For after he had supplied his own
battery, it was the battery next it, and then the one next to that,
which he wanted to supply.... Finally, in the evening, at nightfall,
they came to take him off in the ambulance. The major looked at his
shattered arm, examined his frightful wound, and muttered:
"You are in a bad way. Couldn't you have come here sooner?"
The lieutenant replied humbly:
"Pardon me, I lost a lot of time on the way."
* * * * *
Those men I saw for months fighting and dying to the south of Verdun,
at the Butte des Eparges, knew how to suffer.
The Butte des Eparges dominates the great plain of the Woevre, and
from the very beginning it has been the theater of a frightful and
long drawn out battle of the kind one seldom sees in this war. The
Germans have been entrenched on the left side of the Butte, the French
on the right. And day and night for four years there has been an
incessant battle over its summit of grenades, bombs and shells; a
terrible hand-to-hand fight in which neither one of the contestants
yields an inch of ground. A brook of blood runs its interrupted course
on each slope. On the south slope it is red with German blood; with
French blood on the north.
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