round had previously given,
and, retiring before the enemy, to fight a rear-guard action in the
open. Some three or four miles of country behind that front line was
indeed searched by the enemy guns; some indication of the enormous
expenditure of shells indulged in by the Kaiser. The French left,
resting on the River Meuse and the centre, was thus forced backward,
though the gallant garrison of Herbebois still held on, together with a
force of men on a hill just south-west of them. Some success had in
fact fallen to the German phalanx attack on the Verdun salient.
General von Haeseler, who was nominally in command, though acting under
the orders of the ambitious Crown Prince of Germany, had by his
smashing artillery-fire, though not by his infantry attacks, forced the
French to abandon a portion of their trenches, and had indeed shortened
that line to which we have referred previously--that line which formed
an imaginary base to the Verdun salient. In fact, he had contrived to
narrow the neck of the salient, though not yet very greatly, and
thereby had limited the space across which the French troops could
retire in the event of the abandonment of the salient being necessary.

Repeating the process on the following day--for by then the French had
fallen back to their second line, now badly battered, at Samogneux and
Hill 344--these new positions were assailed with such a torrent of
shells that by the evening they were absolutely untenable, and a
further retirement was essential. Indeed, by the morning of the 24th,
the French left, as it lay on the River Meuse, was withdrawn to the
famous Pepper Hill, so that the distance between the new first line and
the city of Verdun was considerably decreased, while that imaginary
base-line, across which the French must retreat if the salient was to
be evacuated, was still further shortened. But elsewhere, where
artillery-fire had given the enemy less assistance, where, indeed,
massed guns could not be spared to blaze a path towards Verdun,
desperate fighting held up the advance of the Germans. At Herbebois
and Ornes and on to Bezonvaux there was hand-to-hand fighting of the
most desperate nature, while at Maucourt--an advance position held by
the French--terrific execution was done to the masses of troops hurled
forward by the Germans. Here masked French quick-firing guns caught
German columns of attack, twenty men abreast and hundreds deep, at
close range, and blew them in