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THEY SHALL NOT PASS
THEY
SHALL NOT PASS
BY
FRANK H. SIMONDS
AUTHOR OF "THE GREAT WAR"
[Illustration]
GARDEN CITY NEW YORK
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
1916
_Copyright, 1916, by_
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
_All rights reserved, including that of
translation into foreign languages,
including the Scandinavian_
COPYRIGHT, 1916, THE TRIBUNE ASS'N.
Grateful acknowledgment is hereby made to the New York _Tribune_ for
permission to reprint these articles in book form.
CONTENTS
PAGE
I. MY TRIP TO VERDUN--GENERAL PETAIN FACE TO FACE 3
The men who hold the line--what their faces told of the
past and the future of France.
II. MY TRIP TO VERDUN--A DYING, SHELL-RIDDEN CITY 43
The Vauban Citadel, in the shelter of which falling
shells cannot find you--houses and blocks that are
vanishing hourly--"but William will not come"--war
that is invisible--a luncheon underground with a toast
to America--the last courtesy from a general and a
host--nothing that was not beautiful.
III. BATTLE OF VERDUN ANOTHER GETTYSBURG 72
Failure of Crown Prince likened by French to "high tide"
of confederacy.
IV. VERDUN, THE DOOR THAT LEADS NOWHERE 95
The battle and the topography of the battlefield--an
analysis of the attack and defence.
V. IN SIGHT OF THE PROMISED LAND--ON THE LORRAINE
BATTLEFIELD 116
THEY SHALL NOT PASS
I
MY TRIP TO VERDUN--GENERAL PETAIN FACE TO FACE
THE MEN WHO HOLD THE LINE--WHAT THEIR FACES TOLD OF THE PAST
AND THE FUTURE OF FRANCE
My road to Verdun ran through the Elysee Palace, and it was to the
courtesy and interest of the President of the French Republic that I
owed my opportunity to see the battle for the Meuse city at close
range. Already through the kindness of the French General Staff I had
seen the Lorraine and Marne battlegrounds and had been guided over
these fields by officers who had shared in the opening battles that
saved France. But Verdun was more difficult; there is little time for
caring for the wandering correspondent when a decisive contest is
going forward, and quite naturally the General Staff turned a deaf ear
to my request.
Through the kindness of one of the many Frenchmen who gave time and
effort to make my pilgrimage a success I was at last able to see M.
Poincare. Like our own American President, the French Chief Magistrate
is never interviewed, and I mention this audience simply because it
was one more and in a sense the final proof for me of the
friendliness, the courtesy, the interest that the American will find
to-day in France. I had gone to Paris, my ears filled with the
warnings of those who told me that it was hard to be an American in
Europe, in France, in the present hour. I had gone expecting, or at
least fearing, that I should find it so.
Instead, from peasant to President I found only kindness, only
gratitude, only a profound appreciation for all that Americans had
individually done for France in the hour of her great trial. These
things and one thing more I found: a very intense desire that
Americans should be able to see for themselves; the Frenchman will not
talk to you of what France has done, is doing; he shrinks from
anything that might suggest the imitation of the German method of
propaganda. In so far as it is humanly possible he would have you see
the thing for yourself and testify out of your own mouth.
Thus it came about that all my difficulties vanished when I had been
permitted to express to the President my desire to see Verdun and to
go back to America--I was sailing within the week--able to report what
I had seen with my own eyes of the decisive battle still going forward
around the Lorraine city. Without further delay, discussion, it was
promised that I should go to Verdun by motor, that I should go cared
for by the French military authorities and that I should be permitted
to see all that one could see at the moment of the contest.
We left Paris in the early afternoon; my companions were M. Henri
Ponsot, chief of the Press Service of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs,
and M. Hugues le Roux, a distinguished Frenchman of letters well known
to many Americans. To start for the battlefield from a busy, peaceful
city, to run for miles through suburbs as quiet and lacking in martial
aspect as the regions beyond the Harlem, at home, was a thing that
seemed almost unreal; but only for a brief moment, for war has come
very near to Paris, and one may not travel far in Eastern France
without seeing its signs.
In less than an hour we were passing the rear of the line held by the
British at the Battle of the Marne, and barely sixty minutes after we
had passed out through the Vincennes gate we met at Courtacon the
first of the ruined villages that for two hundred miles line the
roadways that lead from the capital to Lorraine and Champagne.
Suddenly in the midst of a peaceful countryside, after passing a
score of undisturbed villages, villages so like one to another, you
come to one upon which the storm has burst, and instead of snug
houses, smiling faces, the air of contentment and happiness that was
France, there is only a heap of ruins, houses with their roofs gone,
their walls torn by shell fire, villages abandoned partially or
wholly, contemporary Pompeiis, overtaken by the Vesuvius of Krupp.
Coincidentally there appear along the roadside, in the fields, among
the plough furrows, on every side, the crosses that mark the graves of
those who died for France--or for Germany. Along the slope you may
mark the passage of a charge by these crosses; those who fell were
buried as they lay, French and Germans with equal care. Indeed, there
is a certain pride visible in all that the French do for their dead
foes. Alongside a hamlet wantonly burned, burned by careful labor and
with German thoroughness; in villages where you will be told of
nameless atrocities and shameful killings, you will see the German
graves, marked by neat crosses, surrounded by sod embankments, marked
with plaques of black and white; the French are marked by plaques of
red, white and blue, and the latter invariably decorated with a flag
and flowers.
Once you have seen these graves by the roadside going east you will
hardly go a mile in two hundred which has not its graves. From the
environs of Meaux, a scant twenty miles from Paris, to the frontier at
the Seille, beyond Nancy, there are graves and more graves, now
scattered, now crowded together where men fought hand to hand. Passing
them in a swift-moving auto, they seem to march by you; there is the
illusion of an army advancing on the hillside, until at last, beyond
Nancy, where the fighting was so terrible, about little villages such
as Corbessaux, you come to the great common graves, where a hundred or
two hundred men have been gathered, where the trenches now levelled
are but long graves, and you read, "Here rest 179 French soldiers," or
across the road, "Here 196 Germans."
Take a map of France and from a point just south of Paris draw a
straight line to the Vosges; twenty or thirty miles to the north draw
another. Between the two is the black district of the Marne and Nancy
battles. It is the district of ruined villages, destroyed farms; it is
the region where every hillside--so it will seem to the traveller--is
marked by these pathetic crosses. It is a region in which the sense of
death and destruction is abroad. Go forty miles north again and draw
two more lines, and this is the region not of the death and
destruction of yesterday, but of to-day; this is the front, where the
graves are still in the making, the region of the Oise to the Meuse,
from Noyon to Verdun.
On this day our route led eastward through the villages which in
September, 1914, woke from at least a century of oblivion, from the
forgetting that followed Napoleon's last campaign in France to a
splendid but terrible ten days: Courtacon, Sezanne, La-Fere
Champenoise, Vitry-le-Francois, the region where Franchet d'Esperey
and Foch fought, where the "Miracle of the Marne" was performed. Mile
after mile the countryside files by, the never-changing impression of
a huge cemetery, the hugest in the world, the stricken villages, now
and then striving to begin again, a red roof here and there telling of
the first counter offensive of peace, of construction made against the
whirlwind that had come and gone.
Always, too, nothing but old men and women, these and children,
working in the broad fields, still partially cultivated, but no longer
the fields of that perfectly cared for France of the other peace days.
Women and children at the plough, old men bent double by age still
spending such strength as is left in the tasks that war has set for
them. This is the France behind the front, and, aside from the ruined
villages and graves, the France that stretches from the Pyrenees to
the Marne, a France from which youth and manhood are gone, in which
age and childhood remain with the women. Yet in this land we were
passing how much of the youth and manhood of France and Germany was
buried in the graves the crosses demonstrated at every kilometre.
But a hundred miles east of Paris there begins a new world. The
graves, the shell-cursed villages, remain, but this is no longer the
France of the Marne fighting and of the war of two years ago. At
Vitry-le-Francois you pass almost without warning into the region
which is the back of the front to-day, the base of all the line of
fire from Rheims to the Meuse, and suddenly along the road appear the
canvas guideposts which bear the terse warning, "Verdun." You pass
suddenly from ancient to contemporary history, from the killing of
other years to the killing that is of to-day--the killing and the
wounding--and along the hills where there are still graves there begin
to appear Red Cross tents and signs, and ambulances pass you bearing
the latest harvest.
And now every village is a garrison town. For a hundred miles there
have been only women and old men, but now there are only soldiers;
they fill the streets; they crowd the doorways of the houses. The
fields are filled with tents, with horses, with all the impedimenta of
an army. The whole countryside is a place of arms. Every branch of
French service is about you--Tunisians, Turcos, cavalry, the black,
the brown, and the white--the men who yesterday or last week were in
the first line, who rest and will return to-morrow or next day to
fight again.
Unmistakably, too, you feel that this is the business of war; you are
in a factory, a machine shop; if the product is death and destruction,
it is no less a matter of machinery, not of romance, of glamour. The
back of the front is a place of work and of rest for more work, but
of parade, of the brilliant, of the fascinating there is just nothing.
Men with bright but plainly weary faces, not young men, but men of
thirty and above, hard bitten by their experience, patently fit, fed,
but somehow related to the ruins and the destruction around them, they
are all about you, and wherever now you see a grave you will discover
a knot of men standing before it talking soberly. Wherever you see the
vestiges of an old trench, a hill that was fought for at this time
twenty months ago, you will see new practice trenches and probably the
recruits, the "Class of 1917," the boys that are waiting for the call,
listening to an officer explaining to them what has been done here,
the mistake or the good judgment revealed by the event. For France is
training the youth that remains to her on the still recent
battlefields and in the presence of those who died to keep the ground.
Just as the darkness came we passed St. Dizier and entered at last
upon the road to Verdun, the one road that is the life line of the
city. For to understand the real problem of the defence of Verdun you
must realize that there is lacking to the city any railroad. In
September, 1914, the Germans took St. Mihiel and cut the railway
coming north along the Meuse. On their retreat from the Marne the
soldiers of the Crown Prince halted at Montfaucon and Varennes, and
their cannon have commanded the Paris-Verdun-Metz Railroad ever since.
Save for a crazy narrow-gauge line wandering along the hill slopes,
climbing by impossible grades, Verdun is without rail communication.
It was this that made the defence of the town next to impossible.
Partially to remedy the defect the French had reconstructed a local
highway running from St. Dizier by Bar-le-Duc to Verdun beyond the
reach of German artillery. To-day an army of a quarter of a million of
men, the enormous parks of heavy artillery and field guns--everything
is supplied by this one road and by motor transport.
Coming north from St. Dizier we entered this vast procession. Mile
after mile the caravan stretched on, fifty miles with hardly a break
of a hundred feet between trucks. Paris 'buses, turned into vehicles
to bear fresh meat; new motor trucks built to carry thirty-five men
and travelling in companies, regiments, brigades; wagons from the hood
of which soldiers, bound to replace the killed and wounded of
yesterday, looked down upon you, calmly but unsmilingly. From St.
Dizier to Verdun the impression was of that of the machinery by which
logs are carried to the saw in a mill. You felt unconsciously, yet
unmistakably, that you were looking, not upon automobiles, not upon
separate trucks, but upon some vast and intricate system of belts and
benches that were steadily, swiftly, surely carrying all this vast
material, carrying men and munitions and supplies, everything human
and inanimate, to that vast grinding mill which was beyond the hills,
the crushing machine which worked with equal remorselessness upon men
and upon things.
Now and again, too, over the hills came the Red Cross ambulances; they
passed you returning from the front and bringing within their
carefully closed walls the finished product, the fruits of the day's
grinding, or a fraction thereof. And about the whole thing there was a
sense of the mechanical rather than the human, something that
suggested an automatic, a machine-driven, movement; it was as if an
unseen system of belts and engines and levers guided, moved, propelled
this long procession upward and ever toward the mysterious front where
the knives or the axes or the grinding stones did their work.
Night came down upon us along the road and brought a new impression.
Mile on mile over the hills and round the curves, disappearing in the
woods, reappearing on the distant summits of the hills, each showing a
rear light that wagged crazily on the horizon, this huge caravan
flowed onward, while in the villages and on the hillsides campfires
flashed up and the faces or the figures of the soldiers could be seen
now clearly and now dimly. But all else was subordinated to the line
of moving transports. Somewhere far off at one end of the procession
there was battle; somewhere down below at the other end there was
peace. There all the resources, the life blood, the treasure in men
and in riches of France were concentrating and collecting, were being
fed into this motor fleet, which like baskets on ropes was carrying it
forward to the end of the line and then bringing back what remained,
or for the most part coming back empty, for more--for more lives and
more treasure.
It was full night when our car came down the curved grades into
Bar-le-Duc, halted at the corner, where soldiers performed the work
of traffic policemen and steadily guided the caravan toward the road
marked by a canvas sign lighted within by a single candle and bearing
the one word, "Verdun." All night, too, the rumble of the passing
transport filled the air and the little hotel shook with the jar of
the heavy trucks, for neither by day nor by night is there a halt in
the motor transport, and the sound of this grinding is never low.
It was little more than daylight when we took the road again, with a
thirty-mile drive to Verdun before us. Almost immediately we turned
into the Verdun route we met again the caravan of automobiles, of
camions, as the French say. It still flowed on without break. Now,
too, we entered the main road, the one road to Verdun, the road that
had been built by the French army against just such an attack as was
now in progress. The road was as wide as Fifth Avenue, as smooth as
asphalt--a road that, when peace comes, if it ever does, will delight
the motorist. Despite the traffic it had to bear, it was in perfect
repair, and soldiers in uniform sat by the side breaking stone and
preparing metal to keep it so.
The character of the country had now changed. We were entering the
region of the hills, between the Aisne and the Meuse, a country
reminiscent of New England. Those hills are the barrier which beyond
the Meuse, under the names of the Cote de Meuse, have been the scene
of so much desperate fighting. The roads that sidled off to the east
bore battle names, St. Mihiel, Troyon, and the road that we followed
was still marked at every turn with the magic word "Verdun." Our
immediate objective was Souilly, the obscure hill town twenty miles,
perhaps, south of the front, from which Sarrail had defended Verdun in
the Marne days and from which Petain was now defending Verdun against
a still more terrible attack.
And in France to-day one speaks only of Verdun and Petain. Soldiers
have their day; Joffre, Castelnau, Foch, all retain much of the
affection and admiration they have deserved, but at the moment it is
the man who has held Verdun that France thinks of, and there was the
promise for us that at Souilly we should see the man whose fame had
filled the world in the recent great and terrible weeks. Upward and
downward over the hills, through more ruined villages, more hospitals,
more camps, our march took us until after a short hour we came to
Souilly, general headquarters of the Army of Verdun, of Petain, the
centre of the world for the moment.
Few towns have done less to prepare for greatness than Souilly. It
boasts a single street three inches deep in the clay mud of the
spring--a single street through which the Verdun route marches almost
contemptuously, the same nest of stone and plaster houses, one story
high, houses from which the owners had departed to make room for
generals and staff officers. This and one thing more, the Mairie, the
town hall, as usual the one pretentious edifice of the French hamlet,
and before the stairway of this we stopped and got out.
We were at headquarters. From this little building, devoted for
perhaps a century to the business of governing the commune of Souilly,
with its scant thousand of people, Petain was defending Verdun and the
fate of an army of 250,000 men at the least. In the upstairs room,
where the town councillors had once debated parochial questions,
Joffre and Castelnau and Petain in the terrible days of the opening
conflict had consulted, argued, decided--decided the fate of France,
so the Germans had said, for they had made the fall of Verdun the
assurance of French collapse.
Unconsciously, too, you felt the change in the character of the
population of this village. There were still the soldiers, the
eternal gray-blue uniforms, but there were also men of a different
type, men of authority. In the street your guides pointed out to you
General Herr, the man who had designed and planned and accomplished
the miracle of the motor transport that had saved Verdun--with the aid
of the brave men fighting somewhere not far beyond the nearest hills.
He had commanded at Verdun when the attack came, and without
hesitation he had turned over his command to Petain, his junior in
service and rank before the war, given up the glory and become the
superintendent of transport. Men spoke to you of the fine loyalty of
that action with unconcealed admiration.
And then out of the remoteness of Souilly there came a voice familiar
to an American. Bunau-Varilla, the man of Panama, wearing the uniform
of a commandant and the Croix de Guerre newly bestowed for some
wonderful engineering achievement, stepped forward to ask for his
friends and yours of the old "_Sun_ paper." I had seen him last in the
_Sun_ office in the days when the war had just broken out and he was
about to sail for home; in the days when the Marne was still unfought
and he had breathed hope then as he spoke with confidence now.
Presently there arrived the two officers whose duty it was to take me
to Verdun, Captain Henri Bourdeaux, a man of letters known to all
Frenchmen; Captain Madelin, an historian, already documented in the
history of the war making under his own eyes. To these gentlemen and
their colleagues who perform this task that can hardly be agreeable,
who risk their lives and give over their time with unfailing courtesy
and consideration that the American newspaper correspondent may see,
may report, it is impossible to return sufficient thanks, and every
American newspaper reader who finds on his breakfast table the
journal that tells him of the progress of the war owes something to
some officer.
"Were we to see Verdun?" This was the first problem. I had been warned
two days before that the bombardment was raging and that it was quite
possible that it would be unsafe to go farther. But the news was
reassuring; Verdun was tranquil. "And Petain?" One could not yet say.
Even as we spoke there was a stirring in the crowd, general saluting,
and I caught a glimpse of the commander-in-chief as he went quickly up
the staircase. For the rest we must wait. But not for very long; in a
few minutes there came the welcome word that General Petain would see
us, would see the stray American correspondent.
Since I saw Petain in the little Mairie at Souilly I have seen many
photographs of him, but none in any real measure give the true picture
of the defender of Verdun. He saw us in his office, the bare upstairs
room, two years ago the office of the Mayor of Souilly. Think of the
Selectmen's office in any New England village and the picture will be
accurate: a bare room, a desk, one chair, a telephone, nothing on the
walls but two maps, one of the military zone, one of the actual front
and positions of the Verdun fighting. A bleak room, barely heated by
the most primitive of stoves. From the single window one looked down
on the cheerless street along which lumbered the caravan of autos. On
the pegs against the wall hung the General's hat and coat,
weather-stained, faded, the clothes of a man who worked in all
weathers. Of staff officers, of uniforms, of color there was just
nothing; of war there was hardly a hint.
At the door the commander-in-chief met us, shook hands, and murmured
clearly and slowly, with incisive distinctness, the formal words of
French greeting; he spoke no English. Instantly there was the
suggestion of Kitchener, not of Kitchener as you see him in flesh, but
in photographs, the same coldness, decision. The smile that
accompanied the words of welcome vanished and the face was utterly
motionless, expressionless. You saw a tall, broad-shouldered man, with
every appearance of physical strength, a clear blue eye, looking
straight forward and beyond.
My French companion, M. Le Roux, spoke with Petain. He had just come
from Joffre and he told an interesting circumstance. Petain listened.
He said now and then "yes" or "no." Nothing more. Watching him
narrowly you saw that occasionally his eyes twitched a little, the
single sign of fatigue that the long strain of weeks of responsibility
had brought.
It was hard to believe, looking at this quiet, calm, silent man, that
you were in the presence of the soldier who had won the Battle of
Champagne, the man whom the war had surprised in the last of his
fifties, a Colonel, a teacher of war rather than a soldier, a
professor like Foch.
No one of Napoleon's marshals had commanded as many men as obeyed this
Frenchman, who was as lacking in the distinction of military
circumstance as our own Grant. Napoleon had won all his famous
victories with far fewer troops than were directed from the telephone
on the table yonder.
Every impression of modern war that comes to one actually in touch
with it is a destruction of illusion: this thing is a thing of
mechanism rather than of brilliance; perhaps Petain has led a
regiment, a brigade, or a division to the charge. You knew
instinctively in seeing the man that you would go or come, as he said,
but there was neither dash nor fire, nothing of the suggestion of
elan; rather there was the suggestion of the commander of a great
ocean liner, the man responsible for the lives, this time of hundreds
of thousands, not scores, for the safety of France, not of a ship, but
the man of machinery and the master of the wisdom of the tides and
the weather, not the Ney, or the Murat, not the Napoleon of Arcola.
The impression was of a strong man whose life was a life beaten upon
by storms; the man on the bridge, to keep to the rather ridiculously
inadequate figure, but not by any chance the man on horseback.
My talk, our talk with Petain was the matter of perhaps five minutes.
The time was consumed by the words of M. Le Roux, who spoke very
earnestly urging that more American correspondents be permitted to
visit Verdun, and Petain heard him patiently, but said just nothing.
Once he had greeted us his face settled into that grim expression that
never changed until he smiled his word of good wishes as we left. Yet
I have since found that apart from one circumstance which I shall
mention in a moment I have remembered those minutes most clearly of
all of my Verdun experience. Just as the photograph does not reveal
the face of the man, the word does not describe the sense of
strength, of responsibility, that he gives.
In a childish sort of way, exactly as one thinks of war as a matter of
dash and color and motion, one thinks of the French general as the
leader of a cavalry charge or of a forlorn hope of infantry. And the
French soldier of this war has not been the man of charge or of
dash--not that he has not charged as well as ever in his history, a
little more bravely, perhaps, for machine guns are new and something
worse than other wars have had. What the French soldier has done has
been to stand, to hold, to die not in the onrush but on the spot.
And Petain in some curious way has fixed in my mind the impression of
the new Frenchman, if there be a new one, or perhaps better of the
French soldier of to-day, whether he wear the stars of the general or
undecorated "horizon" blue of the Poilu. The look that I saw in his
eyes, the calm, steady, utterly emotionless looking straight forward,
I saw everywhere at the front and at the back of the front. It
embodied for me an enduring impression of the spirit and the poise of
the French soldier of the latest and most terrible of French
struggles. And I confess that, more than all I saw and heard at the
front and in Paris, the look of this man convinced me that Verdun
would not fall, that France herself would not either weary or weaken.
In Paris, where one may hear anything, there are those that will tell
you that Joffre's work is done and that France waits for the man who
will complete the task; that the strain of the terrible months has
wearied the general who won the Battle of the Marne and saved France.
They will tell you, perhaps, that Petain is the man; they will
certainly tell you that they hope that the man has been found in
Petain. As to the truth of all this I do not pretend to know. I did
not see Joffre, but all that I have read of Joffre suggests that
Petain is of his sort, the same quiet, silent man, with a certain
coldness of the North, a grimness of manner that is lacking in his
chief.
There was a Kitchener legend in Europe, and I do not think it survives
save a little perhaps in corners of England. There was a legend of a
man of ice and of iron, a man who made victory out of human material
as a man makes a wall of mortar and stone, a man to whom his material
was only mortar and stone, even though it were human. This legend has
perished so far as Kitchener is concerned, gone with so much that
England trusted and believed two years ago, but I find myself thinking
now of Petain as we all thought of Kitchener in his great day.
If I were an officer I should not like to come to the defender of
Verdun with the confession of failure. I think I should rather meet
the Bavarians in the first line trenches, but I should like to know
that when I was obeying orders I was carrying out a minor detail of
something Petain had planned; I should expect it to happen, the thing
that he had arranged, and I should feel that those clear, steel-blue
eyes had foreseen all that could occur, foreseen calmly and utterly,
whether it entailed the death of one or a thousand men, of ten
thousand men if necessary, and had willed that it should happen.
I do not believe Napoleon's Old Guard would have followed Petain as
they followed Ney. I cannot fancy him in the Imperial uniform, and
yet, now that war is a thing of machines, of telephones, of indirect
fire and destruction from unseen weapons at remote ranges, now that
the whole manner and circumstance of conflict have changed, it is but
natural that the General should change, too. Patently Petain is of the
new, not the old, but no less patently he was the master of it.
We left the little Mairie, entered our machines and slid out swiftly
for the last miles, climbed and curved over the final hill and
suddenly looked down on a deep, trenchlike valley marching from east
to west and carrying the Paris-Verdun-Metz Railroad, no longer
available for traffic. And as we coasted down the hill we heard the
guns at last, not steadily, but only from time to time, a distant
boom, a faint billowing up of musketry fire. Some three or four miles
straight ahead there were the lines of fire beyond the brown hills
that flanked the valley.
At the bottom of the valley we turned east, moved on for a mile, and
stopped abruptly. The guns were sounding more clearly, and suddenly
there was a sense not of soldiers, but of an army. On one side of the
road a column was coming toward us, a column of men who were leaving
the trenches for a rest, the men who for the recent days had held the
first line. Wearily but steadily they streamed by; the mud of the
trenches covered their tunics; here and there a man had lost his steel
helmet and wore a handkerchief about his head, probably to conceal a
slight wound that but for the helmet had killed him.
These men were smiling as they marched; they carried their full
equipment and it rattled and tinkled; they carried their guns at all
angles, they wore their uniforms in the strangest of disorders; they
seemed almost like miners coming from the depths of the earth rather
than soldiers returning from a decisive battle, from the hell of
modern shell fire.
But it was the line on the other side of the road that held the eye.
Here were the troops that were going toward the fire, toward the
trenches, that were marching to the sound of the guns, and as one saw
them the artillery rumble took on a new distinctness.
Involuntarily I searched the faces of these men as they passed. They
were hardly ten feet from me. Platoon after platoon, company after
company, whole regiments in columns of fours. And seeing the faces
brought an instant shock; they all wore the same calm, steady,
slightly weary expression, but there was in the whole line scarcely a
young man. Here were men of the thirties, not the twenties; men still
in the prime of strength, of health, but the fathers of families, the
men of full manhood.
Almost in a flash the fact came home. This was what all the graves
along the road had meant. This was what the battlefields and the
glories of the twenty months had spelled--France had sent her youth
and it was spent; she was sending her manhood now.
In the line no man smiled and no man straggled; the ranks were closed
up and there were neither commands nor any visible sign of authority.
These men who were marching to the sound of the guns had been there
before. They knew precisely what it meant. Yet you could not but feel
that as they went a little wearily, sadly, they marched willingly.
They would not have it otherwise. Their faces were the faces of men
who had taken the full measure of their own fate.
You had a sense of the loathing, the horror, above all the sadness
that was in their hearts that this thing, this war, this destruction
had to be. They had come back here through all the waste of ruined
villages and shell-torn hillsides; all the men that you saw would not
measure the cost of a single hour of trench fighting if the real
attack began. This these men knew, and the message of the artillery
fire, which was only one of unknown terrors for you, was intelligible
to the utmost to each of them.
And yet with the weariness there was a certain resignation, a certain
patience, a certain sense of comprehending sacrifice that more than
all else is France to-day, the true France. This, and not the empty
forts, not even the busy guns, was the wall that defended France, this
line of men. If it broke there would come thundering down again out
of the north all the tornado of destruction that had turned
Northeastern France into a waste place and wrecked so much of the
world's store of the beautiful and the inspiring.
Somehow you felt that this was in the minds of all these men. They had
willed to die that France might live. They were going to a death that
sounded ever more clearly as they marched. This death had eaten up all
that was young, most of what was young at the least, of France; it
might yet consume France, and so these men marched to the sound of the
guns, not to martial music, not with any suggestion of dash, of
enthusiasm, but quietly, steadily, all with the same look upon their
faces--the look of men who have seen death and are to see it again.
Instinctively I thought of what Kipling had said to me in London:
"Somewhere over there," he had said, "the thing will suddenly grip
your throat and your heart; it will take hold of you as nothing in
your life has ever done or ever will." And I know that I never shall
forget those lines of quiet, patient, middle-aged men marching to the
sound of the guns, leaving at their backs the countless graves that
hold the youth of France, the men who had known the Marne, the Yser,
Champagne, who had known death for nearly two years, night and day,
almost constantly. Yet during the fifteen minutes I watched there was
not one order, not one straggler; there was a sense of the regularity
with which the blood flows through the human arteries in this tide,
and it was the blood of France.
So many people have asked me, I had asked myself, the question before
I went to France: "Are they not weary of it? Will the French not give
up from sheer exhaustion of strength?" I do not think so, now that I
have seen the faces of these hundreds of men as they marched to the
trenches beyond Verdun. France may bleed to death, but I do not think
that while there are men there will be an end of the sacrifice. No
pen or voice can express the horror that these men, that all
Frenchmen, have of this war, of all war, the weariness. They hate it;
you cannot mistake this; but France marches to the frontier in the
spirit that men manned the walls against the barbarians in the other
days; there is no other way; it must be.
Over and over again there has come the invariable answer; it would
have come from scores and hundreds of these men who passed so near me
I could have touched their faded uniforms if I had asked--"It is for
France, for civilization; it must be, for there is no other way; we
shall die, but with us, with our sacrifice, perhaps this thing will
end." You cannot put it in words quite, I do not think even any
Frenchman has quite said it, but you can see it, you can feel it, you
can understand it, when you see a regiment, a brigade, a division of
these men of thirty, some perhaps of forty, going forward to the war
they hate and will never quiet until that which they love is safe or
they and all of their race are swallowed up in the storm that now was
audibly beating beyond the human walls on the nearby hillsides.
Presently we moved again, we slipped through the column, topped the
last incline, shot under the crumbling gate of the Verdun fortress,
and as we entered a shell burst just behind us and the roar drowned
out all else in its sudden and paralyzing crash. It had fallen, so we
learned a little later, just where we had been watching the passing
troops; it had fallen among them and killed. But an hour or two later,
when we repassed the point where it fell, men were still marching by.
Other regiments of men were still marching to the sound of the guns,
and those who had passed were already over the hills and beyond the
river, filing into the trenches in time, so it turned out, to meet the
new attack that came with the later afternoon.
I went to Verdun to see the forts, the city, the hills, and the
topography of a great battle; I went in the hope of describing with a
little of clarity what the operation meant as a military affair. I
say, and I shall hereafter try to describe this. But I shall never be
able to describe this thing which was the true Verdun for me--these
men, their faces, seen as one heard the shell fire and the musketry
rolling, not steadily but intermittently, the men who had marched over
the roads that are lined with graves, through villages that are
destroyed, who had come of their own will and in calm determination
and marched unhurryingly and yet unshrinkingly, the men who were no
longer young, who had left behind them all that men hold dear in life,
home, wives, children, because they knew that there was no other way.
I can only say to all those who have asked me, "What of France?" this
simple thing, that I do not believe the French will ever stop. I do
not believe, as the Germans have said, that French courage is
weakening, that French determination is abating. I do not believe the
Kaiser himself would think this if he had seen these men's faces as
they marched _toward_ his guns. I think he would feel as I felt, as
one must feel, that these men went willingly, hating war with their
whole soul, destitute of passion or anger. I never heard a passionate
word in France, because there had entered into their minds, into the
mind and heart of a whole race, the belief that what was at stake was
the thing that for two thousand years of history had been France.
II
MY TRIP TO VERDUN--A DYING, SHELL-RIDDEN CITY
THE VAUBAN CITADEL, IN THE SHELTER OF WHICH FALLING SHELLS
CANNOT FIND YOU--HOUSES AND BLOCKS THAT ARE VANISHING
HOURLY--"BUT WILLIAM WILL NOT COME"--WAR THAT IS INVISIBLE--A
LUNCHEON UNDERGROUND WITH A TOAST TO AMERICA--THE LAST
COURTESY FROM A GENERAL AND A HOST--NOTHING THAT WAS NOT
BEAUTIFUL
The citadel of Verdun, the bulwark of the eastern frontier in ancient
days, rises out of the meadows of the Meuse with something of the
abruptness of the sky-scraper, and still preserves that aspect which
led the writers of other wars to describe all forts as "frowning." It
was built for Louis XIV by Vauban. He took a solid rock and blasted
out redoubts and battlements. The generations that followed him dug
into the living rock and created within it a whole city of catacombs,
a vast labyrinth of passages and chambers and halls; even an elevator
was added by the latest engineers, so that one can go from floor to
floor, from the level of the meadow to the level of the summit of the
rock, possibly a hundred feet above.
By reason of the fact that many correspondents have visited this
fortress since the war began the world has come to know of the
underground life in Verdun, to think of the city as defended by some
wonderful system of subterranean works; to think of Verdun, in fact,
as a city or citadel that is defensible either by walls or by forts.
But the truth is far different: even the old citadel is but a deserted
cave; its massive walls of natural rock resist the shells as they
would repulse an avalanche; but the guns that were once on its
parapets are gone, the garrison is gone, gone far out on the trench
lines beyond the hills. The Vauban citadel is now a place where bread
is baked, where wounded men are occasionally brought, where live the
soldiers and officers whose important but unromantic mission it is to
keep the roads through the town open, to police the ashes of the city,
to do what remains of the work that once fell to the lot of the civil
authorities.
To glide swiftly to the shelter of this rock from a region in which a
falling shell has served to remind you of the real meaning of Verdun
of the moment, to leave the automobile and plunge into the welcome
obscurity of this cavern--this was perhaps the most comfortable
personal incident of the day. The mere shadow of the rock gave a sense
of security; to penetrate it was to pass to safety.
Some moments of wandering by corridors and stairways into the very
heart of the rock brought us to the quarters of our host, General
Dubois; to his kind attention I was to owe all my good fortune in
seeing his dying city; to him, at the end, I was to owe the ultimate
evidence of courtesy, which I shall never forget.
Unlike Petain or Joffre, General Dubois is a little man, possibly a
trifle older than either. A white-haired, bright-eyed, vigorous
soldier, who made his real fame in Madagascar with Joffre and with
Gallieni, and when the storm broke was sent to Verdun by these men,
who knew him, to do the difficult work that there was to be performed
behind the battle line. There is about General Dubois a suggestion of
the old, as well as the new, of the French general. The private
soldiers to whom he spoke as he went his rounds responded with a "Oui,
mon General" that had a note of affection as well as of discipline; he
was rather as one fancied were the soldiers of the Revolution, of the
Empire, of the Algerian days of Pere Bugeaud whose memory is still
green.
Our salutations made, we returned through the winding corridors to
inspect the bakeries, the water and light plant, the unsuspected
resources of this rock. In one huge cavern we saw the men who provided
30,000 men with bread each day, men working as the stokers in an ocean
steamer labor amidst the glare of fires; we tasted the bread and found
it good, as good as all French bread is, and that means a little
better than all other bread.
Then we slipped back into daylight and wandered along the face of the
fortress. We inspected shell holes of yesterday and of last month; we
inspected them as one inspects the best blossoms in a garden; we
studied the angle at which they dropped; we measured the miniature
avalanche that they brought with them. But always, so far, there was
the subconscious sense of the rock between us and the enemy. I never
before understood the full meaning of that phrase "a rock in a weary
land."
All this was but preliminary, however. Other automobiles arrived; the
General entered one. I followed in the next and we set out to visit
Verdun, to visit the ruins, or, rather, to see not a city that was
dead, but a city that was visibly, hourly dying--a city that was
vanishing by blocks and by squares--but was not yet fallen to the
estate of Ypres or Arras; a city that in corners, where there were
gardens behind the walls, still smiled; a city where some few brave
old buildings still stood four square and solid, but only waiting what
was to come.
Before I visited Verdun I had seen many cities and towns which had
been wholly or partially destroyed, either by shell fire or by the
German soldiers in their great invasion before the Marne. One shelled
town is much like another, and there is no thrill quite like that you
experience when you see the first. But these towns had died nearly two
years ago; indeed, in most the resurrection had begun: little red
roofs were beginning to shine through the brown trees and stark
ruins. Children played again in the squares. It was like the sense you
have when you see an old peasant ploughing among the cross-marked
graves of a hard-fought battle corner--the sense of a beginning as
well as of death and destruction.
But at Verdun it was utterly different. Of life, or people, of
activity beginning again or surviving there was nothing. Some time in
the recent past all the little people who lived in these houses had
put upon wagons what could be quickly moved and had slipped out of
their home, that was already under sentence of death. They were gone
into the distance, and they had left behind them no stragglers. The
city was empty save for a few soldiers who passed rapidly along the
streets, as one marches in a heavy snowstorm.
Yet Verdun was not wholly dead. Shell fire is the most inexplicable of
all things that carry destruction. As you passed down one street the
mark of destruction varied with each house. Here the blast had come
and cut the building squarely; it had carried with it into ruin behind
in the courtyard all that the house contained, but against the wall
the telephone rested undisturbed; pictures--possibly even a looking
glass--hung as the inhabitants had left it, hung as perhaps it had
hung when the last woman had taken her ultimate hurried glance at her
hat before she departed into the outer darkness.
But the next house had lost only the front walls; it stood before you
as if it had been opened for your inspection by the removal of the
facade. Chairs, beds--all the domestic economy of the house--sagged
visibly outward toward the street, or stood still firm, but open to
the four winds. It was as if the scene were prepared for a stage and
you sat before the footlights looking into the interior. Again, the
next house and that beyond were utterly gone--side walls, front walls,
everything swallowed up and vanished--the iron work twisted into
heaps, the stone work crumbled to dust; the whole mass of ruin still
smoked, for it was a shell of yesterday that had done this work.
Down on the Riviera, where the mistral blows--all the pine trees lean
away from the invariable track of this storm wind--you have the sense,
even in the summer months, of a whole countryside bent by the gales.
In the same fashion you felt in Verdun, felt rather than saw, a whole
town not bent, but crumbled, crushed--and the line of fall was always
apparent; you could tell the direction from which each storm of shells
had come, you could almost feel that the storm was but suspended, not
over, that at any moment it might begin again.
Yet even in the midst of destruction there were enclaves of unshaken
structures. On the Rue Mazel, "Main Street," the chief clothing store
rose immune amid ashes on all sides. Its huge plate-glass window was
not even cracked. And behind the window a little mannikin, one of the
familiar images that wear clothes to tempt the purchaser, stood erect.
A French soldier had crept in and raised the stiff arm of the mannikin
to the salute, pushed back the hat to a rakish angle. The mannikin
seemed alive and more than alive, the embodiment of the spirit of the
place. Facing northward toward the German guns it seemed to respond to
them with a "_morituri salutamus_." "The last civilian in Verdun," the
soldiers called him, but his manner was rather that of the Poilu.
We crossed the river and the canal and stopped by the ruin of what had
once been a big factory or warehouse. We crawled through an open
shell-made breach in the brick wall and stood in the interior. The
ashes were still hot, and in corners there were smoking fires. Two
days ago, at just this time, your guides told you, men had been
working here; making bread, I think. At the same time we had come to
the ruins--the same time of day, that is--the Germans had dropped a
half-dozen incendiary shells into the building and it had burned in
ten minutes. Most of the men who had been there then were still there,
under the smoking mass of wreckage; the smell of burned human flesh
was in the air.