A courteous Commandant, telephoned to from below, came from some upper region to greet us and to show us something of the endless labyrinth of rooms, passages and dormitories, which during the siege often sheltered thousands of men.  The veteran Colonel Duhay, who was in command of the citadel during the greater part of the year-long battle—­a splendid, square-built tower of a man—­I saw later in Paris.  It was ill-luck not to have been able to walk with him over the tragic battle-field itself, for few men can have memories of it at once so comprehensive and so close.  From the few words I had with him I retain a shuddering impression as of a slaughter-house; yet nothing could be cheerfuller or humaner than the broad soldier-face.  But our talk turned on the losses of Verdun, and although these losses—­i.e., the proportion of death to the square yard—­were probably 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.