If you think of Verdun city as a fortress you will put yourself in the eighteenth century. It is just an abandoned town, mostly ashes and completely ruined by a useless bombardment after the main German advance had been checked. If you think of Verdun as a fortified position, like Liège, which, if it fell, would bring disaster, as did the fall of Liège, you are thinking in terms of the situation before the war. The forts of this position have all been abandoned and the French are fighting in trenches in all points save one outside this circle of forts. If you think of Verdun as the gateway to anything, you are thinking of something that doesn't exist. It was a gateway to Central France, to the Plain of Châlons, from the German frontier before the Germans came down into the Plain of Châlons from the north through Belgium.
But if you think of Verdun as a place which has a great sentimental value for both the French and the Germans; if you think of it as a place which by reason of its importance in other days still preserves a value in the minds of the mass of the French and German publics, a town the taking of which would as a result of this wholly false appraisal be reckoned in Germany as a great victory, which would vastly encourage German masses and would be accepted in France as a great defeat which would equally depress the French public, you will think of the battle for Verdun as it is.
If you go to Verdun you will see that the estimate that the world has placed upon it is illusory. You will see it is an abandoned town. You will see, as I did, that great and famous forts are without guns, and you will see, as I did, that the positions which the French have prepared behind the Meuse and above the town are vastly stronger than those which they have held successfully, in Lorraine or any other place where the attacks have been bitter, for nearly two years.
There are no forts, fortifications, fortresses, in this war. There are just trenches, and the Verdun sector is no exception. Verdun is not surrounded; it is not invested. I went to the town from Bar-le-Duc in an automobile without difficulty, and I ran back to Paris by another road, through Châlons, with equal ease. The Germans have never got within three miles of the town on any side; to the west of the River Meuse they are not within six miles of it. They are not gaining, and have not been gaining for weeks; they are merely fighting a desperate trench campaign, and the French are fighting back, retaking trenches on the east of the river, because they are in their last line on this bank of the river, but paying less attention to German trench gains on the west because the Germans are still far from the Charny Ridge, their main position.
If Verdun falls, that is, if the French are compelled under pressure or as a result of the cost of holding their present awkward position to go back behind the river, they will lose fifty or a hundred square miles of French territory, they will lose all the tremendous value of the moral "lift" which the successful defence has brought, but they will lose nothing else; and when the Germans have taken Verdun, the ashes, the ruins, they will stop, because there is no object or value in further attack. They are fighting for moral values, and the French politician has overruled the French soldier and compelled him to accept battle on unfavorable ground for this same moral value, but against his military judgment. He has done it successfully. He expects and France expects that he will continue to do it successfully, but in the wholly remote contingency that he failed (I can only say that it is a contingency no longer considered in France), a loss in moral advantage would be the only consequence.