e
only diversions of impatience in the monotonous routine of trench
warfare by which our men strengthened the mud walls of their School
of Courage, so that the new boys already coming out might learn their
lessons without more grievous interruption than came from the daily
visits of that Intruder to whom the fees were paid. In those two years
it was France which fought the greatest battles, flinging her sons
against the enemy's ramparts in desperate, vain attempts to breach them.
At Verdun, in the months that followed the first month of '16, it was
France which sustained the full weight of the German offensive on the
western front and broke its human waves, until they were spent in a sea
of blood, above which the French poilus, the "hairy ones," stood panting
and haggard, on their death-strewn rocks. The Germans had failed to
deal a fatal blow at the heart of France. France held her head up
still, bleeding from many wounds, but defiant still; and the German
High Command, aghast at their own losses--six hundred thousand
casualties--already conscious, icily, of a dwindling man-power which one
day would be cut off at its source, rearranged their order of battle and
shifted the balance of their weight eastward, to smash Russia. Somehow
or other they must smash a way out by sledge-hammer blows, left and
right, west and east, from that ring of nations which girdled them. On
the west they would stand now on the defensive, fairly sure of their
strength, but well aware that it would be tried to the utmost by that
enemy which, at the back of their brains (at the back of the narrow
brains of those bald-headed vultures on the German General Staff), they
most feared as their future peril--England. They had been fools to let
the British armies grow up and wax so strong. It was the folly of the
madness by which they had flung the gauntlet down to the souls of proud
peoples arrayed against them.

Our armies were now strong and trained and ready. We had about six
hundred thousand bayonet-men in France and Flanders and in England,
immense reserves to fill up the gaps that would be made in their ranks
before the summer foliage turned to russet tints.

Our power in artillery had grown amazingly since the beginning of the
year. Every month I had seen many new batteries arrive, with clean
harness and yellow straps, and young gunners who were quick to get
their targets. We were strong in "heavies," twelve-inchers, 9.2's,
eight-inchers, 4.2'