The Press Tuesday, September 20, 1927. Verdun.

Press, Volume LXIII, Issue 19110, 20 September 1927, Page 8

The Press Tuesday, September 20, 1927. Verdun.

The years go by and memories of the Great War become blurred by time, but every now and then a celebration is held or a memorial dedicated which reminds us of those times when " the " great days ranged like tides and lett "our dead on every shore.'' A few weeks ago it was the dedication ot the Menin Gate, and all the memories of the Ypres salient came crowding in. Britons stopped in their daily roun to salute the fame and sacrifice ot those who fell, or fought and survived, in the most appalling hell of which British warfare at any rate has record. To-day it is Verdun, where in the presence of Marshal Petain and other generals a great ossuary has been dedicated to commemorate that terrible defence. What Ypres is to the British Verdun is to the French. Reading to-day the accounts of the successful resistance of the then Avorn British line in 1914 to the attacks of overwhelmingly superior forces of Germans, we can no longer understand how it was done. The men that so held their ground seem to us now to have been supermen, as for the time they were, raised by the tremendous responsibility of the occasion to a nobility not reached in oidio&ry affairs. At Verdun the same sublime qualities were displayed by the French. The Germans drove at that place with terrifying strength of man and material. Their guns blasted the earth and armies poured into the breach. Week after week the hideous assault went' on. The French lost ground and their casualties were frightful. According to Marjhal Petain, every written order was repeated ten times to ensure one man in ten getting through, yet the French went cn saying: " They shall not pass." And they did not pass. The line was held, and Verdun remained uncaptured. It was one of the momentous chapters of the war. The Germans' bled France cruelly, but they- themselves suffered a staggering failure which no excuses could explain away. The thought to-day, however, is not so much of strategy or tactics as of what might have been had the German assault fallen elsewhere. As for the human side of this past appalling conflict, and especially of the proof it affords of the unimaginable endurance of man, what the soldiers endured in the war completely upset the textbooks of professional writers and the calculations of amateur 1 strategists. Units went on fighting after they had suffered a proportion of casualties which by the rules should have rendered them utterly useless. Men were able to face, as at Ypres, a combination of toud, water, filth,.and devastating bombardments which before the war would have been considered absolutely unendurable. If the war displayed the devilry of man in all its hideousness, it also exhibited as never before the stature and beauty of his unconquerable soul; and futile in. so many respects though all wars are, that is a lesson which we still badly need. .