When the onslaughts upon the entrenchments that he was guarding were at their height, Captain Delvert admired the pose of a bomb-thrower in action. A soldier of the 142nd who managed to get away from Fort Vaux, in describing the attack by flames, gas, and explosive petards, and the giving way of the door, and the men flying in the air, and the Boches rushing in, and Lieutenant Bazy barring the corridor to them, cannot help giving vent to the exclamation, “It was superb!” Cadet Bégouen, leading his fatigue party under the geysers caused by the shells, feels sorry that he has not his camera with him. Such are the undying characteristics of our race, ever in love with beauty, ever desirous, under the most adverse conditions, of seeing life and realizing it to the full.
III
THE HARVEST OF THE FUTURE
Vaux is lost, for the time being, but Vaux will be regained, and the battle of Verdun is being won day by day. Day by day the meaning of the Verdun battle grows clearer. The infantryman who only knows his trench mates is an atom of a vast army distributed over all the fronts: his blood and sweat will mingle in history with the blood and sweat of his unknown and remote brothers. A scrap of disputed territory, which seems to the men involved an end in itself, is really nothing but a point in the vast shifting front where the two great forces of the world are at grips.
On June 12, five days after the capture of the fort, the Commander-in-Chief informs the Verdun troops of the Russian victories in Bukovina and Galicia, through the following Army order:
“The plan matured by the councils of the coalition is now in full course of being carried out.
“Soldiers of Verdun, it is to your heroic resistance that this consummation is due. It is this resistance that was the essential condition, and it is on this resistance that our coming victories depend; for it was this resistance that has created over the whole theatre of the European war a situation that will soon bring about the final triumph of our cause.”
The enemy is now held, and will have to submit to our laws and accept our manœuvres.
On March 10 the enemy climbs the northern slopes of Fort Vaux. He is now only two or three hundred yards off the counterscarp. To cross those two or three hundred yards will take him three months. Three months of superhuman exertions, of ceaseless attacks, of an inconceivable outlay of munitions and incredible losses among her young men, the flower of the nation. Three months, as if the war had no other object than this.