e barbarians in the other
days; there is no other way; it must be.

Over and over again there has come the invariable answer; it would
have come from scores and hundreds of these men who passed so near me
I could have touched their faded uniforms if I had asked--"It is for
France, for civilization; it must be, for there is no other way; we
shall die, but with us, with our sacrifice, perhaps this thing will
end." You cannot put it in words quite, I do not think even any
Frenchman has quite said it, but you can see it, you can feel it, you
can understand it, when you see a regiment, a brigade, a division of
these men of thirty, some perhaps of forty, going forward to the war
they hate and will never quiet until that which they love is safe or
they and all of their race are swallowed up in the storm that now was
audibly beating beyond the human walls on the nearby hillsides.

Presently we moved again, we slipped through the column, topped the
last incline, shot under the crumbling gate of the Verdun fortress,
and as we entered a shell burst just behind us and the roar drowned
out all else in its sudden and paralyzing crash. It had fallen, so we
learned a little later, just where we had been watching the passing
troops; it had fallen among them and killed. But an hour or two later,
when we repassed the point where it fell, men were still marching by.
Other regiments of men were still marching to the sound of the guns,
and those who had passed were already over the hills and beyond the
river, filing into the trenches in time, so it turned out, to meet the
new attack that came with the later afternoon.

I went to Verdun to see the forts, the city, the hills, and the
topography of a great battle; I went in the hope of describing with a
little of clarity what the operation meant as a military affair. I
say, and I shall hereafter try to describe this. But I shall never be
able to describe this thing which was the true Verdun for me--these
men, their faces, seen as one heard the shell fire and the musketry
rolling, not steadily but intermittently, the men who had marched over
the roads that are lined with graves, through villages that are
destroyed, who had come of their own will and in calm determination
and marched unhurryingly and yet unshrinkingly, the men who were no
longer young, who had left behind them all that men hold dear in life,
home, wives, children, because they knew that there was no other way.

I can only say