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
traveling 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.