"January, 1918—On les a! Pétain"
A courteous Commandant, telephoned to from below, came from some upper region to greet us and to show us something of the endless labyrinth of rooms, passages and dormitories, which during the siege often sheltered thousands of men. The veteran Colonel Duhay, who was in command of the citadel during the greater part of the year-long battle—a splendid, square-built tower of a man—I saw later in Paris. It was ill-luck not to have been able to walk with him over the tragic battle-field itself, for few men can have memories of it at once so comprehensive and so close. From the few words I had with him I retain a shuddering impression as of a slaughter-house; yet nothing could be cheerfuller or humaner than the broad soldier-face. But our talk turned on the losses of Verdun, and although these losses—i.e., the proportion of death to the square yard—were probably exceeded in several later battles, in none, it seems to me, has the massacre of men on both sides left so terrible a mark on the survivors. There came a time when the French were sick of slaying, and the German dead were piled mètres high on the slopes of Mort Homme and Cumières; in those weeks at the end of May, when the Germans, conscious that their prestige had suffered irreparably in the hundred days—which were to have been four!—of desperate and indecisive fighting, were at the opening of that fierce last effort which gave them Fort Vaux and its hero-commander, Commandant Raynal, on June 7th—put them in short-lived possession of Thiaumont and Fleury later—and was then interrupted at the end of the month by the thunder of the Allied attack on the Somme.
After leaving the citadel and the much-injured cathedral, beneath the crypt of which some of the labyrinthine passages of the old fortress are hewn, we drove through the eastern section of the battle-field, past what was once Fort Souville, along an upper road, with Vaux on our right, and Douaumont on the northern edge of the hill in front of us; descending again by Froide Terre, with the Côte de Poivre beyond it to the north; while we looked across the Meuse at the dim lines of Mort Homme, of the Bois des Corbeaux and the Crête de l'Oie, of all that "chess-board" of hills which became so familiar to Europe in those marvellous four months from February to June, 1916. Every yard of these high slopes has been fought over again and again, witnessing on the part of the defenders a fury of endurance, a passion of resolve, such as those, perhaps, alone can know who hear through all their being the mystic call of the soil, of the very earth itself, the actual fatherland, on which they fight. "We are but a moment of the eternal France:"—such was once the saying of a French soldier, dying somewhere amid these broken trenches over which we are looking. What was it, asks M. Reinach, that enabled the French to hold out as they did? Daring, he replies—the daring of the leaders, the daring of the troops led. The word hardly renders the French "audace" which is equally mis-translated by our English "audacity." "Audace" implies a daring which is not rashness, a daring which is justified, which is, in fact, the military aspect of a great nation's confidence in itself. It was the spirit of the "Marseillaise," says M. Reinach again—it was the French soul—l'ame française—the soul of country and of freedom, which triumphed here.
And not for France alone. At the moment when the attack on Verdun began, although the British military power was strengthening month by month, and the Military Service Act of May, 1916, which put the finishing touch to Lord Kitchener's great work, was close at hand, the French Army was still not only the principal, but the essential element in the Western campaign. France, at Verdun, as in the Battle of the Marne, was defending not only her own freedom, but the freedom of Europe. A few months later, when the British Army of the Somme went over its parapets at daybreak on July 1st, Verdun was automatically relieved, and it was clear to all the world that Britain's apprenticeship was past, and that another great military power had been born into Europe, on whom, as we now know, the main responsibilities of final victory were to rest. But at Verdun France fought for us—for England and America no less than for herself; and that thought must always deepen the already deep emotion with which English eyes look out upon these tortured hills.
That dim line on the eastern ridge, which marks the ruins of Fort Vaux, stands indeed for a story which has been entrusted by history to the living memory of France's Allies, hardly less than to that of France herself. As we pause among the crumbling trenches and shell-holes to look back upon the height of Vaux, I seem to see the lines of French infantry creeping up the hill, through the communication trenches, in the dark, to the relief of their comrades in the fort; the runners—eager volunteers—assuring communications under the incessant hail of shell; the carrier-pigeons, when the fort is altogether cut off, bringing their messages back to Headquarters; the red and green signal lights shooting up from the ridge into the night. One of these runners, when the siege was nearing its end, arrived at an advance post, having by a miracle got through a terrible barrage unhurt. "You might have waited a few instants," said the Colonel, kindly. But the runner, astonished, showed the envelope. "My Colonel, look—it is written—'urgent!'"
That was the spirit. Or listen to this fragment from the journal of Captain Delvert, defending one of the redoubts that protect Fort Vaux:
"Six o'clock—the bombardment has just begun again. The stretcher-bearer, L___, has just been leaning a few moments—worn out—against the wall of my dug-out. His good, honest face is hollow, his eyes, with their blue rims, seem starting out of his head. 'Mon Capitaine, I'm used up. There are only three stretcher-bearers left. The others are dead or wounded. I haven't eaten for three days, or drunk a drop of water.' His frail body is only held together by a miracle of energy. Talk of heroes—here is a true one!
"Eight o'clock. We are relieved.
"Eleven o'clock. Message from the Colonel. 'Owing to circumstances the 101st cannot be relieved.'
"Merci!