THE FRENCH OFFENSIVE
There is no denying the importance of the German territorial gains in
Belgium and France, even with the smaller acquisitions of the French in
Haut Alsace as a set-off. But the effect which they will have on the
final results of the war has been much exaggerated, not only by the
Germans, but by the States which call themselves neutral, the wavering
small Powers in the Balkans, and our own faint-hearted pessimists at
home. All of these people habitually forget or ignore that practically
the whole of this advantage was gained in the first month of the war,
and that since then the tide has hardly ever stopped flowing, however
slowly, the other way. Once the immediate effects of the first surprise
shock had spent themselves and the war had settled down into its
long-distance stride, it was the Allies who, army for army, proved
themselves the better men. Other things being equal—and what inequality
is likely to arise in the future is in our favour—the conclusion is that
little by little the enemy will inevitably be driven to his own side of
the frontier which he has violated and invaded. If before that time
comes there is any serious talk of peace proposals and neutral
intervention, based on the relative positions of the combatants on the
western front, it will be difficult for the would-be peacemakers to go
on ignoring all that has happened since the first month of the war.
Looked at from this point of view, the offensive in Alsace and Lorraine,
with which the campaign on the eastern frontier opened, was not the
mistake which it was considered at the time by many of General Joffre’s
French and English and German critics. France could not in honour invade
her great neighbour to the north of Longwy, because of the neutral
barriers of Luxembourg and Belgium. But to the south of that point, or
at least south of the obstacle of Metz and its defences, she could and
did. Along the line where the frontiers of France and Germany march
there were no considerations of loyalty to treaty obligations to deter
her from attacking instead of waiting to be attacked. And that was the
course on which General Joffre decided. His offensive was twofold. The
advance north of the barrier of the Vosges failed. But south of them, in
front of the Trouée de Belfort, intersected by the Rhine-Rhone canal and
the tributaries of the Doubs and the Ill, it so far succeeded that the
scene of action has remained ever since in the enemy’s country. The
consequent moral and strategical gains to France are enormous. The
position of the Germans would have been infinitely better than it was
(even without taking into account the possibility of a consequent
further advance) if they had been able to dig the almost stationary line
of trenches which they have occupied since the middle of September,
1914, in the soil of France instead of in the Sundgau.
After the French had mobilized their armies, their great difficulty was
that they could not be sure where to expect the main attack. For many
years the military experts and prophets of both countries had asserted
confidently that it would come by way of Belgium; on the other hand, it
was a traditional belief of the great mass of the French public that it
would be made through Lorraine. Both routes were possible, both had to
be taken into account, but to a certain extent, from a lingering belief
in Germany’s honour as well as out of deference to the popular
expectation (which, on sentimental and political grounds the French
Government could hardly afford to ignore), greater provision was made
for resisting the possible invasion on the eastern frontier than further
north.
It came, as a matter of fact, by both routes at once, but of the two
main assaults, which culminated at Charleroi and Nancy on the same day,
the more important and dangerous was that delivered in Flanders, where
the French had relatively the smaller defensive force.
In the north the first meeting between the French and German armies did
not take place till August 15th at Dinant. In the east they were in
continual contact from the first day of the war. At first, in this
sector of the front, things went well for our allies. In front of the
three great fortresses of Belfort, Epinal, and Toul, the vanguards of
three armies began at once to strike towards the frontier, the first
into Alsace, by the plain of the Sundgau, the second through the passes
of the Vosges, and the third across the boundary river, the Seille, into
the flat country between the Vosges and Metz.
On the exposed part of the frontier guarded by these armies the opening
period of the war lasted for three weeks. At the end of that time, on
August 24th, the French were in apparently desperate straits. Their
extreme left was driven back at Charleroi, in the centre they were just
beginning, with a defeated army, the defence of Nancy, and on the right
they had been obliged by the imminent danger on the left, to withdraw
their forces from Mulhouse for the second time. But up till then, or at
least till the disaster at Morhange on August 20th, they had on the
Eastern sector done much better than they probably expected. The Verdun
army, though not strong enough to adopt an effectively vigorous
offensive, had been able to keep the enemy from attacking its forts, and
south of Metz the commands of de Castelnau and Dubail had advanced well
into German territory.
In the Metz, Verdun, Longwy triangle, bisected by the valley of the Orne
running directly east from Verdun to the Moselle, the fighting was at
first not very important. Conflans, Maugiennes, Spincourt, and several
other towns and villages were early victims of German savagery, both
sides scored moderate local successes, and the net result was that the
enemy secured no advantage except what was due to their surprise
invasion of the strip of territory from which the French withdrew their
troops on the eve of the war. They would have advanced further and more
quickly (as they confidently expected to do) but for two unforeseen
obstacles. In the first place, there was the Verdun field-force, which,
instead of falling back under the protection of its forts, persisted in
coming out into the open; in the second, there was Longwy. Its defender,
Colonel Darche, had only one battalion under his command, and
consequently was not strong enough to follow the example of the Verdun
field-army. But with his slender force he could and did hold up a whole
German army till August 27th, three weeks after the Crown Prince had
arrogantly summoned him to surrender. That officer’s failure to take the
town at the first time of asking was a bitter disappointment to the
Germans, as his army was intended to form the connecting-link between
the two great offensives through Belgium and Lorraine, and orders had
actually been given to German reservists to report themselves at Verdun
in the second week of August. It was the first of the many misfortunes
which have since dogged his footsteps, and it is not surprising that it
brought him into disfavour with his Imperial father. For the heroic
resistance of Longwy, like the defence of Liége and of Nancy, was one of
the determining incidents of the early part of the war.
In the meantime, while Verdun and Longwy were proving that “its dogged
as does it,” to the south of them the characteristic _élan_ of the
French troops was having its fling from the Moselle to Mulhouse, along a
front of over a hundred miles. The strengthening of the forces in this
region and the consequent weakening of the armies on the Belgian
frontier was partly, as I have said, due to political considerations.
But there were also sound military reasons for this distribution of the
available forces, and for the subsequent French offensive in Alsace and
Lorraine. For forty-four years the garrison and field armies of the
rival pairs of fortresses—Verdun and Metz, Toul and Saarburg, Epinal and
Strassburg—had been waiting like kennelled watchdogs, ready, once they
were let loose, to fly at one another’s throats. Primarily the French
troops were intended not for attack—which was the German _métier_—but
for defence. Both by training and tradition they were the frontier force
of the Republic. In time of peace they held the post of honour on the
vulnerable border-line between Luxembourg and the Swiss frontier, always
ready for war, as their ancestors before them had been for generations.
Most of the best generals of France had served their apprenticeship in
one of these famous frontier army corps, and ever since 1870 officers
and men, nearly all of them children of the soil, had been bound more
and more closely together, at first by the war-cry of _la revanche_, and
later by the nobler feeling that, when the threatened and expected
invasion came, the task and the glory of repelling it would be theirs.
They were the flower of the French army, and they looked upon the post
of honour as their birthright.
When the blow fell at last there were several reasons which justified
General Joffre in using them for purposes of offence instead of in the
_rôle_ which French and Germans alike expected of them. Being a soldier
and not a politician, he realized that he could not afford to wait and
see. It was a clear gain that his action should be the exact opposite of
what the Germans looked for. They were so overwhelmingly sure of their
military superiority that they practically counted on a walk-over.
Besides Verdun, other towns far behind the line of the frontier
fortresses, such as Besançon and Dijon, were the appointed rendezvous at
an early date in August of the German soldiers who could not be ready to
join the colours at the outset, and even the officials who were to have
governed these towns after their expected conquest had received their
commissions well in advance of the declaration of war. The Kaiser and
his advisers had made the common mistake of despising the enemy they
were sent to attack. Both in _morale_ and in men the armies of the east
proved far stronger than they had expected.
The consequent upsetting of their original plan of campaign was in
itself a strong vindication of General Joffre’s policy. But he had
another object in view. The first point was to have enough troops on the
eastern frontier to prevent the Germans from breaking through the line
of fortresses. The second—no less important, once the march through
Belgium had begun—was to keep a large part of the enemy’s forces busily
employed at a distance from the northern theatre of operations. That was
the reason and the justification of the offensive in Alsace and
Lorraine.
Up to a point this forward movement of the French was successful. From
Metz the frontier runs south-east for about sixty miles, up the valley
of the river Seille, to the Donon, a mountain just over 3000 feet high
at the north end of the Basses Vosges, and from there, a trifle west of
south along the crests of the range and across the Trouée of Belfort for
about the same distance to Pfetterhausen on the Swiss frontier. The
Vosges half of this line, practically parallel with the course of the
Rhine, is divided into three sections, from the Donon to the Climont (12
miles), from the Climont to the Col de Schlucht (20 miles), and from the
Col de Schlucht to the Ballon d’Alsace (18 miles).
In the northern section the range is broken by the valley of the Bruche,
commanded from the north by the Donon, which runs from south-west to
north-east past Saales and Schirmeck towards Strassburg.
In the central section, steep on the French side, but on the east
sloping gently down to the valley of the Ill, the chief passes are Ste.
Marie aux Mines and the Col du Bonhomme, with a narrow wooded crest
seven miles long at an average altitude of 3000 feet between them.
In the southern section the slope is easier on the French side and more
abrupt on the east, and besides the Col de Schlucht the chief pass is
the Col de Bussang. The summit and eastern slopes of the range command,
of course, an uninterrupted view across the plain to the Rhine, about
fifteen miles from the foothills. Strassburg is a little lower down the
Rhine than the level of the Donon. Colmar lies about the centre of the
plain, midway between the level of the Col du Bonhomme and the Col de
Schlucht, and nearly all the towns which have so far played a part in
the war are in or on a level with the third section—Munster, Guebweiler,
Soulty, St. Amarin, and Thann in the Vosges valleys between the Schlucht
and the Ballon d’Alsace, and the rest—Cernay, Dannemarie, Altkirch,
Mulhouse, and Pfetterhausen—south of the Ballon in the plain opposite to
the Trouée of Belfort, which is called the Sundgau.
It was intended that the French offensive should be carried out along
the whole of this frontier line south of Metz, but especially in the
plains north and east of the Vosges. The Belfort army was to advance
into Alsace, occupy Mulhouse, cut the bridges of the Rhine below Basle
(at Huningue, Neuenburg, and Vieux Brisach) and flank the main advance
of the first and second armies in Lorraine.
In spite of their various acts of trespass on French territory before
the declaration of war, the Germans at first showed little activity.
Beyond the abortive attempt to recapture Montreux-Vieux, in the Belfort
district, practically all they did was to shell and occupy Blamont,
Cirey, Badonviller, and Baccarat, four small towns close to the frontier
and almost midway between the Donon and Lunéville, on August 5th, 6th,
and 8th, and to bombard Pont-à-Mousson, an unfortunate town on the
Moselle fifteen miles below Nancy and the same distance above Metz,
which since then has been shelled more than two hundred times, but,
except for one short period, has always remained in the hands of the
French.
Our Allies were much more energetic, and the advance in Lorraine, the
Vosges, and Alsace was begun with wonderfully little delay. Of these
three theatres of war in the east the third, the country between
Strassburg and the Swiss frontier, cut off from the rest of Germany by
the Rhine and the Black Forest, is strategically of great importance.
Its western boundary, the chain of the Vosges, is the pivot of the long
line of the French defence stretching from Dunkerque to Belfort, and on
its stability depends the security of the whole of the rest of the
front. In order to make that stability absolutely sure the French had to
hold, besides the chain itself, at least a part of the plain of Alsace,
including especially its natural bastion, the Sundgau.
[Illustration:
ALSACE AND THE VOSGES.
(By kind permission of _The Times_.)
]
The Sundgau, which is the part of Alsace to the south of Cernay, is
divided by the Rhone-Rhine canal into two regions, the physical aspects,
geological structure, and tactical value of which are essentially
different. The country to the south of the canal, known as the Alsatian
Jura, is thickly studded with rounded mammelons, like a nest of giant
molehills, intersected by a series of irrigation canals, some of which
are two or three yards wide and useful as lines of defence. The country,
as a rule, is thinly populated, there are few isolated houses, and the
villages are some distance apart. It is watered by three rivers, the
Thalbach, the Ill, which flows northward from the Swiss frontier past
Altkirch, Mulhouse, Colmar, and Strassburg to the Rhine, and the Largue.
On the right bank of the Ill there is a light railway, constructed
shortly before the war, running from Ferette to Altkirch, and on the
left bank of the Largue an ordinary-gauge line, running from Porrentruy,
just across the Swiss frontier, to Dannemarie. There would be a
formidable risk of a German flanking movement by this approach on the
fort of Lomont, to the south of Belfort, if it were not for the careful
watch kept by the Swiss army on their frontier. The general character of
the country is suitable for guerilla warfare, but not for operations on
an extended scale. It has two main defensive positions against a French
attack based on Belfort along the line Petit-Croix, Dannemarie,
Altkirch, at Altkirch itself, and at Britzy-Berg. The first of these
consists of a series of heights on the south of the spur of the
Schweighof (Hill 381), and on the north of a ridge running in the
direction of Heidwiller and the junction of the Ill and the Largue. The
value of this position is especially great on the south-west side where
it commands the important point at which the lines of communication
converging on Altkirch meet and the defile in which lie the railway, the
river Ill, and the main roads from Mulhouse and Basle. The Britzy-Berg
position, three or four miles further north, near Illfurth, commands the
whole of the surrounding country to a considerable distance nearly as
far as Mulhouse, and also sweeps with its fire all the roads that meet
at Altkirch. Both these positions had been strongly fortified by the
Germans.
The part of the Sundgau north of the Rhine-Rhone canal is quite
different from the Alsatian Jura. It is a rolling tableland, with
gentler slopes and wider valleys, and the crests of the rises less
wooded than to the south of the canal. The open country is more thickly
populated and better suited for the movements of large bodies of troops.
The main road from Belfort to Cernay and thence to Colmar runs across
the middle of it, and at right angles to the road, west of Mulhouse,
runs the Doller, a quick-flowing tributary of the Ill. Between this
river and the Rhine-Rhone canal there is a wide, moderately-wooded
plateau, in which the chief military position is at Galfingen,
commanding the approach to Aspach, Mulhouse, and Altkirch on the Colmar
road, to the south of the bridge of Aspach, where on some heights round
the twin villages of Burnhaupt, the Germans had prepared a strong
position overlooking the wide bare plain called the Ochsenfeld, between
them and Cernay. East of the Ochsenfeld they had a second line of
defence in the valley of the Thur (another tributary of the Ill, rising
in the Vosges on the Rheinkopf and flowing down the valley of St.
Amarin, past Thann and Cernay, a deep river with marshy banks, from
fifteen to twenty yards wide). This line extended from the heights of
Steinbach to the forest of Nonenbruck. It was in this country, on both
sides of the Rhine-Rhone canal, that the French began their main advance
into Alsace.
On Friday, August 7th, a French brigade arrived about eight o’clock in
the evening in front of Altkirch, ten miles from the frontier, coming by
Petit-Croix and Dannemarie. On the same day another detachment of French
troops came down the valley of the Thur as far as Thann. The smallness
of the combined force was perhaps accounted for (though it was not
excused) by the fact that the French airmen had reported that the bulk
of the German troops were on the other side of the Rhine, and that
little opposition was to be expected between Mulhouse and the French
frontier. Altkirch was at the time occupied by a German brigade of about
equal strength, with their chief entrenchments south of the town, on the
precipitous spurs of the Schweighof. A little higher up, towards the top
of the hill, they had a battery of eight 77’s and a number of
mitrailleuses. These were quickly silenced by the French 75’s, and the
trenches were then carried by a surprise infantry attack which drove the
Germans at the point of the bayonet off the Schweighof in disorderly
flight. They were chased well past their second line of entrenchments on
the Britzy-Berg, five miles further north in the direction of Illfurth
and Mulhouse, by a dragoon regiment supporting the infantry, and a
number of prisoners were taken before night put an end to the pursuit.
Thus, three days after the declaration of war, at a total loss in killed
and wounded of less than 150, Altkirch, after forty years in the
wilderness of German domination, was once more in the hands of the
French. The inhabitants received their long-hoped-for deliverance with
every sign of frantic delight. The uprooted frontier-posts were carried
in triumph through the flag-decked streets, flowers were rained on the
heads of the triumphant troops, every one was cheering or in tears, and
in the general tumult of joy and excitement no one apparently stopped to
consider the remarkable ease with which the victory had been won or the
extent of the guile which the retreat might possibly conceal.