church.... Again men in stress were worshiping in the bowels of the earth.

We were photographed against a particularly sinister group of blackened trees, and we picked up some helmets and bits of _obus_. As I write, the _couronne_ of one, quite evenly exploded, lies on the little table by my side.

Just before getting into town the colonel ordered the motor to stop, and we got out, and, walking through a field of deep, waving grass, found ourselves in the largest of the cemeteries with its long, even lines of broad graves where lie, in a last co-mingling, the brothers of France, and I repeated to myself in a quiver of feeling, “_Scio quod Redemptor meus vivit et in novissime die resurrecturus sum et in carne mea videbo Deum Salvatorum meum_.”

All was in beautiful order. The crosses bore sometimes a name, but oftener a number only: _140 soldats_, or _85 soldats_. The round tricolor badge hung from every cross. There were a few graves of officers who could be identified, their bodies having been brought in by friends or faithful orderlies. How anything could live on those fire-swept hills is the wonder, not that any one died. Suddenly, again, a great sadness fell upon me, and as the colonel pointed out the grave of an especially dear comrade—Colonel Dubois, I think his name was—dead in some heroic manner, I could look no more.

We finally got back into the green freshness of Verdun, whose normal state, I see, is to be vine-bowered, tree-shaded, grass-carpeted. After the scarred and blazing battle-field, and in spite of the ruined streets, the roofless houses, I had a feeling of refreshment, coming from those heights where “all the round world is indeed a sepulcher” ... and near the station is the monument to the heroes fallen at Verdun, in 1870.

Of the Cercle Militaire on the right bank of the Meuse little is left except the walls, but it is no loss architecturally, and _messieurs les officiers_ are otherwise engaged. The banks of the Meuse are a pitiful sight. The old houses that reach over the water are roofless, bits of mattress hang from broken windows, and heaps of mortar are falling into the river. The great Porte Chaussée of the fifteenth century, with its two huge gray towers, is unharmed. We stopped at the theater for a moment. A big shell last month had made a sort of pudding of it. We crept in through a large aperture, to find the orchestra stalls precipitated onto the stage, and the loges sagging, ready to fall. We then went up into the old, high part of the town, and Colonel Dehaye, a true lover of the arts, in sadness showed us the cathedral and the charming old buildings that surround it. The huge church constructed according to Germanic traditions has two equal transepts, with high and beautiful vaulting, which is now so damaged that the roof at any time may fall. Inside were masses of débris, and nothing was left of the famous stained-glass windows except powdery bits of color on the floor. The colonel had rescued some old Spanish Stations of the Cross, and had put in safety a few other portable things of value. We passed out through the sacristy, which was a scene of disorder, bits of vestment, torn altar-cloths, and books lying about on the floor.

“But,” I said, “the Germans didn’t get here?”

“Oh,” answered one of the officers, with a smile, “_ce sont nos bons français_.”

Then we descended into the crypt, the remains of the church that Pope Eugene III built in the twelfth century. Leading down to it is an old winding stair, with a delicious eighteenth-century wrought-iron railing. An artist in a white blouse, sent to restore some frescoes dating from the twelfth century, was rescuing from too complete destruction a beautiful figure of Christ with something stern and immutable in His look, reminding me of the Christ in the church of San Cosmo and San Damiano in the Roman Forum. We then went into the cloisters, with lovely and diverse _motifs_ on their vaultings, very much damaged in parts, a big shell having landed in the courtyard which they inclose. M. Renouard had stationed himself there with his easel, before a beautiful arrangement of trees and grass and enchanting old statues on mossy pedestals. In front of him was a great heap of fallen masonry, and a beautiful bit of toppling vaulting that the colonel had had propped up by beams, though he said: “_Demain ou après-demain cela ne sera plus_—it’s all at the mercy of a shot.” A sculptured Holy Family, somewhat the worse for _war_, is plastered into one side, dating from the fourteenth century.

From there we passed into what had been a seminary until 1914, and one of the rooms with rows of _lavabos_ (not of the eighteenth century, as the colonel observed) looked out on the great plain of La Woèvre, and again the fateful panorama was unrolled before us. In what had been a council-room there was an old choir high up over the door, with a little balcony giving a Spanish effect.

Coming out, at the north side of the church, an ancient Romanesque statue of Adam and Eve on the outer hemicycle of the apse and some little windows, also of pure Romanesque, were pointed out to us. In the ground underneath the statue of Adam and Eve a great shell had opened up a Roman foundation and walls, formed of immense square blocks of stone, hidden during ages.

Near the church is the great Cour d’Honneur, once the house of the bishop, a very perfect example of Louis XIV, making me think of Versailles; but it, too, has received many a blow in its lovely heart. One longed so to bandage up all those wounds of war, preserve in being those lovelinesses of another age.

We then visited the house of Pope Julius II (I forget what he was doing at Verdun), which, fortunately, has not suffered much up to now, though it, too, is at the mercy of a shot—to-night, to-morrow, or the next day. It would make a perfect museum, with its beautiful old door, bearing inscription and date, through which one passes into a tiny V-shaped court with a flowering linden-tree, and there are two romantic winding stone stairways, with something Boccaccioesque about them, leading to the upper stories.

Though it wasn’t an occasion in which to think how one felt, the flesh _was_ weary by this time, and we went gladly back to the colonel’s mess-room, where we had tea, or rather, to be exact, some ice-cold champagne _coupé d’eau_, and some sort of madeleine, a specialty of Verdun, which gave us the little flip-up that we needed. Another specialty of Verdun is the _dragées_ (hard, sugared almonds), but the factory, so one of the officers said, had been destroyed the year before in one of the bombardments. Generations of tourists having broken their teeth on them, however, we wasted no regrets.

The colonel begged us to stay for dinner, and the cinematograph representation after, but we were obliged to regretfully decline, as we had to pay our respects to the general at Y——, to whose courtesy M. de S. owed the safe-conducts to Verdun. As we passed by we looked into the long, narrow hall where the representations are given, the sight of which the colonel offered as further inducement. It would have ennobled for me forever that most boresome of modern things, had I assisted at one underneath the citadel of Verdun. The hall was hung with flags of the Allies. With sudden tears I saluted, ours waving among them.

We thanked a thousand times the colonel and his group of officers standing by the auto at the entrance to the subterranean passage, and though I had a consciousness of the uncertainty of their lives, I thought again “Nothing but good can befall the soldier, so he plays his part well.”

Now comes to mind a conversation I had before I ever dreamed of going to Verdun, when I talked for three hours of battles and scars with a young hero wounded on Hill 304, June 9, 1916. He is a flashing-eyed, straight-featured, tall, slim-waisted young hero who knows what it is to have made, and with astounding ease, the sacrifice of the life that he loves so, and drinks in full bumpers. And this is part of what we said, one of a thousand, of ten thousand, of a hundred thousand happenings, of which Verdun is the golden frame:

De G.—“There was something hanging about Verdun; ‘_Ils ne passeront pas, et ils ne sont pas passés_.’ If the enemy could have but known how thinly, poorly, in so many places it was defended! It was seemingly the will of Heaven rather than the strength of mortals that they were not to pass, not man, not artillery, but the high destiny of nations.

“When I lay during those hours at the _poste d’observation_ on Hill 304, in front of the French army, signaling ‘shell square 17,’ or 16, or whatever it might be, I could see clearly the havoc in the German ranks as the shells would fall. Great groups of men would be blown to atoms and new formations would press in to take their place. The whole horror was there before me, mapped out in numbered squares.

“I dismissed all my men except my orderly of the fourth Zouaves, who wouldn’t have gone, anyway. It was a work I could do alone, lying with a sand-bag against my head, my field-glasses in my hand, and before me my field map held down by four sticks. We lay there just under the crest of the hill from two o’clock in the morning until the next afternoon, watching seven attacks. Toward three o’clock I was wounded, and I knew it was only a question of time and chance when I would lie like the dead man at my side, that Dueso had been pressing his feet against, and whose place I had been sent to take. Almost at the same moment I caught sight of Dueso spinning around, holding his elbows to his side, and crying out: ‘_Nom de Dieu! Nom de Dieu!_ I’ve got it in the arm!’—but trying with the other hand to undo his _cravate_.

“Two jets of blood were now spurting like two faucets from my leg, the big artery was cut. _Ça y est._ In five minutes I’ll be dead, I thought, and there came a fainting away and a thinking not on God, but on still untasted joys of the flesh and life—not even on my mother’s grief; and waking up after years, it seemed, and calling for water, and Dueso bending over me, after a frantic twisting at his _cravate_, and a frantic pulling and tightening of it about my leg, with one hand and his teeth, and then a pleasant, happy fainting away. A delicious sensation of ease invaded me, and I said to myself, ‘_Ce n’est que ça, mourir?_’ (‘Is death only this?’) I have seen so many men die, and whatever their agonies, if long or short, minutes or hours or days, as it may happen, just before dying something gentle and simple takes place.”

E. O’S.—“The inevitable dust to dust, the natural law fulfilling itself?”

De G.—“It may be. This _rictus de la mort_, I haven’t seen it, though I have heard men screaming and cursing and praying in the trenches as they got their blow, and watched their agonies, but before death something else, softer, always happens. Unless it comes too suddenly. I remember once being on the dunes in Belgium, and against the yellow sand men were sitting in red trousers and _chechias_, and one was telling a tale of laughter when a shell burst. In a moment the blood of his brains was flowing red upon the yellow sand, and then it got blue, and then it sank and was no more, like the laughing man himself from whom it flowed, and his tale of laughter.... About nine o’clock we were brought in. Dueso had been lying with his head under my armpit, and his feet still on the dead man, and we would both come out of a faint from time to time and ask for water.

“Dueso! ah, Dueso! for a human being _il est plus chic que moi_. He had been in jail for various reasons not very _chic_, and I was warned against him when I took him for my orderly, but to him I owe my life. Now he is in Salonique, _cité à l’armée_, knows how to live in those regions, hard as nails, originally from Tunis; a dark man, with dark mustache and very big white teeth.”

E. O’S.—“One thinks so often how little the common soldier, defending honors and riches that he doesn’t share, has to gain. There is nothing for him, in fact, except to step out into anonymous death; at a given moment to make the sacrifice of his life, or his eyes or his limbs, knowing nothing of war except its horror, rarely any glory, sometimes a mention or a medal, oftener not. But,” I continued, after we had sat silent for a while, “who will carry it all on? Few like yourself are left, and it is not enough. France is bleeding white—France, whose sons are heroes, not fathers!”

De G.—“What does it matter if we do go? There are the little ones coming on. It will be like something out of which a whole piece has been cut and the ends must be sewed together. The very old, and the very young, the children, are these ends. We shall have done what we were born to do. This is the immortal history of France that we have made, her _chant du cygne_, too, the most beautiful of her epics and it is enough to have lived for that. To others the carrying on of the generations....”

A pale rose light begins to come in at the window, but sleep cometh not. Fortunately, if need be, I can do without it, but I must close my eyes now. He, too, watching over Israel, slumbers not nor sleeps....