Later, in an unforeseen epoch, in the year ----, it will be taught the children as two dates: the war began August 2, 1914; it ended ----. All the tragedy, all our cries, our furies, our agonies, our suffering and death--all this, without name, blurred and indistinct, will be contained between two numbers, and will mark two eons: that before the War, that after the War. We will have fought and we will have wept; our bodies will have been broken and our hearts will have bled, without our being able to say, “It happened as I have told it,” for we will not know just how it happened. We will be obliged to call to mind the first day when grenades were used; the day torpedoes came to light; the advent of the four-hundreds. Facts will be mixed in our troubled memories. We will no longer recall all that happened to us. To be more explicit, to create a truer picture, we will say: “At the Marne, we used rifles.” “In Champagne, we threw bombs.” “At Verdun--such cannon!” “On the Somme the shells flew so thick they met in mid-air.” “And then--and then, America came!” X VERDUN Those who have not been actively engaged in the war cannot form any conception of it. When they hear a combatant speak of it, they say: “Then you fight all the time?” “No.” Whereupon they think: “Then in the firing-line one is not really in much danger.” Ah, not so fast, good people! In this war, this new, present-day war, the vigilance is continuous, the hand-to-hand struggle is not. Shells fall unceasingly, but the open battle, the assault, is not without interruption. Fortunately. Thus it was that after the German check, after the Crown of Nancy had withstood the foe’s attack, since the Marne in fact, the sector at Verdun remained quiet. It was a particularly good point. Here and there a sprinkle of shells, then nothing more. There was fighting everywhere else, in Flanders, in Artois, in Champagne, even in the Woëvre district, but not at Verdun. The sector was so calm, that the only guard left there consisted of Territorials, mostly older men. They worked without too much effort, these fathers of families; without much disturbance, doing general work of repairs about the fortifications, pipe in mouth, almost at peace in the midst of war. In the winter of 1915 they shivered a little with the cold; but the forest was near by, wood was abundant, and the cold caused no great suffering. In the evening, down in the deep trenches, in the well-heated huts, or in the powerful forts, such as Douaumont, Vaux, Vachereauville, they basked in the heat as on a sunny day. They looked at the falling snow and the landscape sleeping under its white blanket. They swept the snow with branches of trees, blew on their fingers a little, accepted their slight discomfort in patience.