![]() ![]() The superb calm of the French people, the efficiency of their organisation, the equipment of their cheery soldiery, convince one that the men in the German machine would never be able to compare with them. As I write it is late, yet the bombardment is continuing, and the massed guns of the Germans are of greater calibre than have ever been used in such numbers. The present attack on the French is by far the most violent incident of the whole western war. Small groups of firs darken some of the hills, giving a natural resemblance to Scotland. Verdun lies in a great basin with the silvery Meuse twining in the valley. When one finally arrives at the battlefield, there are a dozen vantage points from which, with glasses or the naked eye, one can take in much that has happened. As the gentry examined our papers and waited for telephonic instructions, I counted more than 200 of the distant voices of Kultur. Even at that distance the mournful reverberation of the guns was insistent. Furnished with every possible kind of pass, accompanied by a member of the French headquarters staff in a military car, I was nevertheless held up by intractable gendarmes at a point 25 miles away from the great scene. This vast battle might have been arranged for the benefit of interested spectators, were it not that the whole zone for miles is as tightly closed to the outer world as a lodge of freemasons. It is one of the most gruesome facts of the war that the French, peering through the moonlight at what they thought to be stealthily crawling Germans, found them to be wounded men frozen to death. This instance serves to illustrate the precarious weather in which the Germans undertook adventure. ![]() The French and German officers, without conferring and unwilling to negotiate, turned their backs so they might not see officially so unwarlike a scene, and the men on each side rebuilt their parapets without the firing of a single shot. The situation was astounding and unique in the history of trench warfare. The parapets melted and subsided, and two long lines of men stood up naked, as it were, before each other, face to face with only two possibilities: wholesale murder on the one side or the other, or a temporary unofficial peace for the making of fresh parapet protections. The opposing French and German trenches, their parapets hard frozen, were so close that they were actually within hearing of each other. Changes of temperature, too, are somewhat more frequent than elsewhere - not long ago here occurred one of nature's furious and romantic reminders of her power to impose her will. The district of Verdun lies in one of the coldest and most misty sectors in the long line between Nieuport and Switzerland. It cannot be pretended the attack had in it anything of military necessity. The profits - as the soldier speaks of such matters - being so small, what then were the motives that impelled the attack on Verdun? Was it economic pressure which led to the miscalculation that the taking over of the French line here was a means of ending the war? The Germans are so wont to misread the minds of other nations that they are quite foolish enough to make themselves believe this or any other foolish thing. Taking into account all available indications, it may safely be assumed that, during the fighting of the first 13 days, the Germans lost in killed, wounded and prisoners at least 100,000 men. Yet none of the prisoners questioned estimated the losses at less than one-third of the total effectives. Nothing whatever has been admitted by the Germans as to the appalling price in blood they have paid and are still paying. ![]()
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