_The townlet of Fismes, on the Vesle, like many other places between the Aisne and the Marne, has been shelled in turn by French and Germans. It is practically destroyed, but without being levelled to the ground and swallowed up by weeds like villages farther north._] [Illustration: _PLATE XCVI._ SOISSONS--ST. JEAN DES VIGNES. _Only these two towers, with their beautiful spires, have remained of this church for more than a century. One of the towers has been so damaged as to present strange problems to an engineer in the strength of materials._] The great attack on Verdun was intended to capture the city in four days and to clear the way to Paris at one swoop, and the Emperor (whose presence never seemed to bring good fortune to his troops) was waiting at Ornes, some eight or ten miles north, to make his triumphal entry. The attack began with enormous impetuosity on the 21st of February, 1916, but in four days--with enormous losses on both sides, but chiefly to the attackers--the Germans were still held some four or five miles away from their objective on the east side of the river, and double as far on the west. But nearer the Argonne their positions had allowed them already to cut the full-gauge railway to St. Menehould by shell-fire. A book written by General von Zwehl[40] gives the number of guns used in this attack as being about 230 in each of three corps. He also speaks of the "dejection and pessimism" induced in his troops by the failure of the artillery to make the clear way to the city which had been predicted and promised. [40] Reviewed in _The Times_ Literary Supplement of the 7th of April, 1921. The Douaumont Fort was entered on the 25th, and the Emperor had sent to Berlin the news that the "key of the last defences of Verdun" was in German hands. But on the next day Pétain began counter-attacks, and although during several months the Germans made progress from time to time, eventually gaining the Vaux Fort and most of the Mort Homme Ridge, the great attack had, in reality, miscarried from the start. The city itself, from which all civilians had been evacuated by the 25th of February, was heavily shelled, especially at the commencement of the attack, but as a city it has not suffered to anything like the same extent as Rheims, to say nothing of Albert, Lens, or Ypres. The fighting and the tremendous shelling were always in a zone lying roughly between four and eight miles from the city; within this zone the ground is as completely shell-marked, the villages and woods as completely destroyed, as even on the Somme.