floor there were stretched four rolls of white cloth. The General and
those with him took off their hats as they entered. He opened one of
the packages and you saw only a charred black mass, something that
looked like a half-burned log taken from the fireplace. But two days
ago it had been a man, and the metal disk of identification had
already been found and had served to disclose the victim's name. These
were the first bodies that had been removed from the ruins.
Taking our cars again we drove back and stopped before the Mairie, and
passing under the arch entered the courtyard. The building had fared
better than most, but there were many shell marks. In the courtyard
were four guns. Forty-six years before another German army had come
down from the North, another whirlwind of artillery had struck the
town and laid it in ashes, but even under the ashes the town had held
out for three weeks. Afterward the Republic of France had given these
guns to the people of Verdun in recognition of their heroism.
In the courtyard I was presented to a man wearing the uniform and
helmet of a fireman. He was the chief of the Verdun fire department.
His mission, his perilous duty, it was to help extinguish the fires
that flamed up after every shell. In all my life I have never seen a
man at once so crushed and so patently courageous. He was not young,
but his blue Lorraine eyes were still clear. Yet he looked at you, he
looked out upon the world with undisguised amazement. For a generation
his business had been to fight fires. He had protected his little town
from conflagrations that might sometimes, perhaps once, possibly
twice, have risen to the dignity of a "three alarm." For the rest he
had dealt with blazes.
Now out of the skies and the darkness and out of the daylight, too,
fire had descended upon his town. Under an avalanche of incendiary
shells, under a landslide of fire, his city was melting visibly into
ashes. He had lived fire and dreamed fire for half a century, but now
the world had turned to fire--his world--and he looked out upon it in
dazed wonder. He could no longer fight this fire, restrain it, conquer
it; he could only go out under the bursting shells and strive to
minimize by some fraction the destruction; but it was only child's
play, this work of his which had been a man's business. And there was
no mistaking the fact that this world was now too much for him. He was
a brave man; they told me of things he had done; but his little cosmos
had gone to chaos utterly.
We entered our cars again and went to another quarter of the city.
Everywhere were ashes and ruin, but everywhere the sense of a
destruction that was progressive, not complete: it still marched. It
was as Arras had been, they told me, before the last wall had tumbled
and the Artois capital had become nothing but a memory. We climbed the
slope toward the cathedral and stopped in a little square still
unscathed, the Place d'Armes, the most historic acre of the town.
After a moment I realized what my friends were telling me. It was in
this square that the Crown Prince was to receive the surrender of the
town. Along the road we had climbed he was to lead his victorious army
through the town and out the Porte de France beyond. In this square
the Kaiser was to stand and review the army, to greet his victorious
son. The scene as it had been arranged was almost rehearsed for you in
the gestures of the French officers.
"But William has not come," they said, "and he will not come now."
This last was not spoken as a boast, but as a faith, a conviction.
Still climbing we came to the cathedral. It is seated on the very top
pinnacle of the rock of Verdun, suggesting the French cities of
Provence. Its two towers, severe and lacking ornamentation, are the
landmarks of the countryside for miles around. When I came back to
America I read the story of an American correspondent whom the Germans
had brought down from Berlin to see the destruction of Verdun. They
had brought him to the edge of the hills and then thrown some
incendiary shells into the town, the very shells that killed the men
whose bodies I had seen. The black smoke and flames rushed up around
these towers and then the Germans brought the correspondent over the
hills and showed him the destruction of Verdun. He described it
vividly and concluded that the condition of the town must be
desperate.
They are a wonderful people, these Germans, in their stage management.
Of course this was precisely the thing that they desired that he
should feel. They had sent their shells at the right moment, the whole
performance had gone off like clockwork. Those poor blackened masses
of humanity in the house below were the cost that was represented in
the performance. And since there is much still left to burn in Verdun,
the Germans may repeat this thing whenever they desire.
But somewhere three or four miles from here, and between Verdun and
the Germans, are many thousands of Frenchmen, with guns and cannon,
and hearts of even finer metal. They cannot even know that Verdun is
being shelled or is burning, and if it burns to ultimate ashes it will
not affect them or their lines. This is the fallacy of all the talk of
the destruction of Verdun city and the desperate condition of its
defenders. The army left Verdun for the hills when the war began; the
people left when the present drive began in February. Even the dogs
and cats, which were seen by correspondents in earlier visits, have
been rescued and sent away. Verdun is dead, it is almost as dead as
are Arras and Ypres; but neither of these towns after a year and a
half bombardment has fallen.
The correspondent who was taken up on a hill by the Germans to see
Verdun burn, after it had been carefully set on fire by shell fire,
was discovered by French gunners and shelled. He went away taking with
him an impression of a doomed city. This picture was duly transmitted
to America. But two days later, when I visited the city, there was no
evidence of desperation, because there was no one left to be
desperate. Doubtless on occasion we shall have many more descriptions
of the destruction of this town, descriptions meant to impress
Americans or encourage Germans. The material for such fires is not
exhausted. The cathedral on the top of the hill is hardly shell-marked
at all, and it will make a famous display when it is fired as was
Rheims, as were the churches of Champagne and Artois. But there is
something novel in the thought of a city burned, not to make a Roman
or even German holiday, but burned to make the world believe that the
Battle of Verdun had been a German victory.
For two hours we wandered about the town exploring and estimating the
effect of heavy gunfire, for the Germans are too far from the city to
use anything but heavy guns effectively. The impressions of such a
visit are too numerous to recall. I shall mention but one more. Behind
the cathedral are cloisters that the guide books mention; they inclose
a courtyard that was once decorated with statues of saints. By some
accident or miracle--there are always miracles in shelled towns--one
of these images, perhaps that of the Madonna, has been lifted from its
pedestal and thrown into the branches of a tree, which seems almost to
hold it with outstretched arms.
At length we left the town, going out by the Porte de France, which
cuts the old Vauban ramparts, now as deserted as those of Paris,
ramparts that had been covered with trees and were now strewn with the
debris of the trees that had fallen under the shell fire. In all this
time not a shell had fallen in Verdun; it was the first completely
tranquil morning in weeks; but there was always the sense of impending
destruction, there was always the sense of the approaching shell.
There was an odd subconscious curiosity, and something more than
curiosity, about the mental processes of some men, not far away, who
were beside guns pointed toward you, guns which yesterday or the day
before had sent their destruction to the very spot where you stood.
Yet, oddly enough, in the town there was a wholly absurd sense of
security, derived from the fact that there were still buildings
between you and those guns. You saw that the buildings went to dust
and ashes whenever the guns were fired; you saw that each explosion
might turn a city block into ashes, and yet you were glad of the
buildings and there was reassurance in their shadows. Now we travelled
in the open country; we began to climb across the face of a bare hill,
and it was the face that fronted the Germans.
Presently the General's car stuck in the mud and we halted, for a
minute perhaps; then we went on; we passed a dead horse lying in the
road, then of a sudden came that same terrible grinding, metallic
crash. I have never seen any description of a heavy shell explosion
that fitted it. Behind us we could see the black smoke rising from the
ground in a suburb through which we had just come. I saw three
explosions. A moment later we were at the gate of Fort de la Chaume,
and we were warned not to stop, but to hasten in, for the Germans,
whenever they see cars at this point, suspect that Joffre has arrived,
or President Poincare, and act accordingly. We did not delay.
Fort de la Chaume is one of the many fortifications built since the
Franco-Prussian War and intended to defend the city. Like all the
rest, it ceased to have value when the German artillery had shown at
Liege and at Namur that it was the master of the fort. Then the French
left their forts and went out to trenches beyond and took with them
the heavy guns that the fort once boasted. To-day Fort de la Chaume is
just an empty shell, as empty as the old Vauban citadel in the valley
below. And what is true of this fort is true of all the other forts of
that famous fortress of Verdun, which is no longer a fortress, but a
sector in the trench line that runs from the North Sea to Switzerland.
From the walls of the fort staff officers showed me the surrounding
country. I looked down on the city of Verdun, hiding under the shadow
of its cathedral. I looked across the level Meuse Valley, with its
little river; I studied the wall of hills beyond. Somewhere in the
tangle on the horizon was Douaumont, which the Germans held. Down the
valley of the river in the haze was the town of Bras, which was
French; beyond it the village of Vachereauville, which was German.
Beyond the hills in the centre of the picture, but hidden by them,
were Le Mort Homme and Hill 304.
Verdun is like a lump of sugar in a finger bowl, and I was standing on
the rim. It seemed utterly impossible that any one should even think
of this town as a fortress or count its ashes as of meaning in the
conflict.
Somewhere in the background a French battery of heavy guns was firing,
and the sound was clear; but it did not suggest war, rather a blasting
operation. The German guns were still again. There was a faint
billowing roll of gunfire across the river toward Douaumont, but very
faint. As for trenches, soldiers, evidences of battle, they did not
exist. I thought of Ralph Pulitzer's vivid story of riding to the
Rheims front in a military aeroplane and seeing, of war, just
nothing.
The geography of the Verdun country unrolled before us with absolute
clarity; the whole relation of hills and river and railroads was
unmistakable. But despite the faint sound of musketry, the occasional
roar of a French gun, I might have been in the Berkshires looking down
on the Housatonic. Six miles to the north around Le Mort Homme that
battle which has not stopped for two months was still going on. Around
Douaumont the overture was just starting, the overture to a stiff
fight in the afternoon, but of all the circumstances of battle that
one has read of, that one still vaguely expects to see, there was not
a sign. If it suited their fancy the Germans could turn the hill on
which I stood into a crater of ruin, as they did with Fort Loncin at
Liege. We were well within range, easy range; we lived because they
had no object to serve by such shooting, but we were without even a
hint of their whereabouts.
I have already described the military geography of Verdun. I shall not
attempt to repeat it here, but it is the invisibility of warfare,
whether examined from the earth or the air, which impresses the
civilian. If you go to the trenches you creep through tunnels and
cavities until you are permitted to peer through a peephole, and you
see yellow dirt some yards away. You may hear bullets over your head,
you may hear shells passing, but what you see is a hillside with some
slashings. That is the enemy. If you go to an observation post back of
the trenches, then you will see a whole range of country, but not even
the trenches of your own side.
From the Grand Mont east of Nancy I watched some French batteries
shell the German line. I didn't see the French guns, I didn't see the
German trenches, I didn't see the French line. I did see some black
smoke rising a little above the underbrush, and I was told that the
shells were striking behind the German lines and that the gunners were
searching for a German battery. But I might as well have been
observing a gang of Italians at blasting operations in the Montclair
Mountains. And the officer with me said: "Our children are just
amusing themselves."
From Fort de la Chaume we rode back to the citadel; and there I was
the guest of the General and the officers of the town garrison; their
guest because I was an American who came to see their town. I shall
always remember that luncheon down in the very depths of this rock in
a dimly lighted room. I sat at the General's right, and all around me
were the men whose day's work it was to keep the roads open, the
machinery running in the shell-cursed city. Every time they went out
into daylight they knew that they might not return. For two months the
storm had beaten about this rock, it had written its mark upon all
these faces, and yet it had neither extinguished the light nor the
laughter; the sense of strength and of calmness was inescapable, and
never have I known such charming, such thoughtful hosts.
When the champagne came the old General rose and made me a little
speech. He spoke in English, with absolute correctness, but as one who
spoke it with difficulty. He welcomed me as an American to Verdun, he
thanked me for coming, he raised his glass to drink to my country and
the hope that in the right time she would be standing with France--in
the cause of civilization. Always in his heart, in his thought, in his
speech, the Frenchman is thinking of that cause of civilization;
always this is what the terrible conflict that is eating up all France
means to him.
Afterward we went out of this cavern into daylight, and the officers
came and shook hands with me and said good-bye. One does not say _au
revoir_ at the front; one says _bonne chance_--"good luck; it may and
it may not--we hope not." We entered our cars and were about to start,
when suddenly, with a blinding, stunning crash, a whole salvo landed
in the meadow just beyond the road, we could not see where, because
some houses hid the field. It was the most suddenly appalling crash I
have ever heard.
Instantly the General ordered our drivers to halt. He explained that
it might be the beginning of a bombardment or only a single trial, a
detail in the intermittent firing to cut the road that we were to
take. We sat waiting for several moments and no more shots came. Then
the General turned and gave an order to his car to follow, bade our
drivers go fast, and climbed into my car and sat down. The wandering
American correspondent was his guest. He could not protect him from
the shell fire. He could not prevent it. But he could share the
danger. He could share the risk, and so he rode with me the mile until
we passed beyond the danger zone. There he gave me another _bonne
chance_ and left me, went back to his shell-cursed town with its ruins
and its agonies.
I hope I shall see General Dubois again. I hope it will be on the day
when he is made Governor of Strassburg.
As we left Verdun the firing was increasing; it was rolling up like a
rising gale; the infantry fire was becoming pronounced; the Germans
were beginning an attack upon Le Mort Homme. Just before sunset we
passed through the Argonne Forest and came out beyond. On a hill to
the north against the sky the monument of Valmy stood out in clear
relief, marking the hill where Kellerman had turned back another
Prussian army. Then we slipped down into the Plain of Chalons, where
other Frenchmen had met and conquered Attila. At dark we halted in
Montmirail, where Napoleon won his last victory before his empire
fell. The sound of the guns we had left behind was still in our ears
and the meaning of these names in our minds. Presently my French
companion said to me: "It is a long time, isn't it?" He meant all the
years since the first storm came out of the north, and I think the
same thought is in every Frenchman's mind. Then he told me his story.
"I had two boys," he said; "one was taken from me years ago in an
accident; he was killed and it was terrible. But the other I gave.
"He was shot, my last boy, up near Verdun, in the beginning of the
war. He did not die at once and I went to him. For twenty days I sat
beside him in a cellar waiting for him to die. I bought the last
coffin in the village, that he might be buried in it, and kept it
under my bed. We talked many times before he died, and he told me all
he knew of the fight, of the men about him and how they fell.
"My name is finished, but I say to you now that in all that experience
there was nothing that was not beautiful." And as far as I can analyze
or put in words the impression that I have brought away from France,
from the ruin and the suffering and the destruction, I think it is
expressed in those words. I have seen nothing that was not beautiful,
too, because through all the spirit of France shone clear and bright.
III
BATTLE OF VERDUN ANOTHER GETTYSBURG
FAILURE OF CROWN PRINCE LIKENED BY FRENCH TO "HIGH TIDE" OF
CONFEDERACY
"The parallel between Gettysburg in your Civil War and Verdun in the
present contest is unmistakable and striking." This was said to me by
General Delacroix, one of Joffre's predecessors as chief of the French
General Staff and the distinguished military critic of the Paris
_Temps_ now that because of age he has passed to the retired list.
What General Delacroix meant was patent and must have already
impressed many Americans. Our own Gettysburg was the final bid for
decision of a South which had long been victorious on the battlefield,
which still possessed the armies that seemed the better organized and
the generals whose campaigns had been wonderfully successful. But it
was the bid for decision of a Confederacy which was outnumbered in
men, in resources, in the ultimate powers of endurance, and was
already beginning to feel the growing pinch both in numbers and
credit.
At Gettysburg Lee made his final effort to destroy the army which he
had frequently defeated but never eliminated. Victory meant the fall
of Washington, the coming of despair to the North, an end of the Civil
War, which would bring independence and the prize for which they had
contended to the Confederates. And Lee failed at Gettysburg, not as
Napoleon failed at Waterloo or as MacMahon failed at Sedan, but he
failed, and his failure was the beginning of the end. The victory of
Gettysburg put new heart, new assurance into the North; it broke the
long illusion of an invincible Confederacy; it gave to Europe, to
London, and to Paris, even more promptly than to Washington, the
unmistakable message that the North was bound to win the Civil War.
I mean in a moment to discuss the military aspects of this conflict
about the Lorraine fortress, but before the military it is essential
to grasp the moral consequences of Verdun to France, to the Allies, to
Germany. Not since the Marne, not even then--because it was only after
a long delay that France really knew what had happened in this
struggle--has anything occurred that has so profoundly, so
indescribably, heartened the French people as has the victory at
Verdun. It is not too much to say that the victory has been the most
immediately inspiring thing in French national life since the disaster
at Sedan and that it has roused national confidence, hope, faith, as
nothing else has since the present conflict began.
In this sense rather than in the military sense Verdun was a decisive
battle and its consequences of far-reaching character. France as a
whole, from the moment when the attack began, understood the issue;
the battle was fought in the open and the whole nation watched the
communiques day by day. It was accepted as a terrible if not a final
test, and no Frenchman fails to recognize in all that he says the
strength, the power, the military skill of Germany.
And when the advance was checked, when after the first two weeks the
battle flickered out as did the French offensive in Champagne and the
former German drive about Ypres a year ago, France, which had held her
breath and waited, hoped, read in the results at Verdun the promise of
ultimate victory, felt that all that Germany had, all that she could
produce, had been put to the test and had failed to accomplish the
result for which Germany had striven--or any portion thereof.
War is something beyond armies and tactics, beyond strategy and even
military genius, and the real meaning of Verdun is not to be found in
lines held or lost, not to be found even in the ashes of the old town
that France and not Germany holds. It is to be found in the spirit of
France, now that the great trial is over and the lines have held.
It was Germany and not France that raised the issue of Verdun. The
Germans believed, and all their published statements show this, that
France was weary, disheartened, ready to quit, on fair terms. They
believed that there was needed only a shining victory, a great moral
demonstration of German strength to accomplish the end--to bring
victorious peace. In this I think, and all with whom I talked in
France felt, that the Germans were wrong, that France would have
endured defeat and gone on. But conversely, the Germans knew, must
have known, that to try and to fail was to rouse the whole heart of
France, to destroy any pessimism, and this is precisely what the
failure has done.
The battle for Verdun was a battle for moral rather than military
values, and the moral victory remains with the French. It was a
deliberate and calculated effort to break the spirit of France, and it
roused the spirit of France as perhaps nothing has raised the spirit
of this people since Valmy, where other Frenchmen met and checked
another German invasion, brought to a halt the army of Frederick the
Great, which still preserved the prestige of its great captain who was
dead, turned it back along the road that was presently to end at Jena.
Beside the moral value of Verdun the military is just nothing. To
appreciate its meaning you must understand what it has meant to the
French, and you must understand it by recalling what Gettysburg meant
to the North, invaded as is France, defeated at half a dozen struggles
in Virginia as France has been defeated in the past months of this
war. Gettysburg was and remains the decisive battle of our Civil War,
although the conflict lasted for nearly two years more. For France
Verdun is exactly the same thing. Having accepted the moral likeness,
you may find much that is instructive and suggestive in the military,
but this is of relatively minor importance.
Now, on the military side it is necessary to know first of all that
when the Germans began their gigantic attack upon Verdun the French
high command decided not to defend the city. Joffre and those who with
him direct the French armies were agreed that the city of Verdun was
without military value comparable with the cost of defending it, and
that the wisest and best thing to do was to draw back the lines to the
hills above the city and west of the Meuse. Had their will prevailed
there would have been no real battle at Verdun and the Germans would
long ago have occupied the ashes of the town.
Joffre's view was easily explicable, and it was hardly possible to
quarrel with the military judgment it discloses. To the world Verdun
is a great fortress, a second Gibraltar, encircled by great forts,
furnished with huge guns, the gateway to Paris and the key to the
French eastern frontier. And this is just what Verdun was until the
coming of the present war, when the German and Austrian siege guns
levelled the forts of Antwerp, of Maubeuge, of Liege. But after that
Verdun ceased to be anything, because all fortresses lost their value
with the revelation that they had failed to keep pace with the gun.