bably exceeded in
several later battles, in none, it seems to me, has the massacre of
men on both sides left so terrible a mark on the survivors. There came
a time when the French were sick of slaying, and the German dead were
piled metres high on the slopes of Mort Homme and Cumieres; in those
weeks at the end of May, when the Germans, conscious that their
prestige had suffered irreparably in the hundred days--which were to
have been four!--of desperate and indecisive fighting, were at the
opening of that fierce last effort which gave them Fort Vaux and its
hero-commander, Commandant Raynal, on June 7th--put them in
short-lived possession of Thiaumont and Fleury later--and was then
interrupted at the end of the month by the thunder of the Allied
attack on the Somme.

After leaving the citadel and the much-injured cathedral, beneath the
crypt of which some of the labyrinthine passages of the old fortress
are hewn, we drove through the eastern section of the battle-field,
past what was once Fort Souville, along an upper road, with Vaux on
our right, and Douaumont on the northern edge of the hill in front of
us; descending again by Froide Terre, with the Cote de Poivre beyond
it to the north; while we looked across the Meuse at the dim lines of
Mort Homme, of the Bois des Corbeaux and the Crete de l'Oie, of all
that "chess-board" of hills which became so familiar to Europe in
those marvellous four months from February to June, 1916. Every yard
of these high slopes has been fought over again and again, witnessing
on the part of the defenders a fury of endurance, a passion of
resolve, such as those, perhaps, alone can know who hear through all
their being the mystic call of the soil, of the very earth itself, the
actual fatherland, on which they fight. "_We are but a moment of the
eternal France_:"--such was once the saying of a French soldier, dying
somewhere amid these broken trenches over which we are looking. What
was it, asks M. Reinach, that enabled the French to hold out as they
did? _Daring_, he replies--the daring of the leaders, the daring of
the troops led. The word hardly renders the French "_audace_" which is
equally mis-translated by our English "audacity." "_Audace_" implies a
daring which is not rashness, a daring which is justified, which is,
in fact, the military aspect of a great nation's confidence in itself.
It was the spirit of the "Marseillaise," says M. Reinach again--it was
the French soul--_l'ame