the French Government.

It is twenty miles from Souilly to Verdun, and the road has come to be
known as La Voie Sacre--the Sacred Way--because on the uninterrupted
flow of ammunition and supplies over that road depended the safety of
the fortress. Three thousand men with picks and shovels, working day
and night, kept the road in condition to bear up under the enormous
volume of traffic. The railway to Verdun was so repeatedly cut by
German shells that the French built a narrow-gauge line, which
zig-zags over the hills. Beside the road, at frequent intervals, I
noted cisterns and watering-troughs, and huge overhead water-tanks;
for an army--men, horses, and motor-cars--is incredibly thirsty. This
elaborate water system is the work of Major Bunau-Varilla, who,
fittingly enough, is the head of the _Service d'Eau des Armees_.

Half a dozen miles out of Souilly we crossed the watershed between the
Seine and the Rhine and were in the valley of the Meuse. On the other
side of yonder hill, whence came a constant muttering of cannon, was,
I knew, the Unconquerable City.

While yet Verdun itself was out of sight, we came, quite unexpectedly,
upon one of its mightiest defenders: a 400-millimetre gun mounted on a
railway-truck. So streaked and striped and splashed and mottled with
many colors was it that, monster though it was, it escaped my notice
until we were almost upon it. Suddenly a score or more of grimy men,
its crew, came pelting down the track, as subway laborers run for
shelter when a blast is about to be set off. A moment later came a
mighty bellow; from the up-turned nose of the monster burst a puff of
smoke pierced by a tongue of flame, and an invisible express-train
went roaring eastward in the direction of the German lines. This was
the mighty weapon of which I had heard rumors but had never seen: the
great 16-inch howitzer with which the French had so pounded Fort
Douaumont as to cause its evacuation by the Germans.

The French artillerists were such firm believers in the superiority of
light over heavy artillery, and pinned such faith to their 75's, that
they had paid scant attention to the question of heavy mobile guns.
Hence when the German tidal wave rolled Parisward in 1914, the only
heavy artillery possessed by the French consisted of a very few
4.2-inch Creusot guns of a model adopted just prior to the war, and a
limited number of batteries of 4.8-inch and 6.1-inch guns and
howitzers; all of them, save