But Wilhelm II had learned a lesson.  Verdun must be taken before he ordered his armies upon the French capital; and so it was that, upon February twenty-third, 1916, the German Crown Prince began a determined assault upon the historic French fortress.

In sheer human interest the battle of Verdun surpassed all other individual events of the war.  For six months and more the defenders of the gateway to France withstood a storm at the fury of which the world stood aghast.

Foot by foot, almost inch by inch, the Germans forged ahead with a reckless disregard of their lives, a tenacity and cool courage which was only equalled by the cool determination of the French.  Five months after the opening of this great battle, the unofficial estimate of German dead was a half million men.  The assailants fought their way to within three miles and a half of the fortress itself, but there they were finally halted.  It was then that the tide turned; and though the Germans surged forward day after day in heavy masses they progressed no further.  It was the beginning of the end.

The Germans advanced confidently.  The destruction of the fortress presented no hard problem to them.  The utter worthlessness of similarly fortified positions had been proven in the earlier days of the war—­in the destruction of Louvain, Liege, Brussels and Antwerp, the latter the most strongly fortified city in the world, with the exception of Paris itself.  The huge 42-centimetre guns of the Germans had battered them to pieces in little or no time at all.

It was with the knowledge of the effectiveness of these great guns that the Crown Prince opened the battle of Verdun.  The fortress of Verdun and the outlying fortifications, it was believed, would be shattered with little effort.  With these facts in mind, the German Crown Prince opened with his big guns, first upon the fortresses guarding Verdun itself.

These approaches shattered, the Crown Prince ordered his infantry and cavalry to the attack.  But where the onrushing Germans, according to the reasoning of the Crown Prince, should have found no resistance, they encountered strenuous opposition.  Abandoning the outlying artificial fortifications, the French had thrown up huge earthworks and from behind these received the German attacks coolly.

Against these great earthworks the heavy guns of the attacking forces availed little.  The force of even the great 42-centimetres was not great enough to penetrate the loosely built mounds of earth behind which the French reposed.  The great shells struck the fresh earth, were embedded there and did no harm.  The French general staff had realized the uselessness of fortresses as soon as had the Germans.

Therefore, while the Germans were able to destroy forts and fortresses at will, almost, it availed them little.  The defenders were secure behind their breastworks of earth.  True, German guns dropped huge shells in the trenches, a veritable rain of death, but the gaps in the defending lines were filled promptly.