Old Glory and Verdun, and other stories

In the beginning we did not intend to go to Verdun. We did not dream that it was even within the bright realms of possibility. At the moment—a supremely painful and suspense-filled moment, fraught with danger to France and the Allied world—Verdun belonged strictly to the forbidden zone. Forbidden to all outsiders, men and women, to all civilians and civilian affairs; forbidden, indeed, to all the world save those grim horizon-blue-clad veterans who were rushing northward by trainloads, together with heavy effectives.

Permission had been stopped. Stopped also the parcels to the Front. It was not the hour for the manifestation of woman or love or the transmission of tokens of affection. It was the hour for men and arms. Paris, a military camp shelled in the day by long-range guns and bombed in the night by Gothas, was locked to the north with a staunch lock, and the Grand Quartier General held the key. You could come in if you chanced to be caught up there when the storm broke, but you could not get out again. For it was the closing week of March, 1918. The long-awaited, much-heralded offensive had arrived. For months it had been the first word in the mouths of privates, officers, statesmen, editors—the entire civilized world. When, where, how—some one of those three aspects of the universal question cropped up in every conversation in the course of half an hour.

Well, now we knew the partial answer to those three questions. For the shadow of the menace of the long months was beginning to realize itself; it had become flesh and dwelt among us, a fabulous red monster of carnage and slaughter up there in the north.

When the Germans struck their first sledge-hammer blow and the Fifth British Army recoiled before the blow the entire line from north to south felt the thrill of the shock. Paris, the goal of the enemy, felt it, too, and there went up from the city a kind of big sigh, a long exhalation, which was almost a breath of relief. At any rate the long suspense was past. At the end of the third or fourth day refugees began to pour in by thousands, a poor, tragic, dazed procession, twice bereft of their scanty possessions. They brought with them wild, incoherent, garbled accounts of the terrible sanguinary losses on both sides.

Paris, perhaps all France, possesses the feminine temperament. In hours of ease she is willful, coy and hard to please—especially with strangers; she is charming, baffling, impatient, outspoken over the foibles of her best friends and allies, keenly aware of the ridiculous, gay with a spice of maliciousness; her caricatures, often grossly unjust, are masterpieces of fine satirical wit. But in the hour of trial she gathers herself together with a courage, a poise and a profound tenderness for those of her people who have been stricken that are exceedingly good to see.

And that is what happened now. Paris found immediate food and shelter for the fugitives; printed proclamations that appeared all over the city, bidding the citizens to remain steadfast and unshaken in their faith of victory and put no credence in lying rumors; and at the same time, as the Big Berthas continued their vehement spitting at intervals, and the air raids harried and took toll of the city’s innocent poor—for it is chiefly the workers, the servants, the little people of Paris living in the top stories up under the roofs who had to descend each night to the caves at the call of the siren—the newspapers urged all families who could afford it, all those who had children or old or sick to remove themselves out of the new zone of danger to the tranquillity of the country. And thousands followed the wise advice. Hôtels de luxe were emptied inside of a week. Shopkeepers and workers who could manage to leave ordained a spring holiday and departed to their relatives in the provinces. It was an exodus. There were left the big wide empty places of Paris, filled with a gray-blue gossamer mist soft as chiffon, which wrapped all the city in an enchanted web; the tranquil garden walks deserted by children, vivid with rhododendrons and the drifting pink and white petals of chestnut blooms; and the good solid block of reliable Paris citizens, neither frightened nor fugitive, who had lived through the Marne and the Mons and the Champagne and the Verdun attacks, and who read the disquieting communiqués with composed faces and went about their affairs as usual.

Practically no troops are now routed through the capital, but occasionally one saw small detachments of fantassins with their heavy marching equipment filing through the empty squares. They did not look warlike, those poilus, veterans of four years, when they appeared in the streets of Paris. They marched slowly, laboriously, one foot lagging after the other, shoulders bent beneath the weight of the kit, their eyes fixed on the ground. The horizon-blue uniforms were faded and patched and their clumsy storm coats with the skirts buttoned back gave them an indescribably pathetic air. Seen thus at twilight and melting into the dusky background there was something about these somber, slow-plodding, burdened figures that hurt the heart. One felt an overwhelming tenderness, a pity for these brave little men. And yet these were the selfsame poilus who a few days later stemmed the furious German tide—and they sang as they went into battle. And nearly four years they sang!

It would not be untrue to say that underneath her courageous calm Paris did not feel the cruel strain of that first uncertain week of the offensive. The strain of the situation was brought home to me, waiting for my passes, by several incidents. Naomie, the trim little femme de chambre, pretty as a pink camellia, whose voice has the soft deep throb of a cello, went about with a face as pale as the linen she bore on her arm. And as she made the bed and swept and aired the room she wept, quietly, steadily, the silvery globules stealing silently one by one down her cheeks. When they obstructed her vision she stopped, brushed them away methodically and went on. My pillow was wet with Naomie’s tears.

“I am ashamed, mademoiselle; I ask pardon to be like this,” she murmured one morning when I had caught her outright drying her eyes. “One must be strong these days. But my husband, he has been transferred up north on the British line. And now I have not heard from him, here it is over a week. Before he always sent me a little word each day. He never failed—some little word each day.” She plaited the counterpane with unseeing eyes as she muttered: “Ten days! Yes, it is that—just. And not one little word. But one must be strong, n’est-ce pas, mademoiselle?”

The next disturbing thing that happened was the news that B—— had deserted. His wife was my friend. B—— was a Frenchman in a famous fighting regiment, sensitive, fine-strung, none too strong, who had been in the trenches since 1914. What evil of fear, irritation, revolt or sheer brain collapse led to the decision we shall never know. But one day he threw down his gas mask in the midst of an attack and walked out of the trenches. His battalion had been incessantly shelled for weeks. In the front-line trenches they were hammered by the guns. In the back areas, en repos, they caught the bombs. No sleep in either place. This kept up week after week. And suddenly, like an elephant, B—— had “gone bad.”

He appeared suddenly in Paris at a time when not a single Frenchman was on leave; and he walked the boulevards with the number of that famous fighting regiment on the collar of his tunic blazing forth for all the world to see. It was a miracle he was not instantly caught. As it was he was a prisoner; for he had no papers, and therefore he could not send a telegram or register at a hotel or take a train or leave the city. A friend telegraphed for B——’s wife, who was in the country, sending a noncommittal wire so as not to alarm B——’s mother, an ardent patriot, who would have instantly handed over her recreant son to the police. The wife arrived. To her B—— declared his intention of joining the Foreign Legion. That meant that his brain flare or momentary cowardice had passed.

Anyone may join the Foreign Legion. There no embarrassing questions are asked. They take on all comers, and then pitch them headlong into the very hottest hell of the battle. Accordingly B——, knowing that if he could once win to their offices he would be safe from arrest, stole out from his doorway one morning and, avoiding officers and gendarmes, gained the recruiting bureau.

But here an unexpected blow fell. The recruiting end of the bureau had been shifted to Lyons. But how to get there! He could not ride in a train or a public conveyance. He could not dine openly in a restaurant or sleep in a hotel. And to be seen tramping south in this crisis meant certain arrest and death. However, there was nothing for it but to make the attempt—to walk by night and lie hidden in the day. He started forth—and no word has been heard of him since.

In time the news of his desertion leaked out. And the gendarme on the beat took it upon himself to rebuke Madame B—— for having such a villain husband. He is a fat, greasy, bald-headed little man, this gendarme, who sits long over his grenadine, and has never been nearer the Front than the city fortifications.

Madame B flew at him like a fury.

“Have you ever been out there—fat embusqué?” she shrilled, shaking her finger under his nose. “Have you fought four years in that hell? Been wounded five times, had fever, rheumatism, suffered from shell shock, been made deaf from bombardment, had your nerves shattered so that you never sleep? Is your hair turned gray at twenty-five years? Oh, my God! No? Then keep your mouth shut! ’Tis not for such as you to speak of this war! ’Tis for those who have endured.”

It was this courage made human by the private griefs of the people of France, who after four weary, crucifying years were still bearing the cross, filling the breach, saving the day, and saving it with a superb dash despite individual heartbreaks, that filled my mind as, our passes obtained, we journeyed northward. It seemed to me that perhaps the month of March, 1918, was to be made memorable by the fact that at that particular time America began definitely to shift to her own young shoulders the weight of the agonizing burden France had borne so long. For this reason the opening offensive marked a transition period, for theretofore we had held only quiet sectors.

But it was not the fact of the shifting of the outward burden that interested me so much as to discover if possible whether that shift was to extend also to the spirit—whether the soul of France, the soul of her soldiers, her poilus, was to pass into the soul of this new, strong, eager young Army. For the quality that distinguishes the poilu from his enemies and from his allies alike is not brute force, or body fitness, or stubborn pride, or stiff resistance, or obedience, or cohesion, or physical valor—but sheer spiritual stamina. He has an invincible come-back. His soul can’t be beat. The French, who are an extremely clannish race, say that they feel a closer bond with Americans than with any other people on earth. This is not mere diplomatic balder-dash. They declare that aside from possessing the same democratic ideals, the same passion for scientific research, there is a decided similarity of temperament. In both peoples there are the same swiftness of perception, the same suppleness of mind, lightness of wit and comradeliness toward life and toward each other which have made France like one great family. And now that the two nations in this offensive are fighting side by side and brigade by brigade, the French in their speeches and editorials and communiqués have announced that the spiritual metal of the two armies is the same; that the spontaneous, unquenchable, “En avant! Toujours en avant!” quality of attack, attack, and again attack of the French poilu is also the salient characteristic of the newcomers. It was this particular declaration that put a keener edge on my observations during my journey. I was on the lookout for signs in our men of the conquering will of the poilu.

It is not germane to the subject to describe in detail that eight-day motor trip through the heart of the American war zone in France. We covered each day hundreds of kilometers of the lovely rolling meadow and hill country of Lorraine—orchards, fields and woods radiant in shimmering green, clothed in primal light of leaf. We passed scores of red-tiled hamlets, each the identical facsimile of the other, with steaming manure heaps adorning the front yards of prominent citizens, hens and bouncing babies scratching therein, and toothless old dames sitting on the doorsteps peering out upon the world with faded eyes.

We stopped at numerous American base-hospital centers, some in stone cantonments, formerly army barracks turned over by the French; some former hotel resorts; and still others brand-new frame buildings, entire villages with duck-board streets. We motored through endless series of repos stations, one following hard upon another like beads on a string, of English, American, French, Italian, Portuguese, Annamite and Senegalese troops. At the close of the day in the rosy smolder of the afterglow we hunted aviation camps in the advanced war zone, and found the vast aërodromes so shrewdly camouflaged that we could scarcely discern them from the dappled landscape. We passed through the center where is situated the training school for army officers, a beautiful old fortressed town set like a coronet high on a wooded hill. We stayed the night at Army Headquarters in a hotel packed with the hierarchy of the General Staff, where automobiles with flags drew up before the door and mackintoshed generals beribboned and bestarred strode in out of the lashing rain.

Our quest took us from the drowsy, tranquil rear of the war zone clear up to the Luneville sector beyond Toul, where we witnessed two air fights in the course of one morning. It was the portion of France given over to the American effort. We traversed and crisscrossed it back and forth and from end to end. And everywhere we met the same phenomenon—the lithe, clean-limbed, khaki-clad American soldier. The land was alive with him! Several months previously I had been over this same territory, and then even a Red Cross man was a rare animal which the natives paused to regard. Now, after eight months, the entire countryside hummed and buzzed like a vast beehive. It was the visible result before our eyes of all the sweat and labor and strain of a mighty nation intent on a single goal—to transport men to France.

Well, here were the men, hundreds of thousands of them, scattered over a vast camp ground. We met battalions of them swinging along the roads in step and singing a lively marching air. We came across them in sunny fields prodding dummy Huns with bayonets; we passed groups of them in remote and peaceful valleys picking off targets at rifle ranges. We met them at lonely crossroads, together with a French comrade, acting as military police. They gave us the salute that is known as the Pershing—bringing the hand smartly up to the forage cap in an abrupt little gesture full of style. And they invariably followed the salute with an infectious aftergrin. The salute was Pershing’s. The grin was all their own. We saw them tearing along roads at a breakneck clip in those snorting demons of motor-cycles called “wife-killers.” We overtook them driving camions and transports and mule teams.

Later we met an entire division on the move—artillery, infantry, ammunition and cook wagons—a long strung-out procession against the drab sky line. They were bound up there, they vaguely told us. But we knew and they knew that they were going to participate in a struggle compared to which life in the drowsy Toul sector was as but a holiday fête. We glimpsed them driving powerful American locomotives, beside which the diminutive French engines seemed like toys that one could pick up in the palm of the hand—and they leaned far out of their cabooses to cheer. We saw them packed like herrings in the dingy low-ceiled dining-rooms of provincial towns, drinking their pinard diluted with water in true poilu style, then fetching out their makings and rolling a smoke in true American style. We saw them in camp, en repos, in hospital, on the march.

There is a pageantry about war when one sits back thus and views its effects from the outside—a kind of large, glittering nobility which thrills and quickens the blood despite oneself—until one sees the wrecks. And in the hospitals we began to get the wrecks. In ——, a famous old town turned into a hospital center, we stopped to look up some missing men. The other members of the party went to visit the wards, but I wandered about the streets and presently came upon a squad of privates in wrinkled, freshly disinfected uniforms, the tunics skin-tight, revealing the owners’ slim waists and finely swelling shoulder muscles. But they had a pale washed-out look, as if they themselves had undergone the ordeal of disinfection along with their uniforms. A lieutenant was calling the roll.

Aside from the line-up a few paces stood a husky private with a sulky lowering face. He had crowded his battered sombrero down over his bloodshot eyes and was scowling like a movie pirate. “What’s happening to those men?” I asked, nodding at the squad.

“They’ve been gassed and now they’re declared O. K. and are going back to the Front.”

He spoke in a curious broken rasping whisper, which I recognized.

“You’ve been gassed, too?” I hazarded.

“Yes,” he croaked. “And I’m just as well as any fellow in that gang. We all got it at the same time. But the doc, when he heard my voice, wouldn’t let me go. But damn it all, a guy don’t fight with his voice!”

“He’s playing favorites, that doc,” whispered another lank, humorous-eyed young giant strolling up, his peaked forage cap drawn low so as to shelter, if possible, those bloodshot eyes. “Wouldn’t let me out, either! Durn the durned docs, I say!”

“But you were burned as well as gassed,” I objected, for the entire lower part of his face and neck was an angry red peeling blister. “What kind of gas was it?” I demanded.

“Mustard. Burns your insides out if you get a bad case. I tell you I’ve had enough to last me one life. No more mustard on cold beef for mine!”

“And how is the gas-mask discipline?”

“Well, that depends on the battalion. In my battalion the commander was strong for drills. We had them morning, noon and night, and in the middle of the night. Seemed as if the old man had gone crazy on gas discipline. But when the big gas attack came we had only a four per cent casualty list, and the battalion alongside, which had been going easy on drills, caught it something fierce. Our battalion got recommended to G. H. Q. I caught my gas in a dugout the next day.”

“And you are still keen to get back into all that?”

“Am I?” he repeated, his eyes hardening. “I’ll tell you how I feel: When I first came over I had a kind of sneaking notion that Heinie wasn’t so dusky as he was painted. But I lost that notion pretty quick when I got up front and saw my lieutenant shot in the back by a boche prisoner who had thrown up his hands. Now I want to lick the Huns till they holler, and then keep on licking them for a year after that for the good of their souls.”

Inside of the hospital were grimmer cases. In one of the wards we came on a Texan with the bright, clear-gazing eyes that one sometimes finds in old sailors. They had taken his leg off. When we asked how he was making it he turned on us those straight deep eyes, and there was trouble in them.

“There’s just one thing I’m sorry for,” said he.

“What is that?”

“That I didn’t have more time.”

Time for what, I wondered. And then looking down on that wrecked body, with the covers lifted high over apparatus so as not to touch the tormented nerves, I thought I understood. He was sorry he didn’t have more time to get out of the way. That was it. It was what anybody would wish for—two, three, five seconds of grace to have gotten out of the way. Lying here through the long hours empty of everything but pain, he had doubtless worked out the problem to the finest precision, and he knew to the last trick just how much more time it would have taken to have dropped to the ground, to have eluded that exploding shell. Now all his life long he was going to regret the lack of those few precious seconds.

“Yes,” he repeated slowly, laboriously, the trouble still in his eyes, “I’d like to have had more time. Don’t seem right somehow. ’Tain’t fitting to be lying here with the show just begun. I’d like to have done more damage. But,” he brightened, “I’ve figured there’s still some jobs a peg-legged man can do over here. And I tell you one thing: I’m not going home till we’ve licked the Huns or the Huns have licked us.”

He laughed at the latter impossibility, and the laughter shook his body and turned him pale. And still he laughed on. I thought when he wished for more time that he was thinking in terms of self and personal safety, and all the time he had been thinking in the biggest terms of service to mankind.

It was not until the fifth day of our trip that Verdun loomed on the horizon as a rosy possibility. We were dining in Nancy at Voltaire’s with M. Martin, the sous-préfet of the department of Meurthe-et-Moselle. M. Martin, it appeared, had never been in Verdun. Since we had business at a French hospital fifteen kilometers from the citadel he thought it possible, probable—of course, nothing was sure; absolutely no Verdun passes had been issued for ten days—still, one never could tell; and if we would like him to try—he paused to beam and smile—if we would give him our papers he would send them in to the Grand Quartier General, together with his own, and then—well, in short we would await the turn of events.

“Whether we shall be accorded permission at this crucial moment is doubtful,” he concluded. “But at any rate we may hope.”

So we turned in our papers and we hoped. To see Verdun at this crisis, when to the north millions of men were crashing together in terrific combat, with an appalling sanguinary back tide of wounded and dead, lent the occasion a deep significance, for Verdun to the whole world has become a symbol of confidence, a kind of ark of the covenant to battling mankind. I did not conceal from myself that what gave Verdun its specific interest to me was the news that our troops round Montdidier and Amiens were now engaged in the present titanic struggle. That fact took the famous fortress out of the list of mere great monuments of history; it made it in short our own, part and parcel of America, its glories our glories, its defense our defense, its high challenge our challenge, its victory our victory. But there was something more than that in the back of my mind. Verdun was behind the French, so to speak, finished history. Our Verduns were still of to-morrow, a promise, a prophecy. The actors were those humorous-eyed khaki-clad soldiers standing at lonely crossroads who had given us the smart little salute with the friendly aftergrin. Thus it was with the feeling of reading ahead of time a page of history not yet evoked but inevitable that I prepared to go to Verdun.

The past week had been of a piece with the raw spring weather, lowering, foggy or sluicing water by the liquid ton out of a somber sky. With one accord we prayed for sunshine in order to view the surrounding heights, Côte 304, Saint Mihiel, Douaumont, Veau and Mort Homme. But the day that dawned was brother to the rest—bleak, dark, with a clinging fog, which muffled the landscape and grew ever thicker as the hours passed. Our passes had arrived from French Headquarters, but the final visé, the permission to enter Verdun itself, must be obtained at V——, fifteen kilometers from the citadel, and if there was heavy shelling either of the fort or of the surrounding roads we should certainly be refused.

It was six o’clock in the morning when as guests of the French Government and of M. Martin in particular we clambered into a military automobile, one of those lean, powerful drab monsters that go cycloning along the highways behind the lines at a stupefying rate of speed. We had estimated that, including necessary stops at French hospitals containing American wounded, we should arrive at Verdun about noon. Therefore we had taken the precaution to bring our luncheon, with the intention of picnicking among the ruins and perhaps obtaining some coffee from the poilus’ mess. The chefs d’oeuvrès of the provisions were two tiny cold fowl de luxe weighing about a pound apiece, which had cost eight round silver dollars.

The next four hours on my part were given to the task of keeping my hair and my ears on. For the wind as it swooped by tried to drive us bodily from the car; the cold congealed us in cramped positions and the fog chilled us to the bone. We could not discern the road twenty yards ahead. The car roared forward into a barrage of thick mist which shredded on the hillcrests only to sag more heavily in the valleys. This, M. Martin assured us, was typical Picardy weather. At crossroads where we were stopped by the police M. Martin presented his card of identity, signed in Joffre’s own hand, and we were waved onward with honorable presentations of arms. As we neared our destination we diverged from the straight highroad, making a detour, for some routes are reserved for ingoing and some for outgoing traffic, and these routes are constantly altered in order to safeguard materials and confound the Hun.

Arrived at V—— we drew up in a long rank of machines in front of Headquarters and M. Martin vanished to make his felicitations to the commandant and to telephone in to Verdun. Our fate still hung in the balance. The minutes slipped by. Generals—French, American, British—dashed up in their automobiles, descended, saluted and vanished or stood talking in earnest groups. Americans, recognizing compatriots, saluted us from streets and doorways and strolled over to ask of home and how the Statue of Liberty fared. She was a pretty fine old girl, quoi?—as the French say.

An hour passed. And still M. Martin tarried. At the end of twenty minutes more he reappeared down the end of a street, his civilian black standing out in striking relief against the motley of khaki and horizon-blue uniforms and gold braid.

“En avant!” he exclaimed gayly, climbing into the car. “They got the commanding officer of the citadel on the wire. He expects us and asked us to mess with his officers in the citadel, but I refused, as it will be long past one by the time we arrive. This fog after all has served us well. They are not bombarding the fortress to-day.”

I do not recall the last fifteen kilometers of that journey, save that we sped like the wind, straining our eyes through the mist for the first glimpse of the famous stronghold. Presently “There! There!” broke simultaneously from our lips, and a few minutes later we were rolling under a noble stone archway, green and mossy with age, which looked as if it had been reared in the days of Uther Pendragon, and were being greeted by the commanding officer of the citadel of Verdun. We were to take everything out of the car, said he, and come right in. Lunch was waiting. In vain M. Martin protested. The colonel waved his protests aside with a smile. He led us into the fortress, down a long underground tunnel, which rang hollowly beneath our feet, to a set of guests’ dressing rooms, where we repaired the ravages of the long ride. A few minutes later he returned, conducted us through another series of corridors, through an enormous mess hall, where the men as he entered sprang clattering to their feet, and ushered us into the officers’ mess room.

It was small, that dining room situated forty feet underground in the stone heart of the citadel, seating scarce a dozen persons, and simple, lofty-ceiled, severe. And yet it was a veritable jewel, flashing with rich strong colors, magnificent with its brilliant sheaths of battle flags, and glittering with the steel and silver and gold of its souvenirs of valor—armor and medals and trophies which gleamed from cabinet and wall. Here had collected at one time and another all the great chiefs of the Allies; and here the presumptuous Crown Prince had sworn to eat his triumphal banquet.

Over the mantelpiece hung the pennants of all the Entente Powers, a bright formidable array, topped with the watchword of the impregnable fortress, “On ne passe pas,” a phrase descending from the days of the Little Corporal. The opposite wall bore medals of honor—the Croix de Guerre, the Médaille Militaire and the Legion d’Honneur bestowed by a grateful nation upon the citadel itself, as if it possessed a glorious soul. Here and there hung heavy-studded shields surrounded by rayons of ancient swords and battle-axes.

What we ate or whether we ate I cannot recall. The colonel had left us, bidding us genially to make haste, as there was much to see, much to recount, and we sat drinking in the spell of that wondrous little room, steeped in the atmosphere of valor, hearkening to the voice of the past, rejoicing in the brave prophecy of the future, and trying to realize that even as we sat French and American troops were rushing north to stem the furious onslaught of the Hun.

“Well, now,” said the colonel, opening the door, “if you are refreshed we will begin. We shall take first the view of the heights, then I shall show you the fortress, and after that the ruins of Verdun.”

We had asked M. Martin to recount the history of the great offensive, and he had turned over the appeal to the commanding officer of the citadel, who had promised to describe the climax of the decisive battle on the exact spot where the Germans made their final stubborn stand and were beaten back with stupendous loss.

Outside, the weather had settled to a continuous drizzle. We wound round the hill by a serpentine road and presently attained its crest. Here we abandoned the car and stumbled over a torn and wrenched terrain, pitted with shell holes fifty feet across and partially filled with black filthy water. Filled also with old dismantled cannon, unexploded cartridges, rusted bayonets, twisted iron fragments of great shells, and an occasional sodden képi. Between these craters the hummocks were dotted with graves marked with a cross and the simple French cocarde. Standing under that bleak sky and gazing out across that sinister smitten landscape with its gaunt shot-off trees and its deep gashes of trenches marked by blood-red earth was like looking upon some huge monster frozen in a horrible death agony. It had been foully murdered, that hill, and it lay like a mutilated corpse, stiffly outflung, uncovered, indecent, its hideous wounds gaping up to the sky.

The colonel came to a halt. “Here we are,” he began. “Here is the farthest point that the enemy penetrated. Here he was beaten back—just at your feet, mademoiselle.” He pointed with his cane, and I stared down, expecting to see I scarce know what, some visible sign, some chalk mark or whitewashed tennis-court line, to identify that tremendous check. But there was nothing. My feet were pressing down a clump of fresh blue violets, wet-eyed from the rain. I stepped off them hastily.

The colonel continued his narrative. The wind blew back the heavy skirts of his greatcoat; his sturdy, compact figure, firmly planted as a statue, defied the elements; his leonine white head, which reminded one of Joffre’s, glistened with rain drops; his voice, gentle, level, dispassionate, filled one with utter conviction. We knew what he said was true. Here came the enemy from that direction—he pointed—and from there, and there, all converging on this one point. And when they were very near, advancing shoulder to shoulder in dense mass formation, two concealed French batteries, one from either side, opened on their serried columns a terrific enfilading fire. It was close-range slaughter—such as was going on even now in the north. Their first ranks lay in windrows. Their dead covered this hill like a carpet. And still their thinning numbers were filled with rushing hosts from behind and they pressed on and on, wave upon wave, the farthest of which had broken just at the point where we stood. There it was pushed back by a spirited counter thrust by the French fantassins.

“And your own troops, mon colonel, I suppose they gave a good account of themselves?” queried M. Martin.

“You have said it,” replied the colonel with proud simplicity. “My brave men in that attack covered and recovered themselves with glory.”

In the meantime, he continued, down below—he would show us presently—another strong enemy force had tried to force an entrance to the fortress at one of the tunnel exits. This exit, leading by a series of passages on different levels to the very innermost heart of the citadel, gave on the outside upon a contracted open space between two ridges, and was protected first by a deep surrounding fosse filled with a maze of barbed wire, and second by a fifteen-foot stone wall which formed part of the outer fortifications. Down this wall the Germans had leaped like a tumbling cataract. The first wave fell into the fosse and was followed by another and another, until the ancient moat was heaped level with a writhing human bridge across which the hostile troops rushed and gained the narrow space before the mouth of the tunnel.

“And were there no French machine guns playing upon them from the entrance?”

“Oh, yes—there were two seventy-fives,” said the colonel quietly, “less than a hundred yards away.” We could perhaps imagine, he continued, what carnage they wrought in that confined space. Germans had dropped down from that height like overripe fruit trained against a wall. The French gunners obliterated the first, the second, the third and the fourth waves; and the fifth broke right on the flaming snouts of their guns. The sixth gained the tunnel entrance. Here the garrison counter-attacked, and the enemy turned tail and ran. But not far. The wall was before them and the guns were behind. That particular hostile force was wiped out to a man.

The colonel’s calm voice flowed on and on, describing the desperate details of that epic attack, and now and again he pointed with his stick into the fog, locating great enemy batteries which had poured a deadly hail of shells upon this hill. Altogether, he said, the French had lost in killed during that six months’ offensive one hundred and ten thousand; the Germans more than half a million. And most of them had fallen on and round this height on which we stood. I looked about that somber, brooding, ghost-haunted hill, where half a million souls slain violently in battle had flown upward in a thick mist—and as I looked it seemed that the fog had a ruddy under tinge as if a subtle crimson reek exuded from the blood-drenched ground.

As the colonel continued his narrative I tried in fancy to reconstruct the vision of the battlefield. Of German prisoners I had seen a-plenty with their close-cropped, bullet-shaped heads and furtive yet arrogant eyes. The French poilus also—those gay, stout-hearted little men, some of the greatest fighters and the greatest phrase-makers on earth—were familiar figures in my mind. So that all the ingredients of the picture were at hand. Nevertheless, all unconsciously I kept making a curious mental error. The intensity of the combat still raging to the north somehow drew the picture out of focus, causing it to appear, not past history but something which was still actually going on. I knew it was past, and still it fused in my mind with the unfinished present.

Added to that, my brain was so saturated with images of our American troops as I had seen them the past week, and those images were so vivid, powerful and real that I could visualize nothing else. Thus, when the colonel said “nos soldats,” my mind unconsciously translated “our soldiers”; and I saw, not the horizon blue of the poilus but the clean, lithe khaki-clad Americans with their fresh faces and good-humored eyes. And when he said “Our brave troops charged here—and here—and here,” my mind saw “our brave troops charging here—and here—and here.” I tried to rid my mind of that delusion—for it was too painful on that dusky death-smitten hill, with the knowledge that even at that very moment our own brave troops were indeed charging to the north upon some other hill. But the past week had etched the images too deeply on my mind; and I could not wipe them out.

M. Martin interrogated the colonel concerning their losses.

“Yes,” replied the colonel soberly, “one hundred and ten thousand of our men fell.”

“One hundred and ten thousand of our men fell!” reiterated my heart with a pang. Never before had that figure seemed so monstrous. Why, that was one, two, three, four, five whole divisions! Our first division, that I had seen, our second, all those fine Rainbow fellows—pshaw! It was incredible!

“One hundred and ten thousand are a great many men to die!” I remarked aloud.

And even as I spoke, my mind, righting itself, said within itself: “But of course those one hundred and ten thousand men were Frenchmen! Not Americans. Our men have only just gone north. Don’t you remember, you saw the —th Division on the move?” Thus mentally I righted myself. Nevertheless, one hundred and ten thousand were indeed a great many men to die, and I repeated my remark.

“Pas trop!”—not too many!—replied the colonel simply. And those two words, soberly spoken, were the epitome of the Verdun spirit.

Later he pointed out a cemetery on a distant hillside containing five thousand fallen heroes. “In that one cemetery,” said he, “lie thirty of my own officers.”

“And you, you have been wounded, my colonel?” inquired M. Martin.

“Three times only,” replied the colonel with a shrug. “Once seriously. But I would not leave the citadel. I do not like hospitals—those white places. They are not for me. If I die I die here where I belong, with my men.”

The rain still continued, a steady drenching downpour. “But you may be thankful,” remarked the colonel, wiping his streaming face, “as otherwise this hill would be impossible. To-day the cannon are giving us a rest.”

He led the way to the nearest tunnel entrance to the citadel. With the others I followed, eagerly listening to his explanations. But my mind was still in a whirl. That dark and desolate blood-soaked hill, the staunch old colonel, with the dewdrops in his white hair, recounting the valorous deeds of his fallen heroes, those acres on acres of graves, the ascending hosts of souls—were not some of them perhaps still lingering in this lonely spot, dazed by their violent severance from the flesh, ignorant that they had passed across? Would they not cry out at night for aid, for news of the battle front: “Why are we abandoned thus? Who wins? Vaterland? La Patrie?”—the Americans, who had not engaged in this struggle, to be sure, but were now fighting in an even mightier struggle—all these things mingled confusedly in my mind like the unmatched parts of a puzzle.

Thanks to my classical education, I had no proper conception of what constitutes a modern fortress. I had vaguely imagined it as a city ringed round with a very substantial stone wall, crenelated and turreted, with dozens of peepholes for the doughty gunners to take pot shots at the enemy established outside. In the very heart of the city would be the citadel, which figured in my mind as a big, round, impregnable stone tower bristling with teethlike rows of cannon, its foundations naturally extending scores of feet underneath. Accordingly when we set out to traverse the long series of dimly-lit reverberating subterranean passages, descended flights of slimy stone stairs to lower and danker levels, stopped in gun and ammunition rooms, electric-plant rooms, kitchens, mess rooms, infirmaries, chapels, musées, cinema and rest rooms, dormitories, cavernous abodes, twenty, thirty and forty feet below ground, I began to wonder when we were going upstairs.

“But there is no upstairs,” responded M. Martin, laughing in answer to my query—“not in this citadel. Here it all is, just as you see, underground. You observed those big iron mushroom affairs six inches or so aboveground when we were up on the hill?”

“But I thought they were the observation posts of hidden guns—like that of the Big Bertha.”

“So they are—they are our own Big Berthas. Nevertheless, those observation posts are all the upstairs there is to this citadel. What do you suppose would happen to the superstructure of a fort if it were hit by a shell which made a crater as large as the one we saw on the hill—fifty feet across and twenty feet deep? Not much upstairs left, eh?”

So much for a classical education!

“And all the French troops eat and sleep and pray and drill down here? There are none billeted in Verdun?”

“There’s nobody in Verdun.”

“No old men and old women who still cling to their ruined firesides and creep out into the morning sunshine after a night’s bombardment?”

“Not a single soul. It’s a blanched city of the dead.”

By this time it was well upon six o’clock and we stopped for a moment to view a mess hall where, seated at long refectory tables, about four hundred poilus were taking sustenance from great steaming casseroles of ragout placed in the centers of the tables. Here indeed were the veritable heroes of Verdun! The indomitables! I looked for halos, but found none but the fragrant encircling wreaths of the smoking ragout, which the heroes were bolting down like one o’clock. These men, however, were no callow youths, but tough-muscled, tanned and bearded veterans—or if they were youths they were veteran youths with lines in their faces and gray in their hair. As the commanding officer loomed in the doorway they sprang to their feet as one man. The colonel waved them back to their stew, explaining that here were some of their allies—American friends. What a cheer it was that rose! Some of the Americans frankly wiped their eyes. The colonel beamed round upon us all with a kind of indulgent fatherly grace. His blue eyes caressed his troops with affectionate regard.

And as we departed he commented: “You will please note one thing: I did not order that cheer. It sprang spontaneously from the hearts of my men.”

He continued to speak of America, of the deep fraternal tenderness existing in the hearts of the French for the splendid young army from overseas; of the fine morale America was exhibiting in the business of food conservation; of the hope they had in American aviation. Simple, brave, friendly words from a brave, friendly soul.

We tramped on through vast resounding twilight caverns, slippery underfoot with mud and exuding large clammy dewdrops from the overarching walls. Sometimes it was pitch dark and a pocket torch or the outstretched hand of the colonel guided our course. Once we climbed by a kind of vertical ship’s ladder fastened against the solid wall up into the platform of a monstrous subterranean gun which hurled annihilation miles away. For months the Germans had been assiduously trying to locate that gun.

It was the colonel who suggested the idea of Verdun as a Mecca for tourist parties after the war.

“Here they will come,” he chuckled, “by train and ship loads from all over the civilized world to view this historic spot. They will passionately collect every old piece of shrapnel or cap or exploded cartridge, every stick, every brick, every stone. And when all of the veritable souvenirs have been snatched up doubtless our ingenious guardians of the citadel will resow the sacred ground with another artificial crop from a huge factory established hard by. ’Twill be an industry. They will charge—let me see—three francs admission.” And the colonel laughed heartily over his prophecy.

“But they will not have the commanding officer of the citadel for their guide!” interjected M. Martin slyly.

“If they have the commanding officer of the citadel for their guide it will be five francs,” said the colonel firmly. “Three francs for an ordinary tour; five francs with the commanding officer for guide. That is not too dear!”

They elaborated the idea with gayety. Instead of great rough soldiers with clattering bayonets and clumping boots, the hollow corridors would reverberate to soft, pretty laughter and the click-clack of ladies’ high-heeled boots. And downy college lads and pig-tailed misses, with bespectacled tutors bearing Baedekers—no, mon Dieu, not Baedekers; doubtless American histories!—and peaceful and portly papas and mammas who vaguely remembered the great war in their extreme youth would stroll through these echoing passages pensively, hand in hand. For it would then be a public musée, this impregnable citadel, and its tragic battles a troubled dream of yesterday.

“But in the meantime,” warned the colonel, laughing, “I am going to charge five francs!”

After the citadel he proceeded to show us the town, demolished beyond hope of reconstruction. Fine ancient façades with filigree stonework delicate as thread lace; matchless old cathedral closes of the fourteenth century designed and wrought in solid granite by a master mason who was also a master builder; fortification walls dating back to the days of the Cæsars; medieval turrets beneath which troubadour soldier lovers sang; glorious architecture of the Louis the Fourteenth period—ineffable masterpieces of structural art never to be reproduced on earth, they lay in smashed and huddled fragments on the ground.

We entered a church, its roof caved in, massive columns rent, holy statues razed, empty as an eggshell—the result of a single cannon shot.

“Un coup de canon—and there you are!” the colonel commented grimly.

We sped past the Big Canal and the Little Canal, tranquil stretches of twilight water, colored like gorgeous rose windows by a liberated gleam of the westering sun; reminiscent of Venice, with their overhanging houses, now glooming ruins whose window holes stared like sightless sockets of men blinded in battle; past the business and the residence sections of the city, dead and desolate as the tombs of the Pharaohs; and finally wound up to the summit of a hill whence, the colonel explained, we could obtain a comprehensive view of the havoc the Huns had wrought. And when we had gazed our fill on that tragic exhibition of arrogance and hate, the colonel, like the fine artist he was, led us into a lovely quiet garden close whose darkening air was sweet with the scent of hyacinths, violets, crocuses and spring roses. And kneeling down on the damp turf and getting out his clasp-knife he proceeded to gather us each a nosegay in honor of the event.

“For,” he observed sagely, “flowers are better souvenirs than bits of iron shells.”

When we wondered how he came to be possessed of a garden on this deserted hill-top among the crumbling ruins he explained it was his favorite point of observation. Knowing his love for the spot his men had secretly made this garden for him and tended it carefully and kept it in fresh bloom.

Returning to the citadel we dined once more in the famous mess room, this time with the colonel and all his officers. It was nine o’clock when we finally took leave of him, standing bareheaded in the rain to assure us of the warm pleasure we had given him! It had been an amazing day, crowded with images, emotions, events; and not least amazing was this French colonel, commanding officer of the citadel of Verdun, bubbling over with gayety and humor, filled with profound tenderness and knowledge of life, a savant, learned in history and languages, a distinguished warrior who had been tried in the fiery furnace of battle, and yet simple-hearted as a child or one of his beloved poilus.

It was long after midnight when we arrived in Nancy. Those two tiny fowls de luxe which cost eight dollars we had fallen on and devoured in the night. The following day, on our return to Paris, we learned that the battle to the north was still raging. But the Germans had been checked. Our troops, the ones we had seen moving north, were in the great struggle too. They were being heavily gassed and shelled.

“Worse than Verdun!” said my informant, an American who had just returned from the British Front. “I saw several hundred of our fellows who had been mustard-gassed, lying in a field hospital. They lay on cots, their smarting eyes bandaged with soothing lotions, and they talked to each other in low broken whispers. It gave one a choke in the throat to see all those stalwarts lying flat, eyes bandaged, whispering to the comrades they could not see. I tell you, it made me feel mighty ugly toward the Hun! I wished some of our peace propagandists at home might see that sight, hear those low, choking whispers!”

“What were they talking about? Home? Mother? Where is my wandering boy to-night?”

The officer gave a grim laugh. “Not by a jolly jugful! They were trying to fix the exact hour of the gas attack in order to reckon how soon they’d be back in the trenches to tackle the Hun!”

This, then, was the spirit of the Americans who had entered the great fight. It was the spirit of the poilus before Verdun. It was the spirit of that indomitable colonel who had replied that one hundred and ten thousand brave lives were not too many to give for such a cause. Verdun of to-day was the heritage of these men in khaki who lay with bandaged eyes and spoke in choked whispers. And the Verduns of to-morrow would be theirs by the same sign: The conquering force of spirit controlling the conquering force of arms.