Later, in an unforeseen epoch, in the year ——, it will be taught the children as two dates: the war began August 2, 1914; it ended ——. All the tragedy, all our cries, our furies, our agonies, our suffering and death—all this, without name, blurred and indistinct, will be contained between two numbers, and will mark two eons: that before the War, that after the War. We will have fought and we will have wept; our bodies will have been broken and our hearts will have bled, without our being able to say, “It happened as I have told it,” for we will not know just how it happened. We will be obliged to call to mind the first day when grenades were used; the day torpedoes came to light; the advent of the four-hundreds. Facts will be mixed in our troubled memories. We will no longer recall all that happened to us. To be more explicit, to create a truer picture, we will say:
“At the Marne, we used rifles.”
“In Champagne, we threw bombs.”
“At Verdun—such cannon!”
“On the Somme the shells flew so thick they met in mid-air.”
“And then—and then, America came!”
X
VERDUN
THOSE who have not been actively engaged in the war cannot form any conception of it. When they hear a combatant speak of it, they say:
“Then you fight all the time?” “No.” Whereupon they think: “Then in the firing-line one is not really in much danger.”
Ah, not so fast, good people! In this war, this new, present-day war, the vigilance is continuous, the hand-to-hand struggle is not. Shells fall unceasingly, but the open battle, the assault, is not without interruption. Fortunately.