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The Eager Soul looked at her watch, gave him some medicine, which we took to be a heart stimulant; for he revived under it, and said to me: "Remember that night at Douaumont?" "Where you whistled the 'Meditation from Thais, in the moonlight?" "Yes," he murmured, "and we watched the trucks come out of the mist full of life and go into the mist, toward death."
No detailed description is possible of the terrible fighting from house to house, or the countless deeds of heroism performed by our men in this bloody struggle, which lasted for two hours. The gaps in our ranks increased from moment to moment. Finally we were ordered to retire to a position about 200 meters south of the exit from Douaumont.
In the second phase, after an hour's stop to consolidate the first gains, the French troops were to press on to the crest of the heights to the north of the ravine of Couleuvre, the village of Douaumont, the fort of Douaumont, the dam and pond of Vaux, and on to the battery of Damloup.
There was a lull in the fighting during most of the day of April 28, 1916, but in the twilight the Germans attacked at points between Douaumont and Vaux and west of Thiaumont, but were forced back by the French artillery. During the following day the Germans incessantly bombarded French positions and made a futile attack.
On the morrow a furious counter-attack drove the Germans out of the greater part of Fort Douaumont and back to the northern edge of the plateau, and the crisis of the first surprise had passed.
There was the tall boy who played Saint Saens on the Espagne, and did the funny stunt at the auction; there was the night we sat on the food box near the front at Douaumont and heard the ambulance boy whistling the bit from "Thais," far up the hill in the misty moonlight; there was the French soldier by the splintered tree in the Forest of Hess; there was the head nurse killed by the abri between Souilly and Verdun, who waited while her girls went in; there was the poor dying boy in the hospital for whom you bought the flowers and there was the handsome New York woman coming over to start her hospital.
By the middle of March the first crisis was about over and the French had restored their line, the most expensive detail in their defense. But they had not been able to retake Douaumont, and German possession was to prove a thorn in their side thenceforth. With the great general attack of April 9, 1916, the first phase of the battle for Verdun was over.
Creeping along the battered trenches, crawling across masses of tumbled earth, where communication-trenches had once existed, and, by slow degrees, moving to a part where a fold in the ground gave some shelter, though little enough, from the shells which the German guns still sent, the depleted regiment to which Henri and Jules belonged was finally massed in the hollow, and, having been fed there and rested for a while, was marched to the east, towards the fort of Douaumont.
But as the Germans came south, and when they took Douaumont, they were able to reach the bridges across the Meuse behind the French troops on the Meuse Hills and to destroy them by indirect fire, and these French troops, more than a hundred thousand probably, were fighting with their backs to a deep river and exposed to destruction in case their lines did not hold.
Pierre was there in that glorious charge at the end of October which carried the heights of Douaumont and took six thousand prisoners. He was there at the recapture of the Fort de Vaux which the Germans evacuated in the first week of November.
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