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Updated: September 8, 2025
The Meuse was constantly bringing down corpses of men and horses; they could be seen floating with the current at any moment of the day, swollen and of a greenish hue, in the early stages of decomposition.
Indeed, some of these troops had crossed the Meuse the night before, and now, at a little after 6 o'clock, their advance could be seen just north of the village of Floing.
They were reckless of their lives, and the valley of the Meuse was choked with their corpses. The river itself was strewn with dead bodies of men and horses, and literally ran red with blood. The most tremendous fighting took place for the possession of the bridges, but the French engineers blew them up one after the other as they retired southwards.
It seemed but too probable that the eighteenth century would find great armies still confronting each other on the Meuse and the Rhine, industrious populations still ground down by taxation, fertile provinces still lying waste, the ocean still made impassable by corsairs, and the plenipotentiaries still exchanging notes, drawing up protocols, and wrangling about the place where this minister should sit, and the title by which that minister should be called.
A respite, however was needed for the reorganization of the command and the re-formation of the armies shattered in the fruitless attacks and it was not until 3 May that the Germans were ready to begin the second battle of Verdun. This time it opened on the west bank of the Meuse, and Mort Homme was as before the obstacle and the objective.
He took the Queen with him, and there was not a dissentient voice as to the necessity of beginning hostilities at once. Sully, however, was alone in urging that the main force of the attack should be in the north, upon the Rhine and Meuse. Villeroy and those who were secretly in the Spanish interest were for beginning it with the southern combination and against Milan.
The original character of the country, a marshland intersected by the numerous channels of the Rhine and the Meuse, rendered it imperative that the System of dykes should be accompanied by a brother system of canals. The over-abundant waters had not merely to be arrested, they had to be confined and led off into prepared channels. In this manner also they were made to serve the purposes of man.
The defenses of Liege were hardly worth an enemy's gunfire before 1890. They had consisted of a single fort on the Meuse right bank, and the citadel crowning the heights of the old town. But subsequently the Belgian Chamber voted the necessary sums for fortifying Liege and Namur on the latest principles.
When spring came again to the shell-torn fields near Verdun, we saw how Nature in places was reclothing the meadows in their mantles of green and around the ruined, tenantless homes along the Meuse, how the primrose and violet were covering up the scars made by unnumbered shells. The air was filled with the joyous notes of the lark, and the linnet and the black-cap warbled among the hedgerows.
Although this theater presents, in one point of view, four geographical sections, viz.: the space between the Rhine and the Moselle, that between the Moselle and the Meuse, that between the Meuse and the Scheldt, and that between the last river and the sea, it is nevertheless true that an army of which A A is the base and B B the front of operations will have only three general directions to choose from; for the two spaces in the center will form a single central zone, as it will always have one on the right and another on the left.
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