Every yard of these high slopes has been fought over again and again, witnessing on the part of the defenders a fury of endurance, a passion of resolve, such as those, perhaps, alone can know who hear through all their being the mystic call of the soil, of the very earth itself, the actual fatherland, on which they fight.

"_We are but a moment of the eternal France_:"-- such was once the saying of a French soldier, dying somewhere amid these broken trenches over which we are looking.

What was it, asks M.Reinach, that enabled the French to hold out as they did?
_Daring_, he replies--the daring of the leaders, the daring of the troops led.

The word hardly renders the French "_audace_" which is equally mis-translated by our English "audacity." "_Audace_" implies a daring which is not rashness, a daring which is justified, which is, in fact, the military aspect of a great nation's confidence in itself.
It was the spirit of the "Marseillaise," says M.Reinach again--it was the French soul--_l'ame francaise_--the soul of country and of freedom, which triumphed here.
And not for France alone.

At the moment when the attack on Verdun began, although the British military power was strengthening month by month, and the Military Service Act of May, 1916, which put the finishing touch to Lord Kitchener's great work, was close at hand, the French Army was still not only the principal, but the essential element in the Western campaign.