French folding postcard map of Verdun and the Meuse River, number 9 from the series Les Cartes du Front. Montfaucon is in the upper left and St. Mihiel at the bottom.
Les Cartes du FrontVerdun et Côtes de MeuseEchelle 1:32,000RoutesChemin de ferCanauxMaps of the FrontVerdun and the Hills of the MeuseScale: 1:32,000RoadsRailwaysCanals1. - Les Flandres2. - Artois, Picardie3. - Aisne, Champagne4. - Argonne et Meuse5. - Lorraine6. - Vosges et Alsace7. - Route des Dame et Plateau de Craonne8. - Région de Perthes9. - Verdun10. - Somme et Santerre11. - Plateau d'Artois12. - Belgique - FlandresA. Hatier. Editeur.8.Rue d'Assas, Paris.Outer front:Correspondence of the ArmiesMilitary Franchise
"This place is called Le Chalet. There was a real little village: dugouts, cabins, hangers, little chalets, supply dumps, and a tacot train station. Night and day there was an intense level of activity, and this just a few hundred meters from the German listening posts! But the sharp declivities of the valley's terrain didn't permit the German gunners, clever as they were, to drop a shell on us.But one detail was hardly reassuring: all the trees were dead. A hideous yellow coating covered their trunks, clearly indicating that a deadly cloud of poison gas had passed by here."
Excerpt from the notebooks of French Infantry Corporal Louis Barthas writing of the end of February, 1918. Barthas served much of the war in the 296th Regiment, one implicated in the army mutinies of the spring and early summer 1917. The regiment had been dissolved and its men assigned to other units, Barthas to a regiment from Breton. Since the beginning of the year he had been in the Argonne, moving into the relative protection of the Meurissons ravine on February 21.
Poilu: The World War I Notebooks of Corporal Louis Barthas, Barrelmaker, 1914-1918 by Louis Barthas, page 362, copyright © 2014 by Yale University, publisher: Yale University Press, publication date: 2014
1918-02-24, 1918, February, poison gas, gas, Verdun et Cotes de Meuse
