The daily progressive-miner. [volume] (Ketchikan, Alaska) 1915-1919, 1918-08-23
KETCHIKAN FURNITURE co.
Agents
HOW FRENCH
HELD VERDUN
By Elizabeth Frazer
in The Saturday Evening Post

10y CllLdUclu FIdLCI
in The Saturday Evening Post
We wound round the hill of Verdun
by it's crest. Here we abandoned the
car and stumbled over torn and
wrenched terrain, pitted with shell
holes so feet across and partially fill
ed with black filthy water. Filled also
with old dismantled cannon, unexplod-
ed cartridges rusted bayonets, twisted
iron fragments of great shells, and an
occasional sodden kept
Between these craters the humocks
were dotted with graves marked with
a cross, and the simple French CO.
carde. Standing under that bleak
sky and gazing out across that sinis-
ter smitten landscape with it's gaunt
shot-off trees and it's deep ashes of
trenches marked by blood-red earth
was like looking upon some huge mon
ster frozen in horrible death agony
1t had been foully murdered, that hill,
and it lay like a mutilated corpse,
stiffly. outfiung. uncovered, indecent,
its hideous wounds gaping up to the
sky.
The colonel came to halt Here
is the farthest point that the enemy
penetrated. Here he was beaten back
Just at your feet, madomoiselle,"
here came the enemy from that direc-
tion-he pointed--and from there, and
there, all converging on this one spot.
And when they were very near, ad-
vancing shoulder to shoulder in dense
mass formation, two concealed French
batteries, one from either side, open.
ed on their serted columns a terrific
enfilading fire. 1t was close-range
slaughter-suc as was going on even
now in the north. Their first ranks
lay in windrows. Their dead covered
this hill like carpet. And still their
thinning numbers were filled with
rushing hosts from behind and they
pressed on and on, wave upon wave,
the farthest of which had broken just
at the point where we stood. There
it was pushed back by spirited coun-
ter thrust by the French fantassins
In the meantime, he continued,
down below-he would show us pres
ently-another strong enemy force
had tried to force an entrance to the
fortress, at one of the tunnel exits
This exit, leading by series of pas
scscs on different levels to the very
innermost heart of the citadel, gave
on the outside upon contracted open
space between two ridges, and was
protected first by deep Surrounding
fossee filled with a maze >of barbed
vac, ana second by 15-fOOt stone
wall watch formed part OF the outer
fortiications Down this wall the
Germans had leaped like a tumbling
cataract. The first wave fell into
the floss and was followed by another
and another, until the ancient moat
was heaped level with a writhing hui
man BRUCE which the hostile troops
rushed and gained the narrow space
oe-,le Tie mouth OF the tunnel.
And were there no French machine
guns paying upon them from the en-
trance?
oh yes-there were two seventy
hves,' said the colonel quietly, "less
than hundred yards away" We
could perhaps imagine, he continued,
what carnage they wrought in that
confined space. Germans had drop
ped down from that height like over
ripe fruit trained against wall. The
French gunners obliterated the first
the second, the third and the fourth
waves; and the fifth broke right on
the flaming shouts of their guns. The
sixth gained the tunnel entrance.
Here the garrison counter attacked,
and the enemy turned tail and ran.
But not far The wal was before
them and the guns were behind.
That particular hostile force was
wiped out to a man.
Altogether, he said, the French had
lost in killed during that six months
offensive one hundred, and ten thous-
and; the Germans more than half
million. And most OF them had fallen
on and around this height on which
we stood.