Roland has raised himself up. He is calling. He stretches out his arms towards “sweet France.”
For the second time the echo of Charlemagne’s trumpets has been borne as far as the vale of Roncevaux.
For the second time the Souville headquarters reply to Fort Vaux: “Your message received. Don’t lose heart!”
* * * * *
Don’t lose heart! Will this wreck of a fort have any heart left after the three days it has just lived through? Not for a single moment has the storm ceased to shake the plateau. To the left, it wreaks its fury upon the entrenchment R¹, which has the audacity to resist; to the right, upon the Damloup battery, which holds the promontory and sweeps La Horgne bottom and the outlet from the village, and upon the immediate approaches, which are defended to the west by La Courtine and to the right by the Belfort and Montbéliard trenches. The enemy follows up the general attacks with local attacks, in order either to carry the whole position at a blow, or to make us waver at one point, against which he can then concentrate his onrush. He plunges into the abyss with three divisions, which he will even have to reinforce with a brigade of the Alpine corps. He lays siege to the fort from three sides—he is around it, above it, and inside it. Yet the fort doggedly refuses to give in. Cut off from the outer world for a whole day, it has no sense of being forsaken. Outside there, it feels certain, they are working on its behalf. Inside it sets up more and more barricades. Step by step it defends the stairways, and foot by foot the corridors. It faces heavy artillery, machine-guns, grenades, liquid fire, smoke-bombs, thirst, poisoning, intoxication, stench, putrefaction. It will go to the utmost limit of human endurance, the limit that is extended still further when one thinks that it has been reached, goes beyond all anticipation, and verges on the impossible. Among its cramped stones and under its echoing vaults the terrible sacrifice will be accomplished in full measure.
A second lieutenant of the 142nd, an officer in Chevassu’s battalion, fighting on the plateau outside the fort, described later to a comrade those days of horror: “Everywhere there was nothing but fire and dust, and in this pandemonium a few soldiers on the watch prevented the Boche hordes from passing. Their attacks were renewed every day, striking now at this point, now at that; never did we yield an inch of ground so long as there was a man to defend it. I will not speak to you of all that we went through. No water, no revictualling; those who went out to bring us supplies never got back. The only thing that we were not short of was munitions. We are terribly weakened, but happy to have done our duty, to have had our share in preventing the Boches from taking Verdun—Verdun, which their Emperor promised to them, and which they will never gain.... They would be compelled to pass over our bodies and over the corpses of all their comrades whom we have slain.... They attacked us from three sides at once, but they never got us in their claws....”
During the day of June 3 the enemy seeks to turn to account the capture of Damloup and make his way round the fort to the east. Details of the 142nd and 53rd Regiments hold him in check, and, assuming the offensive, even force him to draw back.
Whether for army, army corps, division, or brigade, the High Command supports the conflict that stretches from Fumin Wood to La Gayette bottom, pours fresh troops into the firing line, and prepares counter-attacks. There is a counter-attack on Damloup from the morning of June 2; at any rate this rescues the battery. There is a counter-attack on the fort from the evening of the 2nd, made by a battalion of the 53rd Regiment, which has to run the gauntlet of murderous curtain fires and can only reinforce the troops of the sector. There is a counter-attack on June 3 upon our left, to recapture the line of the entrenchments and come to the aid of R¹, which still holds out. And the balloon observers never cease from signalling the arrival of enemy columns, which are coming up the slopes to swell the number of the assailants.
Connection with the fort must be established, that is beyond all question. Comrades are there, waiting for the hour of their deliverance to strike: “In the fort we have French comrades,” the army telephones; “they must be released from their present plight. First and foremost, we must get into touch with them. This is the duty of all alike—a sacred duty.” General Tatin, who is in command of the sector, will personally direct the operation.
Yet the enemy does not leave off attacking, and he floods his objective with an endless deluge of projectiles. On the 4th, at two o’clock in the morning, an attack upon the fort is started from the north-east and the south-west. It begins by making progress, then it is checked by the machine-guns. At daybreak an aeroplane flies above the fort and comes down so low that it casts a shadow over all this chaos. Will the daring bird let itself be wounded, like the last pigeon? It darts through the midst of shells and bullets like a salamander in the fire, and behold, it is now rising again and going away! It has fulfilled its mission: on the superstructure of the fort it has registered the position of the machine-guns. A few minutes later our 75’s and our 155’s crush to pulp everything that the Germans had installed on the upper part of the earthwork. At ten o’clock in the morning, the weather being clear, our airmen report that the fort trenches have been entirely razed and that not a man is left upon the top of the fort.