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Once we get Verdun, it is the general opinion that this portion of the French front will break completely, carrying with it the adjacent sectors, and the French Armies in the Vosges and Argonne will be committed to a general retreat on converging lines.
Nor need we tell how presently they were drafted into the city of Verdun, where it lies beside the River Meuse in a sleepy hollow facing the heights beyond, which lay between it and the Germans.
"We progressed slightly to the East of Mort Homme, and took an element of trenches. We captured two machine guns, and made several prisoners." "My papa's in Alsace," piped one listener. "And mine's in the Somme." "That's all right," inferred the elder. "Isn't mine at Verdun?" and then proudly, "And machine gunner at that!"
"Was there ever a battle like this in the world before?" said Mr. Meredith, one evening in mid-April. "It's such a titanic thing we can't grasp it," said the doctor. "What were the scraps of a few Homeric handfuls compared to this? The whole Trojan war might be fought around a Verdun fort and a newspaper correspondent would give it no more than a sentence.
The German had not yielded his offensive at Verdun after the attack of July 1st. At least, he still showed the face of initiative there while he rested content that at the same time he could maintain his front intact on the Somme.
Even as far behind the actual fighting as Bar-le-Duc one could sense one's proximity to a vast military operation. The endless convoys of motor trucks, the fast-flowing stream of troops, and the distressing number of ambulances brought realization of the near presence of a gigantic battle. Within a twenty-mile radius of the Verdun front aviation camps abound.
The quality of this sympathetic appeal was that of the thoroughbred racial and national spirit of a great people, in the politeness which gave to a thickset peasant woman a certain grace, in the smiles of the land and its inhabitants, in that inbred patriotism which through the centuries has created a distinctive civilization called French by the same ready sacrifices for its continuity as those which were made on the Marne and at Verdun.
There were three of these grandsons, and, when their struggle had left them thoroughly exhausted, they divided the empire into three. Their treaty of Verdun is often quoted as beginning the modern kingdoms of Germany, France, and Italy. The division was in some sense a natural one, emphasized by differences of language and of race.
They, too, needed reserves: reserves to feed those horrible gaps at Verdun; reserves to march against the British Front; reserves to rail to Russia, there, if it were possible, to stem the tide of Muscovite troops pouring through the broken Austrian lines on their way to Vienna and Berlin. Let us leave the combatants there to return to Jules and Henri.
Intelligence of the taking of Verdun arrived during the night of the 1st of September. The commune availed themselves of this moment, when Paris, filled with terror, thought it saw the enemy already at its gates, to execute their fearful projects. The cannon were again fired, the tocsin sounded, the barriers were closed, and the massacre began.
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