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 quit until that which they love is safe or
they and all their race are swallowed up.... Under the crumbling gate
of the Verdun fortress ... 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....
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 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 has been
France.