“They were instantly manned”—this remark proves the superiority of the human will to all the mechanical forces that science can let loose. The supreme command drew from it this deduction: “What the artillery achieves is the weakening of the material resources of the defence and the wearing down of its morale, not its complete overthrow.”
Of this hurricane of fire the fort received its full share.
“Those are 150 mm. shells. Here come some 210 mm. Ah, these are surely 380 mm. My vaults are ringing. My vaults are still sound. How are my transverse galleries? They’re resisting. And my turret? It is still standing. The observing stations? One has been touched. I can see quite well with one eye. Besides, the damage can perhaps still be made good. A breach in the counterscarp? They’ll make it firmer when they stop it up. My big neighbour, Douaumont, has come off even worse than I. He attracts the lightning like some stately oak on a hilltop. I should like to know what is going on. My telephones are no longer working. I am cut off from the rest of the world. Such a storm cannot last. Let us wait for the end.”
The end does not come, the storm continues to roar and rumble, but bad news comes up the hillsides, no one knows how. On both banks of the Meuse villages are burning, forests crackling, stones crumbling.
The nearer one is to things that are happening, the less information one can glean about them. The ration fatigue parties are still the best source of news. But these cooks certainly draw the long bow; they tell some alarming tales.
“Caures Wood was lost the second day.”
“Caures Wood? Impossible! Driant is there!—unless Driant is dead.”
“They don’t know what has become of him. And if it were only Caures Wood that was lost!”
If they are to be believed, Herbebois and Chaume Wood, the village of Ornes and, in the Woevre, Fromezay and Herméville—the last two abandoned intentionally, in order to gain support on the Meuse Heights—are in the enemy’s hands. Confound those croakers! They are trying to sow the seeds of panic. Their work is certainly carried on under great difficulties. There is no job like it, except that of the scouts. And even the scouts have no load to bear: they jump lightly from shell-hole to shell-hole; they lie down, burrow themselves in, disappear, get up again, dart off like arrows, and again lay themselves out flat when the hail of bullets cuts off their road. You cannot get along very fast with twenty bowls on your back and water-bottles slung across your shoulders, or a whole grocer’s shop of tinned food, or bags filled with every kind of provender, and, to crown it all, a mask on your face which half stifles you. (The mask is worn because of all the poison-gases which linger long in the ravines and rifts in the ground, and lie in wait for you, like footpads to seize you by the throat.) The bottoms of the valleys are all but impassable. The enemy have got the range of all the roads and have battered them. The second and third lines have suffered as badly from “Jack Johnsons” as the first. Never, within the memory of men who went out on the first day of the war and have come back, Heaven knows how, from the Marne and the Yser, from Artois and Champagne, have we had to face such a deluge of fire and steel. So a cook here is a soldier who comes from the back to the front with honour as well as his burden.
On the fourth day a liaison officer assures us that Les Fosses Wood and Les Caurières Wood have been lost.