(PLATES 98 TO 106.)

After the first battle of the Marne, in 1914, the Germans were driven back to positions encircling Verdun on three sides (north-west, north-east, and south-east) at a distance of ten to twelve miles. They succeeded, however, in holding a little salient at St. Mihiel, on the eastern bank of the Meuse, about twenty miles south of Verdun, and with it the village of Chauvoncourt, on the west side of the river. This village was entered by the French in November, 1914, but immediately blown up (it had been already mined) by the Germans, and regained by them in a counter-attack. It remained in their hands until 1918, but they were so tightly held all round by the French that they could make no use of it as a bridge-head.

The possession of the St. Mihiel Salient, however, gave the Germans command of a stretch of the main road in the Meuse valley, and enabled them to cut the only full-gauge railway which still connected Verdun with the rest of France. This road and railway were therefore, until the successful American attack of September, 1918, entirely useless to the city, and its only railway was the narrow-gauge line leading southwards to the main line at Bar-le-Duc, and the one main road to the same place via Souilly. The latter came to be known as the "Sacred Way" (La Voie SacrÉe), and became the principal line of communication for men, munitions, and stores. It is stated that thirteen battalions of infantry were occupied in keeping it in such repair as was possible, and that 1,700 lorries passed over it daily. In 1919 the northern part of the Voie SacrÉe was still as bumpy for motoring as many of the worst roads in Flanders.

The great attack on Verdun was intended to capture the city in four days and to clear the way to Paris at one swoop, and the Emperor (whose presence never seemed to bring good fortune to his troops) was waiting at Ornes, some eight or ten miles north, to make his triumphal entry. The attack began with enormous impetuosity on the 21st of February, 1916, but in four days—with enormous losses on both sides, but chiefly to the attackers—the Germans were still held some four or five miles away from their objective on the east side of the river, and double as far on the west. But nearer the Argonne their positions had allowed them already to cut the full-gauge railway to St. Menehould by shell-fire.

A book written by General von Zwehl[40] gives the number of guns used in this attack as being about 230 in each of three corps. He also speaks of the "dejection and pessimism" induced in his troops by the failure of the artillery to make the clear way to the city which had been predicted and promised.

The Douaumont Fort was entered on the 25th, and the Emperor had sent to Berlin the news that the "key of the last defences of Verdun" was in German hands. But on the next day PÉtain began counter-attacks, and although during several months the Germans made progress from time to time, eventually gaining the Vaux Fort and most of the Mort Homme Ridge, the great attack had, in reality, miscarried from the start.

The city itself, from which all civilians had been evacuated by the 25th of February, was heavily shelled, especially at the commencement of the attack, but as a city it has not suffered to anything like the same extent as Rheims, to say nothing of Albert, Lens, or Ypres. The fighting and the tremendous shelling were always in a zone lying roughly between four and eight miles from the city; within this zone the ground is as completely shell-marked, the villages and woods as completely destroyed, as even on the Somme.

The greatest German advance was reached in June, 1916, Thiaumont Fort being taken on the 30th of June, when at one point the Germans were only three miles from the city. Thiaumont was retaken when the French offensive started in the following October, and on the 2nd of November Vaux Fort was recovered and the Germans had been driven back nearly to the lines they had succeeded in occupying on the 24th of February. But the Mort Homme Ridge was entirely regained only in August, 1917, and it was still another year before it could be said that Verdun was entirely "cleared." The final success of the French in driving back the enemy is attributed by General von Zwehl to the overwhelming superiority of their artillery, the German heavy guns having been sent elsewhere.

Plate 98, taken from the left bank of the Meuse, shows the broken bridge at St. Mihiel and the ridge above; the little town lies chiefly beyond the picture in a hollow on the right. It has been very little damaged; even the great clock in the church tower is uninjured. It is easily seen how entirely the ridge, some 300 feet above the river and filling up an acute bend, enabled the Germans to dominate the road and railway on the left bank for a long distance. In April, 1915, a French attack on the north side of the salient took Les Éparges after severe fighting, but made no further progress. The neighbouring country to the west of the Meuse is quite unharmed until one comes within a few miles of the river. The St. Mihiel Salient was attacked from the south by the Americans and by the French from the north on the 11th of September, 1918, just as the Germans had determined to evacuate it, and it was finally cleared within a week.

The view from the Pont Ste. Croix at Verdun over the Meuse (Plate 99) shows a portion of the most destroyed area of the city, in which some sort of reconstruction had already started. On the opposite side of the river, however, tall buildings were standing quite uninjured, and entering the city from the south by the Porte St. Victor one traverses a long length of street without seeing any serious destruction. The cathedral (not a very interesting building after many reconstructions) has been badly damaged as to its vaulting and roof, but the towers still stand; the Church of St. Saviour has been less fortunate.

Vaux Fort—although we did not hear so much of it in England as of Douaumont—was the scene of one of the most gallant episodes of the war. The fort is somewhat less than five miles north-east of the city; it was completed only in 1911, and is a huge mass of masonry and reinforced concrete, with many underground works, on an eminence which dominates the country on the side away from the city and faces the Douaumont Ridge across a valley in which lies the village of Vaux. The tops of both Vaux and Douaumont Forts look like a wilderness of shell-holes in a gravel bed; apparently the concrete has been covered over with many feet of something in the nature of gravel as an additional protection. Vaux Fort was held against three months of incessant attacks by Major Raynal and his men, the last of whom were finally completely imprisoned within it, but held out and fought hand to hand in the steep underground passages leading to the northern fosse (Plate 100), the only outlet remaining to them. Great efforts were made to relieve them, but without success, and after a final week of continuous fighting, during the last two days of which they had only water enough for the wounded men, the little garrison was overpowered on the 8th of June, 1916. The Germans had the courtesy, in recognition of his splendid defence, to allow Major Raynal to retain his sword. The fort was finally regained on the 2nd of November of the same year.

The village of Vaux, which lies in the valley north of the fort, was fought for strenuously and eventually taken long before the fort itself. I tried to find some sign of its existence; its site is certainly somewhere in the centre of Plate 101, but such remains as may exist are entirely blotted out by the growth of the rank herbage which fills the whole valley from side to side.

The fort of Douaumont (Plate 102) was that of which the name was most familiar in this country, owing to its partial capture in the early attack and also to the absurd boasting of the Emperor, already alluded to, in connection with it. It lies to the north-west of Vaux, upon a parallel ridge. The fort was taken on the 25th of February, the fifth day of the great attack in which the French troops had been fighting continuously against "five times their strength in men and ten times their strength in guns." The Kaiser was at Ornes, waiting for its fall; men's lives were to form no hindrance to the attack; the Brandenburgers[41] succeeded in getting into it, and a few of them held on in the ruins, with the French on both sides of them. But PÉtain had arrived, and the Germans were beaten, although at that time neither side knew it, and although thousands of lives had still to be sacrificed before the end arrived.

In the following May the French retook the fort, but were driven out after two days by an overwhelming attack. In October, 1916, it passed finally to the French under General Mangin, after a heavy bombardment. The troops for this attack had been trained on a complete model, constructed behind the lines, of the ground and of the fort, to familiarise them exactly with the position to be dealt with.

The earlier Verdun attacks were made upon the east side of the river, but after these were fought to a standstill fighting shifted to the western side, where it eventually reached an even greater intensity than before. The Mort Homme Ridge (Plate 103), about eight miles north-west of Verdun, lies about two miles in front of the original German positions of the 21st of February, and its possession was essential to the Germans if they were to be any more successful in reaching Verdun from the north-west than they had been from the north-east. Its highest point is about 300 feet above the city. The artillery attack commenced on the 2nd of March, and the advance four days later, but the progress made was very slow, and although the slaughter was absolutely terrific, when the fighting died down on the 9th of April—forty-eight days after it had started—the Mort Homme was still untaken. Onwards from this date the fighting at Verdun was—at least, in comparison with what had gone before—only desultory. In May the highest point ("304") on the ridge had to be abandoned, and by the 21st of May the Germans had gained the north-east slopes of the Mort Homme. But the battle as a whole had been lost long before this, and no local gains could change its result. Plate 103 shows the monument put up by the French on the southern slope of the Mort Homme to which they had been driven, a little below point 295. It is very difficult in a photograph taken from ground-level to give any idea of the surface of shell-holed ground, but something of it can be seen in this view and something also in Plate 104, which shows the last French front-line positions near the top of the southern slope of the ridge, where the final attack occurred on the 28th of May, 1916. But the French front still remained unbroken; they had never even been pushed back to their main positions of defence. The great counter-attack on the left of the Meuse came in August, 1917, when the Mort Homme and CumiÈres Wood were retaken on the first day, and the whole original front restored in a week.

The Argonne Forest, in which the Americans had such stiff fighting in pushing back the Germans in 1918, lies about twenty miles west of Verdun and covers an area of some 150 square miles up to the line where the Aire River cuts across it on its way to the Aisne. Its huge dimensions, and the fact that only a portion of it was the scene of actual fighting for any considerable time, have saved it from undergoing the total destruction of so many of the smaller woods. Plate 105 shows some of the southern portion between St. Menehould and Clermont, which is practically uninjured, although the village of Les Islettes (faintly seen in the valley, which here separates the forest into two sections) is in ruins. Along the road from St. Menehould to Verdun through the forest (from which the view was taken) there were in 1919 long lines of fruit-trees quite uninjured, an unusually cheerful sight. In September, 1914, after the first battle of the Marne, the Germans in their retreat held the northern part of the forest, practically on the cross-road from Varennes to Vienne-le-ChÂteau. From that time until the end of 1915 there was continuous and very severe fighting in the section of the forest between that road and the St. Menehould road. Fighting in the depths of the forest among thick trees, on wet and slippery ground traversed by endless ravines, was incessant by day and night, often hand to hand, and below ground as well as on the surface. The French did not succeed in dislodging the enemy, but they were successful in defeating two powerful attacks by the Crown Prince, in June and July, 1915, directed at the St. Menehould-Verdun road. The enemy got within five or six miles of Les Islettes, and the little town was destroyed, but they never got to the road, and were promptly driven back to their old lines. The town of Clermont, farther east on this road, had been sacked and then burnt by the Germans in their retreat in 1914.

Varennes (Plate 106) is on the eastern edge of the forest, where it is crossed by the River Aire, which up to that point had been flowing northwards east of the Argonne, as the Aisne does on the west. It was the headquarters of the Crown Prince's army in 1915, and his attacks in that year started from it. It is only a few miles west of Avocourt and Malancourt, from which started the March attack on the Mort Homme Ridge from the west in 1916.

After the end of 1915 the Argonne quieted down, but trench fighting and mining was always going on until the commencement of the Franco-American offensive on the 26th of September, 1918, following the American success at St. Mihiel. Among other forms of defence the Germans here used steel-wire net-screens, 3 metres high, fixed to the tree-trunks. The Americans had very hard work in getting through the forest—how severe may be judged from the fact that there are over 25,000 graves in the great American cemetery near Montfaucon; but eventually the Germans were compelled to retreat, and on the 9th of October the French from the west and the Americans from the east met at GrandprÉ, at the northern extremity of the forest.

Varennes itself (the little town where Louis XVI. was arrested in 1791 on his attempted flight from France) is very nearly destroyed. The Americans took it on the first day of their advance, when it was defended by a division of Prussian Guards, and on the next day they captured Montfaucon, the headquarters of the Crown Prince for his Verdun attack. The ground here is high, and the Germans had built themselves an excellent O.P. from the materials of the church. Here also, according to General Maurice, the Crown Prince had directed operations from a "palatial dugout."

Traces of the American occupation of this district were still visible months afterwards in the shape of road notices, "Do your bit! Obey the traffic regulations!" and it was in the familiar accent of a young American officer that we received instructions as to getting our car through the narrow streets of Verdun.