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Updated: May 27, 2025
The Vauban citadel in the city became merely an advanced headquarters, a telephone exchange, a supply station, a sort of central office, from the safety of whose subterranean casemates General Dubois, the commander of the city, directed the execution of the orders which he received from General Nivelle at Souilly, twenty miles away.
"Why do they drive like that?" she wondered, hunting blindly for her handkerchief, and mopping at her face. She thought there must be some desperate need calling for the lorries, and looked after them with respect. When she had found her street, and fetched her "client," she drove at his order to Souilly, upon the great road to Verdun.
It is said that at Waterloo Napoleon and Wellington watched each other through their telescopes. Compare this with the battle for Verdun, where the headquarters of the Crown Prince must have been at least thirty miles from those of General Nivelle at Souilly.
Mihiel, Troyon, and the road that we followed was still marked at every turn with the magic word "Verdun." Our immediate objective was Souilly, the obscure hill town twenty miles, perhaps, south of the front, from which Sarrail had defended Verdun in the Marne days and from which Pétain was now defending Verdun against a still more terrible attack.
But the dimples and the smile faded and she closed the door firmly and finally on romance, when she said: "On the record of service shown by my entrance card, they have made me assistant to the new head nurse who is coming over from Souilly to-night."
He was wounded at Mount Blainville, near the Argonne Forest and died at Souilly, France, October 7, 1918. As if to join in this glorious celebration Nature unfurled many a banner of rarest beauty. There was the deep red of the crimson rambler, the blue of larkspur and clematis forming a wonderful background for the golden stars of the daisy that nodded and gleamed in the warm, clear light.
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.
Upward and downward over the hills, through more ruined villages, more hospitals, more camps, our march took us until after a short hour we came to Souilly, general headquarters of the Army of Verdun, of Pétain, the centre of the world for the moment. Few towns have done less to prepare for greatness than Souilly.
From this little building, devoted for perhaps a century to the business of governing the commune of Souilly, with its scant thousand of people, Pétain was defending Verdun and the fate of an army of 250,000 men at the least.
It is twenty miles from Souilly to Verdun, and the road has come to be known as La Voie Sacré the Sacred Way because on the uninterrupted flow of ammunition and supplies over that road depended the safety of the fortress. Three thousand men with picks and shovels, working day and night, kept the road in condition to bear up under the enormous volume of traffic.
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