THE fortress of Verdun will stand forever, a bastion cut against the sky, and behind and above, like a flaming cresset, will burn Douaumont.

Verdun in March of 1916 was the name of a fortress and a town; to-day it is no longer a name. It has become a word lifted among the star words common to all languages and all times. Valor, splendor, devotion, endurance, patriotism,—how grand are these words! Yet Verdun is the grandest of them all, for it includes them all.

It is the word that France has flung to the world not from her fleshly lips, but from the lips of her soul.

To the cringing neutrals; to Swiss waiters, and Dutch hucksters and English sedition-mongers, and Irish hole-and-corner men, and Swedish marketmen. To the hordes of the Beast and the powers of darkness France has flung the light of that one burning word, just as the Spartans, four hundred and eighty years before the birth of Christ, flung to us the light of the word ThermopylÆ.

The old heroic times seemed dead, littleness seemed everywhere, till the light of this war showed the soul of man great as in the days of Alexander.

The counter-attack at Douaumont is but an incident, a crystallized moment out of the endless battle on the Meuse.

H. DE VERE STACPOOLE.