The Project Gutenberg EBook of They Shall Not Pass, by Frank H. Simonds
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Title: They Shall Not Pass
Author: Frank H. Simonds
Release Date: February 24, 2009 [EBook #28171]
Language: English
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THEY SHALL NOT PASS
THEY
SHALL NOT PASS
BY
FRANK H. SIMONDS
AUTHOR OF "THE GREAT WAR"
[Illustration]
GARDEN CITY NEW YORK
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
1916
_Copyright, 1916, by_
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
_All rights reserved, including that of
translation into foreign languages,
including the Scandinavian_
COPYRIGHT, 1916, THE TRIBUNE ASS'N.
Grateful acknowledgment is hereby made to the New York _Tribune_ for
permission to reprint these articles in book form.
CONTENTS
PAGE
I. MY TRIP TO VERDUN--GENERAL PÉTAIN FACE TO FACE 3
The men who hold the line--what their faces told of the
past and the future of France.
II. MY TRIP TO VERDUN--A DYING, SHELL-RIDDEN CITY 43
The Vauban Citadel, in the shelter of which falling
shells cannot find you--houses and blocks that are
vanishing hourly--"but William will not come"--war
that is invisible--a luncheon underground with a toast
to America--the last courtesy from a general and a
host--nothing that was not beautiful.
III. BATTLE OF VERDUN ANOTHER GETTYSBURG 72
Failure of Crown Prince likened by French to "high tide"
of confederacy.
IV. VERDUN, THE DOOR THAT LEADS NOWHERE 95
The battle and the topography of the battlefield--an
analysis of the attack and defence.
V. IN SIGHT OF THE PROMISED LAND--ON THE LORRAINE
BATTLEFIELD 116
THEY SHALL NOT PASS
I
MY TRIP TO VERDUN--GENERAL PÉTAIN FACE TO FACE
THE MEN WHO HOLD THE LINE--WHAT THEIR FACES TOLD OF THE PAST
AND THE FUTURE OF FRANCE
My road to Verdun ran through the Elysée Palace, and it was to the
courtesy and interest of the President of the French Republic that I
owed my opportunity to see the battle for the Meuse city at close
range. Already through the kindness of the French General Staff I had
seen the Lorraine and Marne battlegrounds and had been guided over
these fields by officers who had shared in the opening battles that
saved France. But Verdun was more difficult; there is little time for
caring for the wandering correspondent when a decisive contest is
going forward, and quite naturally the General Staff turned a deaf ear
to my request.
Through the kindness of one of the many Frenchmen who gave time and
effort to make my pilgrimage a success I was at last able to see M.
Poincaré. Like our own American President, the French Chief Magistrate
is never interviewed, and I mention this audience simply because it
was one more and in a sense the final proof for me of the
friendliness, the courtesy, the interest that the American will find
to-day in France. I had gone to Paris, my ears filled with the
warnings of those who told me that it was hard to be an American in
Europe, in France, in the present hour. I had gone expecting, or at
least fearing, that I should find it so.
Instead, from peasant to President I found only kindness, only
gratitude, only a profound appreciation for all that Americans had
individually done for France in the hour of her great trial. These
things and one thing more I found: a very intense desire that
Americans should be able to see for themselves; the Frenchman will not
talk to you of what France has done, is doing; he shrinks from
anything that might suggest the imitation of the German method of
propaganda. In so far as it is humanly possible he would have you see
the thing for yourself and testify out of your own mouth.
Thus it came about that all my difficulties vanished when I had been
permitted to express to the President my desire to see Verdun and to
go back to America--I was sailing within the week--able to report what
I had seen with my own eyes of the decisive battle still going forward
around the Lorraine city. Without further delay, discussion, it was
promised that I should go to Verdun by motor, that I should go cared
for by the French military authorities and that I should be permitted
to see all that one could see at the moment of the contest.
We left Paris in the early afternoon; my companions were M. Henri
Ponsot, chief of the Press Service of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs,
and M. Hugues le Roux, a distinguished Frenchman of letters well known
to many Americans. To start for the battlefield from a busy, peaceful
city, to run for miles through suburbs as quiet and lacking in martial
aspect as the regions beyond the Harlem, at home, was a thing that
seemed almost unreal; but only for a brief moment, for war has come
very near to Paris, and one may not travel far in Eastern France
without seeing its signs.
In less than an hour we were passing the rear of the line held by the
British at the Battle of the Marne, and barely sixty minutes after we
had passed out through the Vincennes gate we met at Courtacon the
first of the ruined villages that for two hundred miles line the
roadways that lead from the capital to Lorraine and Champagne.
Suddenly in the midst of a peaceful countryside, after passing a
score of undisturbed villages, villages so like one to another, you
come to one upon which the storm has burst, and instead of snug
houses, smiling faces, the air of contentment and happiness that was
France, there is only a heap of ruins, houses with their roofs gone,
their walls torn by shell fire, villages abandoned partially or
wholly, contemporary Pompeiis, overtaken by the Vesuvius of Krupp.
Coincidentally there appear along the roadside, in the fields, among
the plough furrows, on every side, the crosses that mark the graves of
those who died for France--or for Germany. Along the slope you may
mark the passage of a charge by these crosses; those who fell were
buried as they lay, French and Germans with equal care. Indeed, there
is a certain pride visible in all that the French do for their dead
foes. Alongside a hamlet wantonly burned, burned by careful labor and
with German thoroughness; in villages where you will be told of
nameless atrocities and shameful killings, you will see the German
graves, marked by neat crosses, surrounded by sod embankments, marked
with plaques of black and white; the French are marked by plaques of
red, white and blue, and the latter invariably decorated with a flag
and flowers.
Once you have seen these graves by the roadside going east you will
hardly go a mile in two hundred which has not its graves. From the
environs of Meaux, a scant twenty miles from Paris, to the frontier at
the Seille, beyond Nancy, there are graves and more graves, now
scattered, now crowded together where men fought hand to hand. Passing
them in a swift-moving auto, they seem to march by you; there is the
illusion of an army advancing on the hillside, until at last, beyond
Nancy, where the fighting was so terrible, about little villages such
as Corbessaux, you come to the great common graves, where a hundred or
two hundred men have been gathered, where the trenches now levelled
are but long graves, and you read, "Here rest 179 French soldiers," or
across the road, "Here 196 Germans."
Take a map of France and from a point just south of Paris draw a
straight line to the Vosges; twenty or thirty miles to the north draw
another. Between the two is the black district of the Marne and Nancy
battles. It is the district of ruined villages, destroyed farms; it is
the region where every hillside--so it will seem to the traveller--is
marked by these pathetic crosses. It is a region in which the sense of
death and destruction is abroad. Go forty miles north again and draw
two more lines, and this is the region not of the death and
destruction of yesterday, but of to-day; this is the front, where the
graves are still in the making, the region of the Oise to the Meuse,
from Noyon to Verdun.
On this day our route led eastward through the villages which in
September, 1914, woke from at least a century of oblivion, from the
forgetting that followed Napoleon's last campaign in France to a
splendid but terrible ten days: Courtacon, Sézanne, La-Fère
Champenoise, Vitry-le-François, the region where Franchet d'Esperey
and Foch fought, where the "Miracle of the Marne" was performed. Mile
after mile the countryside files by, the never-changing impression of
a huge cemetery, the hugest in the world, the stricken villages, now
and then striving to begin again, a red roof here and there telling of
the first counter offensive of peace, of construction made against the
whirlwind that had come and gone.
Always, too, nothing but old men and women, these and children,
working in the broad fields, still partially cultivated, but no longer
the fields of that perfectly cared for France of the other peace days.
Women and children at the plough, old men bent double by age still
spending such strength as is left in the tasks that war has set for
them. This is the France behind the front, and, aside from the ruined
villages and graves, the France that stretches from the Pyrenees to
the Marne, a France from which youth and manhood are gone, in which
age and childhood remain with the women. Yet in this land we were
passing how much of the youth and manhood of France and Germany was
buried in the graves the crosses demonstrated at every kilometre.
But a hundred miles east of Paris there begins a new world. The
graves, the shell-cursed villages, remain, but this is no longer the
France of the Marne fighting and of the war of two years ago. At
Vitry-le-François you pass almost without warning into the region
which is the back of the front to-day, the base of all the line of
fire from Rheims to the Meuse, and suddenly along the road appear the
canvas guideposts which bear the terse warning, "Verdun." You pass
suddenly from ancient to contemporary history, from the killing of
other years to the killing that is of to-day--the killing and the
wounding--and along the hills where there are still graves there begin
to appear Red Cross tents and signs, and ambulances pass you bearing
the latest harvest.
And now every village is a garrison town. For a hundred miles there
have been only women and old men, but now there are only soldiers;
they fill the streets; they crowd the doorways of the houses. The
fields are filled with tents, with horses, with all the impedimenta of
an army. The whole countryside is a place of arms. Every branch of
French service is about you--Tunisians, Turcos, cavalry, the black,
the brown, and the white--the men who yesterday or last week were in
the first line, who rest and will return to-morrow or next day to
fight again.
Unmistakably, too, you feel that this is the business of war; you are
in a factory, a machine shop; if the product is death and destruction,
it is no less a matter of machinery, not of romance, of glamour. The
back of the front is a place of work and of rest for more work, but
of parade, of the brilliant, of the fascinating there is just nothing.
Men with bright but plainly weary faces, not young men, but men of
thirty and above, hard bitten by their experience, patently fit, fed,
but somehow related to the ruins and the destruction around them, they
are all about you, and wherever now you see a grave you will discover
a knot of men standing before it talking soberly. Wherever you see the
vestiges of an old trench, a hill that was fought for at this time
twenty months ago, you will see new practice trenches and probably the
recruits, the "Class of 1917," the boys that are waiting for the call,
listening to an officer explaining to them what has been done here,
the mistake or the good judgment revealed by the event. For France is
training the youth that remains to her on the still recent
battlefields and in the presence of those who died to keep the ground.
Just as the darkness came we passed St. Dizier and entered at last
upon the road to Verdun, the one road that is the life line of the
city. For to understand the real problem of the defence of Verdun you
must realize that there is lacking to the city any railroad. In
September, 1914, the Germans took St. Mihiel and cut the railway
coming north along the Meuse. On their retreat from the Marne the
soldiers of the Crown Prince halted at Montfaucon and Varennes, and
their cannon have commanded the Paris-Verdun-Metz Railroad ever since.
Save for a crazy narrow-gauge line wandering along the hill slopes,
climbing by impossible grades, Verdun is without rail communication.
It was this that made the defence of the town next to impossible.
Partially to remedy the defect the French had reconstructed a local
highway running from St. Dizier by Bar-le-Duc to Verdun beyond the
reach of German artillery. To-day an army of a quarter of a million of
men, the enormous parks of heavy artillery and field guns--everything
is supplied by this one road and by motor transport.
Coming north from St. Dizier we entered this vast procession. Mile
after mile the caravan stretched on, fifty miles with hardly a break
of a hundred feet between trucks. Paris 'buses, turned into vehicles
to bear fresh meat; new motor trucks built to carry thirty-five men
and travelling in companies, regiments, brigades; wagons from the hood
of which soldiers, bound to replace the killed and wounded of
yesterday, looked down upon you, calmly but unsmilingly. From St.
Dizier to Verdun the impression was of that of the machinery by which
logs are carried to the saw in a mill. You felt unconsciously, yet
unmistakably, that you were looking, not upon automobiles, not upon
separate trucks, but upon some vast and intricate system of belts and
benches that were steadily, swiftly, surely carrying all this vast
material, carrying men and munitions and supplies, everything human
and inanimate, to that vast grinding mill which was beyond the hills,
the crushing machine which worked with equal remorselessness upon men
and upon things.
Now and again, too, over the hills came the Red Cross ambulances; they
passed you returning from the front and bringing within their
carefully closed walls the finished product, the fruits of the day's
grinding, or a fraction thereof. And about the whole thing there was a
sense of the mechanical rather than the human, something that
suggested an automatic, a machine-driven, movement; it was as if an
unseen system of belts and engines and levers guided, moved, propelled
this long procession upward and ever toward the mysterious front where
the knives or the axes or the grinding stones did their work.
Night came down upon us along the road and brought a new impression.
Mile on mile over the hills and round the curves, disappearing in the
woods, reappearing on the distant summits of the hills, each showing a
rear light that wagged crazily on the horizon, this huge caravan
flowed onward, while in the villages and on the hillsides campfires
flashed up and the faces or the figures of the soldiers could be seen
now clearly and now dimly. But all else was subordinated to the line
of moving transports. Somewhere far off at one end of the procession
there was battle; somewhere down below at the other end there was
peace. There all the resources, the life blood, the treasure in men
and in riches of France were concentrating and collecting, were being
fed into this motor fleet, which like baskets on ropes was carrying it
forward to the end of the line and then bringing back what remained,
or for the most part coming back empty, for more--for more lives and
more treasure.
It was full night when our car came down the curved grades into
Bar-le-Duc, halted at the corner, where soldiers performed the work
of traffic policemen and steadily guided the caravan toward the road
marked by a canvas sign lighted within by a single candle and bearing
the one word, "Verdun." All night, too, the rumble of the passing
transport filled the air and the little hotel shook with the jar of
the heavy trucks, for neither by day nor by night is there a halt in
the motor transport, and the sound of this grinding is never low.
It was little more than daylight when we took the road again, with a
thirty-mile drive to Verdun before us. Almost immediately we turned
into the Verdun route we met again the caravan of automobiles, of
camions, as the French say. It still flowed on without break. Now,
too, we entered the main road, the one road to Verdun, the road that
had been built by the French army against just such an attack as was
now in progress. The road was as wide as Fifth Avenue, as smooth as
asphalt--a road that, when peace comes, if it ever does, will delight
the motorist. Despite the traffic it had to bear, it was in perfect
repair, and soldiers in uniform sat by the side breaking stone and
preparing metal to keep it so.
The character of the country had now changed. We were entering the
region of the hills, between the Aisne and the Meuse, a country
reminiscent of New England. Those hills are the barrier which beyond
the Meuse, under the names of the Côte de Meuse, have been the scene
of so much desperate fighting. The roads that sidled off to the east
bore battle names, St. Mihiel, Troyon, and the road that we followed
was still marked at every turn with the magic word "Verdun." Our
immediate objective was Souilly, the obscure hill town twenty miles,
perhaps, south of the front, from which Sarrail had defended Verdun in
the Marne days and from which Pétain was now defending Verdun against
a still more terrible attack.
And in France to-day one speaks only of Verdun and Pétain. Soldiers
have their day; Joffre, Castelnau, Foch, all retain much of the
affection and admiration they have deserved, but at the moment it is
the man who has held Verdun that France thinks of, and there was the
promise for us that at Souilly we should see the man whose fame had
filled the world in the recent great and terrible weeks. Upward and
downward over the hills, through more ruined villages, more hospitals,
more camps, our march took us until after a short hour we came to
Souilly, general headquarters of the Army of Verdun, of Pétain, the
centre of the world for the moment.
Few towns have done less to prepare for greatness than Souilly. It
boasts a single street three inches deep in the clay mud of the
spring--a single street through which the Verdun route marches almost
contemptuously, the same nest of stone and plaster houses, one story
high, houses from which the owners had departed to make room for
generals and staff officers. This and one thing more, the Mairie, the
town hall, as usual the one pretentious edifice of the French hamlet,
and before the stairway of this we stopped and got out.
We were at headquarters. From this little building, devoted for
perhaps a century to the business of governing the commune of Souilly,
with its scant thousand of people, Pétain was defending Verdun and the
fate of an army of 250,000 men at the least. In the upstairs room,
where the town councillors had once debated parochial questions,
Joffre and Castelnau and Pétain in the terrible days of the opening
conflict had consulted, argued, decided--decided the fate of France,
so the Germans had said, for they had made the fall of Verdun the
assurance of French collapse.
Unconsciously, too, you felt the change in the character of the
population of this village. There were still the soldiers, the
eternal gray-blue uniforms, but there were also men of a different
type, men of authority. In the street your guides pointed out to you
General Herr, the man who had designed and planned and accomplished
the miracle of the motor transport that had saved Verdun--with the aid
of the brave men fighting somewhere not far beyond the nearest hills.
He had commanded at Verdun when the attack came, and without
hesitation he had turned over his command to Pétain, his junior in
service and rank before the war, given up the glory and become the
superintendent of transport. Men spoke to you of the fine loyalty of
that action with unconcealed admiration.
And then out of the remoteness of Souilly there came a voice familiar
to an American. Bunau-Varilla, the man of Panama, wearing the uniform
of a commandant and the Croix de Guerre newly bestowed for some
wonderful engineering achievement, stepped forward to ask for his
friends and yours of the old "_Sun_ paper." I had seen him last in the
_Sun_ office in the days when the war had just broken out and he was
about to sail for home; in the days when the Marne was still unfought
and he had breathed hope then as he spoke with confidence now.
Presently there arrived the two officers whose duty it was to take me
to Verdun, Captain Henri Bourdeaux, a man of letters known to all
Frenchmen; Captain Madelin, an historian, already documented in the
history of the war making under his own eyes. To these gentlemen and
their colleagues who perform this task that can hardly be agreeable,
who risk their lives and give over their time with unfailing courtesy
and consideration that the American newspaper correspondent may see,
may report, it is impossible to return sufficient thanks, and every
American newspaper reader who finds on his breakfast table the
journal that tells him of the progress of the war owes something to
some officer.
"Were we to see Verdun?" This was the first problem. I had been warned
two days before that the bombardment was raging and that it was quite
possible that it would be unsafe to go farther. But the news was
reassuring; Verdun was tranquil. "And Pétain?" One could not yet say.
Even as we spoke there was a stirring in the crowd, general saluting,
and I caught a glimpse of the commander-in-chief as he went quickly up
the staircase. For the rest we must wait. But not for very long; in a
few minutes there came the welcome word that General Pétain would see
us, would see the stray American correspondent.
Since I saw Pétain in the little Mairie at Souilly I have seen many
photographs of him, but none in any real measure give the true picture
of the defender of Verdun. He saw us in his office, the bare upstairs
room, two years ago the office of the Mayor of Souilly. Think of the
Selectmen's office in any New England village and the picture will be
accurate: a bare room, a desk, one chair, a telephone, nothing on the
walls but two maps, one of the military zone, one of the actual front
and positions of the Verdun fighting. A bleak room, barely heated by
the most primitive of stoves. From the single window one looked down
on the cheerless street along which lumbered the caravan of autos. On
the pegs against the wall hung the General's hat and coat,
weather-stained, faded, the clothes of a man who worked in all
weathers. Of staff officers, of uniforms, of color there was just
nothing; of war there was hardly a hint.
At the door the commander-in-chief met us, shook hands, and murmured
clearly and slowly, with incisive distinctness, the formal words of
French greeting; he spoke no English. Instantly there was the
suggestion of Kitchener, not of Kitchener as you see him in flesh, but
in photographs, the same coldness, decision. The smile that
accompanied the words of welcome vanished and the face was utterly
motionless, expressionless. You saw a tall, broad-shouldered man, with
every appearance of physical strength, a clear blue eye, looking
straight forward and beyond.
My French companion, M. Le Roux, spoke with Pétain. He had just come
from Joffre and he told an interesting circumstance. Pétain listened.
He said now and then "yes" or "no." Nothing more. Watching him
narrowly you saw that occasionally his eyes twitched a little, the
single sign of fatigue that the long strain of weeks of responsibility
had brought.
It was hard to believe, looking at this quiet, calm, silent man, that
you were in the presence of the soldier who had won the Battle of
Champagne, the man whom the war had surprised in the last of his
fifties, a Colonel, a teacher of war rather than a soldier, a
professor like Foch.
No one of Napoleon's marshals had commanded as many men as obeyed this
Frenchman, who was as lacking in the distinction of military
circumstance as our own Grant. Napoleon had won all his famous
victories with far fewer troops than were directed from the telephone
on the table yonder.
Every impression of modern war that comes to one actually in touch
with it is a destruction of illusion: this thing is a thing of
mechanism rather than of brilliance; perhaps Pétain has led a
regiment, a brigade, or a division to the charge. You knew
instinctively in seeing the man that you would go or come, as he said,
but there was neither dash nor fire, nothing of the suggestion of
élan; rather there was the suggestion of the commander of a great
ocean liner, the man responsible for the lives, this time of hundreds
of thousands, not scores, for the safety of France, not of a ship, but
the man of machinery and the master of the wisdom of the tides and
the weather, not the Ney, or the Murat, not the Napoleon of Arcola.
The impression was of a strong man whose life was a life beaten upon
by storms; the man on the bridge, to keep to the rather ridiculously
inadequate figure, but not by any chance the man on horseback.
My talk, our talk with Pétain was the matter of perhaps five minutes.
The time was consumed by the words of M. Le Roux, who spoke very
earnestly urging that more American correspondents be permitted to
visit Verdun, and Pétain heard him patiently, but said just nothing.
Once he had greeted us his face settled into that grim expression that
never changed until he smiled his word of good wishes as we left. Yet
I have since found that apart from one circumstance which I shall
mention in a moment I have remembered those minutes most clearly of
all of my Verdun experience. Just as the photograph does not reveal
the face of the man, the word does not describe the sense of
strength, of responsibility, that he gives.
In a childish sort of way, exactly as one thinks of war as a matter of
dash and color and motion, one thinks of the French general as the
leader of a cavalry charge or of a forlorn hope of infantry. And the
French soldier of this war has not been the man of charge or of
dash--not that he has not charged as well as ever in his history, a
little more bravely, perhaps, for machine guns are new and something
worse than other wars have had. What the French soldier has done has
been to stand, to hold, to die not in the onrush but on the spot.
And Pétain in some curious way has fixed in my mind the impression of
the new Frenchman, if there be a new one, or perhaps better of the
French soldier of to-day, whether he wear the stars of the general or
undecorated "horizon" blue of the Poilu. The look that I saw in his
eyes, the calm, steady, utterly emotionless looking straight forward,
I saw everywhere at the front and at the back of the front. It
embodied for me an enduring impression of the spirit and the poise of
the French soldier of the latest and most terrible of French
struggles. And I confess that, more than all I saw and heard at the
front and in Paris, the look of this man convinced me that Verdun
would not fall, that France herself would not either weary or weaken.
In Paris, where one may hear anything, there are those that will tell
you that Joffre's work is done and that France waits for the man who
will complete the task; that the strain of the terrible months has
wearied the general who won the Battle of the Marne and saved France.
They will tell you, perhaps, that Pétain is the man; they will
certainly tell you that they hope that the man has been found in
Pétain. As to the truth of all this I do not pretend to know. I did
not see Joffre, but all that I have read of Joffre suggests that
Pétain is of his sort, the same quiet, silent man, with a certain
coldness of the North, a grimness of manner that is lacking in his
chief.
There was a Kitchener legend in Europe, and I do not think it survives
save a little perhaps in corners of England. There was a legend of a
man of ice and of iron, a man who made victory out of human material
as a man makes a wall of mortar and stone, a man to whom his material
was only mortar and stone, even though it were human. This legend has
perished so far as Kitchener is concerned, gone with so much that
England trusted and believed two years ago, but I find myself thinking
now of Pétain as we all thought of Kitchener in his great day.
If I were an officer I should not like to come to the defender of
Verdun with the confession of failure. I think I should rather meet
the Bavarians in the first line trenches, but I should like to know
that when I was obeying orders I was carrying out a minor detail of
something Pétain had planned; I should expect it to happen, the thing
that he had arranged, and I should feel that those clear, steel-blue
eyes had foreseen all that could occur, foreseen calmly and utterly,
whether it entailed the death of one or a thousand men, of ten
thousand men if necessary, and had willed that it should happen.
I do not believe Napoleon's Old Guard would have followed Pétain as
they followed Ney. I cannot fancy him in the Imperial uniform, and
yet, now that war is a thing of machines, of telephones, of indirect
fire and destruction from unseen weapons at remote ranges, now that
the whole manner and circumstance of conflict have changed, it is but
natural that the General should change, too. Patently Pétain is of the
new, not the old, but no less patently he was the master of it.
We left the little Mairie, entered our machines and slid out swiftly
for the last miles, climbed and curved over the final hill and
suddenly looked down on a deep, trenchlike valley marching from east
to west and carrying the Paris-Verdun-Metz Railroad, no longer
available for traffic. And as we coasted down the hill we heard the
guns at last, not steadily, but only from time to time, a distant
boom, a faint billowing up of musketry fire. Some three or four miles
straight ahead there were the lines of fire beyond the brown hills
that flanked the valley.
At the bottom of the valley we turned east, moved on for a mile, and
stopped abruptly. The guns were sounding more clearly, and suddenly
there was a sense not of soldiers, but of an army. On one side of the
road a column was coming toward us, a column of men who were leaving
the trenches for a rest, the men who for the recent days had held the
first line. Wearily but steadily they streamed by; the mud of the
trenches covered their tunics; here and there a man had lost his steel
helmet and wore a handkerchief about his head, probably to conceal a
slight wound that but for the helmet had killed him.
These men were smiling as they marched; they carried their full
equipment and it rattled and tinkled; they carried their guns at all
angles, they wore their uniforms in the strangest of disorders; they
seemed almost like miners coming from the depths of the earth rather
than soldiers returning from a decisive battle, from the hell of
modern shell fire.
But it was the line on the other side of the road that held the eye.
Here were the troops that were going toward the fire, toward the
trenches, that were marching to the sound of the guns, and as one saw
them the artillery rumble took on a new distinctness.
Involuntarily I searched the faces of these men as they passed. They
were hardly ten feet from me. Platoon after platoon, company after
company, whole regiments in columns of fours. And seeing the faces
brought an instant shock; they all wore the same calm, steady,
slightly weary expression, but there was in the whole line scarcely a
young man. Here were men of the thirties, not the twenties; men still
in the prime of strength, of health, but the fathers of families, the
men of full manhood.
Almost in a flash the fact came home. This was what all the graves
along the road had meant. This was what the battlefields and the
glories of the twenty months had spelled--France had sent her youth
and it was spent; she was sending her manhood now.
In the line no man smiled and no man straggled; the ranks were closed
up and there were neither commands nor any visible sign of authority.
These men who were marching to the sound of the guns had been there
before. They knew precisely what it meant. Yet you could not but feel
that as they went a little wearily, sadly, they marched willingly.
They would not have it otherwise. Their faces were the faces of men
who had taken the full measure of their own fate.
You had a sense of the loathing, the horror, above all the sadness
that was in their hearts that this thing, this war, this destruction
had to be. They had come back here through all the waste of ruined
villages and shell-torn hillsides; all the men that you saw would not
measure the cost of a single hour of trench fighting if the real
attack began. This these men knew, and the message of the artillery
fire, which was only one of unknown terrors for you, was intelligible
to the utmost to each of them.
And yet with the weariness there was a certain resignation, a certain
patience, a certain sense of comprehending sacrifice that more than
all else is France to-day, the true France. This, and not the empty
forts, not even the busy guns, was the wall that defended France, this
line of men. If it broke there would come thundering down again out
of the north all the tornado of destruction that had turned
Northeastern France into a waste place and wrecked so much of the
world's store of the beautiful and the inspiring.
Somehow you felt that this was in the minds of all these men. They had
willed to die that France might live. They were going to a death that
sounded ever more clearly as they marched. This death had eaten up all
that was young, most of what was young at the least, of France; it
might yet consume France, and so these men marched to the sound of the
guns, not to martial music, not with any suggestion of dash, of
enthusiasm, but quietly, steadily, all with the same look upon their
faces--the look of men who have seen death and are to see it again.
Instinctively I thought of what Kipling had said to me in London:
"Somewhere over there," he had said, "the thing will suddenly grip
your throat and your heart; it will take hold of you as nothing in
your life has ever done or ever will." And I know that I never shall
forget those lines of quiet, patient, middle-aged men marching to the
sound of the guns, leaving at their backs the countless graves that
hold the youth of France, the men who had known the Marne, the Yser,
Champagne, who had known death for nearly two years, night and day,
almost constantly. Yet during the fifteen minutes I watched there was
not one order, not one straggler; there was a sense of the regularity
with which the blood flows through the human arteries in this tide,
and it was the blood of France.
So many people have asked me, I had asked myself, the question before
I went to France: "Are they not weary of it? Will the French not give
up from sheer exhaustion of strength?" I do not think so, now that I
have seen the faces of these hundreds of men as they marched to the
trenches beyond Verdun. France may bleed to death, but I do not think
that while there are men there will be an end of the sacrifice. No
pen or voice can express the horror that these men, that all
Frenchmen, have of this war, of all war, the weariness. They hate it;
you cannot mistake this; but France marches to the frontier in the
spirit that men manned the walls against the barbarians in the other
days; there is no other way; it must be.
Over and over again there has come the invariable answer; it would
have come from scores and hundreds of these men who passed so near me
I could have touched their faded uniforms if I had asked--"It is for
France, for civilization; it must be, for there is no other way; we
shall die, but with us, with our sacrifice, perhaps this thing will
end." You cannot put it in words quite, I do not think even any
Frenchman has quite said it, but you can see it, you can feel it, you
can understand it, when you see a regiment, a brigade, a division of
these men of thirty, some perhaps of forty, going forward to the war
they hate and will never quiet until that which they love is safe or
they and all of their race are swallowed up in the storm that now was
audibly beating beyond the human walls on the nearby hillsides.
Presently we moved again, we slipped through the column, topped the
last incline, shot under the crumbling gate of the Verdun fortress,
and as we entered a shell burst just behind us and the roar drowned
out all else in its sudden and paralyzing crash. It had fallen, so we
learned a little later, just where we had been watching the passing
troops; it had fallen among them and killed. But an hour or two later,
when we repassed the point where it fell, men were still marching by.
Other regiments of men were still marching to the sound of the guns,
and those who had passed were already over the hills and beyond the
river, filing into the trenches in time, so it turned out, to meet the
new attack that came with the later afternoon.
I went to Verdun to see the forts, the city, the hills, and the
topography of a great battle; I went in the hope of describing with a
little of clarity what the operation meant as a military affair. I
say, and I shall hereafter try to describe this. But I shall never be
able to describe this thing which was the true Verdun for me--these
men, their faces, seen as one heard the shell fire and the musketry
rolling, not steadily but intermittently, the men who had marched over
the roads that are lined with graves, through villages that are
destroyed, who had come of their own will and in calm determination
and marched unhurryingly and yet unshrinkingly, the men who were no
longer young, who had left behind them all that men hold dear in life,
home, wives, children, because they knew that there was no other way.
I can only say to all those who have asked me, "What of France?" this
simple thing, that I do not believe the French will ever stop. I do
not believe, as the Germans have said, that French courage is
weakening, that French determination is abating. I do not believe the
Kaiser himself would think this if he had seen these men's faces as
they marched _toward_ his guns. I think he would feel as I felt, as
one must feel, that these men went willingly, hating war with their
whole soul, destitute of passion or anger. I never heard a passionate
word in France, because there had entered into their minds, into the
mind and heart of a whole race, the belief that what was at stake was
the thing that for two thousand years of history had been France.
II
MY TRIP TO VERDUN--A DYING, SHELL-RIDDEN CITY
THE VAUBAN CITADEL, IN THE SHELTER OF WHICH FALLING SHELLS
CANNOT FIND YOU--HOUSES AND BLOCKS THAT ARE VANISHING
HOURLY--"BUT WILLIAM WILL NOT COME"--WAR THAT IS INVISIBLE--A
LUNCHEON UNDERGROUND WITH A TOAST TO AMERICA--THE LAST
COURTESY FROM A GENERAL AND A HOST--NOTHING THAT WAS NOT
BEAUTIFUL
The citadel of Verdun, the bulwark of the eastern frontier in ancient
days, rises out of the meadows of the Meuse with something of the
abruptness of the sky-scraper, and still preserves that aspect which
led the writers of other wars to describe all forts as "frowning." It
was built for Louis XIV by Vauban. He took a solid rock and blasted
out redoubts and battlements. The generations that followed him dug
into the living rock and created within it a whole city of catacombs,
a vast labyrinth of passages and chambers and halls; even an elevator
was added by the latest engineers, so that one can go from floor to
floor, from the level of the meadow to the level of the summit of the
rock, possibly a hundred feet above.
By reason of the fact that many correspondents have visited this
fortress since the war began the world has come to know of the
underground life in Verdun, to think of the city as defended by some
wonderful system of subterranean works; to think of Verdun, in fact,
as a city or citadel that is defensible either by walls or by forts.
But the truth is far different: even the old citadel is but a deserted
cave; its massive walls of natural rock resist the shells as they
would repulse an avalanche; but the guns that were once on its
parapets are gone, the garrison is gone, gone far out on the trench
lines beyond the hills. The Vauban citadel is now a place where bread
is baked, where wounded men are occasionally brought, where live the
soldiers and officers whose important but unromantic mission it is to
keep the roads through the town open, to police the ashes of the city,
to do what remains of the work that once fell to the lot of the civil
authorities.
To glide swiftly to the shelter of this rock from a region in which a
falling shell has served to remind you of the real meaning of Verdun
of the moment, to leave the automobile and plunge into the welcome
obscurity of this cavern--this was perhaps the most comfortable
personal incident of the day. The mere shadow of the rock gave a sense
of security; to penetrate it was to pass to safety.
Some moments of wandering by corridors and stairways into the very
heart of the rock brought us to the quarters of our host, General
Dubois; to his kind attention I was to owe all my good fortune in
seeing his dying city; to him, at the end, I was to owe the ultimate
evidence of courtesy, which I shall never forget.
Unlike Pétain or Joffre, General Dubois is a little man, possibly a
trifle older than either. A white-haired, bright-eyed, vigorous
soldier, who made his real fame in Madagascar with Joffre and with
Gallieni, and when the storm broke was sent to Verdun by these men,
who knew him, to do the difficult work that there was to be performed
behind the battle line. There is about General Dubois a suggestion of
the old, as well as the new, of the French general. The private
soldiers to whom he spoke as he went his rounds responded with a "Oui,
mon Général" that had a note of affection as well as of discipline; he
was rather as one fancied were the soldiers of the Revolution, of the
Empire, of the Algerian days of Père Bugeaud whose memory is still
green.
Our salutations made, we returned through the winding corridors to
inspect the bakeries, the water and light plant, the unsuspected
resources of this rock. In one huge cavern we saw the men who provided
30,000 men with bread each day, men working as the stokers in an ocean
steamer labor amidst the glare of fires; we tasted the bread and found
it good, as good as all French bread is, and that means a little
better than all other bread.
Then we slipped back into daylight and wandered along the face of the
fortress. We inspected shell holes of yesterday and of last month; we
inspected them as one inspects the best blossoms in a garden; we
studied the angle at which they dropped; we measured the miniature
avalanche that they brought with them. But always, so far, there was
the subconscious sense of the rock between us and the enemy. I never
before understood the full meaning of that phrase "a rock in a weary
land."
All this was but preliminary, however. Other automobiles arrived; the
General entered one. I followed in the next and we set out to visit
Verdun, to visit the ruins, or, rather, to see not a city that was
dead, but a city that was visibly, hourly dying--a city that was
vanishing by blocks and by squares--but was not yet fallen to the
estate of Ypres or Arras; a city that in corners, where there were
gardens behind the walls, still smiled; a city where some few brave
old buildings still stood four square and solid, but only waiting what
was to come.
Before I visited Verdun I had seen many cities and towns which had
been wholly or partially destroyed, either by shell fire or by the
German soldiers in their great invasion before the Marne. One shelled
town is much like another, and there is no thrill quite like that you
experience when you see the first. But these towns had died nearly two
years ago; indeed, in most the resurrection had begun: little red
roofs were beginning to shine through the brown trees and stark
ruins. Children played again in the squares. It was like the sense you
have when you see an old peasant ploughing among the cross-marked
graves of a hard-fought battle corner--the sense of a beginning as
well as of death and destruction.
But at Verdun it was utterly different. Of life, or people, of
activity beginning again or surviving there was nothing. Some time in
the recent past all the little people who lived in these houses had
put upon wagons what could be quickly moved and had slipped out of
their home, that was already under sentence of death. They were gone
into the distance, and they had left behind them no stragglers. The
city was empty save for a few soldiers who passed rapidly along the
streets, as one marches in a heavy snowstorm.
Yet Verdun was not wholly dead. Shell fire is the most inexplicable of
all things that carry destruction. As you passed down one street the
mark of destruction varied with each house. Here the blast had come
and cut the building squarely; it had carried with it into ruin behind
in the courtyard all that the house contained, but against the wall
the telephone rested undisturbed; pictures--possibly even a looking
glass--hung as the inhabitants had left it, hung as perhaps it had
hung when the last woman had taken her ultimate hurried glance at her
hat before she departed into the outer darkness.
But the next house had lost only the front walls; it stood before you
as if it had been opened for your inspection by the removal of the
façade. Chairs, beds--all the domestic economy of the house--sagged
visibly outward toward the street, or stood still firm, but open to
the four winds. It was as if the scene were prepared for a stage and
you sat before the footlights looking into the interior. Again, the
next house and that beyond were utterly gone--side walls, front walls,
everything swallowed up and vanished--the iron work twisted into
heaps, the stone work crumbled to dust; the whole mass of ruin still
smoked, for it was a shell of yesterday that had done this work.
Down on the Riviera, where the mistral blows--all the pine trees lean
away from the invariable track of this storm wind--you have the sense,
even in the summer months, of a whole countryside bent by the gales.
In the same fashion you felt in Verdun, felt rather than saw, a whole
town not bent, but crumbled, crushed--and the line of fall was always
apparent; you could tell the direction from which each storm of shells
had come, you could almost feel that the storm was but suspended, not
over, that at any moment it might begin again.
Yet even in the midst of destruction there were enclaves of unshaken
structures. On the Rue Mazel, "Main Street," the chief clothing store
rose immune amid ashes on all sides. Its huge plate-glass window was
not even cracked. And behind the window a little mannikin, one of the
familiar images that wear clothes to tempt the purchaser, stood erect.
A French soldier had crept in and raised the stiff arm of the mannikin
to the salute, pushed back the hat to a rakish angle. The mannikin
seemed alive and more than alive, the embodiment of the spirit of the
place. Facing northward toward the German guns it seemed to respond to
them with a "_morituri salutamus_." "The last civilian in Verdun," the
soldiers called him, but his manner was rather that of the Poilu.
We crossed the river and the canal and stopped by the ruin of what had
once been a big factory or warehouse. We crawled through an open
shell-made breach in the brick wall and stood in the interior. The
ashes were still hot, and in corners there were smoking fires. Two
days ago, at just this time, your guides told you, men had been
working here; making bread, I think. At the same time we had come to
the ruins--the same time of day, that is--the Germans had dropped a
half-dozen incendiary shells into the building and it had burned in
ten minutes. Most of the men who had been there then were still there,
under the smoking mass of wreckage; the smell of burned human flesh
was in the air.
A few steps away there was a little house standing intact. On the
floor there were stretched four rolls of white cloth. The General and
those with him took off their hats as they entered. He opened one of
the packages and you saw only a charred black mass, something that
looked like a half-burned log taken from the fireplace. But two days
ago it had been a man, and the metal disk of identification had
already been found and had served to disclose the victim's name. These
were the first bodies that had been removed from the ruins.
Taking our cars again we drove back and stopped before the Mairie, and
passing under the arch entered the courtyard. The building had fared
better than most, but there were many shell marks. In the courtyard
were four guns. Forty-six years before another German army had come
down from the North, another whirlwind of artillery had struck the
town and laid it in ashes, but even under the ashes the town had held
out for three weeks. Afterward the Republic of France had given these
guns to the people of Verdun in recognition of their heroism.
In the courtyard I was presented to a man wearing the uniform and
helmet of a fireman. He was the chief of the Verdun fire department.
His mission, his perilous duty, it was to help extinguish the fires
that flamed up after every shell. In all my life I have never seen a
man at once so crushed and so patently courageous. He was not young,
but his blue Lorraine eyes were still clear. Yet he looked at you, he
looked out upon the world with undisguised amazement. For a generation
his business had been to fight fires. He had protected his little town
from conflagrations that might sometimes, perhaps once, possibly
twice, have risen to the dignity of a "three alarm." For the rest he
had dealt with blazes.
Now out of the skies and the darkness and out of the daylight, too,
fire had descended upon his town. Under an avalanche of incendiary
shells, under a landslide of fire, his city was melting visibly into
ashes. He had lived fire and dreamed fire for half a century, but now
the world had turned to fire--his world--and he looked out upon it in
dazed wonder. He could no longer fight this fire, restrain it, conquer
it; he could only go out under the bursting shells and strive to
minimize by some fraction the destruction; but it was only child's
play, this work of his which had been a man's business. And there was
no mistaking the fact that this world was now too much for him. He was
a brave man; they told me of things he had done; but his little cosmos
had gone to chaos utterly.
We entered our cars again and went to another quarter of the city.
Everywhere were ashes and ruin, but everywhere the sense of a
destruction that was progressive, not complete: it still marched. It
was as Arras had been, they told me, before the last wall had tumbled
and the Artois capital had become nothing but a memory. We climbed the
slope toward the cathedral and stopped in a little square still
unscathed, the Place d'Armes, the most historic acre of the town.
After a moment I realized what my friends were telling me. It was in
this square that the Crown Prince was to receive the surrender of the
town. Along the road we had climbed he was to lead his victorious army
through the town and out the Porte de France beyond. In this square
the Kaiser was to stand and review the army, to greet his victorious
son. The scene as it had been arranged was almost rehearsed for you in
the gestures of the French officers.
"But William has not come," they said, "and he will not come now."
This last was not spoken as a boast, but as a faith, a conviction.
Still climbing we came to the cathedral. It is seated on the very top
pinnacle of the rock of Verdun, suggesting the French cities of
Provence. Its two towers, severe and lacking ornamentation, are the
landmarks of the countryside for miles around. When I came back to
America I read the story of an American correspondent whom the Germans
had brought down from Berlin to see the destruction of Verdun. They
had brought him to the edge of the hills and then thrown some
incendiary shells into the town, the very shells that killed the men
whose bodies I had seen. The black smoke and flames rushed up around
these towers and then the Germans brought the correspondent over the
hills and showed him the destruction of Verdun. He described it
vividly and concluded that the condition of the town must be
desperate.
They are a wonderful people, these Germans, in their stage management.
Of course this was precisely the thing that they desired that he
should feel. They had sent their shells at the right moment, the whole
performance had gone off like clockwork. Those poor blackened masses
of humanity in the house below were the cost that was represented in
the performance. And since there is much still left to burn in Verdun,
the Germans may repeat this thing whenever they desire.
But somewhere three or four miles from here, and between Verdun and
the Germans, are many thousands of Frenchmen, with guns and cannon,
and hearts of even finer metal. They cannot even know that Verdun is
being shelled or is burning, and if it burns to ultimate ashes it will
not affect them or their lines. This is the fallacy of all the talk of
the destruction of Verdun city and the desperate condition of its
defenders. The army left Verdun for the hills when the war began; the
people left when the present drive began in February. Even the dogs
and cats, which were seen by correspondents in earlier visits, have
been rescued and sent away. Verdun is dead, it is almost as dead as
are Arras and Ypres; but neither of these towns after a year and a
half bombardment has fallen.
The correspondent who was taken up on a hill by the Germans to see
Verdun burn, after it had been carefully set on fire by shell fire,
was discovered by French gunners and shelled. He went away taking with
him an impression of a doomed city. This picture was duly transmitted
to America. But two days later, when I visited the city, there was no
evidence of desperation, because there was no one left to be
desperate. Doubtless on occasion we shall have many more descriptions
of the destruction of this town, descriptions meant to impress
Americans or encourage Germans. The material for such fires is not
exhausted. The cathedral on the top of the hill is hardly shell-marked
at all, and it will make a famous display when it is fired as was
Rheims, as were the churches of Champagne and Artois. But there is
something novel in the thought of a city burned, not to make a Roman
or even German holiday, but burned to make the world believe that the
Battle of Verdun had been a German victory.
For two hours we wandered about the town exploring and estimating the
effect of heavy gunfire, for the Germans are too far from the city to
use anything but heavy guns effectively. The impressions of such a
visit are too numerous to recall. I shall mention but one more. Behind
the cathedral are cloisters that the guide books mention; they inclose
a courtyard that was once decorated with statues of saints. By some
accident or miracle--there are always miracles in shelled towns--one
of these images, perhaps that of the Madonna, has been lifted from its
pedestal and thrown into the branches of a tree, which seems almost to
hold it with outstretched arms.
At length we left the town, going out by the Porte de France, which
cuts the old Vauban ramparts, now as deserted as those of Paris,
ramparts that had been covered with trees and were now strewn with the
débris of the trees that had fallen under the shell fire. In all this
time not a shell had fallen in Verdun; it was the first completely
tranquil morning in weeks; but there was always the sense of impending
destruction, there was always the sense of the approaching shell.
There was an odd subconscious curiosity, and something more than
curiosity, about the mental processes of some men, not far away, who
were beside guns pointed toward you, guns which yesterday or the day
before had sent their destruction to the very spot where you stood.
Yet, oddly enough, in the town there was a wholly absurd sense of
security, derived from the fact that there were still buildings
between you and those guns. You saw that the buildings went to dust
and ashes whenever the guns were fired; you saw that each explosion
might turn a city block into ashes, and yet you were glad of the
buildings and there was reassurance in their shadows. Now we travelled
in the open country; we began to climb across the face of a bare hill,
and it was the face that fronted the Germans.
Presently the General's car stuck in the mud and we halted, for a
minute perhaps; then we went on; we passed a dead horse lying in the
road, then of a sudden came that same terrible grinding, metallic
crash. I have never seen any description of a heavy shell explosion
that fitted it. Behind us we could see the black smoke rising from the
ground in a suburb through which we had just come. I saw three
explosions. A moment later we were at the gate of Fort de la Chaume,
and we were warned not to stop, but to hasten in, for the Germans,
whenever they see cars at this point, suspect that Joffre has arrived,
or President Poincaré, and act accordingly. We did not delay.
Fort de la Chaume is one of the many fortifications built since the
Franco-Prussian War and intended to defend the city. Like all the
rest, it ceased to have value when the German artillery had shown at
Liège and at Namur that it was the master of the fort. Then the French
left their forts and went out to trenches beyond and took with them
the heavy guns that the fort once boasted. To-day Fort de la Chaume is
just an empty shell, as empty as the old Vauban citadel in the valley
below. And what is true of this fort is true of all the other forts of
that famous fortress of Verdun, which is no longer a fortress, but a
sector in the trench line that runs from the North Sea to Switzerland.
From the walls of the fort staff officers showed me the surrounding
country. I looked down on the city of Verdun, hiding under the shadow
of its cathedral. I looked across the level Meuse Valley, with its
little river; I studied the wall of hills beyond. Somewhere in the
tangle on the horizon was Douaumont, which the Germans held. Down the
valley of the river in the haze was the town of Bras, which was
French; beyond it the village of Vachereauville, which was German.
Beyond the hills in the centre of the picture, but hidden by them,
were Le Mort Homme and Hill 304.
Verdun is like a lump of sugar in a finger bowl, and I was standing on
the rim. It seemed utterly impossible that any one should even think
of this town as a fortress or count its ashes as of meaning in the
conflict.
Somewhere in the background a French battery of heavy guns was firing,
and the sound was clear; but it did not suggest war, rather a blasting
operation. The German guns were still again. There was a faint
billowing roll of gunfire across the river toward Douaumont, but very
faint. As for trenches, soldiers, evidences of battle, they did not
exist. I thought of Ralph Pulitzer's vivid story of riding to the
Rheims front in a military aeroplane and seeing, of war, just
nothing.
The geography of the Verdun country unrolled before us with absolute
clarity; the whole relation of hills and river and railroads was
unmistakable. But despite the faint sound of musketry, the occasional
roar of a French gun, I might have been in the Berkshires looking down
on the Housatonic. Six miles to the north around Le Mort Homme that
battle which has not stopped for two months was still going on. Around
Douaumont the overture was just starting, the overture to a stiff
fight in the afternoon, but of all the circumstances of battle that
one has read of, that one still vaguely expects to see, there was not
a sign. If it suited their fancy the Germans could turn the hill on
which I stood into a crater of ruin, as they did with Fort Loncin at
Liège. We were well within range, easy range; we lived because they
had no object to serve by such shooting, but we were without even a
hint of their whereabouts.
I have already described the military geography of Verdun. I shall not
attempt to repeat it here, but it is the invisibility of warfare,
whether examined from the earth or the air, which impresses the
civilian. If you go to the trenches you creep through tunnels and
cavities until you are permitted to peer through a peephole, and you
see yellow dirt some yards away. You may hear bullets over your head,
you may hear shells passing, but what you see is a hillside with some
slashings. That is the enemy. If you go to an observation post back of
the trenches, then you will see a whole range of country, but not even
the trenches of your own side.
From the Grand Mont east of Nancy I watched some French batteries
shell the German line. I didn't see the French guns, I didn't see the
German trenches, I didn't see the French line. I did see some black
smoke rising a little above the underbrush, and I was told that the
shells were striking behind the German lines and that the gunners were
searching for a German battery. But I might as well have been
observing a gang of Italians at blasting operations in the Montclair
Mountains. And the officer with me said: "Our children are just
amusing themselves."
From Fort de la Chaume we rode back to the citadel; and there I was
the guest of the General and the officers of the town garrison; their
guest because I was an American who came to see their town. I shall
always remember that luncheon down in the very depths of this rock in
a dimly lighted room. I sat at the General's right, and all around me
were the men whose day's work it was to keep the roads open, the
machinery running in the shell-cursed city. Every time they went out
into daylight they knew that they might not return. For two months the
storm had beaten about this rock, it had written its mark upon all
these faces, and yet it had neither extinguished the light nor the
laughter; the sense of strength and of calmness was inescapable, and
never have I known such charming, such thoughtful hosts.
When the champagne came the old General rose and made me a little
speech. He spoke in English, with absolute correctness, but as one who
spoke it with difficulty. He welcomed me as an American to Verdun, he
thanked me for coming, he raised his glass to drink to my country and
the hope that in the right time she would be standing with France--in
the cause of civilization. Always in his heart, in his thought, in his
speech, the Frenchman is thinking of that cause of civilization;
always this is what the terrible conflict that is eating up all France
means to him.
Afterward we went out of this cavern into daylight, and the officers
came and shook hands with me and said good-bye. One does not say _au
revoir_ at the front; one says _bonne chance_--"good luck; it may and
it may not--we hope not." We entered our cars and were about to start,
when suddenly, with a blinding, stunning crash, a whole salvo landed
in the meadow just beyond the road, we could not see where, because
some houses hid the field. It was the most suddenly appalling crash I
have ever heard.
Instantly the General ordered our drivers to halt. He explained that
it might be the beginning of a bombardment or only a single trial, a
detail in the intermittent firing to cut the road that we were to
take. We sat waiting for several moments and no more shots came. Then
the General turned and gave an order to his car to follow, bade our
drivers go fast, and climbed into my car and sat down. The wandering
American correspondent was his guest. He could not protect him from
the shell fire. He could not prevent it. But he could share the
danger. He could share the risk, and so he rode with me the mile until
we passed beyond the danger zone. There he gave me another _bonne
chance_ and left me, went back to his shell-cursed town with its ruins
and its agonies.
I hope I shall see General Dubois again. I hope it will be on the day
when he is made Governor of Strassburg.
As we left Verdun the firing was increasing; it was rolling up like a
rising gale; the infantry fire was becoming pronounced; the Germans
were beginning an attack upon Le Mort Homme. Just before sunset we
passed through the Argonne Forest and came out beyond. On a hill to
the north against the sky the monument of Valmy stood out in clear
relief, marking the hill where Kellerman had turned back another
Prussian army. Then we slipped down into the Plain of Châlons, where
other Frenchmen had met and conquered Attila. At dark we halted in
Montmirail, where Napoleon won his last victory before his empire
fell. The sound of the guns we had left behind was still in our ears
and the meaning of these names in our minds. Presently my French
companion said to me: "It is a long time, isn't it?" He meant all the
years since the first storm came out of the north, and I think the
same thought is in every Frenchman's mind. Then he told me his story.
"I had two boys," he said; "one was taken from me years ago in an
accident; he was killed and it was terrible. But the other I gave.
"He was shot, my last boy, up near Verdun, in the beginning of the
war. He did not die at once and I went to him. For twenty days I sat
beside him in a cellar waiting for him to die. I bought the last
coffin in the village, that he might be buried in it, and kept it
under my bed. We talked many times before he died, and he told me all
he knew of the fight, of the men about him and how they fell.
"My name is finished, but I say to you now that in all that experience
there was nothing that was not beautiful." And as far as I can analyze
or put in words the impression that I have brought away from France,
from the ruin and the suffering and the destruction, I think it is
expressed in those words. I have seen nothing that was not beautiful,
too, because through all the spirit of France shone clear and bright.
III
BATTLE OF VERDUN ANOTHER GETTYSBURG
FAILURE OF CROWN PRINCE LIKENED BY FRENCH TO "HIGH TIDE" OF
CONFEDERACY
"The parallel between Gettysburg in your Civil War and Verdun in the
present contest is unmistakable and striking." This was said to me by
General Delacroix, one of Joffre's predecessors as chief of the French
General Staff and the distinguished military critic of the Paris
_Temps_ now that because of age he has passed to the retired list.
What General Delacroix meant was patent and must have already
impressed many Americans. Our own Gettysburg was the final bid for
decision of a South which had long been victorious on the battlefield,
which still possessed the armies that seemed the better organized and
the generals whose campaigns had been wonderfully successful. But it
was the bid for decision of a Confederacy which was outnumbered in
men, in resources, in the ultimate powers of endurance, and was
already beginning to feel the growing pinch both in numbers and
credit.
At Gettysburg Lee made his final effort to destroy the army which he
had frequently defeated but never eliminated. Victory meant the fall
of Washington, the coming of despair to the North, an end of the Civil
War, which would bring independence and the prize for which they had
contended to the Confederates. And Lee failed at Gettysburg, not as
Napoleon failed at Waterloo or as MacMahon failed at Sedan, but he
failed, and his failure was the beginning of the end. The victory of
Gettysburg put new heart, new assurance into the North; it broke the
long illusion of an invincible Confederacy; it gave to Europe, to
London, and to Paris, even more promptly than to Washington, the
unmistakable message that the North was bound to win the Civil War.
I mean in a moment to discuss the military aspects of this conflict
about the Lorraine fortress, but before the military it is essential
to grasp the moral consequences of Verdun to France, to the Allies, to
Germany. Not since the Marne, not even then--because it was only after
a long delay that France really knew what had happened in this
struggle--has anything occurred that has so profoundly, so
indescribably, heartened the French people as has the victory at
Verdun. It is not too much to say that the victory has been the most
immediately inspiring thing in French national life since the disaster
at Sedan and that it has roused national confidence, hope, faith, as
nothing else has since the present conflict began.
In this sense rather than in the military sense Verdun was a decisive
battle and its consequences of far-reaching character. France as a
whole, from the moment when the attack began, understood the issue;
the battle was fought in the open and the whole nation watched the
communiqués day by day. It was accepted as a terrible if not a final
test, and no Frenchman fails to recognize in all that he says the
strength, the power, the military skill of Germany.
And when the advance was checked, when after the first two weeks the
battle flickered out as did the French offensive in Champagne and the
former German drive about Ypres a year ago, France, which had held her
breath and waited, hoped, read in the results at Verdun the promise of
ultimate victory, felt that all that Germany had, all that she could
produce, had been put to the test and had failed to accomplish the
result for which Germany had striven--or any portion thereof.
War is something beyond armies and tactics, beyond strategy and even
military genius, and the real meaning of Verdun is not to be found in
lines held or lost, not to be found even in the ashes of the old town
that France and not Germany holds. It is to be found in the spirit of
France, now that the great trial is over and the lines have held.
It was Germany and not France that raised the issue of Verdun. The
Germans believed, and all their published statements show this, that
France was weary, disheartened, ready to quit, on fair terms. They
believed that there was needed only a shining victory, a great moral
demonstration of German strength to accomplish the end--to bring
victorious peace. In this I think, and all with whom I talked in
France felt, that the Germans were wrong, that France would have
endured defeat and gone on. But conversely, the Germans knew, must
have known, that to try and to fail was to rouse the whole heart of
France, to destroy any pessimism, and this is precisely what the
failure has done.
The battle for Verdun was a battle for moral rather than military
values, and the moral victory remains with the French. It was a
deliberate and calculated effort to break the spirit of France, and it
roused the spirit of France as perhaps nothing has raised the spirit
of this people since Valmy, where other Frenchmen met and checked
another German invasion, brought to a halt the army of Frederick the
Great, which still preserved the prestige of its great captain who was
dead, turned it back along the road that was presently to end at Jena.
Beside the moral value of Verdun the military is just nothing. To
appreciate its meaning you must understand what it has meant to the
French, and you must understand it by recalling what Gettysburg meant
to the North, invaded as is France, defeated at half a dozen struggles
in Virginia as France has been defeated in the past months of this
war. Gettysburg was and remains the decisive battle of our Civil War,
although the conflict lasted for nearly two years more. For France
Verdun is exactly the same thing. Having accepted the moral likeness,
you may find much that is instructive and suggestive in the military,
but this is of relatively minor importance.
Now, on the military side it is necessary to know first of all that
when the Germans began their gigantic attack upon Verdun the French
high command decided not to defend the city. Joffre and those who with
him direct the French armies were agreed that the city of Verdun was
without military value comparable with the cost of defending it, and
that the wisest and best thing to do was to draw back the lines to the
hills above the city and west of the Meuse. Had their will prevailed
there would have been no real battle at Verdun and the Germans would
long ago have occupied the ashes of the town.
Joffre's view was easily explicable, and it was hardly possible to
quarrel with the military judgment it discloses. To the world Verdun
is a great fortress, a second Gibraltar, encircled by great forts,
furnished with huge guns, the gateway to Paris and the key to the
French eastern frontier. And this is just what Verdun was until the
coming of the present war, when the German and Austrian siege guns
levelled the forts of Antwerp, of Maubeuge, of Liège. But after that
Verdun ceased to be anything, because all fortresses lost their value
with the revelation that they had failed to keep pace with the gun.
After the Battle of the Marne, when the trench war began, the French
took all their guns out of the forts of Verdun, pushed out before the
forts, and Verdun became just a sector in the long trench line from
the sea to Switzerland. It was defended by trenches, not forts. It was
neither of more importance nor less than any other point in the line
and it was a place of trenches, not of forts. The forts were empty and
remain empty, monuments to the past of war, quite as useless as the
walls of Rome would be against modern artillery.
The decline of Verdun was even more complete. From the strongest point
in French defence it became the weakest. When the Germans took St.
Mihiel in September, 1914, they cut the north and south railroad that
binds Verdun to the Paris-Nancy Railroad. When they retreated from the
Marne they halted at Varennes and Montfaucon, and from these points
they command the Paris-Verdun-Metz Railroad. Apart from a single
narrow-gauge railroad of minor value, which wanders among the hills,
climbing at prohibitive grades, Verdun is isolated from the rest of
France. Consider what this means in modern war when the amount of
ammunition consumed in a day almost staggers belief. Consider what it
means when there are a quarter of a million men to be fed and
munitioned in this sector.
More than all this, when the lines came down to the trench condition
Verdun was a salient, it was a narrow curve bulging out into the
German front. It was precisely the same sort of military position as
Ypres, which the Germans have twice before selected as the point for
a great attack. In the Verdun sector the French are exposed to a
converging fire; they are inside the German semicircle. Moreover, the
salient is so narrow that the effect of converging fire is not to be
exaggerated.
When the French attacked the Germans in Champagne last fall they
advanced on a wide front from a line parallel to the German line. As
they pierced the first German lines they were exposed to the
converging fire of the Germans, because they were pushing a wedge in.
Ultimately they got one brigade through all the German lines, but it
was destroyed beyond by this converging fire. But as the Germans
advanced upon Verdun they were breaking down a salient and possessed
the advantage they had had on the defensive in Champagne.
Finally, one-half the French army of Verdun fought with its back to a
deep river, connected with the other half only by bridges, some of
which presently came under German fire, and there was every
possibility that these troops might be cut off and captured if the
German advance were pushed home far enough on the west bank of the
Meuse and the German artillery was successful in interrupting the
passage of the river. It was a perilous position and there were some
days when the situation seemed critical.
Accordingly, when the German drive at Verdun was at last disclosed in
its real magnitude Joffre prepared to evacuate the town and the east
bank of the river, to straighten his line and abolish the salient and
give over to the Germans the wreck of Verdun. The position behind the
river was next to impregnable; the lines would then be parallel; there
would be no salient, and in the new position the French could
concentrate their heavy artillery while the Germans were moving up the
guns that they had fixed to the north of the old front.
But at this point the French politician interfered. He recognized the
wisdom of the merely military view of Joffre, but he saw also the
moral value. He recognized that the French and the German public alike
would not see Verdun as a mere point in a trench line and a point
almost impossible to defend and destitute of military value. He saw
that the French and German publics would think of Verdun as it had
been thought of before the present war changed all the conditions of
conflict. He recognized that the German people would be roused to new
hope and confidence by the capture of a great fortress, and that the
French would be equally depressed by losing what they believed was a
great fortress.
You had therefore in France for some hours, perhaps for several days,
something that approximated a crisis growing out of the division of
opinion between the civil and the military authorities, a division of
opinion based upon two wholly different but not impossible equally
correct appraisals. Joffre did not believe it was worth the men or the
risk to hold a few square miles of French territory, since to
evacuate would strengthen, not weaken, the line. The French
politicians recognized that to lose Verdun was to suffer a moral
defeat which would almost infallibly bring down the Ministry, might
call into existence a new Committee of Public Safety, and would fire
the German heart and depress the French.
In the end the politicians had their way and Castelnau, Joffre's
second in command, came over to their view and set out for Verdun to
organize the defence for the position at the eleventh hour. He had
with him Pétain, the man who had commanded the French army in the
Battle of Champagne and henceforth commanded the army that was hurried
to the Verdun sector. France now took up definitely the gage of battle
as Germany had laid it down. Verdun now became a battle in the
decisive sense of the word, although still on the moral side. Nothing
is more preposterous than to believe that there ever was any chance of
a German advance through Verdun to Paris. One has only to go to
Verdun and see the country and the lines behind the city and miles
back of the present front to realize how foolish such talk is.
Meantime the German advance had been steady and considerable. All
these attacks follow the same course--Ypres, Artois, Champagne,
Dunajec. There is first the tremendous artillery concentration of the
assailant; then the bombardment which abolishes the first and second
line trenches of the defenders; then the infantry attack which takes
these ruined trenches and almost invariably many thousands of
prisoners and scores of guns. But now the situation changes. The
assailant has passed beyond the effective range of his own heavy
artillery, which cannot be immediately advanced because of its weight;
he encounters a line of trenches that has not been levelled, he has
come under the concentrated fire of his foe's heavy and light
artillery without the support of his own heavy artillery, and all the
advantage of surprise has gone.
What happened at Verdun is what happened in the Champagne. The German
advance was quite as successful--rather more successful than the
French last September; it covered three or four miles on a
considerable front, and it even reached Douaumont, one of the old
forts and the fort which was placed on the highest hill in the
environs of Verdun. Thousands of prisoners had been captured and many
guns taken. But at this point the French resistance stiffened, as had
the German last year. French reserves and artillery arrived. Pétain
and Castelnau arrived. There was an end of the rapid advance and there
began the pounding, grinding attack in which the advantage passed to
the defender. It was just what happened at Neuve Chapelle so long ago
when we first saw this kind of fighting exemplified completely.
In the new attacks the Germans still gained ground, but they gained
ground because the French withdrew from positions made untenable
through the original German advance at other points. They
consolidated their line, organized their new front. Ten days after the
attack had begun it had ceased to be a question of Verdun, just as in
a shorter time the French had realized last September that they could
not break the German line in Champagne. But like the French in
Champagne, like the British at Neuve Chapelle, the Germans persevered,
and in consequence suffered colossal losses, exactly as the French and
British had.
To understand the German tactics you must recognize two things. The
Germans had expected to take Verdun, and they had unquestionably known
that the French military command did not intend at the outset to hold
the town. They had advertised the coming victory far and wide over the
world; they had staked much upon it. Moreover, in the first days, when
they had taken much ground, when they had got Douaumont and could look
down into Verdun, they had every reason to believe that they possessed
the key to the city and that the French high command was slowly but
steadily drawing back its lines and would presently evacuate the city.
Knowing these things you can understand why the Germans were so
confident. They did not invent stories of coming victory which they
did not believe. They believed that Verdun was to fall because they
knew, and the same thing was known and mentioned in London. I heard it
there when the battle was in its earlier stages--that the French high
command intended to evacuate Verdun. What they did not know and could
not know was that the French politicians, perhaps one should say
statesmen this time, had interfered, that the French high command had
yielded and that Verdun was to be defended to the last ditch.
When this decision was made the end of the real German advance was
almost instantaneous. All that has happened since has been nothing but
active trench war, violent fighting, desperate charge and counter
charge, a material shortening of the French line at certain points,
the abolition of minor salients, but of actual progress not the
smallest. The advance stopped before lines on which Pétain elected to
make his stand when he came with his army to defend Verdun. The
Germans are still several miles outside of Verdun itself, and only at
Douaumont have they touched the line of the exterior forts, which
before the war were expected to defend the city.
In Paris and elsewhere you will be told that Douaumont was occupied
without resistance and that it was abandoned under orders before there
had been a decision to hold Verdun. I do not pretend to know whether
this is true or not, although I heard it on authority that was wholly
credible, but the fact that the map discloses, that I saw for myself
at Verdun, is that, save for Douaumont, none of the old forts have
been taken and that the Germans have never been able to advance a foot
from Douaumont or reach the other forts at any other point. And this
is nothing more or less than the French experience at Champagne, the
German experience about Ypres in 1915.
In a later chapter I hope to discuss the situation at Verdun as I saw
it on April 6th, and also the miracle of motor transport which played
so great a part in the successful defence of the position. But the
military details are wholly subordinate to the moral. All France was
roused by a successful defence of a position attacked by Germany with
the advertised purpose of breaking the spirit of the French people.
The battle was fought in the plain daylight without the smallest
concealment, and the least-informed reader of the official reports
could grasp the issue which was the fate of the city of Verdun.
The fact, known to a certain number of Frenchmen only, that the
defence was improvised after the decision had been made to evacuate
the whole salient, serves for them to increase the meaning of the
victory as it increases the real extent of the French exploit. But
this is a detail. The Germans openly, deliberately, after long
preparation, announced their purpose, used every conceivable bit of
strength they could bring to bear to take Verdun, and told their own
people not merely that Verdun would fall, but at one moment that it
had fallen. They did this with the firm conviction that it would
fall--was falling.
The French were steadily aware that Verdun might be lost. They knew
from letters coming daily from the front how terrible the struggle
was, and it is impossible to exaggerate the tension of the early days,
although it was not a tension of panic or fear. Paris did not expect
to see the invader, and there was nothing of this sort of moonshine
abroad. But it was plain that the fall of the town would bring a
tremendous wave of depression and if not despair yet a real reduction
of hope. Instead, Verdun defended itself, the lines were maintained
several miles on the other side of the town and all substantial
advance came to an end in the first two weeks. The army itself, the
military observers, were convinced that all danger was over as early
as the second week in March, when correspondents of French newspapers
were being taken to Verdun to see the situation and tell the people
the facts.
All over Northern France, and I was in many towns and cities, the
"lift" that Verdun had brought was unmistakable and French confidence
was everywhere evident. It showed itself in a spontaneous welcome to
Alexander of Serbia in Paris, which, I am told, was the first thing of
the sort in the war period. Frenchmen did not say that Verdun was the
beginning of the end, and they did not forecast the prompt collapse of
Germany. They did not even forecast the immediate end of the fighting
about Verdun. They did not regard the victory as a Waterloo or a Sedan
or any other foolish thing. But they did rather coolly and quite
calmly appraise the thing and see in it the biggest German failure
since the Marne, and a failure in a fight which the Germans had laid
down all the conditions in advance and advertised the victory that
they did not achieve as promising the collapse of French endurance and
spirit.
The Battle of Verdun was a battle for moral values, and the possession
of the town itself was never of any real military value. Verdun
commands nothing, and behind it lie well-prepared fortifications on
dominating heights, positions that are ten times as easy to defend as
those which the French have defended. It was not a battle for Paris,
and there was never a prospect of the piercing of the French line;
Germany was never as near a great military success as she was at Ypres
after the first gas attack a year ago. The French army leaders judged
the Verdun position as not worth the cost of defending. They were
overruled by the politicians and they defended it successfully. But
their first decision is the best evidence of the wholly illusory value
that has been attached to the possession of Verdun itself.
The politicians were unquestionably right as to the moral value, and
it is possible if not probable that the relinquishment of the city
voluntarily might have precipitated the fall of the Briand Ministry
and the creation of a Committee of Public Safety--not to make peace,
but to make war successfully. The will to defend Verdun came from the
French people, it imposed itself upon the army and it resulted in a
moral victory the consequences of which cannot be exaggerated and have
given new heart and confidence to a people whose courage and
determination must make an enduring impression on any one who sees
France in the present terrible but glorious time.
IV
VERDUN, THE DOOR THAT LEADS NOWHERE
THE BATTLE AND THE TOPOGRAPHY OF THE BATTLEFIELD--AN ANALYSIS
OF THE ATTACK AND DEFENCE
In a preceding article I have endeavored to explain the tremendous
moral "lift" that the successful defence of the city of Verdun has
brought to France, a moral "lift" which has roused French confidence
and expectation of ultimate victory to the highest point since the war
began. I have also tried to demonstrate how utterly without value the
fortress of Verdun was, because the forts were of no use in the
present war, were as useless against German heavy artillery as those
of Antwerp and Maubeuge, and had been evacuated by the French a full
eighteen months before the present battle began. Finally I have
indicated that so little military value was attached to Verdun by the
French high command that it was prepared to evacuate the whole
position, which is the most difficult to defend on the whole French
front, and was only persuaded to give over his purpose by the
arguments of the politicians, who believed that the moral effect of
the evacuation would be disastrous to France and inspiriting to
Germany.
I now desire to describe at some length the actual topographical
circumstances of Verdun and later I shall discuss the fashion in which
an automobile transport system was improvised to meet the situation
created by the interruption of traffic by German artillery fire along
the two considerable railroad lines. It was this system which actually
saved the town and is the real "miracle of Verdun," if one is to have
miracles to explain what brave and skilful men do.
I saw Verdun on April 6th. I went through the city, which was little
more than a mass of ashes, with General Dubois, the military governor
of the town itself, and with him I went to Fort de la Chaume, on one
of the highest hills near Verdun, and from this vantage point had the
whole countryside explained to me. The day on which I visited Verdun
was the first completely quiet day in weeks, and I was thus fortunate
in being able to see and to go about without the disturbing or
hindering circumstances which are incident to a bombardment.
The city of Verdun is situated at the bottom of the Meuse Valley on
both sides of the river. But the main portion of the town is on the
west bank and surrounds a low hill, crowned by the cathedral and old
Vauban citadel. The town is surrounded by old ramparts, long ago
deprived of military value and belonging, like the citadel, to
eighteenth century warfare. The Valley of the Meuse is here several
miles wide, as flat as your hand, and the river, which is small but
fairly deep, a real obstacle since it cannot be forded, wanders back
and forth from one side of the valley to the other. Below Verdun it is
doubled, as a military obstacle, by the Canal de l'Est.
If you put a lump of sugar in a finger bowl you will pretty fairly
reproduce the Verdun topography. The lump of sugar will represent
Verdun, the rim of the bowl the hills around the city, the interior of
the bowl the little basin in which the city stands. This rim of hills,
which rise some five or six hundred feet above the town itself, is
broken on the west by a deep and fairly narrow trough which comes into
the Meuse Valley and connects it some thirty miles to the west with
the Plain of Châlons. If you should look down upon this region from an
aeroplane this furrow would look like a very deep gutter cutting far
into the tangle of hills.
Now in the warfare of other centuries the value of the Verdun fortress
was just this: the furrow which I have described is the one avenue
available for an invading army coming from the east out of Metz or
south from Luxemburg and aiming to get into the Plain of Châlons to
the west. It is the way the Prussians came in 1792 and were defeated
at Valmy, at the western entrance of the trough about thirty miles
away. They took Verdun on their way--so did the Germans in 1870.
Verdun in French hands closed this trough to the invaders.
It closed it because the low hill which bears the town was strongly
fortified and was surrounded by lower ground. Such artillery as was in
existence was not of a sufficiently long range to place upon the hills
about Verdun which we have described as the rim of the bowl. The town
of Verdun was situated on both sides of the river and commanded all
the bridges. It was, in fact, the stopple in the mouth of the
bottle-neck passage leading into North Central France, the passage
through which ran the main road and, later, the railway from the
frontier nearest Paris to the capital.
But when the modern developments of artillery came, then Verdun, the
old fortress that Vauban built for Louis XIV, lost its value. It was
commanded by the surrounding hills and the French moved out of the
town and the Vauban fortifications and built on the surrounding hills,
on the rim, to go back to our figure, the forts which were the defence
of the town when the present war began, forts arranged quite like
those of Liège or Antwerp and some four or five miles away from the
town. But bear in mind these forts were designed, like the old
fortress and fortifications of the eighteenth century, to bar the road
from the Meuse and from Germany to the Plain of Châlons and the level
country west of the Argonne. When the Germans came south through
Belgium and got into the Plain of Châlons from the north they had
turned the whole Verdun position and had got into the region it
barred by another route; they had come in by the back door; Verdun
was the front. Not only that, but they are there now and have been
there ever since the first days of September, 1914.
When one hears about Verdun as the gateway to Paris or anything else
one hears about the Verdun of the past. It was not the door to Paris
but the outer door to the region around Paris, to the Plains of
Champagne and Châlons. But as the Germans are already in these plains
the taking of Verdun now would not bring them nearer to Paris; they
are only fifty miles away at Noyon, on the Oise, and they would be 160
at Verdun if they took the city. If they took Verdun they would get
control of the Paris-Metz Railway, and if they then drove the French
away from the trough we have been describing they would get a short
line into France, and a line coming from German territory directly,
not passing through Belgium. But they would not be nearer to Paris.
When the French saw, in the opening days of the war, that forts were
of no permanent value against the German guns they left the forts on
the hills above Verdun as they had abandoned the Vauban works and
moved north for a few miles. Here they dug trenches, mounted their
guns in concealed positions, and stood on the defensive, as they were
standing elsewhere from Belgium to Switzerland. There was now no
fortress of Verdun, and Verdun city was nothing but a point behind the
lines of trenches, a point like Rheims, or Arras. The forts of the rim
were equally of no more importance and were now empty of guns or
garrisons. If the Germans, by a sudden attack, broke all the way
through the French trenches here it would be quite as serious as if
they broke through at other points, but no more so. There was no
fortress of Verdun and the Verdun position commanded nothing.
The Battle of Verdun, as it is disclosed to an observer who stands on
Fort de la Chaume, a mile or two west and above Verdun and in the
mouth of the trough we have described, was this: On the west bank of
the Meuse, four or five miles northwest of the town, there is a steep
ridge going east and west and perhaps 1,100 feet high. This is the
crest of Charny, and it rises sharply from the flat valley and marches
to the west without a break for some miles. On it are the old forts of
the rim.
Three or four miles still to the north is a line of hills which are
separated from each other by deep ravines leading north and south. Two
of these hills, Le Mort Homme (Dead Man's Hill) and Hill 304, have
been steadily in the reports for many weeks. They are the present
front of the French. Between one and two miles still to the north are
other confused and tangled hills facing north, and it was here that
the French lines ran when the great attack began in the third week of
February. On this side the Germans have advanced rather less than two
miles; they have not reached the Charny Ridge, which is the true and
last line of defence of the Verdun position, and they have not
captured the two hills to the north, which are the advanced position,
now the first line.
When I was in Paris before I went to Verdun there was a general belief
that the French might ultimately abandon the two outer hills, Dead
Man's and 304, and come back to the Charny Ridge, which is a wall
running from the river west without a break for miles. Apparently this
has not been found necessary, but what is worth noting is that if
these hills were evacuated it would not mean the withdrawal from
Verdun but only to the best line of defence (the last line, to be
sure), which includes the town itself.
Now, east of the river the situation is materially different. Between
the Meuse and the level plateau, which appears in the dispatches from
the front as the Woevre, is a long, narrow ridge, running from north
to south for perhaps thirty-five or forty miles. This is the Côte de
Meuse, or, translated, the Hills of the Meuse. The range is never more
than ten miles wide and at many points less than half as wide. On the
west it rises very sharply from the Meuse and on the east it breaks
down quite as abruptly into the Woevre Plain. It cannot be effectively
approached from the Woevre, because the Woevre is an exceedingly
marshy plain, with much sub-surface water and in spring a mass of
liquid clay.
Now the French, when the German drive began, stood on this ridge some
eight miles, rather less, perhaps, to the north of the town of Verdun;
their line ran from the Meuse straight east along this ridge and then
turned at right angles and came south along the eastern edge of the
Meuse Hills and the shore of the Woevre Plain until it touched the
river again at St. Mihiel, twenty miles to the south, where the
Germans had broken through the Meuse Hills and reached the river. The
German attack came south along the crest of this ridge because the
German heavy artillery could not be brought over the Woevre.
About halfway between the French front and Verdun, on a little crest
somewhat higher than the main ridge, the French had erected a line of
forts, just as they had on the Charny Ridge, Forts Douaumont and Vaux,
familiar names now, were the forts most distant from Verdun. But the
French here, as on the other side of the river, had come out of these
forts, abandoned and dismantled them, and taken to trenches much to
the north. It was upon these trenches that the main German attack
fell, and in the first days the French were pushed back until their
trench line followed the crests that bear the old forts, and at one
point, at Douaumont, the Germans had actually got possession of one of
the old forts; but the French trenches pass in front of this fort at a
distance of but a few hundred yards.
Now, in the first days of the battle the position of the French on
the east bank of the Meuse was just this: the troops facing north were
meeting and slowly yielding to a terrific drive coming south and
southwest; the rest of the troops that faced east toward the Woevre
were not attacked severely. But as the Germans came south, and when
they took Douaumont, they were able to reach the bridges across the
Meuse behind the French troops on the Meuse Hills and to destroy them
by indirect fire, and these French troops, more than a hundred
thousand probably, were fighting with their backs to a deep river and
exposed to destruction in case their lines did not hold.
In this situation Joffre proposed to take his troops behind the Meuse
and on the hills to the west and above the city, leaving the city to
the Germans. The French line would thus come north behind the Meuse
from St. Mihiel and then turn west above Verdun, following either the
Charny Ridge or else the Hills of Regret and Chaume, on either side
of the trough, described above, which the road to Paris follows.
If Verdun were a fortress actually; if either the old town or the
circle of forts outside had been of value, Joffre would not have
proposed this thing. But they were of no value. Verdun was once a
fortress barring the way to the Plain of Châlons, but the Germans were
in the plain, having come through Belgium by the back door, as it
were. The forts outside the city on the rim of the basin had already
been abandoned because they could have been destroyed by German heavy
artillery, as were those of Liège and Antwerp. Verdun was just a
position; but it was a difficult position to defend because of the
river, which cut off one-half the army and could be crossed only by
bridges, which were under indirect fire.
If the French had come back to the Charny Ridge, or even to the Regret
Hills south of the trough followed by the Paris-Metz road, they would
have stood on hills of patent military value; the trough is a natural
ditch in front. These hills are all trenched and prepared for defence.
The French would merely have shortened their lines and taken an easy
position to defend, instead of holding a bad position. But ultimately
this would have meant the relinquishing of Verdun, the little town
down in the valley below, now become a heap of ruins and having lost
its military value thirty years earlier, when heavy artillery began
its decisive success over the old fortifications.
The French did not retire, because the civil government overruled the
military; decided that the moral effect of the withdrawal from Verdun
would be disastrous to the French and advantageous to the Germans.
Instead of retiring, the French stood and held the hills beyond the
Charny Ridge, Dead Man's and 304; they hold them still and seem
determined to keep them. But remember that they can still retire to
the Charny Ridge if they choose, and only then find their best line
west of the Meuse, if they mean to hold on to the city of Verdun.
On the other hand, east of the River Meuse the French are
approximately in their last line. The hills and crests they hold upon
the Meuse Hills are some three or four miles from Verdun, but if the
French retired far they would begin to come down hill, with a deep
river at their backs. In consequence, whenever you hear that the
Germans have made some slight gain, taken a trench about Douaumont or
Vaux, you are certain to hear at once that the French have counter
attacked and retaken the lost ground.
The essential thing to remember is that the defence of Verdun is not
the defence of a position that has a great military value. The French
would be better off, would lose fewer men and run smaller risk of
considerable losses if they should quit the east bank of the Meuse and
occupy the hills back of Verdun on the west bank. On the west bank the
Germans have never made any material gain, and they have not come
within reach of the hills that bear the old forts. But the French
Government has decided that for political reason, for reasons that
affect the moral, not the military, situation, Verdun must not be
surrendered; hence the army is holding it at a cost of men less than
the Germans are paying to take it, but at a far greater cost than
would be necessary to hold the better positions west of the river.
The Germans have not made any gain of importance in nearly two months.
The French are very sure they will not come farther south. They are as
confident as men could be. But if the Germans should come farther
south and at last force the French to come back behind the river and
to the hills above the town, they would only win a moral victory. The
military situation would not be changed, unless they should also
pierce the French lines on the west of the river, and this is
absolutely unthinkable now.
If you think of Verdun city as a fortress you will put yourself in the
eighteenth century. It is just an abandoned town, mostly ashes and
completely ruined by a useless bombardment after the main German
advance had been checked. If you think of Verdun as a fortified
position, like Liège, which, if it fell, would bring disaster, as did
the fall of Liège, you are thinking in terms of the situation before
the war. The forts of this position have all been abandoned and the
French are fighting in trenches in all points save one outside this
circle of forts. If you think of Verdun as the gateway to anything,
you are thinking of something that doesn't exist. It was a gateway to
Central France, to the Plain of Châlons, from the German frontier
before the Germans came down into the Plain of Châlons from the north
through Belgium.
But if you think of Verdun as a place which has a great sentimental
value for both the French and the Germans; if you think of it as a
place which by reason of its importance in other days still preserves
a value in the minds of the mass of the French and German publics, a
town the taking of which would as a result of this wholly false
appraisal be reckoned in Germany as a great victory, which would
vastly encourage German masses and would be accepted in France as a
great defeat which would equally depress the French public, you will
think of the battle for Verdun as it is.
If you go to Verdun you will see that the estimate that the world has
placed upon it is illusory. You will see it is an abandoned town. You
will see, as I did, that great and famous forts are without guns, and
you will see, as I did, that the positions which the French have
prepared behind the Meuse and above the town are vastly stronger than
those which they have held successfully, in Lorraine or any other
place where the attacks have been bitter, for nearly two years.
There are no forts, fortifications, fortresses, in this war. There
are just trenches, and the Verdun sector is no exception. Verdun is
not surrounded; it is not invested. I went to the town from Bar-le-Duc
in an automobile without difficulty, and I ran back to Paris by
another road, through Châlons, with equal ease. The Germans have never
got within three miles of the town on any side; to the west of the
River Meuse they are not within six miles of it. They are not gaining,
and have not been gaining for weeks; they are merely fighting a
desperate trench campaign, and the French are fighting back, retaking
trenches on the east of the river, because they are in their last line
on this bank of the river, but paying less attention to German trench
gains on the west because the Germans are still far from the Charny
Ridge, their main position.
If Verdun falls, that is, if the French are compelled under pressure
or as a result of the cost of holding their present awkward position
to go back behind the river, they will lose fifty or a hundred square
miles of French territory, they will lose all the tremendous value of
the moral "lift" which the successful defence has brought, but they
will lose nothing else; and when the Germans have taken Verdun, the
ashes, the ruins, they will stop, because there is no object or value
in further attack. They are fighting for moral values, and the French
politician has overruled the French soldier and compelled him to
accept battle on unfavorable ground for this same moral value, but
against his military judgment. He has done it successfully. He expects
and France expects that he will continue to do it successfully, but in
the wholly remote contingency that he failed (I can only say that it
is a contingency no longer considered in France), a loss in moral
advantage would be the only consequence.
V
IN SIGHT OF THE PROMISED LAND--ON THE LORRAINE BATTLEFIELD
In the third week of August, 1914, a French army crossed the frontier
of Alsace-Lorraine and entered the Promised Land, toward which all
Frenchmen had looked in hope and sadness for forty-four years. The
long-forgotten communiqués of that early period of the war reported
success after success, until at last it was announced that the
victorious French armies had reached Sarrebourg and Morhange, and were
astride the Strassburg-Metz Railroad. And then Berlin took up the cry,
and France and the world learned of a great German victory and of the
defeat and rout of the invading army. Even Paris conceded that the
retreat had begun and the "army of liberation" was crowding back
beyond the frontier and far within French territory.
Then the curtain of the censorship fell and the world turned to the
westward to watch the terrible battle for Paris. In the agony and
glory of the Marne the struggle along the Moselle was forgotten; the
Battle of Nancy, of Lorraine, was fought and won in the darkness, and
when the safety of Paris was assured the world looked toward the
Aisne, and then toward Flanders. So it came about that one of the
greatest battles of the whole war, one of the most important of the
French victories, the success that made the Marne possible, the rally
and stand of the French armies about Nancy, escaped the fame it
earned. Only in legend, in the romance of the Kaiser with his cavalry
waiting on the hills to enter the Lorraine capital, did the battle
live.
When I went to France one of the hopes I had cherished was that I
might be permitted to visit this battlefield, to see the ground on
which a great battle had been fought, that was still unknown country,
in the main, for those who have written on the war. The Lorraine field
was the field on which France and Germany had planned for a generation
to fight. Had the Germans respected the neutrality of Belgium, it is
by Nancy, by the gap between the Vosges and the hills of the Meuse,
that they must have broken into France. The Marne was a battlefield
which was reached by chance and fought over by hazard, but every foot
of the Lorraine country had been studied for the fight long years in
advance. Here war followed the natural course, followed the plans of
the general staff prepared years in advance. Indeed, I had treasured
over years a plan of the Battle of Nancy, contained in a French book
written years ago, which might serve as the basis for a history of
what happened, as it was written as a prophecy of what was to come.
When the Great General Staff was pleased to grant my request to see
the battlefield of Nancy I was advised to travel by train to that
town accompanied by an officer from the General Staff, and informed
that I should there meet an officer of the garrison, who would conduct
me to all points of interest and explain in detail the various phases
of the conflict. Thus it fell out, and I have to thank Commandant
Leroux for the courtesy and consideration which made this excursion
successful.
In peace time one goes from Paris to Nancy in five hours, and the
distance is about that from New York to Boston, by Springfield. In war
all is different, and the time almost doubled. Yet there are
compensations. Think of the New York-Boston trip as bringing you
beyond New Haven to the exact rear of battle, of battle but fifteen
miles away, with the guns booming in the distance and the aeroplanes
and balloons in full view. Think also of this same trip, which from
Hartford to Worchester follows the line of a battle not yet two years
old, a battle that has left its traces in ruined villages, in
shattered houses. On either side of the railroad track the graves
descend to meet the embankments; you can mark the advance and the
retreat by the crosses which fill the fields. The gardens that touch
the railroad and extend to the rear of houses in the little towns are
filled with graves. Each enclosure has been fought for at the point of
the bayonet, and every garden wall recalls the Château of Hougoumont,
at Waterloo.
All this was two years ago, but there is to-day, also. East of
Bar-le-Duc the main line is cut by German shell fire now. From Fort
Camp des Romains above St. Mihiel German guns sweep the railroad near
Commercy, and one has to turn south by a long detour, as if one went
to Boston by Fitchburg, travel south through the country of Jeanne
d'Arc and return by Toul, whose forts look out upon the invaded land.
Thus one comes to Nancy by night, and only by night, for twenty miles
beyond there are Germans and a German cannon, which not so long ago
sent a shell into the town and removed a whole city block beside the
railroad station. It is the sight of this ruin as you enter the town
which reminds you that you are at the front, but there are other
reminders.
As we ate our dinner in the café, facing the beautiful Place
Stanislas, we were disturbed by a strange and curious drumming sound.
Going out into the square, we saw an aeroplane, or rather its lights,
red and green, like those of a ship. It was the first of several, the
night patrol, rising slowly and steadily, and then sweeping off in a
wide curve toward the enemy's line. They were the sentries of the air
which were to guard us while we slept, for men do sentry-go in the air
as well as on the earth about the capital of Lorraine. Then the
searchlights on the hills began to play, sweeping the horizon toward
that same mysterious region where beyond the darkness there is war.
The next morning I woke with the sense of Fourth of July. Bang! Bang!
Bang! Such a barking of cannon crackers I had never heard. Still
drowsy, I pushed open the French windows and looked down on the
square. There I beheld a hundred or more men, women, and children,
their eyes fixed on something in the air above and behind the hotel.
Still the incessant barking of guns, with the occasional boom of
something more impressive. With difficulty I grasped the fact. I was
in the midst of a Taube raid. Somewhere over my head, invisible to me
because of the wall of my hotel, a German aeroplane was flying, and
all the anti-aircraft guns were shooting at it. Was it carrying bombs?
Should I presently see or feel the destruction following the descent
of these?
But the Taube turned away, the guns fired less and less frequently,
the people in the streets drifted away, the children to school, the
men to work, the women to wait. It was just a detail in their lives,
as familiar as the incoming steamer to the commuters on the North
River ferryboats. Some portion of war has been the day's history of
Nancy for nearly two years now. The children do not carry gas masks to
school with them as they do at Pont-à-Mousson, a dozen miles to the
north, but women and children have been killed by German shells, by
bombs, brought by Zeppelins and by aeroplanes. There is always
excitement of sorts in the district of Nancy.
After a breakfast, broken by the return of the aeroplanes we had seen
departing the night before for the patrol, we entered our cars and set
out for the front, for the near-front, for the lines a few miles
behind the present trenches, where Nancy was saved but two years ago.
Our route lay north along the valley of the Meurthe, a smiling broad
valley, marching north and south and meeting in a few miles that of
the Moselle coming east. It was easy to believe that one was riding
through the valley of the Susquehanna, with spring and peace in the
air. Toward the east a wall of hills shut out the view. This was the
shoulder of the Grand Couronné, the wall against which German
violence burst and broke in September, 1914.
Presently we came to a long stretch of road walled in on the river
side by brown canvas, exactly the sort of thing that is used at
football games to shut out the non-paying public. But it had another
purpose here. We were within the vision of the Germans, across the
river, on the heights behind the forest, which outlined itself at the
skyline; there were the Kaiser's troops and that forest was the
Bois-le-Prêtre, the familiar incident in so many communiqués since the
war began. Thanks to the canvas, it was possible for the French to
move troops along this road without inviting German shells. Yet it was
impossible to derive any large feeling of security from a canvas wall,
which alone interposed between you and German heavy artillery.
We passed through several villages and each was crowded with troops;
cavalry, infantry, all the branches represented; it was still early
and the soldiers were just beginning their day's work; war is so
completely a business here. Transport wagons marched along the roads,
companies of soldiers filed by. Interspersed with the soldiers were
civilians, the women and children, for none of the villages are
evacuated. Not even the occasional boom of a gun far off could give to
this thing the character of real war. It recalled the days of my
soldiering in the militia camp at Framingham in Massachusetts. It was
simply impossible to believe that it was real. Even the faces of the
soldiers were smiling. There was no such sense of terribleness, of
strain and weariness as I later found about Verdun. The Lorraine front
is now inactive, tranquil; it has been quiet so long that men have
forgotten all the carnage and horror of the earlier time.
We turned out of the valley and climbed abruptly up the hillside. In a
moment we came into the centre of a tiny village and looked into a row
of houses, whose roofs had been swept off by shell fire. Here and
there a whole house was gone; next door the house was undisturbed and
the women and children looked out of the doors. The village was St.
Geneviève, and we were at the extreme front of the French in August,
and against this hill burst the flood of German invasion. Leaving the
car we walked out of the village, and at the end of the street a sign
warned the wayfarer not to enter the fields, for which we were bound:
"War--do not trespass." This was the burden of the warning.
Once beyond this sign we came out suddenly upon an open plateau, upon
trenches. Northward the slope descended to a valley at our feet. It
was cut and seamed by trenches, and beyond the trenches stood the
posts that carried the barbed-wire entanglements. Here and there,
amidst the trenches, there were graves. I went down to the barbed-wire
entanglements and examined them curiously. They at least were real.
Once thousands of men had come up out of the little woods a quarter of
a mile below; they had come on in that famous massed attack, they
had come on in the face of machine gun and "seventy-fives." They had
just reached the wires, which marked high water. In the woods below,
the Bois de Facq, in the fields by the river 4,000 Germans had been
buried.
[Illustration: GERMAN LORRAINE (map)]
Looking out from the trenches the whole country unfolded. Northward
the little village of Atton slept under the steep slope of
Côte-de-Mousson, a round pinnacle crowned with an ancient château.
From the hill the German artillery had swept the ground where I stood.
Below the hill to the west was Pont-à-Mousson, the city of 150
bombardments, which the Germans took when they came south and lost
later. Above it was the Bois-le-Prêtre, in which guns were now booming
occasionally. Far to the north was another hill, just visible, and its
slope toward us was cut and seamed with yellow slashes: Those were the
French trenches, then of the second or third line; beyond there was
still another hill, it was slightly blurred in the haze, but it was
not over five miles away, and it was occupied by the Germans. From the
slope above me on a clear day it is possible to see Metz, so near are
French and German lines to the old frontier.
Straight across the river to the west of us was another wood, with a
glorious name, the Forest of the Advance Guard. It swept to the south
of us. In that wood the Germans had also planted their guns on the day
of battle. They had swept the trenches where I stood from three sides.
Plainly it had been a warm corner. But the French had held on. Their
commander had received a verbal order to retreat. He insisted that it
should be put in writing, and this took time. The order came. It had
to be obeyed, but he obeyed slowly. Reluctantly the men left the
trenches they had held so long. They slipped southward along the road
by which we had come. But suddenly their rear guards discovered the
Germans were also retreating. So the French came back and the line of
St. Geneviève was held, the northern door to Nancy was not forced.
Looking down again it was not difficult to reconstitute that German
assault, made at night. The thing was so simple the civilian could
grasp it. A road ran through the valley and along it the Germans had
formed; the slope they had to advance up was gentle, far more gradual
than that of San Juan. They had been picked troops selected for a
forlorn hope, and they had come back four times. The next morning the
whole forest had been filled with dead and dying. Not less than a
division--20,000 men--had made the terrible venture. Now there was a
strange sense of emptiness in the country; war had come and gone, left
its graves, its trenches, its barbed-wire entanglements; but these
were all disappearing already. On this beautiful spring morning it was
impossible to feel the reality of what happened here, what was
happening now, in some measure, five miles or more to the north.
Nature is certainly the greatest of all pacifists; she will not permit
the signs of war to endure nor the mind to believe that war itself has
existed and exists.
From St. Geneviève we went to the Grand Mont d'Amance, the most famous
point in all the Lorraine front, the southeast corner of the Grand
Couronné, as St. Geneviève is the northern. Here, from a hill some
1,300 feet high, one looks eastward into the Promised Land of
France--into German Lorraine. In the early days of August the great
French invasion, resting one flank upon this hill, the other upon the
distant Vosges, had stepped over the frontier. One could trace its
route to the distant hills among which it had found disaster. In these
hills the Germans had hidden their heavy guns, and the French, coming
under their fire without warning, unsupported by heavy artillery,
which was lacking to them, had broken. Then the German invasion had
rolled back. You could follow the route. In the foreground the little
Seille River could be discerned; it marked the old frontier. Across
this had come the defeated troops. They had swarmed down the low, bare
hills; they had crossed and vanished in the woods just at my feet;
these woods were the Forest of Champenoux. Into this forest the
Germans had followed by the thousand, they were astride the main road
to Nancy, which rolled white and straight at my feet. But in the woods
the French rallied. For days there was fought in this stretch of trees
one of the most terrible of battles.
As I stood on the Grand Mont I faced almost due east. In front of me
and to the south extended the forest. Exactly at my feet the forest
reached up the hill and there was a little cluster of buildings about
a fountain. All was in ruins, and here, exactly here, was the high
water mark of the German advance. They had occupied the ruins for a
few moments and then had been driven out. Elsewhere they had never
emerged from the woods; they had approached the western shore, but the
French had met them with machine guns and "seventy-fives." The brown
woods at my feet were nothing but a vast cemetery; thousands of French
and German soldiers slept there.
In their turn the Germans had gone back. Now, in the same woods, a
French battery was shelling the Germans on the other side of the
Seille. Under the glass I studied the little villages unfolding as on
a map; they were all destroyed, but it was impossible to recognize
this. Some were French, some German; you could follow the line, but
there were no trenches; behind them French shells were bursting
occasionally and black smoke rose just above the ground. Thousands of
men faced each other less than four miles from where I stood, but all
that there was to be detected were the shell bursts; otherwise one saw
a pleasant country, rolling hills, mostly without woods, bare in the
spring, which had not yet come to turn them green. In the foreground
ran that arbitrary line Bismarck had drawn between Frenchmen forty-six
years before--the frontier--but of natural separation there was none.
He had cut off a part of France, that was all, and one looked upon
what had been and was still a bleeding wound.
I asked the French commandant about the various descriptions made by
those who have written about the war. They have described the German
attack as mounting the slope of the Grand Mont, where we stood. He
took me to the edge and pointed down. It was a cliff almost as steep
as the Palisades. "C'est une blague," he smiled. "Just a story." The
Germans had not charged here, but in the forest below, where the Nancy
road passed through and enters the valley of the Amezeule. They had
not tried to carry but to turn the Grand Mont. More than 200,000 men
had fought for days in the valley below. I asked him about the legend
of the Kaiser, sitting on a hill, waiting in white uniform with his
famous escort, waiting until the road was clear for his triumphal
entrance into the capital of Lorraine. He laughed. I might choose my
hill; if the Emperor had done this thing the hill was "over there,"
but had he? They are hard on legends at the front, and the tales that
delight Paris die easily on the frontiers of war.
But since I had asked so much about the fighting my commandant
promised to take me in the afternoon to the point where the struggle
had been fiercest, still farther to the south, where all the hills
break down and there is a natural gateway from Germany into France,
the beginning of the famous Charmes Gap, through which the German road
to Paris from the east ran, and still runs. Leaving Nancy behind us,
and ascending the Meurthe valley on the eastern bank, turning out of
it before Saint Nicholas du Port, we came presently to the most
completely war-swept fields that I have ever seen. On a perfectly
level plain the little town of Haraucourt stands in sombre ruins. Its
houses are nothing but ashes and rubble. Go out of the village toward
the east and you enter fields pockmarked by shell fire. For several
miles you can walk from shell hole to shell hole. The whole country is
a patchwork of these shell holes. At every few rods a new line of old
trenches approaches the road and wanders away again. Barbed-wire
entanglements run up and down the gently sloping hillsides.
Presently we came out upon a perfectly level field. It was simply torn
by shell fire. Old half-filled trenches wandered aimlessly about, and
beyond, under a gentle slope, the little village of Courbessaux stood
in ruins. The commandant called my attention to a bit of woods in
front.
"The Germans had their machine guns there," said he. "We didn't know
it, and a French brigade charged across this field. It started at
8:15, and at 8:30 it had lost more than 3,000 out of 6,000. Then the
Germans came out of the woods in their turn, and our artillery, back
at Haraucourt, caught them and they lost 3,500 men in a quarter of an
hour." Along the roadside were innumerable graves. We looked at one.
It was marked: "Here 196 French." Twenty feet distant was another; it
was marked: "Here 196 Germans." In the field where we stood I was told
some 10,000 men are buried. They were buried hurriedly, and even now
when it rains arms and legs are exposed.
Two years had passed, almost two years, since this field had been
fought for. The Germans had taken it. They had approached Haraucourt,
but had not passed it. This was the centre and the most vital point in
the Lorraine battle. What Foch's troops had done about La Fêre
Champenoise, those of Castelnau had done here. The German wave had
been broken, but at what cost? And now, after so many months, the
desolation of war remained. But yet it was not to endure. Beside the
very graves an old peasant was ploughing, guiding his plough and his
horses carefully among the tombs. Four miles away more trenches faced
each other and the battle went on audibly, but behind this line, in
this very field where so many had died, life was beginning.
Later we drove south, passing within the lines the Germans had held in
their great advance, we travelled through Lunéville, which they had
taken and left unharmed, save as shell fire had wrecked an eastern
suburb. We visited Gerbéviller, where in an excess of rage the Germans
had burned every structure in the town. I have never seen such a
headquarters of desolation. Everything that had a shape, that had a
semblance of beauty or of use, lies in complete ruin, detached houses,
a château, the blocks in the village, all in ashes. Save for Sermaize,
Gerbéviller is the most completely wrecked town in France.
You enter the village over a little bridge across the tiny Mortagne.
Here some French soldiers made a stand and held off the German advance
for some hours. There was no other battle at Gerbéviller, but for this
defence the town died. Never was death so complete. Incendiary
material was placed in every house, and all that thoroughness could do
to make the destruction complete was done. Gerbéviller is dead, a few
women and children live amidst its ashes, there is a wooden barrack by
the bridge with a post-office and the inevitable postcards, but only
on postcards, picture postcards, does the town live. It will be a
place of pilgrimage when peace comes.
From Gerbéviller we went by Bayon to the Plateau of Saffais, the ridge
between the Meurthe and the Moselle, where the defeated army of
Castelnau made its last and successful stand. The French line came
south from St. Geneviève, where we had been in the morning, through
the Grand Mont, across the plain by Haraucourt and Corbessaux, then
crossed the Meurthe by Dombasle and stood on the heights from
Rossières south. Having taken Lunèville, the Germans attempted to
cross the Meurthe coming out of the Forest of Vitrimont.
Standing on the Plateau of Saffais and facing east, the whole country
unfolded again, as it did at the Grand Mont. The face of the plateau
is seamed with trenches. They follow the slopes, and the village of
Saffais stands out like a promontory. On this ridge the French had
massed three hundred cannon. Their army had come back in ruins, and to
steady it they had been compelled to draw troops from Alsace.
Mülhausen was sacrificed to save Nancy. Behind these crests on which
we stood a beaten army, almost routed, had in three days found itself
and returned to the charge.
In the shadow of the dusk I looked across the Meurthe into the brown
mass of the Forest of Vitrimont. Through this had come the victorious
Germans. They had debouched from the wood; they had approached the
river, hidden under the slope, but, swept by the hell of this
artillery storm, they had broken. But few had lived to pass the river,
none had mounted the slopes. There were almost no graves along these
trenches. Afterward the Germans had in turn yielded to pressure from
the south and gone back. Before the Battle of the Marne began the
German wave of invasion had been stopped here in the last days of
August. A second terrific drive, coincident with the Marne, had
likewise failed. Then the Germans had gone back to the frontier. The
old boundary line of Bismarck is now in many instances an actual line
of fire, and nowhere on this front are the Germans more than three or
four miles within French territory.
If you should look at the map of the wholly imaginary Battle of Nancy,
drawn by Colonel Boucher to illustrate his book, published before
1910, a book describing the problem of the defence of the eastern
frontier, you will find the lines on which the French stood at Saffais
indicated exactly. Colonel Boucher had not dreamed this battle, but
for a generation the French General Staff had planned it. Here they
had expected to meet the German thrust. When the Germans decided to go
by Belgium they had in turn taken the offensive, but, having failed,
they had fought their long-planned battle.
Out of all the region of war, of war to-day and war yesterday, one
goes back to Nancy, to its busy streets, its crowds of people
returning from their day's work. War is less than fifteen miles away,
but Nancy is as calm as London is nervous. Its bakers still make
macaroons; even Taube raids do not excuse the children from punctual
attendance at school. Nancy is calm with the calmness of all France,
but with just a touch of something more than calmness, which forty-six
years of living by an open frontier brings. Twenty-one months ago it
was the gauge of battle, and half a million men fought for it; a new
German drive may approach it at any time. Out toward the old frontier
there is still a German gun, hidden in the Forest of Bézange, which
has turned one block to ashes and may fire again at any hour.
Zeppelins have come and gone, leaving dead women and children behind
them, but Nancy goes on with to-day.
And to-morrow? In the hearts of all the people of this beautiful city
there is a single and a simple faith. Nancy turns her face toward the
ancient frontier, she looks hopefully out upon the shell-swept Grand
Couronné and beyond to the Promised Land. And the people say to you,
if you ask them about war and about peace, as one of them said to me:
"Peace will come, but not until we have our ancient frontier, not
until we have Metz and Strassburg. We have waited a long time, is it
not so?"
THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS, GARDEN CITY, NEW YORK.
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| Page 56: Everywhere where replaced with Everywhere were |
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