onquerors when Mecca was theirs. There must be
something sacred to a Frenchman in the citadel which held life secure
and in the ruins which bore their share of the blows upon this old
fortress town in the lap of the hills, looking out toward hills which
had been the real defense.

Interest quickened on the way to the Verdun front as you came to the
slopes covered with torn and fallen trees, where the Germans laid their
far-reaching curtains of fire to catch the French reserves struggling
through mud and shell-craters on those February and March days to the
relief of the front line. Only when you have known the life of an army
in action in winter in such a climate can you appreciate the will that
drove men forward to the attack and the will of the defenders against
outnumbering guns, having to yield, point by point, with shrewd thrift,
small bands of men in exposed places making desperate resistance against
torrents of shells.

Verdun was German valor at its best and German gunnery at its mightiest,
the effort of Colossus shut in a ring of steel to force a decision; and
the high-water mark of German persistence was where you stood on the
edge of the area of mounds that shells had heaped and craters that
shells had scooped by the concentration of fire on Fort Souville. A few
Germans in the charge reached here, but none returned. The survivors
entered Verdun, the French will tell you with a shrug, as prisoners.
Down the bare slope with its dead grass blotched by craters the eye
travels and then up another slope to a crest which you see as a cumulus
of shell-tossed earth under an occasional shell-burst. That is
Douaumont, whose taking cost the Germans such prolonged and bloody
effort and aroused the Kaiser to a florid outburst of laudation of his
Brandenburgers who, by its capture, had, as Germany then thought,
brought France to her death-gasp.

On that hill German prestige and system reached their zenith; and the
answer eight months later was French _elan_ which, in two hours, with
the swiftness and instinctive cohesion of democracy drilled and
embattled and asking no spur from an autocrat, swept the Germans off the
summit. From other charges I could visualize the precise and spirited
movement of those blue figures under waves of shell fire in an attack
which was the triumphant example of the latest style of offensive
against frontal positions. There was no Kaiser to burst into rhetoric to
thank General Nivelle, who had