The battles of Festubert, Neuve Chapelle, Loos, and all minor attacks
which led to little salients, were but experimental adventures in the
science of slaughter, badly bungled in our laboratories. They had no
meaning apart from providing those mistakes by which men learn;
ghastly mistakes, burning more than the fingers of life's children.
They were only diversions of impatience in the monotonous routine of
trench warfare by which our men strengthened the mud walls of their
School of Courage, so that the new boys already coming out might learn
their lessons without more grievous interruption than came from the
daily visits of that Intruder to whom the fees were paid. In those two
years it was France which fought the greatest battles, flinging her
sons against the enemy's ramparts in desperate, vain attempts to
breach them. At Verdun, in the months that followed the first month of
'16, it was France which sustained the full weight of the German
offensive on the western front and broke its human waves, until they
were spent in a sea of blood, above which the French poilus, the
"hairy ones," stood panting and haggard, on their death-strewn rocks.
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