accounts. While changing troops in the line, the position had somehow
been forgotten in a confusion of orders. Only a battery commander and
a few men remained in the fort. Some German soldiers, seeing the door
open, had crawled into the fort, and taken everyone inside prisoner. A
little later the French who were on the slopes of the hill were
horrified at being shot at from the fort. There had been no battle at
Douaumont and no losses. Nor had the French troops advanced beyond it
as the communiqués seemed to say. They were beyond it on either side,
to be sure, but the fort was in enemy hands.

Yet from the communiqué everyone believed that the fort was half
surrounded. The words did not explicitly say so, but "the press, as
usual, forced the pace." Military writers concluded that the Germans
would soon have to surrender. In a few days they began to ask
themselves why the garrison, since it lacked food, had not yet
surrendered. "It was necessary through the press bureau to request
them to drop the encirclement theme." [Footnote: Pierrefeu, _op.
cit._, pp. 134-5.]

2

The editor of the French communiqué tells us that as the battle
dragged out, his colleagues and he set out to neutralize the
pertinacity of the Germans by continual insistence on their terrible
losses. It is necessary to remember that at this time, and in fact
until late in 1917, the orthodox view of the war for all the Allied
peoples was that it would be decided by "attrition." Nobody believed
in a war of movement. It was insisted that strategy did not count, or
diplomacy. It was simply a matter of killing Germans. The general
public more or less believed the dogma, but it had constantly to be