"Rarely!" he replied, a single word which had the emphasis of both that jaw and that shrewd, piercing eye.
"What is the best time to go out to the front?" I asked the general.
"Five o'clock in the morning!"
The officer who escorted me did not think anything of getting up at that hour. Mangin's is a five-o'clock-in-the-morning corps.
Shall I describe that town on the banks of the Meuse which has been described many times? Or that citadel built by Vauban, with dynamos and electric light in its underground chambers and passages, its hospitals, shops, stores and barrack room, so safe under its walls and roof of masonry that the Germans presciently did not waste their shells on it but turned them with particular vengeance on the picturesque old houses along the river bank, neglecting the barracks purposely in view of their usefulness to the conquerors when Mecca was theirs. There must be something sacred to a Frenchman in the citadel which held life secure and in the ruins which bore their share of the blows upon this old fortress town in the lap of the hills, looking out toward hills which had been the real defense.
Interest quickened on the way to the Verdun front as you came to the slopes covered with torn and fallen trees, where the Germans laid their far-reaching curtains of fire to catch the French reserves struggling through mud and shell-craters on those February and March days to the relief of the front line. Only when you have known the life of an army in action in winter in such a climate can you appreciate the will that drove men forward to the attack and the will of the defenders against outnumbering guns, having to yield, point by point, with shrewd thrift, small bands of men in exposed places making desperate resistance against torrents of shells.
Verdun was German valor at its best and German gunnery at its mightiest, the effort of Colossus shut in a ring of steel to force a decision; and the high-water mark of German persistence was where you stood on the edge of the area of mounds that shells had heaped and craters that shells had scooped by the concentration of fire on Fort Souville. A few Germans in the charge reached here, but none returned. The survivors entered Verdun, the French will tell you with a shrug, as prisoners. Down the bare slope with its dead grass blotched by craters the eye travels and then up another slope to a crest which you see as a cumulus of shell-tossed earth under an occasional shell-burst. That is Douaumont, whose taking cost the Germans such prolonged and bloody effort and aroused the Kaiser to a florid outburst of laudation of his Brandenburgers who, by its capture, had, as Germany then thought, brought France to her death-gasp.
On that hill German prestige and system reached their zenith; and the answer eight months later was French élan which, in two hours, with the swiftness and instinctive cohesion of democracy drilled and embattled and asking no spur from an autocrat, swept the Germans off the summit. From other charges I could visualize the precise and spirited movement of those blue figures under waves of shell fire in an attack which was the triumphant example of the latest style of offensive against frontal positions. There was no Kaiser to burst into rhetoric to thank General Nivelle, who had his reward in an autographed photograph from Father Joffre; and the men of that charge had theirs in the gratitude of a people.
Fort Vaux, on another crest at the right, was still in German hands, but that, too, was to be regained with the next rush. Yes, it was good to be at Verdun after Douaumont had been retaken, standing where you would have been in range of a German sniper a week before. Turning as on a pivot, you could identify through the glasses all the positions whose names are engraved on the French mind. Not high these circling hills, the keystone of a military arch, but taken together it was clear how, in this as in other wars, they were nature's bastion at the edge of the plain that lay a misty line in the distance.
Either in front or to the rear of Souville toward Verdun the surprising thing was how few soldiers you saw and how little transport within range of German guns; which impressed you with the elastic system of the French, who are there and are not there. Let an attack by the Germans develop and soldiers would spring out of the earth and the valleys echo with the thunder of guns. A thrifty people, the French.