N ANOTHER GETTYSBURG 72

Failure of Crown Prince likened by French to "high tide"
of confederacy.

IV. VERDUN, THE DOOR THAT LEADS NOWHERE 95

The battle and the topography of the battlefield--an
analysis of the attack and defence.

V. IN SIGHT OF THE PROMISED LAND--ON THE LORRAINE
BATTLEFIELD 116

THEY SHALL NOT PASS

I

MY TRIP TO VERDUN--GENERAL PETAIN FACE TO FACE

THE MEN WHO HOLD THE LINE--WHAT THEIR FACES TOLD OF THE PAST
AND THE FUTURE OF FRANCE

My road to Verdun ran through the Elysee Palace, and it was to the
courtesy and interest of the President of the French Republic that I
owed my opportunity to see the battle for the Meuse city at close
range. Already through the kindness of the French General Staff I had
seen the Lorraine and Marne battlegrounds and had been guided over
these fields by officers who had shared in the opening battles that
saved France. But Verdun was more difficult; there is little time for
caring for the wandering correspondent when a decisive contest is
going forward, and quite naturally the General Staff turned a deaf ear
to my request.

Through the kindness of one of the many Frenchmen who gave time and
effort to make my pilgrimage a success I was at last able to see M.
Poincare. Like our own American President, the French Chief Magistrate
is never interviewed, and I mention this audience simply because it
was one more and in a sense the final proof for me of the
friendliness, the courtesy, the interest that the American will find
to-day in France. I had gone to Paris, my ears filled with the
warnings of those who told me that it was hard to be an American in
Europe, in France, in the present hour. I had gone expecting, or at
least fearing, that I should find it so.

Instead, from peasant to President I found only kindness, only
gratitude, only a profound appreciation for all that Americans had
individually done for France in the hour of her great trial. These
things and one thing more I found: a very intense desire that
Americans should be able to see for themselves; the Frenchman will not
talk to you of what France has done, is doing; he shrinks from
anything that might suggest the imitation of the German method of
propaganda. In so far as it is humanly possible he would have you see
the thing for yourself and testify out of your o