My road to Verdun ran through the Elysée 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.
Poincaré. 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 Frenchmen 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 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.