dramatic speech rarely deserts the Frenchman—­or Frenchwoman.  It is present in the letter written by Roger Vamier’s mother, as in the Ordres du Jour of Castelnau or Petain.  Facility of this kind is not our forte.  Our lack of it suggests the laughter in that most delightful of recent French books, Les Silences du Colonel Bramble, which turns upon our national taciturnities and our minimising instinct in any matter of feeling, an instinct which is like the hiding instinct, the protective colouring of birds—­only anxious to be mistaken for something else.  The Englishman, when emotion compels him, speaks more readily in poetry than prose; it is the natural result of our great poetic tradition; and in the remarkable collections of war poetry written by English soldiers we have the English counterpart to the French prose utterance of the war—­so much more eloquent and effective, generally, than our own.

* * * * *

One more look round the slopes over which the light is fading.  The heroism of the defence!—­that, here, is the first thought.  But on the part of the attackers there was a courage no less amazing, though of another sort; the effect of an iron discipline hypnotising the individual will, and conferring on the soldier such superhuman power of dying at another man’s will as history—­on such a scale—­has scarcely seen equalled.  In the first battle of Verdun, which lasted forty-eight days (February 21st to April 9th), the German casualties were over 200,000, with a very high proportion of killed.  And by the end of the year the casualties at Verdun, on both sides, had reached 700,000.  Opinion in Germany, at first so confident, wavered and dropped.  Why not break off?  But the dynasty was concerned.  Fortune, toute entiere a sa proie attachee, drove the German Army again and again through lanes of death, where the French 75’s worked their terrible will—­for no real military advantage.  “On the 10th of March,” says M. Henri Bordeaux, “the enemy climbed the northern slopes of Fort Vaux.  He was then from two to three hundred metres from the counter-scarp.  He took three months to cross these two to three hundred metres—­three months of superhuman effort, and of incredible losses in young men, the flower of the nation.”  The German strategic reserves were for the first time seriously shaken, and by the end of this wonderful year Petain, Nivelle, and Mangin between them had recovered from the assailants all but a fraction of what had been lost at Verdun.  Meanwhile, behind the “shield” of Verdun, which was thus attracting and wasting the force of the enemy, the Allied Armies had prepared the great offensive of the summer.  Italy struck in the Trentino on the 25th of June, Russia attacked in June and July, the British attacked on the Somme on July 1st.  The “wearing-down” battle had begun in earnest.  “Soldiers of Verdun,” said Marshal Joffre, in his order of the 12th of June, “the plans