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The O'Farrells had not got permission for Verdun, nor for Rheims, where we of the great gray car were going next. Still more than our glimpse of the trenches were these two places "extra special." Two days later, we were to meet again at Paris, and continue as Puck impudently put it "our rôle of ministering angels," along the Noyon front and beyond.
On December 15, 1916, the French troops won an important victory in the region of Verdun, north of Douaumont, when they broke through the German lines on a front of six and a quarter miles, extending from the Meuse River to the plain of Woevre, penetrating to a depth of nearly two miles.
Who has not, for example, read with tears in their eyes, in the Mémoires sur les Prisons, what the author relates of the fourteen girls of Verdun? "Of those girls," he said, "of unparalleled fairness, and who appeared like young virgins dressed for a public fête. They disappeared," added Riouffe, "all at once, and were mowed down in the spring of life.
He was a broad-shouldered, solidly built, four-square sort of man, with cool, level eyes, and a quiet, almost taciturn manner. It was General Robert Nivelle, the man who held Verdun for France. He it was who, when the fortress was quivering beneath the Germans' sledge-hammer blows, had quietly remarked: "They shall not pass!" And they did not.
The next day's march we regarded as our first in the advance into Germany to which we had so long looked forward. We found the great Verdun highway which had played such an important part in the defense that broke the back of the Hun to be in excellent shape and a pleasant change from the shell-pitted roads to which we had become accustomed.
What are your reasons beyond that cursed optimism which has been our ruin? Why announce things like that as though divinely inspired? For God's sake let us stare straight at the facts." "The Germans are losing the war by this attack on Verdun. They are just pouring their best soldiers into the furnace burning the flower of their army. It is our gain. It will lead in the end to our victory."
At one-thirty they started out again, to chase over the grey downs in search of Russian camps folded away in small depressions and hollows, invisible from the main roads. And thus, day after day, for five days, she drove him from morning to evening, from camp to camp around Verdun, until they had seen many thousands of Russians.
At Annecy he was pleased to find the waiter at the Hôtel Verdun remembered his visit twenty years before; everywhere he met old friends, and saw old scenes that he had feared he never would revisit. After crossing the Cenis and hastening through Turin and Genoa, he reached Lucca, to be awaited at the Albergo Reale dell' Universo by a crowd, every one anxious to shake hands with Signor Ruskin.
The whole pack of hell was loose and raging. I thought of that crazy, chinless Crown Prince sitting in his safe little cottage hidden in the woods somewhere they say he had flowers and vines planted around it drinking stolen champagne and sicking on his dogs of death. He was in no danger. I cursed him in my heart, that blood-lord! The shells rained on Verdun.
Before the building flowed the great highway from Bar-le-Duc to Verdun; relays of motor lorries went by, and gendarmes, organized into a kind of traffic squad, stood every hundred feet or so.
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