Verdun in March of 1916 was the name of a fortress and a town; to-day it is no longer a name. It has become a word lifted among the star words common to all languages and all times. Valor, splendor, devotion, endurance, patriotism,--how grand are these words! Yet Verdun is the grandest of them all, for it includes them all. It is the word that France has flung to the world not from her fleshly lips, but from the lips of her soul. To the cringing neutrals; to Swiss waiters, and Dutch hucksters and English sedition-mongers, and Irish hole-and-corner men, and Swedish marketmen. To the hordes of the Beast and the powers of darkness France has flung the light of that one burning word, just as the Spartans, four hundred and eighty years before the birth of Christ, flung to us the light of the word Thermopylæ. The old heroic times seemed dead, littleness seemed everywhere, till the light of this war showed the soul of man great as in the days of Alexander. The counter-attack at Douaumont is but an incident, a crystallized moment out of the endless battle on the Meuse. H. DE VERE STACPOOLE. [Illustration] _The Morning Paper_ The Kaiser said “his heart bled” when the Allies raided Carlsruhe from the air. The hemorrhage was not serious, but it had a value as tending to show that the heart was there. Or was it that the Allies had performed the classic feat of drawing blood from a stone? It was more than his own airmen could do when they killed children and women in London and Paris. Perhaps some day a poet will arise who will be able to write for us the epic of the Morning Paper during this war. It used to lie under doors till wanted, and then Father had it, and Mother didn’t want it till after lunch, and George got it after Father, and Arthur must therefore buy an “evening” paper at the station where he caught the 9:19 to the City. And it really didn’t matter much, after all, except that it was something to talk about, and the Other Side was taking the country to the dogs (a trip on which it has been entering any time these last five hundred years), and one must know the latest entries for the Thousand Guineas, anyway, and yesterday’s goals. And now! “Hasn’t the paper come yet? Where’s the paper? Is there any news? What are We doing? Have the French advanced? What about Verdun? Why’s the paper late? How’s Russia this morning? Read it out, Father, or else order a copy each!” The holy, classical, breakfast gloom of the British family is shattered by machine-gun fire of questions, of anxiety, of hope, of anguish, of pride, of horror, of hope again. Those folded sheets of printing, less clear than it used to be, on paper less good than it was, have even eclipsed that domestic Mercury, the postman! Letters lie unopened till the news has been scanned. That alone represents a revolution in British family life, and the same thing obtains in all the Allied western countries.