German trench
gains on the west because the Germans are still far from the Charny
Ridge, their main position.

If Verdun falls, that is, if the French are compelled under pressure
or as a result of the cost of holding their present awkward position
to go back behind the river, they will lose fifty or a hundred square
miles of French territory, they will lose all the tremendous value of
the moral "lift" which the successful defence has brought, but they
will lose nothing else; and when the Germans have taken Verdun, the
ashes, the ruins, they will stop, because there is no object or value
in further attack. They are fighting for moral values, and the French
politician has overruled the French soldier and compelled him to
accept battle on unfavorable ground for this same moral value, but
against his military judgment. He has done it successfully. He expects
and France expects that he will continue to do it successfully, but in
the wholly remote contingency that he failed (I can only say that it
is a contingency no longer considered in France), a loss in moral
advantage would be the only consequence.

V

IN SIGHT OF THE PROMISED LAND--ON THE LORRAINE BATTLEFIELD

In the third week of August, 1914, a French army crossed the frontier
of Alsace-Lorraine and entered the Promised Land, toward which all
Frenchmen had looked in hope and sadness for forty-four years. The
long-forgotten communiques of that early period of the war reported
success after success, until at last it was announced that the
victorious French armies had reached Sarrebourg and Morhange, and were
astride the Strassburg-Metz Railroad. And then Berlin took up the cry,
and France and the world learned of a great German victory and of the
defeat and rout of the invading army. Even Paris conceded that the
retreat had begun and the "army of liberation" was crowding back
beyond the frontier and far within French territory.

Then the curtain of the censorship fell and the world turned to the
westward to watch the terrible battle for Paris. In the agony and
glory of the Marne the struggle along the Moselle was forgotten; the
Battle of Nancy, of Lorraine, was fought and won in the darkness, and
when the safety of Paris was assured the world looked toward the
Aisne, and then toward Flanders. So it came about that one of the
greatest battles of the whole war, one of the most important of the
French victories, the success that made the Marne possible, the r