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 Côte 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 Pétain was now defending Verdun against a still
more terrible attack.
And in France to-day one speaks only of Verdun and Pétain. 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 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 Pétain, the center 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, Pétain 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 Pétain 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 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 Pétain, 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....