utal militarism--Simple rules for surviving
shell fire--A "happy home" with a shell arriving every
minute--Business-like monotony of the battle--Insignificance of one
man among millions--A victory of position, of will, of _morale_!

Sometimes it occurred to one to consider what history might say about
the Ridge and also to wonder how much history, which pretends to know
all, would really know. Thus, one sought perspective of the colossal
significance of the uninterrupted battle whose processes numbed the mind
and to distinguish the meaning of different stages of the struggle.
Nothing had so well reflected the character of the war or of its
protagonists, French, British and German, as this grinding of resources,
of courage, and of will of three powerful races.

We are always talking of phases as the result of natural human
speculation and tendency to set events in groups. Observers also may
gratify this inclination as well as the contemporaneous military expert
writing from his maps. It is historically accepted, I think, that the
first decisive phase was the battle of the Marne when Paris was saved.
The second was Verdun, when the Germans again sought a decision on the
Western front by an offensive of sledgehammer blows against frontal
positions; and, perhaps, the third came when on the Ridge the British
and the French kept up their grim, insistent, piecemeal attacks, holding
the enemy week in and week out on the defensive, aiming at mastery as
the scales trembled in the new turn of the balance and initiative passed
from one side to the other in the beginning of that new era.

This scarred slope with its gentle ascent, this section of farming land
with its woods growing more ragged every day from shell fire, with its
daily and nightly thunders, its trickling procession of wounded and
prisoners down the communication trenches speaking the last word in
human bravery, industry, determination and endurance--this might one day
be not only the monument to the positions of all the battalions that had
fought, its copses, its villages, its knolls famous to future
generations as is Little Round Top with us, but in its monstrous realism
be an immortal expression, unrealized by those who fought, of a
commander's iron will and foresight in gaining that supremacy in arms,
men and material which was the genesis of the great decision.

The German had not yielded his offensive at Verdun after the attack of
July 1st. At leas