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 entière à sa proie attachée_, 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 mètres from the counter-scarp. He took three months to cross these two to three hundred mètres--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 Pétain, 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 determined on by the Coalition are in full work. It is your heroic resistance that has made this possible. It was the indispensable condition, and it will be the foundation, of our coming victories." "Germany"--says M. Reinach--"during ten months had used her best soldiers in furious assaults on Verdun.... These troops, among the finest in the world, had in five of these months gained a few kilometres of ground on the road to the fortress. This ground, watered with blood as no field of carnage had ever been, which saw close upon 700,000 men fall, was lost in two actions (October 24th--November 3rd and December 15th--18th), and Germany was brought back to within a few furlongs of her starting point.... Douaumont and Louvemont were certainly neither Rocroy nor Austerlitz; but Verdun, from the first day to the last, from the rush stemmed by Castelnau to the battles won by Nivelle and Mangin; Verdun, with her mud-stained _poilu_, standing firm in the tempest, who said: