IN ALSACE
Next morning the General was as good as his word. A note was brought to
our hotel by an orderly to say that if we would be round at his quarters
after lunch we should be able to see _des choses intéressantes_, and by
half-past one, in a motor-car driven by an Alsatian sergeant (who, like
many others in the same position, had preferred service in the French
army to his pre-war occupation as a German private), we were driving
between the outlying forts on our way to the frontier, with Captain de
Borieux of the Headquarters Staff as our guide and friend. Lie number
one was soon disposed of. It was quite evident that the German claim
that they were investing Belfort, and had even taken two of its forts,
was false. Till we reached the frontier, after passing for eight miles
over a wide, rolling plain, which even then was scarred in all
directions with line upon line of French entrenchments and other
formidable defences, there was not a sign of them, and even then it was
only the negative sign that the boundary post erected by the Germans
after 1870 was now rebaptized with the colours of France. A yard
further, and I was in Alsace, the first of the very few Englishmen who
since the beginning of the war have crossed into the part of the annexed
provinces which had been won back from the enemy.
[Illustration:
Photograph by Libert-Fernand, Nancy.
LES HALLES, RAON L’ETAPE—VOSGES.
]
We stopped first at Montreux Vieux, the German name for which was Alt
Munster—a little town a mile or so beyond the frontier on the
Rhine-Rhone Canal, just before it takes a turn to Dannemarie and
Altkirch—in which a month before there had been some brisk fighting. In
their attack on the town, which suffered pretty severely from their
guns, the Germans pushed forward their infantry as far as the canal,
about two hundred yards across the fields from the French sandbag
defences in front of the station. That was the nearest point to Belfort
which they reached. Before they got to the movable bridge over the canal
a sergeant who was on guard in the bridge-house, ran out under heavy
fire and turned the wheel by which it is raised and lowered till it
stood erect on the French side. “_Il était temps que j’y aille, mon
Colonel_,” he said afterwards to his commanding-officer, when the enemy
had been finally driven back from the canal banks to the woods round
Romagny, a scattered village a mile or two off which we visited later in
the afternoon. The Germans visited it too, on the same day that they
failed to get into Montreux Vieux, and vented their spite on its feeble
inhabitants (their own fellow-subjects) in the now familiar way,
bombarding church and houses from a distance of a few hundred yards, and
then setting fire to a quarter of its cottages and homesteads, in none
of which were there any French soldiers. I have often thought since of
the two pictures—the quiet sergeant by the canal bridge and those
smoking piles of rubbish that once were peasants’ homes—though the
destruction in Romagny was nothing at all compared with the wholesale
ruin and desolation which we saw afterwards in Meurthe et Moselle and
other departments further north. They seem to me typical illustrations
of the difference between the French and German conceptions of making
war. For we know now that one of the normal features of the much-vaunted
German organization (till the deadlock of the trenches made it
impossible) was the organized burning by squads of disciplined men of
defenceless villages, peopled, as a rule, only by old men and women and
children. Even for the malign fits of bad temper which found vent in
these wanton acts of incendiarism, the mailed fist of the drill sergeant
gave the signal, and the men, acting under his orders and those of his
superiors, carried them out, working shoulder to shoulder, as part of
the regular system. There was nothing systematic about the act of the
French sergeant at the bridge-house. He just did his duty, as he saw it
himself, and on his own initiative, when he felt that it had to be done.
The German soldier, for all his courage, is part of a mass, a cog or a
nut in an unthinking machine. The Frenchman, for all his discipline,
remains an individual, and the French army is made up not of men burning
with the spirit of _la revanche_, but of patriots who have gone to the
defence of their country because they thought it time.
That night, five weeks after the war had begun, we penetrated a good
deal further into Alsace, to within about twenty miles of the Rhine. It
was before the hard-and-fast line of the trenches had been drawn, and
between the outposts on either side there was a wide stretch of No-Man’s
land in the Sundgau (the corner of the Rhine plain in the angle between
the ranges of the Vosges and the Bernese Jura) which was constantly
traversed by both French and Germans. Colonel Quais, the officer
commanding the brigade stationed at Montreux Vieux, had arranged for the
following day a reconnaissance in force as far as Ferette, which lies
close to the Swiss frontier a little way west of Basle. Part of his
object was to round up the German troops by which it was tenanted, as
they had been making themselves a nuisance to his cavalry patrols. His
force consisted of two regiments of infantry and two batteries of 75’s,
with detachments of dragoons and bicyclists. From Montreux Vieux to
Pfetterhausen, to which they had marched that evening, was only eleven
miles, and from Pfetterhausen to Ferette another seven or eight. But
night marches are leisurely affairs, and to be on the ground in good
time in the morning, we had to start before midnight. So after a very
early dinner with the Colonel and his staff we turned in at eight
o’clock on the shake-downs which he provided for us, and, after three
hours’ sleep and a hasty snack, five of us packed into a smallish car
and set off for what he called his little _fête_, with high hopes of
what the morrow might bring forth. Unfortunately, for all of us—our kind
host as well as ourselves—the promised fight did not come off, but for
all that the trip was well worth making. It is not every night in the
war that English journalists get a chance of a forty-mile march into
German territory with an escort of between two and three thousand French
troops.
On the way to Pfetterhausen we were challenged several times by sentries
posted at different barriers on the road. At each stop the car slowed
down and was pulled up, the officer sitting next the driver got down and
opened the slide of his lantern—the night was pitch dark, with only a
thin crescent moon high up in the cloudy sky—gave the word, advanced to
the barrier, showed our papers, and finally turned the lantern in our
direction to show that we might come on. Once or twice he must have
found the pauses before the sentries would let him walk up to the
muzzles of their loaded and levelled rifles uncomfortably long. We were
cutting across the narrow strip of French territory which lies between
Montreux Vieux and Pfetterhausen, and their lonely posts were quite
close enough to the frontier to make the question of dealing with an
unknown motor, arriving suddenly in the dead of night, rather a nervous
problem. They could not know for certain, till they had examined the
permits—even the Acting-Brigadier had to have one—whether we were
friends or foes, and to fire first and inquire afterwards might have
seemed to them the better part of discretion if not of valour. That did
happen more than once to harmless travellers like ourselves while we
were driving about Belgium, where the sturdy patriots of the _troisième
ban_, who guarded the barriers with ancient weapons that looked as if
they had been dug up on the field of Waterloo, were a real terror by
night. But these sentries were disciplined French soldiers, not ignorant
Wallachian peasants, and gave one quite a pleasant feeling of
security—once we had passed them. No German scouts were likely to be
prowling about within, at any rate, a mile or two of their posts.
When we had left the last of them behind and had turned into Alsace
again we seemed to be alone in the quiet night, when, all of a sudden,
startlingly close beside us, there was the clink of a chain and the
stamp of a horse’s hoof, and we could just see that we were abreast of a
long line of horses and guns and men drawn up along the side of a narrow
lane, barely leaving room for us to pass on to the cross-roads of the
village. Here there was a long wait while the officers of the different
units got their orders from the Brigadier. The men, who were drawn up
along the roads leading to the village, were curiously quiet. They spoke
very little and only in whispers, and even the tramp of their feet when
the column began to get on the move soon after two o’clock had struck,
with the Colonel marching with the infantry at its head and the dragoons
darkly silhouetted against the grey walls of the houses, made hardly a
sound. We gave them a long start and then followed on in the car,
continually overtaking and passing different bodies of the long column,
horse and foot. At one time, at a moment when we happened to be out of
touch with any part of it and were rather afraid that we might have lost
our way, we roused a scared German villager out of his bed and took him
on board to show us the road. We were not anxious to come upon the enemy
unawares, and when we sighted and caught up another body of troops, it
was distinctly comforting to see in the dawning light that the colour of
their trousers was red and not grey. Just after that, in the middle of a
thick wood, the car stuck for a time in some boggy ground as we were
trying to get past a couple of trees which the Germans had felled the
day before and dragged across the road—a likely enough place for an
ambush. Nothing, however, happened, and a mile or two further on, as the
sun rose in front of us beyond the Rhine, a quickly-fading picture of
gorgeous rose and crimson and deep blue, we overtook the head of the
column, picked up the Colonel, as fresh and eager as a boy for all his
sixty-two years, and five minutes later were eating bread and cheese and
other good things in the orchard which was to be his headquarters in the
battle of Ferette. And after all, there was no battle. The batteries
took up their position in our rear, the infantry deployed in open order
over the fields, the cyclists and dragoons exchanged snap-shots with the
enemy’s vanishing scouts and skirmishers far away on the left flank, and
gradually the town, which nestles among the wooded hills of the Bernese
Jura, was surrounded. But not a German soldier was left in it, and the
only result of the reconnaissance was to prove that in that part of
Alsace there was no body of enemy troops strong enough to risk an attack
on our half-brigade.
If the Colonel had been a German officer he would probably have treated
Ferette as the enemy had Romagny, by way of revenge and as an
object-lesson in terrorism to the Alsatian villagers. There was nothing
and no one to prevent him. He had the men and the guns and at a pinch
could have improvised the fire-lighters which the Frenchman does not
carry ready-made in his haversack, like the Boche. But that is not the
French way. They fight like soldiers, not with women and children, and
they do not wantonly destroy property. At the same time I am bound to
say that just to show what the 75’s, though served by territorials,
could do, they were allowed to fire one shot at the ruined castle which
stands on one of the wooded heights above the town. The range was about
three miles, the target was invisible to the gunners, the observation
officer was perched in a tree three or four hundred yards from the
battery, and yet the shell struck the wall exactly in the middle of the
panel above the central window, making a neat little extra window,
absolutely round, which was even an improvement on the original
architect’s design.
It was a trifling little incident, but it was very characteristic of the
light-hearted boyish way in which the French set about the business of
war. The nearer you get to the front the more that fact strikes you.
Behind the armies, far away from the trenches, war is a dreary affair.
The office-clerks, the road-menders, the men who guard canals and
bridges and lines of communication, or are scattered about in little
_postes_ of twenty or thirty, in ugly suburbs and out-of-the-way
villages, and all the other hosts of soldiers (including most of the
_embusqués_), who have never come face to face with an enemy, except,
perhaps, a disarmed prisoner—these are the real unfortunates of the war.
They only see its unpicturesque side, where if there is little danger
there is also no glory and no excitement, and are apt to lose heart and
take a gloomy view of its prospects. The optimists and the real
light-hearted children of the nation are the fighting men who suffer its
horrors and its hardships day and night, summer and winter, at the
front. Their life, as was said shortly before his death by an Eton boy
and gallant English soldier, is a glorified picnic—a picnic with an
object. They live the open-air existence, which is the proper
environment of the natural man. It is better fun to ride and march
through the night to Ferette, with a chance of a scrap with the Boches
at the end of it, than to put on a stiff collar and hard hat to crawl to
a stuffy office day after day in a crowded suburban train. It is better
fun, as well as a more dignified calling, to be a soldier fighting your
country’s battles than a waiter or a flunkey or a billiard-marker or a
rich idler with no real work to do. That is how the French soldier at
the front takes the war, in spite of its hardships and sufferings and
its deadly home-sickness, the aching separation from those he loves,
which is the worst thing that the soldier has to bear. For a long year
now in the east of France his home for the most part has been in the big
woods that, in the Vosges and Lorraine and La Woevre, lie almost
everywhere behind the lines, and it is because he is a boy at heart that
when he has built his leafy wigwam or his wooden or stone hut, or
hollowed out and roofed his cave in the ground—just the things that boys
love to do—he is able to keep lively and cheerful. He surrounds his new
home with little paths and garden-beds—generally with coloured stones
arranged in patterns instead of borders and flowers—he decorates it with
war trophies, and, if he is an artist, with war pictures and even
frescoes, he collects round it young boars and owls and other live
mascots (which boys would call pets), he builds his own fires and has
picnic meals in the open, he is constantly doing things with his hands,
he goes to bed early and sleeps like a top (when he is not in the
trenches), his relaxations, which he has to invent for himself, are
simple and clean, and, officer or man, although he is living constantly
face to face with death, he manages somehow, but chiefly because he is a
Frenchman, to be nearly always gay and young-hearted.
I remember once coming to a nearly roofless village near Thiaucourt,
which was held as part of the front line of trenches by an infantry
battalion of territorials. An enemy aeroplane was whirring overhead, and
occasional shells were dropping not very far off. It was an off-time,
and the men were mostly in the street, playing with their baby
_sanglier_ and posing for a snap-shotting photographer. When the Taube
came “over” they all bolted for cover like a lot of cheerful rabbits,
and in half a minute came running out again, laughing and joking like
schoolchildren, and crowding together in front of the camera to be taken
in a regimental group. The spirit of the officers was just the same.
Four young lieutenants were just starting to play tennis on a vilely bad
mud court, and, Taube or no Taube, they went on with their game. But the
Colonel, portly and middle-aged, was the real joy. He had just invented
and rigged up an ingenious system of taps and pulleys and cisterns and
boilers, thanks to which his men could enjoy the luxury of hot as well
as cold shower-baths. As he was showing it off he stopped for a moment
to listen to the scream of an approaching shell, then said, “Ce n’est
pas pour nous,” and went on enthusing over the merits of his new toy.
Apparently he had not a thought of war in his head.
That is one side of the character of French soldiers as I have seen it
in this war. But there is another, which almost seems to have been born
during the war, some little time after it had begun. I only speak from a
very slight experience, but some of the French as well as the Belgian
officers whom we met right at the beginning gave me the idea of being
nervous and rattled of knowing nothing about their own plans or the
enemy’s whereabouts, and of being generally in a state of mental
confusion and irritable uncertainty, which looked extremely likely to
lead to disaster. When I came to France later on I saw an extraordinary
change, or perhaps my original diagnosis was entirely wrong. Bad
mistakes were certainly made at the beginning, and probably the greatest
service rendered by General Joffre to France was the way in which,
quietly and without unnecessary publicity, but with perfect firmness, he
weeded out the men, whatever their rank, whom he held to be at fault.
But these, perhaps, were exceptions. The spirit and training of the
great bulk of the army may have been as admirable from the first as it
is now, and that spirit may have been in existence before the war, and
not produced by it and by the example and warning of the preliminary
failures. At all events, there is no doubt about it now. The confusion
and uncertainty and nervous apprehension, if they ever existed to an
extent greater than what was naturally caused by the suddenness of
Germany’s unprovoked attack, are gone—were already gone when we arrived
in Belfort. Even in those anxious times, when we had only just begun to
throw back the impetuous rush of the enemy, there was everywhere order,
and method, and quiet confidence, and a fixed determination to go on,
neither unduly elated by success nor troubled by failure, to the
absolutely certain end. No one was in a hurry, but every one was quick
and alert. The army, officers and men, seemed to be an army of real
soldiers, masters of their profession, and not a collection of bunglers.
If mistakes had been made, or should be made, they would have to be
rectified. But no mistakes and no defeats, and no possible combination
of circumstances, would alter the final issue, because France and her
Allies were fighting for the cause of the liberty of the world, the
triumph of which was absolutely certain. That was the spirit of the
French a year ago, and it is so now more than ever. For all their
light-heartedness they are taking the war as seriously as a religion,
and out of the travail of it a new France has been born.