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The northerly wind was rising. The clouds climbed more swiftly. The poplars shimmered, the willows glistened, the veils of mist vanished. From very far away there came a rumbling thunder, heavy, insistent, continuous, punctuated with louder crashes. "It is the guns," muttered the soldier, shivering. "It is the guns around Verdun! Those damned Boches!"
And I confess that, more than all I saw and heard at the front and in Paris, the look of this man convinced me that Verdun would not fall, that France herself would not either weary or weaken.
And no other French battle-field wears for a Frenchman quite the same aureole that shines for ever on those dark, riven hills of Verdun.
A queer murmur, half laugh and half applause, ran over the reserved seats, and the tall, thin commandant beside me said softly, "That is the way they came out of the trenches at Verdun."
While one slept in the back of the car, the other drove, and so we went on and on, both day and night, for the next forty-eight hours a race against time and against the police. From Dijon we left the Paris road and struck due north by Chaumont and Bar-le-duc to Verdun, Sedan, and Givet, where we passed into Belgium.
Apart from the urgent need of relieving the pressure on Verdun, a British offensive was due as a contribution to the common task; and the front on which it would be made did not offer a great variety of choice.
"Principally with Lady L'Estrange, of Verdun Royal, sir," she replied. "I left because Miss L'Estrange was growing up, and my lady wished to have a French maid." In after years he thought how strange it was that he should have asked the question. "I want you," said Lord Charlewood, "to devote yourself entirely to the little one; you will be so liberally paid as not to need work of any other kind.
It is not the time or the place to assert that what Bernhardi forecast has now come true, but it is clear that Germany, temporarily or permanently, as it may prove, lost the initiative following her defeat at Verdun, that she was compelled to accept the defensive on all fronts by July, and that up to the date this article is written, August 8, 1916, she has been losing ground on all fronts.
In one week's attack north of Verdun the Germans fired 2,400,000 field-gun shells and 600,000 larger ones. To transport this mountain of potential destruction required 240 trains, each carrying 200 tons of projectiles. During the "Big Push" on the Somme, there were frequently eighty guns on a front of two hundred yards.
The spring of 1916 was slow in coming. The German attack at Verdun had coincided with a long spell of deep snow and bitter cold.
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