A few days after our Strasbourg visit we drove, furnished with General Gouraud's notes and maps, up into the heart of the "front de Champagne." You cross the wide, sandy plains to the north of Châlons, with their scanty pine-woods, where Attila met his over-throw, and where the French Army has trained and manoeuvred for generations. And presently, beyond the great military camp of pre-war days, you begin to mount into a region of chalk hills, barren and lonely enough before the war, and now transformed by the war into a scene which almost rivals the Ypres salient and Verdun itself in tragic suggestiveness. Standing in the lonely graveyard of Mont Muret, one looks over a tortured wilderness of trenches and shell-holes. Close by are all the places famous through years of fighting—Souain, Navarin Farm, Tahure, the Butte de Tahure, and, to the north-west, Somme-Py, Ste. Marie-Py, and so on to Moronvilliers and Craonne. In the south-western distance I could just descry the Monts de Champagne, while turning to the north one faced the slopes of Notre Dame des Champs, and recalled the statement of General Gouraud that on that comparatively open ground the fiercest fighting of last October had taken place.
And now, not a soul, not a movement! Everywhere lay piles of unused shell, German and French, small heaps of hand-grenades and bundles of barbed wire. The camouflaged battery positions, the deep dug-outs and strong posts of the enemy were all about us; a dead horse lay not far away; and in front, the white crosses of the graveyard. A grim scene, under the January sky! But in the very middle of the little cemetery some tender hand had just recently fastened a large bunch of white narcissus to one of the crosses. We had passed no one that I could remember on the long ascent; yet the flowers were quite fresh and the thought of them—the only living and beautiful thing for miles in that scarred wilderness, over which a creeping fog was beginning to gather—stayed with me for days.
The Champagne-battle-field is indeed deeply interwoven with the whole history of the war. The flower of the French Army and almost all the leading French Generals—Castelnau, Pétain, Nivelle, Gouraud, have passed through its furnace. But famous as it is, and for ever associated with the remarkable and fascinating personality of General Gouraud, which gives to it a panache of its own, it has not the sacredness of Verdun.
We had spent the day before the expedition to Champagne at St. Mihiel and Verdun. To St. Mihiel I will return in my next chapter. Verdun I had never seen, and the impression that it makes, even in a few hours, is profound. In March, 1916, I well remember at Havre, at Boulogne, at St. Omer, how intent and absorbed a watch was kept along our front over the news from Verdun. It came in hourly, and the officers in the hotels, French and English, passed it to each other without much speech, with a shrug, or a look of anxiety, or a smile, as the case might be. When we arrived on March 6th at the Visitors' Château at G.H.Q.—then, of course, at St. Omer—our first question was: "Verdun?" "All right," was the quick reply. "We have offered help, but they have refused it."
No—France, heroic France, trod that wine-press alone; she beat back her cruel foe alone; and, at Verdun, she triumphed alone. Never, indeed, was human sacrifice more absolute; and never was the spiritual force of what men call patriotism more terribly proved. "The poilu of Verdun," writes M. Joseph Reinach, "became an epic figure"—and the whole battle rose before Europe as a kind of apocalyptic vision of Death and Courage, staged on a great river, in an amphitheatre of blood-stained hills. All the eyes in the world were fixed on this little corner of France. For a Frenchman—"Verdun was our first thought on waking, and was never absent from us through the day."
The impression made by the battle—or rather, the three battles—of Verdun does not depend on the numbers engaged. The British Battle of the Somme, and the battles of last year on the British front far surpassed it in the number of men and guns employed. From March 21st last year to April 17th, the British front was attacked by 109 divisions, and the French by 25. In the most critical fighting at Verdun, from February 21st to March 21st, the French had to face 21 divisions, and including the second German attack in June and the triumphant French advance in December, the total enemy forces may be put at 42 divisions. But the story is incomparable! Everything contributed—the fame of the ancient fortress, the dynastic and political interests involved, the passion of patriotism which the struggle evoked in France, the spendthrift waste of life on the part of the German Command.
After the French rally, indeed, from the first terrific bombardment, which nearly gave the German Command its coveted prey, the thing became a duel, watched by all Europe, between Pétain and the Crown Prince; between the dynastic interests of the Hohenzollerns, served by a magnificent army, and the finest military and patriotic traditions of France. From day to day the public in this country watched the fluctuations of the struggle with an interest so absorbing that the names of Douaumont, Vaux, Mort Homme, Cumières, the Goose's Crest, came to ring in our ears almost as the names of Hougoumont, La Haye Sainte, La Belle Alliance, rang in those of an earlier time.
Verdun, from a distance, produces the same illusion as Rheims. The Cathedral and the town are apparently still in being. They have not lost their essential outlines, and the veils of grey and purple haze between the spectator and the reality disguises what both have suffered. Then one draws nearer. One enters the famous fortress, through the old Vauban fortifications, and over the Vauban bridge—little touched, to all appearance. And presently, as one passes along the streets, one sees that here is not a town, but only the ghost, the skeleton of a town. The roofless, windowless houses, of which the streets still keep, as in Rheims, their ancient lines, stare at you like so many eyeless skulls—the bare bones of a city. Only the famous citadel, with its miles of underground passages and rooms, is just as it was before the battle, and as it will be, one may hope, through the long years to come; preserved, not for any active purpose of war, but as the shrine of immortal memories. Itself, it played a great part in the struggle. For here, in these dormitories and mess-rooms and passages so far underground that even the noise of the fierce struggle outside never reached them, it was possible for troops worn out by the superhuman ordeal of the battle, to find complete rest—to sleep—without fear.
We entered through a large mess-room full of soldiers, with, at its further end, a kitchen, with a busy array of cooks and orderlies. Then someone opened a door, and we found ourselves in a small room, very famous in the history of the war. During the siege, scores of visitors from Allied and neutral countries—statesmen, generals, crowned heads—took luncheon under its canopy of flags, buried deep underground, while the storm of shell raged outside. There, in the visitors' book, one might turn to the two signatures—one of them then only a fortnight old—that all France knows:
"March, 1916—On les aura! Pétain"