ng to do was to draw back the lines to the
hills above the city and west of the Meuse. Had their will prevailed
there would have been no real battle at Verdun and the Germans would
long ago have occupied the ashes of the town.

Joffre's view was easily explicable, and it was hardly possible to
quarrel with the military judgment it discloses. To the world Verdun
is a great fortress, a second Gibraltar, encircled by great forts,
furnished with huge guns, the gateway to Paris and the key to the
French eastern frontier. And this is just what Verdun was until the
coming of the present war, when the German and Austrian siege guns
levelled the forts of Antwerp, of Maubeuge, of Liege. But after that
Verdun ceased to be anything, because all fortresses lost their value
with the revelation that they had failed to keep pace with the gun.

After the Battle of the Marne, when the trench war began, the French
took all their guns out of the forts of Verdun, pushed out before the
forts, and Verdun became just a sector in the long trench line from
the sea to Switzerland. It was defended by trenches, not forts. It was
neither of more importance nor less than any other point in the line
and it was a place of trenches, not of forts. The forts were empty and
remain empty, monuments to the past of war, quite as useless as the
walls of Rome would be against modern artillery.

The decline of Verdun was even more complete. From the strongest point
in French defence it became the weakest. When the Germans took St.
Mihiel in September, 1914, they cut the north and south railroad that
binds Verdun to the Paris-Nancy Railroad. When they retreated from the
Marne they halted at Varennes and Montfaucon, and from these points
they command the Paris-Verdun-Metz Railroad. Apart from a single
narrow-gauge railroad of minor value, which wanders among the hills,
climbing at prohibitive grades, Verdun is isolated from the rest of
France. Consider what this means in modern war when the amount of
ammunition consumed in a day almost staggers belief. Consider what it
means when there are a quarter of a million men to be fed and
munitioned in this sector.

More than all this, when the lines came down to the trench condition
Verdun was a salient, it was a narrow curve bulging out into the
German front. It was precisely the same sort of military position as
Ypres, which the Germans have twice before selected as the point for
a great attack. In the Verdun sector