great a degree of accuracy as the
field-gun. Such great importance is attached to the trench mortars by
the Italians that they have formed them into a distinct arm of the
service, entirely independent of the artillery, the officers of the
trench-mortar batteries, who are drawn from the cavalry, being trained
at a special school.

The city of Verdun, or rather the blackened ruins which are all that
remain of it, stands in the centre of a great valley which is shaped
not unlike a platter. Down this valley, splitting the city in half,
meanders the River Meuse. The houses of Verdun, like those of so many
mediaeval cities, are clustered about the foot of a great fortified
rock. From this rock Vauban, at the order of Louis XIV, blasted
ramparts and battlements. To meet the constantly changing conditions
of warfare, later generations of engineers gradually honeycombed the
rock with passages, tunnels, magazines, store-rooms, halls, and
casemates, a veritable labyrinth of them, thus creating the present
Citadel of Verdun. Then, because the city and its citadel lie in the
middle of a valley dominated by hills--like a lump of sugar in the
middle of a platter--upon those hills was built a chain of barrier
forts: La Chaume, Tavannes, Thiaumont, Vaux, Douaumont, and others.
But when, at Liege and Namur, at Antwerp and Maubeuge, the Germans
proved conclusively that no forts could long withstand the battering
of their heavy guns, the French took instant profit by the lesson.
They promptly left the citadel and the forts nearest to it and
established themselves in trenches on the surrounding hills, taking
with them their artillery. This trench-line ran through certain of the
small outlying forts, such as Tavannes, Thiaumont, Douaumont, and
Vaux, and that is why you have read in the papers so much of the
desperate fighting about them. Thus the much-talked-of fortress of
Verdun was no longer a fortress at all, but merely a sector in that
battle-line which extends from the Channel to the Alps. Barring its
historic associations, and the moral effect which its fall might have
in France and abroad, its capture by the Germans would have had no
more strategic importance, if as much, than if the French line had
been bent back for a few miles at Rheims, or Soissons, or Thann. The
Vauban citadel in the city became merely an advanced headquarters, a
telephone exchange, a supply station, a sort of central office, from
the safety of whose subterrane