two considerable railroad lines. It was this system which actually
saved the town and is the real "miracle of Verdun," if one is to have
miracles to explain what brave and skilful men do.

I saw Verdun on April 6th. I went through the city, which was little
more than a mass of ashes, with General Dubois, the military governor
of the town itself, and with him I went to Fort de la Chaume, on one
of the highest hills near Verdun, and from this vantage point had the
whole countryside explained to me. The day on which I visited Verdun
was the first completely quiet day in weeks, and I was thus fortunate
in being able to see and to go about without the disturbing or
hindering circumstances which are incident to a bombardment.

The city of Verdun is situated at the bottom of the Meuse Valley on
both sides of the river. But the main portion of the town is on the
west bank and surrounds a low hill, crowned by the cathedral and old
Vauban citadel. The town is surrounded by old ramparts, long ago
deprived of military value and belonging, like the citadel, to
eighteenth century warfare. The Valley of the Meuse is here several
miles wide, as flat as your hand, and the river, which is small but
fairly deep, a real obstacle since it cannot be forded, wanders back
and forth from one side of the valley to the other. Below Verdun it is
doubled, as a military obstacle, by the Canal de l'Est.

If you put a lump of sugar in a finger bowl you will pretty fairly
reproduce the Verdun topography. The lump of sugar will represent
Verdun, the rim of the bowl the hills around the city, the interior of
the bowl the little basin in which the city stands. This rim of hills,
which rise some five or six hundred feet above the town itself, is
broken on the west by a deep and fairly narrow trough which comes into
the Meuse Valley and connects it some thirty miles to the west with
the Plain of Chalons. If you should look down upon this region from an
aeroplane this furrow would look like a very deep gutter cutting far
into the tangle of hills.

Now in the warfare of other centuries the value of the Verdun fortress
was just this: the furrow which I have described is the one avenue
available for an invading army coming from the east out of Metz or
south from Luxemburg and aiming to get into the Plain of Chalons to
the west. It is the way the Prussians came in 1792 and were defeated
at Valmy, at the western entrance of the trough about thirty miles
away.