rthern
trenches, close to Brabant, where the French lines crossed the river,
and in the course of a few hours opened the eyes of the French
command--which, though well aware of an impending attack, was perhaps
not fully informed as to the scale and significance of the German
preparations. Indeed, in those first few hours of the bombardment of
the northern sector of the salient, there was repeated on this Western
Front the phalanx concentration which Von Mackensen had used against
the Russians during the previous summer, when thousands of guns,
arrayed against a comparatively narrow area, burst and blazed a way
through it, or, more accurately perhaps, smashed the Russian trenches,
and, unopposed by their artillery--for, as we have stated already, the
Russians were wofully short of guns and ammunition--slew the
unfortunate troops of the Tsar holding those trenches, forced their
supports and reserves to fall back, and, having gained a certain depth
of territory, moved forward and repeated the process again and again,
thus compelling continual retirement.

Here then, on the 19th February, 1916--a date which is destined to
become historical--the Germans commenced on the Western Front, against
the northern-most curve of the Verdun salient, a similar attack, an
attack heralded by a storm of shells thrown from masses of artillery
which had been collected for weeks past and hidden in the woods in that
neighbourhood. There were guns dug in in every direction, guns which
had been there, perhaps, since the commencement of the war; there were
others artfully concealed in natural hollows; and there were yet again
others, literally hundreds of them, parked close together in the woods
and forests without other attempt at concealment--a huge mass of metal
which, at a given signal, commenced to pound the French defences.
Never before, without doubt, had such a storm of shell been cast on any
one line of trenches; and continuing, as it did, for hours, ploughing
the ground over a comparatively narrow stretch, it reduced everything
within that selected area to a shapeless and tangled mass of wreckage.
It was to be wondered at, indeed, that anything living could survive
the ordeal. French trenches, stretching across the slope behind those
meshes of laced barbed wire, were blotted out--were stamped out
indeed--and soon became indistinguishable from the hundreds of cavities
and craters and holes which marked the slopes across which they had