"THEY SHALL NOT PASS" AT VERDUN

By Lord Northcliffe.

NORTHCLIFFE, the great British newspaper proprietor, was a witness to the German assault on Verdun, as here described in a dispatch he wrote and sent to the London "Times," March 4, 1916. This mightiest effort of German artillery began February 21 and was kept up steadily for more than a month. The Germans were commanded by the Crown Prince. General Petain took command of the defense March 1, and his cheery assurance, "Now, we shall have them!" has become almost as noted as that other Verdun battle-cry, "They shall not pass!"

Answering a question asked here, Count de Souza, the French military authority, states that the Germans "lost 100,000 men (as compared with 20,000 French) in this vain effort to command the Heights of the Meuse, the key to the whole region." Ludendorff, of the German High Command, states that the success of the Verdun operation would have forestalled the American Argonne-Meuse attack in 1918.

WHAT is the secret motive underlying the German attempt to break the French line at Verdun, in which the Crown Prince's army is incurring such appalling losses? Is it financial, in view of the coming war loan? Is it dynastic? Or is it intended to influence doubting neutrals? From the evidence of German deserters it is known that the attack was originally intended to take place a month or two hence, when the ground was dry. Premature spring caused the Germans to accelerate their plans. There were two final delays owing to bad weather, and then came the colossal onslaught of February 21st.

The Germans made a good many of the mistakes we made at Gallipoli. They announced that something large was pending by closing the Swiss frontier. The French, who were not ready, were also warned by their own astute Intelligence Department. Their avions were not idle, and, if confirmation were needed, it was given by deserters, who, surmising the horrors that were to come, crept out of the trenches at night, lay down by the edge of the Meuse till the morning, and then gave themselves up, together with information that has since proved to be accurate. Things went wrong with the Germans in other ways. A Zeppelin that was to have blown up important railway junctions on the French line of communications was brought down at Revigny, and incidentally the inhabitants of what remains of that much-bombarded town were avenged by the spectacle of the blazing dirigible crashing to the ground and the hoisting with their own petard of 30 Huns therein. It is not necessary to recapitulate that the gigantic effort of February 21st was frustrated by the coolness and tenacity of the French soldiers and the deadly curtain fire of the French gunners.

Though a great deal of calculated nonsense has been sent out in official communiques and dilated upon by dithyrambic Berlin newspaper correspondents as to the taking by storm of the long-dismantled fort at Douaumont, nothing whatever has been admitted by the Germans as to the appalling price in blood they have paid since February 21st and are still paying. The French losses are, and have been, insignificant. I know the official figure. It has been verified by conversations with members of the British, French and American Red Cross Societies, who are obviously in a position to know. The wounded who pass through their hands have, in many cases, come straight from where they have seen dead Germans, as has been described by scores of witnesses, lying as lay the Prussian Guard in the first Battle of Ypres. The evidence of one army as to another army's losses needs careful corroboration. This exists amply in the evidence of many German prisoners interrogated singly and independently at the French Headquarters.

The case of one man, belonging to the 3rd Battalion of the 12th Regiment in the 5th Division of the 3rd Army Corps, may be taken as characteristic. On the morning of February 28th this prisoner reached the fort of Douaumont and found there one battalion of the 24th Regiment, elements of the 64th Regiment and of the 3rd Battalion of Jagers. The strength of his company had been, on February 21st, 200 rifles with four officers. On February 22nd it had fallen to 70 rifles, with one officer. The other companies had suffered similar losses. On February 23rd the prisoner's company was reenforced by 45 men, bearing the numbers of the 12th, the 52nd, the 35th, and the 205th Regiments. These men had been drawn from various depots in the interior. The men of the 12th Regiment believed that five regiments were in reserve in the woods behind the 3rd Corps, but, as time went on and losses increased without any sign of the actual presence of these reserves, doubt spread whether they were really in existence. The prisoner declared that his comrades were no longer capable of fresh effort.

None of the prisoners questioned estimated the losses suffered by their companions at less than one-third of the total effectives. Taking into account all available indications, it may safely be assumed that, during the fighting of the first 13 days, the Germans lost in killed, wounded, and prisoners at least 100,000 men.

The profits as the soldier speaks of such matters being so small, what then were the overwhelming motives that impelled the attack on Verdun, and the chicanery of the German communiques? Was it any of the reasons I have given above, or was it an effect of economic pressure which led to the miscalculation that the possible taking over of the French line at Verdun was a means of ending the war? The Germans are so wont to misread the minds of other nations that they are quite foolish enough to make themselves believe this or any other foolish thing. It cannot be pretended that the attack had in it anything of military necessity. It was urged forward at a time of year when weather conditions might prove, as they proved, a serious handicap in such matters as the moving of big guns and the essential observation by aeroplanes.

The district of Verdun lies in one of the coldest and also the most misty sectors in the long line between Nieuport and Switzerland. Changes of temperature, too, are somewhat more frequent here than elsewhere ; and so sudden are these changes that not long ago here occurred, on a part of the front, one of nature's furious and romantic reminders of her power to impose her will. The opposing French and German trenches, their parapets hard frozen, were so close that they were actually within hearing of each other. Towards dawn a rapid thaw set in. The parapets melted and subsided, and two long lines of men stood up naked, as it were, before each other, face to face with only two possibilities wholesale murder on the one side or the other, or a temporary unofficial peace for the making of fresh parapet protections.

The situation was astounding and unique in the history of trench warfare. The French and German officers, without conferring and unwilling to negotiate, turned their backs so that they might not see officially so unwarlike a scene, and the men on each side rebuilt their parapets without the firing of a single shot.

This instance serves to illustrate the precarious weather in which the Germans undertook an adventure in the quick success of which the elements play such a part. That the attack would certainly prove more costly to them than to the French the German Staff must have known. That the sufferings of the wounded lying out through the long nights of icy wind in the No Man's Land between the lines would be great did not probably disturb the Crown Prince. It is one of the most gruesome facts in the history of the War that the French, peering through the moonlight at what they thought to be stealthily crawling Germans, found them to be wounded men frozen to death.

The vast battle of Verdun might have been arranged for the benefit of interested spectators, were it not that the whole zone for miles around the great scene is as tightly closed to the outer world as a lodge of Freemasons. Furnished with every possible kind of pass, accompanied by a member of the French Headquarters Staff in a military car driven by a chauffeur whose steel helmet marked him as a soldier, I was nevertheless held up by intractable gendarmes at a point twenty-five miles away from the great scene. Even at that distance the mournful and unceasing reverberation of the guns was insistent, and, as the sentry examined our papers and waited for telephonic instructions, I counted more than 200 of the distant voices of Kultur.