WORLD'S END

The German high command had made up its collective mind that in order to win the war they had to break through on the western front, and they had picked the fortress of Verdun as the place. This was the head of the original French defenses, the part which had not given way; a complex of fortifications covering various heights along both banks of the river Meuse. Now that the war had been going on for a year and a half, the technique of taking such fortifications had become well settled. You had to bring up enough heavy guns, and pile enough ammunition behind them, to reduce the enemy entrenchments to dust and rubble; then you put down what was called a "creeping barrage" of shells which exploded in small fragments, to destroy the men who had been hiding underground and who came up after your heavy bombardment. The "creeping barrage" moved forward, just ahead of your lines of infantry, which could thus advance in comparative safety, and take what was left of the trenches, an operation known as "mopping up." The enemy would have line after line of trenches, and you had to repeat this same procedure and hope to break through finally and turn a "war of position" into a "war of movement."

To stop such an attack, the French gunners had to be better than the Germans, and have more shells. The French airmen had to keep the mastery and bring in more information as to what was happening. But more than anything else, the plain everyday poilu had to crawl into his rabbit warrens, and those of him who were left alive had to pop up at the right moment, and hide in whatever shell holes might be left and shoot enough of the advancing Germans to discourage the rest. That was all there was to it, you just had to outstay the enemy. When you had fired all your cartridges, you got more from a dead comrade in the same shell hole. If the night passed and nobody brought you food, you starved. If it rained, you lay in the mud, and if the mud froze, you tried to keep your hands alive so that you could shoot.

The Verdun area covered a hundred square miles or so, and during the fighting it was turned into a chaos of shell craters and nothing else. Places like Fort Douaumont were taken and retaken a half-dozen times, and the living fought among the dead of both sides. The main battle began in February of 1916 and lasted until July without cessation, and after that off and on for a year. The Germans brought sixty-four divisions, which was more than a million men. The French fired more than ten million shells from field guns, and nearly two million from medium and heavy guns.

The German Crown Prince was in command, and that was one more reason for the French wanting to win. The whole world watched and waited while the armies staggered back and forth. A break-through might mean the German conquest of France, and nobody knew that better than the poilu; he invented for himself a chant, which became a sort of incantation, a spell to rouse the souls of men perishing of wounds and exhaustion, who yet would kill one more enemy before dying. "Passeront pas, passeront pas!" they sang or gasped. "They shall not pass."

VIII

Such were the events some three hundred miles to the north of Lanny Budd while he was playing with love in springtime. He couldn't keep the war from troubling his conscience, but there was nothing he could do about it - especially not so long as he was under pledge to keep neutral. He was the one person of that sort he knew. Eddie Patterson was now driving an ambulance behind the lines at Verdun, and so his Sophie no longer had any motive for not hating the Germans, and she was hating them. All Lanny could say was: "Excuse me, I promised my father not to talk about the war."

Budd's were now making small arms and ammunition in large quantities, and exclusively for the Allies. There was no way to make any for the Germans; the British blockade was too tight, and anyhow the British and French were on hand to buy everything you could produce, paying top prices on the nail. The big Wall Street banks took British and French bonds and sold them to the American public, and Budd's got the cash. Under Robbie's contract he was entitled to a commission on every deal. He would spend this money freely and gaily, as always; but he was a stubborn fellow, and nobody was going to get him to say that any nation of Europe - and that included the British Empire - was ever right about anything. Robbie had been on the inside, and knew they were all wrong.