Chapter V: In Sight of the Promised Land--On the Lorraine (2)

We entered our cars again and went to another quarter of the city. Everywhere were ashes and ruin, but everywhere the sense of a destruction that was progressive, not complete: it still marched. It was as Arras had been, they told me, before the last wall had tumbled and the Artois capital had become nothing but a memory. We climbed the slope toward the cathedral and stopped in a little square still unscathed, the Place d'Armes, the most historic acre of the town. After a moment I realized what my friends were telling me. It was in this square that the Crown Prince was to receive the surrender of the town. Along the road we had climbed he was to lead his victorious army through the town and out the Porte de France beyond. In this square the Kaiser was to stand and review the army, to greet his victorious son. The scene as it had been arranged was almost rehearsed for you in the gestures of the French officers.

"But William has not come," they said, "and he will not come now." This last was not spoken as a boast, but as a faith, a conviction.

Still climbing we came to the cathedral. It is seated on the very top pinnacle of the rock of Verdun, suggesting the French cities of Provence. Its two towers, severe and lacking ornamentation, are the landmarks of the countryside for miles around. When I came back to America I read the story of an American correspondent whom the Germans had brought down from Berlin to see the destruction of Verdun. They had brought him to the edge of the hills and then thrown some incendiary shells into the town, the very shells that killed the men whose bodies I had seen. The black smoke and flames rushed up around these towers and then the Germans brought the correspondent over the hills and showed him the destruction of Verdun. He described it vividly and concluded that the condition of the town must be desperate.

They are a wonderful people, these Germans, in their stage management. Of course this was precisely the thing that they desired that he should feel. They had sent their shells at the right moment, the whole performance had gone off like clockwork. Those poor blackened masses of humanity in the house below were the cost that was represented in the performance. And since there is much still left to burn in Verdun, the Germans may repeat this thing whenever they desire.

But somewhere three or four miles from here, and between Verdun and the Germans, are many thousands of Frenchmen, with guns and cannon, and hearts of even finer metal. They cannot even know that Verdun is being shelled or is burning, and if it burns to ultimate ashes it will not affect them or their lines. This is the fallacy of all the talk of the destruction of Verdun city and the desperate condition of its defenders. The army left Verdun for the hills when the war began; the people left when the present drive began in February. Even the dogs and cats, which were seen by correspondents in earlier visits, have been rescued and sent away. Verdun is dead, it is almost as dead as are Arras and Ypres; but neither of these towns after a year and a half bombardment has fallen.

The correspondent who was taken up on a hill by the Germans to see Verdun burn, after it had been carefully set on fire by shell fire, was discovered by French gunners and shelled. He went away taking with him an impression of a doomed city. This picture was duly transmitted to America. But two days later, when I visited the city, there was no evidence of desperation, because there was no one left to be desperate. Doubtless on occasion we shall have many more descriptions of the destruction of this town, descriptions meant to impress Americans or encourage Germans. The material for such fires is not exhausted. The cathedral on the top of the hill is hardly shell-marked at all, and it will make a famous display when it is fired as was Rheims, as were the churches of Champagne and Artois. But there is something novel in the thought of a city burned, not to make a Roman or even German holiday, but burned to make the world believe that the Battle of Verdun had been a German victory.

For two hours we wandered about the town exploring and estimating the effect of heavy gunfire, for the Germans are too far from the city to use anything but heavy guns effectively. The impressions of such a visit are too numerous to recall. I shall mention but one more. Behind the cathedral are cloisters that the guide books mention; they inclose a courtyard that was once decorated with statues of saints. By some accident or miracle--there are always miracles in shelled towns--one of these images, perhaps that of the Madonna, has been lifted from its pedestal and thrown into the branches of a tree, which seems almost to hold it with outstretched arms.

At length we left the town, going out by the Porte de France, which cuts the old Vauban ramparts, now as deserted as those of Paris, ramparts that had been covered with trees and were now strewn with the debris of the trees that had fallen under the shell fire. In all this time not a shell had fallen in Verdun; it was the first completely tranquil morning in weeks; but there was always the sense of impending destruction, there was always the sense of the approaching shell. There was an odd subconscious curiosity, and something more than curiosity, about the mental processes of some men, not far away, who were beside guns pointed toward you, guns which yesterday or the day before had sent their destruction to the very spot where you stood.

Yet, oddly enough, in the town there was a wholly absurd sense of security, derived from the fact that there were still buildings between you and those guns. You saw that the buildings went to dust and ashes whenever the guns were fired; you saw that each explosion might turn a city block into ashes, and yet you were glad of the buildings and there was reassurance in their shadows. Now we travelled in the open country; we began to climb across the face of a bare hill, and it was the face that fronted the Germans.

Presently the General's car stuck in the mud and we halted, for a minute perhaps; then we went on; we passed a dead horse lying in the road, then of a sudden came that same terrible grinding, metallic crash. I have never seen any description of a heavy shell explosion that fitted it. Behind us we could see the black smoke rising from the ground in a suburb through which we had just come. I saw three explosions. A moment later we were at the gate of Fort de la Chaume, and we were warned not to stop, but to hasten in, for the Germans, whenever they see cars at this point, suspect that Joffre has arrived, or President Poincare, and act accordingly. We did not delay.

Fort de la Chaume is one of the many fortifications built since the Franco-Prussian War and intended to defend the city. Like all the rest, it ceased to have value when the German artillery had shown at Liege and at Namur that it was the master of the fort. Then the French left their forts and went out to trenches beyond and took with them the heavy guns that the fort once boasted. To-day Fort de la Chaume is just an empty shell, as empty as the old Vauban citadel in the valley below. And what is true of this fort is true of all the other forts of that famous fortress of Verdun, which is no longer a fortress, but a sector in the trench line that runs from the North Sea to Switzerland.

From the walls of the fort staff officers showed me the surrounding country. I looked down on the city of Verdun, hiding under the shadow of its cathedral. I looked across the level Meuse Valley, with its little river; I studied the wall of hills beyond. Somewhere in the tangle on the horizon was Douaumont, which the Germans held. Down the valley of the river in the haze was the town of Bras, which was French; beyond it the village of Vachereauville, which was German. Beyond the hills in the centre of the picture, but hidden by them, were Le Mort Homme and Hill 304.

Verdun is like a lump of sugar in a finger bowl, and I was standing on the rim. It seemed utterly impossible that any one should even think of this town as a fortress or count its ashes as of meaning in the conflict.

Somewhere in the background a French battery of heavy guns was firing, and the sound was clear; but it did not suggest war, rather a blasting operation. The German guns were still again. There was a faint billowing roll of gunfire across the river toward Douaumont, but very faint. As for trenches, soldiers, evidences of battle, they did not exist. I thought of Ralph Pulitzer's vivid story of riding to the Rheims front in a military aeroplane and seeing, of war, just nothing.

The geography of the Verdun country unrolled before us with absolute clarity; the whole relation of hills and river and railroads was unmistakable. But despite the faint sound of musketry, the occasional roar of a French gun, I might have been in the Berkshires looking down on the Housatonic. Six miles to the north around Le Mort Homme that battle which has not stopped for two months was still going on. Around Douaumont the overture was just starting, the overture to a stiff fight in the afternoon, but of all the circumstances of battle that one has read of, that one still vaguely expects to see, there was not a sign. If it suited their fancy the Germans could turn the hill on which I stood into a crater of ruin, as they did with Fort Loncin at Liege. We were well within range, easy range; we lived because they had no object to serve by such shooting, but we were without even a hint of their whereabouts.

I have already described the military geography of Verdun. I shall not attempt to repeat it here, but it is the invisibility of warfare, whether examined from the earth or the air, which impresses the civilian. If you go to the trenches you creep through tunnels and cavities until you are permitted to peer through a peephole, and you see yellow dirt some yards away. You may hear bullets over your head, you may hear shells passing, but what you see is a hillside with some slashings. That is the enemy. If you go to an observation post back of the trenches, then you will see a whole range of country, but not even the trenches of your own side.

From the Grand Mont east of Nancy I watched some French batteries shell the German line. I didn't see the French guns, I didn't see the German trenches, I didn't see the French line. I did see some black smoke rising a little above the underbrush, and I was told that the shells were striking behind the German lines and that the gunners were searching for a German battery. But I might as well have been observing a gang of Italians at blasting operations in the Montclair Mountains. And the officer with me said: "Our children are just amusing themselves."

From Fort de la Chaume we rode back to the citadel; and there I was the guest of the General and the officers of the town garrison; their guest because I was an American who came to see their town. I shall always remember that luncheon down in the very depths of this rock in a dimly lighted room. I sat at the General's right, and all around me were the men whose day's work it was to keep the roads open, the machinery running in the shell-cursed city. Every time they went out into daylight they knew that they might not return. For two months the storm had beaten about this rock, it had written its mark upon all these faces, and yet it had neither extinguished the light nor the laughter; the sense of strength and of calmness was inescapable, and never have I known such charming, such thoughtful hosts.

When the champagne came the old General rose and made me a little speech. He spoke in English, with absolute correctness, but as one who spoke it with difficulty. He welcomed me as an American to Verdun, he thanked me for coming, he raised his glass to drink to my country and the hope that in the right time she would be standing with France--in the cause of civilization. Always in his heart, in his thought, in his speech, the Frenchman is thinking of that cause of civilization; always this is what the terrible conflict that is eating up all France means to him.

Afterward we went out of this cavern into daylight, and the officers came and shook hands with me and said good-bye. One does not say _au revoir_ at the front; one says _bonne chance_--"good luck; it may and it may not--we hope not." We entered our cars and were about to start, when suddenly, with a blinding, stunning crash, a whole salvo landed in the meadow just beyond the road, we could not see where, because some houses hid the field. It was the most suddenly appalling crash I have ever heard.

Instantly the General ordered our drivers to halt. He explained that it might be the beginning of a bombardment or only a single trial, a detail in the intermittent firing to cut the road that we were to take. We sat waiting for several moments and no more shots came. Then the General turned and gave an order to his car to follow, bade our drivers go fast, and climbed into my car and sat down. The wandering American correspondent was his guest. He could not protect him from the shell fire. He could not prevent it. But he could share the danger. He could share the risk, and so he rode with me the mile until we passed beyond the danger zone. There he gave me another _bonne chance_ and left me, went back to his shell-cursed town with its ruins and its agonies.

I hope I shall see General Dubois again. I hope it will be on the day when he is made Governor of Strassburg.

As we left Verdun the firing was increasing; it was rolling up like a rising gale; the infantry fire was becoming pronounced; the Germans were beginning an attack upon Le Mort Homme. Just before sunset we passed through the Argonne Forest and came out beyond. On a hill to the north against the sky the monument of Valmy stood out in clear relief, marking the hill where Kellerman had turned back another Prussian army. Then we slipped down into the Plain of Chalons, where other Frenchmen had met and conquered Attila. At dark we halted in Montmirail, where Napoleon won his last victory before his empire fell. The sound of the guns we had left behind was still in our ears and the meaning of these names in our minds. Presently my French companion said to me: "It is a long time, isn't it?" He meant all the years since the first storm came out of the north, and I think the same thought is in every Frenchman's mind. Then he told me his story.

"I had two boys," he said; "one was taken from me years ago in an accident; he was killed and it was terrible. But the other I gave.

"He was shot, my last boy, up near Verdun, in the beginning of the war. He did not die at once and I went to him. For twenty days I sat beside him in a cellar waiting for him to die. I bought the last coffin in the village, that he might be buried in it, and kept it under my bed. We talked many times before he died, and he told me all he knew of the fight, of the men about him and how they fell.

"My name is finished, but I say to you now that in all that experience there was nothing that was not beautiful." And as far as I can analyze or put in words the impression that I have brought away from France, from the ruin and the suffering and the destruction, I think it is expressed in those words. I have seen nothing that was not beautiful, too, because through all the spirit of France shone clear and bright.

III

BATTLE OF VERDUN ANOTHER GETTYSBURG

FAILURE OF CROWN PRINCE LIKENED BY FRENCH TO "HIGH TIDE" OF
CONFEDERACY

"The parallel between Gettysburg in your Civil War and Verdun in the present contest is unmistakable and striking." This was said to me by General Delacroix, one of Joffre's predecessors as chief of the French General Staff and the distinguished military critic of the Paris _Temps_ now that because of age he has passed to the retired list.

What General Delacroix meant was patent and must have already impressed many Americans. Our own Gettysburg was the final bid for decision of a South which had long been victorious on the battlefield, which still possessed the armies that seemed the better organized and the generals whose campaigns had been wonderfully successful. But it was the bid for decision of a Confederacy which was outnumbered in men, in resources, in the ultimate powers of endurance, and was already beginning to feel the growing pinch both in numbers and credit.

At Gettysburg Lee made his final effort to destroy the army which he had frequently defeated but never eliminated. Victory meant the fall of Washington, the coming of despair to the North, an end of the Civil War, which would bring independence and the prize for which they had contended to the Confederates. And Lee failed at Gettysburg, not as Napoleon failed at Waterloo or as MacMahon failed at Sedan, but he failed, and his failure was the beginning of the end. The victory of Gettysburg put new heart, new assurance into the North; it broke the long illusion of an invincible Confederacy; it gave to Europe, to London, and to Paris, even more promptly than to Washington, the unmistakable message that the North was bound to win the Civil War.

I mean in a moment to discuss the military aspects of this conflict about the Lorraine fortress, but before the military it is essential to grasp the moral consequences of Verdun to France, to the Allies, to Germany. Not since the Marne, not even then--because it was only after a long delay that France really knew what had happened in this struggle--has anything occurred that has so profoundly, so indescribably, heartened the French people as has the victory at Verdun. It is not too much to say that the victory has been the most immediately inspiring thing in French national life since the disaster at Sedan and that it has roused national confidence, hope, faith, as nothing else has since the present conflict began.

In this sense rather than in the military sense Verdun was a decisive battle and its consequences of far-reaching character. France as a whole, from the moment when the attack began, understood the issue; the battle was fought in the open and the whole nation watched the communiques day by day. It was accepted as a terrible if not a final test, and no Frenchman fails to recognize in all that he says the strength, the power, the military skill of Germany.

And when the advance was checked, when after the first two weeks the battle flickered out as did the French offensive in Champagne and the former German drive about Ypres a year ago, France, which had held her breath and waited, hoped, read in the results at Verdun the promise of ultimate victory, felt that all that Germany had, all that she could produce, had been put to the test and had failed to accomplish the result for which Germany had striven--or any portion thereof.

War is something beyond armies and tactics, beyond strategy and even military genius, and the real meaning of Verdun is not to be found in lines held or lost, not to be found even in the ashes of the old town that France and not Germany holds. It is to be found in the spirit of France, now that the great trial is over and the lines have held.

It was Germany and not France that raised the issue of Verdun. The Germans believed, and all their published statements show this, that France was weary, disheartened, ready to quit, on fair terms. They believed that there was needed only a shining victory, a great moral demonstration of German strength to accomplish the end--to bring victorious peace. In this I think, and all with whom I talked in France felt, that the Germans were wrong, that France would have endured defeat and gone on. But conversely, the Germans knew, must have known, that to try and to fail was to rouse the whole heart of France, to destroy any pessimism, and this is precisely what the failure has done.

The battle for Verdun was a battle for moral rather than military values, and the moral victory remains with the French. It was a deliberate and calculated effort to break the spirit of France, and it roused the spirit of France as perhaps nothing has raised the spirit of this people since Valmy, where other Frenchmen met and checked another German invasion, brought to a halt the army of Frederick the Great, which still preserved the prestige of its great captain who was dead, turned it back along the road that was presently to end at Jena.

Beside the moral value of Verdun the military is just nothing. To appreciate its meaning you must understand what it has meant to the French, and you must understand it by recalling what Gettysburg meant to the North, invaded as is France, defeated at half a dozen struggles in Virginia as France has been defeated in the past months of this war. Gettysburg was and remains the decisive battle of our Civil War, although the conflict lasted for nearly two years more. For France Verdun is exactly the same thing. Having accepted the moral likeness, you may find much that is instructive and suggestive in the military, but this is of relatively minor importance.

Now, on the military side it is necessary to know first of all that when the Germans began their gigantic attack upon Verdun the French high command decided not to defend the city. Joffre and those who with him direct the French armies were agreed that the city of Verdun was without military value comparable with the cost of defending it, and that the wisest and best thing to do was to draw back the lines to the hills above the city and west of the Meuse. Had their will prevailed there would have been no real battle at Verdun and the Germans would long ago have occupied the ashes of the town.

Joffre's view was easily explicable, and it was hardly possible to quarrel with the military judgment it discloses. To the world Verdun is a great fortress, a second Gibraltar, encircled by great forts, furnished with huge guns, the gateway to Paris and the key to the French eastern frontier. And this is just what Verdun was until the coming of the present war, when the German and Austrian siege guns levelled the forts of Antwerp, of Maubeuge, of Liege. But after that Verdun ceased to be anything, because all fortresses lost their value with the revelation that they had failed to keep pace with the gun.

After the Battle of the Marne, when the trench war began, the French took all their guns out of the forts of Verdun, pushed out before the forts, and Verdun became just a sector in the long trench line from the sea to Switzerland. It was defended by trenches, not forts. It was neither of more importance nor less than any other point in the line and it was a place of trenches, not of forts. The forts were empty and remain empty, monuments to the past of war, quite as useless as the walls of Rome would be against modern artillery.

The decline of Verdun was even more complete. From the strongest point in French defence it became the weakest. When the Germans took St. Mihiel in September, 1914, they cut the north and south railroad that binds Verdun to the Paris-Nancy Railroad. When they retreated from the Marne they halted at Varennes and Montfaucon, and from these points they command the Paris-Verdun-Metz Railroad. Apart from a single narrow-gauge railroad of minor value, which wanders among the hills, climbing at prohibitive grades, Verdun is isolated from the rest of France. Consider what this means in modern war when the amount of ammunition consumed in a day almost staggers belief. Consider what it means when there are a quarter of a million men to be fed and munitioned in this sector.

More than all this, when the lines came down to the trench condition Verdun was a salient, it was a narrow curve bulging out into the German front. It was precisely the same sort of military position as Ypres, which the Germans have twice before selected as the point for a great attack. In the Verdun sector the French are exposed to a converging fire; they are inside the German semicircle. Moreover, the salient is so narrow that the effect of converging fire is not to be exaggerated.

When the French attacked the Germans in Champagne last fall they advanced on a wide front from a line parallel to the German line. As they pierced the first German lines they were exposed to the converging fire of the Germans, because they were pushing a wedge in. Ultimately they got one brigade through all the German lines, but it was destroyed beyond by this converging fire. But as the Germans advanced upon Verdun they were breaking down a salient and possessed the advantage they had had on the defensive in Champagne.

Finally, one-half the French army of Verdun fought with its back to a deep river, connected with the other half only by bridges, some of which presently came under German fire, and there was every possibility that these troops might be cut off and captured if the German advance were pushed home far enough on the west bank of the Meuse and the German artillery was successful in interrupting the passage of the river. It was a perilous position and there were some days when the situation seemed critical.

Accordingly, when the German drive at Verdun was at last disclosed in its real magnitude Joffre prepared to evacuate the town and the east bank of the river, to straighten his line and abolish the salient and give over to the Germans the wreck of Verdun. The position behind the river was next to impregnable; the lines would then be parallel; there would be no salient, and in the new position the French could concentrate their heavy artillery while the Germans were moving up the guns that they had fixed to the north of the old front.

But at this point the French politician interfered. He recognized the wisdom of the merely military view of Joffre, but he saw also the moral value. He recognized that the French and the German public alike would not see Verdun as a mere point in a trench line and a point almost impossible to defend and destitute of military value. He saw that the French and German publics would think of Verdun as it had been thought of before the present war changed all the conditions of conflict. He recognized that the German people would be roused to new hope and confidence by the capture of a great fortress, and that the French would be equally depressed by losing what they believed was a great fortress.

You had therefore in France for some hours, perhaps for several days, something that approximated a crisis growing out of the division of opinion between the civil and the military authorities, a division of opinion based upon two wholly different but not impossible equally correct appraisals. Joffre did not believe it was worth the men or the risk to hold a few square miles of French territory, since to evacuate would strengthen, not weaken, the line. The French politicians recognized that to lose Verdun was to suffer a moral defeat which would almost infallibly bring down the Ministry, might call into existence a new Committee of Public Safety, and would fire the German heart and depress the French.

In the end the politicians had their way and Castelnau, Joffre's second in command, came over to their view and set out for Verdun to organize the defence for the position at the eleventh hour. He had with him Petain, the man who had commanded the French army in the Battle of Champagne and henceforth commanded the army that was hurried to the Verdun sector. France now took up definitely the gage of battle as Germany had laid it down. Verdun now became a battle in the decisive sense of the word, although still on the moral side. Nothing is more preposterous than to believe that there ever was any chance of a German advance through Verdun to Paris. One has only to go to Verdun and see the country and the lines behind the city and miles back of the present front to realize how foolish such talk is.

Meantime the German advance had been steady and considerable. All these attacks follow the same course--Ypres, Artois, Champagne, Dunajec. There is first the tremendous artillery concentration of the assailant; then the bombardment which abolishes the first and second line trenches of the defenders; then the infantry attack which takes these ruined trenches and almost invariably many thousands of prisoners and scores of guns. But now the situation changes. The assailant has passed beyond the effective range of his own heavy artillery, which cannot be immediately advanced because of its weight; he encounters a line of trenches that has not been levelled, he has come under the concentrated fire of his foe's heavy and light artillery without the support of his own heavy artillery, and all the advantage of surprise has gone.

What happened at Verdun is what happened in the Champagne. The German advance was quite as successful--rather more successful than the French last September; it covered three or four miles on a considerable front, and it even reached Douaumont, one of the old forts and the fort which was placed on the highest hill in the environs of Verdun. Thousands of prisoners had been captured and many guns taken. But at this point the French resistance stiffened, as had the German last year. French reserves and artillery arrived. Petain and Castelnau arrived. There was an end of the rapid advance and there began the pounding, grinding attack in which the advantage passed to the defender. It was just what happened at Neuve Chapelle so long ago when we first saw this kind of fighting exemplified completely.

In the new attacks the Germans still gained ground, but they gained ground because the French withdrew from positions made untenable through the original German advance at other points. They consolidated their line, organized their new front. Ten days after the attack had begun it had ceased to be a question of Verdun, just as in a shorter time the French had realized last September that they could not break the German line in Champagne. But like the French in Champagne, like the British at Neuve Chapelle, the Germans persevered, and in consequence suffered colossal losses, exactly as the French and British had.

To understand the German tactics you must recognize two things. The Germans had expected to take Verdun, and they had unquestionably known that the French military command did not intend at the outset to hold the town. They had advertised the coming victory far and wide over the world; they had staked much upon it. Moreover, in the first days, when they had taken much ground, when they had got Douaumont and could look down into Verdun, they had every reason to believe that they possessed the key to the city and that the French high command was slowly but steadily drawing back its lines and would presently evacuate the city.

Knowing these things you can understand why the Germans were so confident. They did not invent stories of coming victory which they did not believe. They believed that Verdun was to fall because they knew, and the same thing was known and mentioned in London. I heard it there when the battle was in its earlier stages--that the French high command intended to evacuate Verdun. What they did not know and could not know was that the French politicians, perhaps one should say statesmen this time, had interfered, that the French high command had yielded and that Verdun was to be defended to the last ditch.

When this decision was made the end of the real German advance was almost instantaneous. All that has happened since has been nothing but active trench war, violent fighting, desperate charge and counter charge, a material shortening of the French line at certain points, the abolition of minor salients, but of actual progress not the smallest. The advance stopped before lines on which Petain elected to make his stand when he came with his army to defend Verdun. The Germans are still several miles outside of Verdun itself, and only at Douaumont have they touched the line of the exterior forts, which before the war were expected to defend the city.

In Paris and elsewhere you will be told that Douaumont was occupied without resistance and that it was abandoned under orders before there had been a decision to hold Verdun. I do not pretend to know whether this is true or not, although I heard it on authority that was wholly credible, but the fact that the map discloses, that I saw for myself at Verdun, is that, save for Douaumont, none of the old forts have been taken and that the Germans have never been able to advance a foot from Douaumont or reach the other forts at any other point. And this is nothing more or less than the French experience at Champagne, the German experience about Ypres in 1915.

In a later chapter I hope to discuss the situation at Verdun as I saw it on April 6th, and also the miracle of motor transport which played so great a part in the successful defence of the position. But the military details are wholly subordinate to the moral. All France was roused by a successful defence of a position attacked by Germany with the advertised purpose of breaking the spirit of the French people. The battle was fought in the plain daylight without the smallest concealment, and the least-informed reader of the official reports could grasp the issue which was the fate of the city of Verdun.

The fact, known to a certain number of Frenchmen only, that the defence was improvised after the decision had been made to evacuate the whole salient, serves for them to increase the meaning of the victory as it increases the real extent of the French exploit. But this is a detail. The Germans openly, deliberately, after long preparation, announced their purpose, used every conceivable bit of strength they could bring to bear to take Verdun, and told their own people not merely that Verdun would fall, but at one moment that it had fallen. They did this with the firm conviction that it would fall--was falling.

The French were steadily aware that Verdun might be lost. They knew from letters coming daily from the front how terrible the struggle was, and it is impossible to exaggerate the tension of the early days, although it was not a tension of panic or fear. Paris did not expect to see the invader, and there was nothing of this sort of moonshine abroad. But it was plain that the fall of the town would bring a tremendous wave of depression and if not despair yet a real reduction of hope. Instead, Verdun defended itself, the lines were maintained several miles on the other side of the town and all substantial advance came to an end in the first two weeks. The army itself, the military observers, were convinced that all danger was over as early as the second week in March, when correspondents of French newspapers were being taken to Verdun to see the situation and tell the people the facts.

All over Northern France, and I was in many towns and cities, the "lift" that Verdun had brought was unmistakable and French confidence was everywhere evident. It showed itself in a spontaneous welcome to Alexander of Serbia in Paris, which, I am told, was the first thing of the sort in the war period. Frenchmen did not say that Verdun was the beginning of the end, and they did not forecast the prompt collapse of Germany. They did not even forecast the immediate end of the fighting about Verdun. They did not regard the victory as a Waterloo or a Sedan or any other foolish thing. But they did rather coolly and quite calmly appraise the thing and see in it the biggest German failure since the Marne, and a failure in a fight which the Germans had laid down all the conditions in advance and advertised the victory that they did not achieve as promising the collapse of French endurance and spirit.

The Battle of Verdun was a battle for moral values, and the possession of the town itself was never of any real military value. Verdun commands nothing, and behind it lie well-prepared fortifications on dominating heights, positions that are ten times as easy to defend as those which the French have defended. It was not a battle for Paris, and there was never a prospect of the piercing of the French line; Germany was never as near a great military success as she was at Ypres after the first gas attack a year ago. The French army leaders judged the Verdun position as not worth the cost of defending. They were overruled by the politicians and they defended it successfully. But their first decision is the best evidence of the wholly illusory value that has been attached to the possession of Verdun itself.

The politicians were unquestionably right as to the moral value, and it is possible if not probable that the relinquishment of the city voluntarily might have precipitated the fall of the Briand Ministry and the creation of a Committee of Public Safety--not to make peace, but to make war successfully. The will to defend Verdun came from the French people, it imposed itself upon the army and it resulted in a moral victory the consequences of which cannot be exaggerated and have given new heart and confidence to a people whose courage and determination must make an enduring impression on any one who sees France in the present terrible but glorious time.

IV

VERDUN, THE DOOR THAT LEADS NOWHERE

THE BATTLE AND THE TOPOGRAPHY OF THE BATTLEFIELD--AN ANALYSIS
OF THE ATTACK AND DEFENCE

In a preceding article I have endeavored to explain the tremendous moral "lift" that the successful defence of the city of Verdun has brought to France, a moral "lift" which has roused French confidence and expectation of ultimate victory to the highest point since the war began. I have also tried to demonstrate how utterly without value the fortress of Verdun was, because the forts were of no use in the present war, were as useless against German heavy artillery as those of Antwerp and Maubeuge, and had been evacuated by the French a full eighteen months before the present battle began. Finally I have indicated that so little military value was attached to Verdun by the French high command that it was prepared to evacuate the whole position, which is the most difficult to defend on the whole French front, and was only persuaded to give over his purpose by the arguments of the politicians, who believed that the moral effect of the evacuation would be disastrous to France and inspiriting to Germany.

I now desire to describe at some length the actual topographical circumstances of Verdun and later I shall discuss the fashion in which an automobile transport system was improvised to meet the situation created by the interruption of traffic by German artillery fire along the two considerable railroad lines. It was this system which actually saved the town and is the real "miracle of Verdun," if one is to have miracles to explain what brave and skilful men do.

I saw Verdun on April 6th. I went through the city, which was little more than a mass of ashes, with General Dubois, the military governor of the town itself, and with him I went to Fort de la Chaume, on one of the highest hills near Verdun, and from this vantage point had the whole countryside explained to me. The day on which I visited Verdun was the first completely quiet day in weeks, and I was thus fortunate in being able to see and to go about without the disturbing or hindering circumstances which are incident to a bombardment.

The city of Verdun is situated at the bottom of the Meuse Valley on both sides of the river. But the main portion of the town is on the west bank and surrounds a low hill, crowned by the cathedral and old Vauban citadel. The town is surrounded by old ramparts, long ago deprived of military value and belonging, like the citadel, to eighteenth century warfare. The Valley of the Meuse is here several miles wide, as flat as your hand, and the river, which is small but fairly deep, a real obstacle since it cannot be forded, wanders back and forth from one side of the valley to the other. Below Verdun it is doubled, as a military obstacle, by the Canal de l'Est.

If you put a lump of sugar in a finger bowl you will pretty fairly reproduce the Verdun topography. The lump of sugar will represent Verdun, the rim of the bowl the hills around the city, the interior of the bowl the little basin in which the city stands. This rim of hills, which rise some five or six hundred feet above the town itself, is broken on the west by a deep and fairly narrow trough which comes into the Meuse Valley and connects it some thirty miles to the west with the Plain of Chalons. If you should look down upon this region from an aeroplane this furrow would look like a very deep gutter cutting far into the tangle of hills.

Now in the warfare of other centuries the value of the Verdun fortress was just this: the furrow which I have described is the one avenue available for an invading army coming from the east out of Metz or south from Luxemburg and aiming to get into the Plain of Chalons to the west. It is the way the Prussians came in 1792 and were defeated at Valmy, at the western entrance of the trough about thirty miles away. They took Verdun on their way--so did the Germans in 1870.

Verdun in French hands closed this trough to the invaders.

It closed it because the low hill which bears the town was strongly fortified and was surrounded by lower ground. Such artillery as was in existence was not of a sufficiently long range to place upon the hills about Verdun which we have described as the rim of the bowl. The town of Verdun was situated on both sides of the river and commanded all the bridges. It was, in fact, the stopple in the mouth of the bottle-neck passage leading into North Central France, the passage through which ran the main road and, later, the railway from the frontier nearest Paris to the capital.

But when the modern developments of artillery came, then Verdun, the old fortress that Vauban built for Louis XIV, lost its value. It was commanded by the surrounding hills and the French moved out of the town and the Vauban fortifications and built on the surrounding hills, on the rim, to go back to our figure, the forts which were the defence of the town when the present war began, forts arranged quite like those of Liege or Antwerp and some four or five miles away from the town. But bear in mind these forts were designed, like the old fortress and fortifications of the eighteenth century, to bar the road from the Meuse and from Germany to the Plain of Chalons and the level country west of the Argonne. When the Germans came south through Belgium and got into the Plain of Chalons from the north they had turned the whole Verdun position and had got into the region it barred by another route; they had come in by the back door; Verdun was the front. Not only that, but they are there now and have been there ever since the first days of September, 1914.

When one hears about Verdun as the gateway to Paris or anything else one hears about the Verdun of the past. It was not the door to Paris but the outer door to the region around Paris, to the Plains of Champagne and Chalons. But as the Germans are already in these plains the taking of Verdun now would not bring them nearer to Paris; they are only fifty miles away at Noyon, on the Oise, and they would be 160 at Verdun if they took the city. If they took Verdun they would get control of the Paris-Metz Railway, and if they then drove the French away from the trough we have been describing they would get a short line into France, and a line coming from German territory directly, not passing through Belgium. But they would not be nearer to Paris.

When the French saw, in the opening days of the war, that forts were of no permanent value against the German guns they left the forts on the hills above Verdun as they had abandoned the Vauban works and moved north for a few miles. Here they dug trenches, mounted their guns in concealed positions, and stood on the defensive, as they were standing elsewhere from Belgium to Switzerland. There was now no fortress of Verdun, and Verdun city was nothing but a point behind the lines of trenches, a point like Rheims, or Arras. The forts of the rim were equally of no more importance and were now empty of guns or garrisons. If the Germans, by a sudden attack, broke all the way through the French trenches here it would be quite as serious as if they broke through at other points, but no more so. There was no fortress of Verdun and the Verdun position commanded nothing.

The Battle of Verdun, as it is disclosed to an observer who stands on Fort de la Chaume, a mile or two west and above Verdun and in the mouth of the trough we have described, was this: On the west bank of the Meuse, four or five miles northwest of the town, there is a steep ridge going east and west and perhaps 1,100 feet high. This is the crest of Charny, and it rises sharply from the flat valley and marches to the west without a break for some miles. On it are the old forts of the rim.

Three or four miles still to the north is a line of hills which are separated from each other by deep ravines leading north and south. Two of these hills, Le Mort Homme (Dead Man's Hill) and Hill 304, have been steadily in the reports for many weeks. They are the present front of the French. Between one and two miles still to the north are other confused and tangled hills facing north, and it was here that the French lines ran when the great attack began in the third week of February. On this side the Germans have advanced rather less than two miles; they have not reached the Charny Ridge, which is the true and last line of defence of the Verdun position, and they have not captured the two hills to the north, which are the advanced position, now the first line.

When I was in Paris before I went to Verdun there was a general belief that the French might ultimately abandon the two outer hills, Dead Man's and 304, and come back to the Charny Ridge, which is a wall running from the river west without a break for miles. Apparently this has not been found necessary, but what is worth noting is that if these hills were evacuated it would not mean the withdrawal from Verdun but only to the best line of defence (the last line, to be sure), which includes the town itself.

Now, east of the river the situation is materially different. Between the Meuse and the level plateau, which appears in the dispatches from the front as the Woevre, is a long, narrow ridge, running from north to south for perhaps thirty-five or forty miles. This is the Cote de Meuse, or, translated, the Hills of the Meuse. The range is never more than ten miles wide and at many points less than half as wide. On the west it rises very sharply from the Meuse and on the east it breaks down quite as abruptly into the Woevre Plain. It cannot be effectively approached from the Woevre, because the Woevre is an exceedingly marshy plain, with much sub-surface water and in spring a mass of liquid clay.

Now the French, when the German drive began, stood on this ridge some eight miles, rather less, perhaps, to the north of the town of Verdun; their line ran from the Meuse straight east along this ridge and then turned at right angles and came south along the eastern edge of the Meuse Hills and the shore of the Woevre Plain until it touched the river again at St. Mihiel, twenty miles to the south, where the Germans had broken through the Meuse Hills and reached the river. The German attack came south along the crest of this ridge because the German heavy artillery could not be brought over the Woevre.

About halfway between the French front and Verdun, on a little crest somewhat higher than the main ridge, the French had erected a line of forts, just as they had on the Charny Ridge, Forts Douaumont and Vaux, familiar names now, were the forts most distant from Verdun. But the French here, as on the other side of the river, had come out of these forts, abandoned and dismantled them, and taken to trenches much to the north. It was upon these trenches that the main German attack fell, and in the first days the French were pushed back until their trench line followed the crests that bear the old forts, and at one point, at Douaumont, the Germans had actually got possession of one of the old forts; but the French trenches pass in front of this fort at a distance of but a few hundred yards.

Now, in the first days of the battle the position of the French on the east bank of the Meuse was just this: the troops facing north were meeting and slowly yielding to a terrific drive coming south and southwest; the rest of the troops that faced east toward the Woevre were not attacked severely. But as the Germans came south, and when they took Douaumont, they were able to reach the bridges across the Meuse behind the French troops on the Meuse Hills and to destroy them by indirect fire, and these French troops, more than a hundred thousand probably, were fighting with their backs to a deep river and exposed to destruction in case their lines did not hold.

In this situation Joffre proposed to take his troops behind the Meuse and on the hills to the west and above the city, leaving the city to the Germans. The French line would thus come north behind the Meuse from St. Mihiel and then turn west above Verdun, following either the Charny Ridge or else the Hills of Regret and Chaume, on either side of the trough, described above, which the road to Paris follows.