OCCUPATIONS OF MULHOUSE
Encouraged by their success at Altkirch, the French set out early next
morning for Mulhouse, ten miles further down the valley of the Ill. The
troops which had descended the previous day on Thann also advanced by
way of Cernay, and along the twelve-mile front between Thann and
Altkirch the whole way to Mulhouse no trace of the Germans was seen
except their deserted entrenchments. At one o’clock a small patrol of
dragoons trotted up to the Hotel de Ville, and after a momentary halt
clattered away again to report that not a single German soldier was left
in the town. As a matter of fact, they were not, however, very far off,
and the dragoons had hardly disappeared when a squad of Bavarian
infantry marched into the principal square, seized a tramway car which
was standing in front of the town-hall, and forced the driver to follow
the dragoons, breaking the windows of the car as they went to make
convenient rests for their rifles. By chance, however, they took the
Brunstatt or south road out of the town, whereas the dragoons had gone
west along the Dornach road, so that after a short and fruitless
journey, they thought it wiser to turn back and join the main body on
the further side of the town, once more leaving it empty of all but the
civilian inhabitants, who by this time were in a state of the wildest
excitement. After that there was another long wait till after six
o’clock, and then, at last, a couple of platoons of dragoons and
Chasseurs-à-cheval came riding in along the Dornach road, and the whole
population turned out to greet them and the main body, which followed a
quarter of an hour behind them, with the same extravagant manifestations
of delight and enthusiasm as at Altkirch on the previous day.
That was on the Saturday evening, during which the French took up their
position on the heights at Rixheim, about two miles east of the town,
their front protected by the road and railway which curve down
southwards to Basle, the Germans being a few miles north of them along
the Rhone-Rhine canal towards Neu-Brisach and also in the Hardt (a big
forest about twenty miles long between Mulhouse and the Rhine) on their
right.
Next day, though some of the wiser of the townspeople were shaking their
heads over the smallness of the French force, the rejoicings continued
until the middle of the afternoon, when suddenly, between three and four
o’clock, the guns on each side began firing, covering and resisting the
advance of the XIVth German Army Corps, which was directed on Mulhouse
through the Hardt Forest by the road from Mulheim and two other roads
further north. The battle continued through the evening and all night
till six o’clock on Monday morning. The artillery duel was at its height
at about two a.m., and before that time a number of shells had fallen in
the town, across which the batteries posted on the left flank of the
French were firing. For the Germans the disadvantage of the position was
that after leaving the shelter of the forest they had to advance for
about two miles over an open plain, where they were exposed to the fire
not only of the 75’s on the heights of Rixheim, but of the French
infantry on the slopes below them, and here they lost heavily. Their
numbers were, however, so superior that they were able to press on
without paying any attention to their losses, whereas the French, for
the opposite reason, ran a great chance of being surrounded and cut off
from their line of retreat on Belfort. They fought on, however, with
much determination (at one time only the embankment of the railway to
Basle separated the front lines of the two forces) till six o’clock in
the morning, when, after a series of skirmishes in the streets of
Mulhouse, they were finally withdrawn in good order and most fortunately
were able to fall back on Belfort. They probably owed their escape to
the fact that the German plans had not been carried out exactly as had
been intended. Besides the XIVth Army Corps, the XVth were also to have
joined in the attack, coming by train from Strassburg to Colmar, and
from there down to Cernay, where they hoped to catch the French after
they had been driven westwards by the XIVth. The only flaw in the
execution of this scheme was that the XIVth started too soon and had
finished their part of the work before the XVth arrived on the scene. At
seven o’clock on the morning of Monday, August 10th, they marched into
the town, and the French occupation—a dream the realization of which
lasted for just thirty-six hours—was over.
Exactly what the intention of the French _haut-commandement_ was I do
not pretend to know, though it is improbable that they could have
seriously contemplated the permanent occupation of an open town like
Mulhouse, and any attempt at a further advance through the Hardt Forest
on the strongly entrenched positions on each side of the Rhine with the
inadequate forces at their disposal would have been madness. The
probability is that the enemy, fully informed by some of the German-born
Alsatians with whom the district swarmed of the pitiful smallness of the
French army, deliberately fell back in the hopes of luring it on to
destruction, while the French, on the other hand, intoxicated by the
welcome which they had received and the ease with which they had marched
twenty-five miles into the enemy’s country in two days, thought of
nothing but the moral triumph of the recapture of Mulhouse. They made
their advance with far too small a force and much too quickly, and they
neglected the vital precaution, all the more necessary because they were
so few, of entrenching step by step the ground which they had won. At
all events, we have it on the authority of the French Commander-in-Chief
that the Alsace part of the offensive was badly carried out by the
General Officer in charge of it, and that he was at once relieved of his
command.
For the French, therefore, the net result of the first occupation of the
town, beyond the temporary moral effect which it produced in France, was
nil. For the loyalist inhabitants of Alsace it was the beginning of an
organized system of terrorism by which the Germans, after burning the
food and forage storehouses of Mulhouse when they left it on August 8th,
endeavoured to create through the length and breadth of the country a
paralyzing dread of the cruel weight of the mailed fist.
In Mulhouse itself the time that followed was also one of great hardship
for many of the inhabitants. The enemy were furious at the welcome given
to the French troops by the Alsatians (after forty-four years of the
beneficent sway of the Fatherland), and they punished what they chose to
consider their base and inexplicable ingratitude by treating all whom
they suspected of French leanings in the true Savernian manner. To
discover them was an easy matter. The two elements of the true Alsatians
and the German colonists (whom the natives of the old French stock still
persist in calling _immigrés_) have never really amalgamated, and the
town was therefore thickly peopled with German sympathisers, only too
eager to act as informers against their fellow-citizens.
But it was the foreigners resident in Mulhouse who at that time suffered
the worst treatment at the hands of the enemy. Directly after the
retreat of the French, several scores of them, men of all ages (from
boys of fourteen to old men of over eighty) were peremptorily rounded up
in the town barracks, and carried off to Germany as prisoners, leaving
behind them practically all their possessions except the clothes in
which they stood up. Before their departure, after they had been left
for many anxious hours herded together without any food, they were
suddenly told to form themselves into ranks, and the first batch were
lined up, in front of some soldiers with loaded rifles, with their backs
to the wall. Not unnaturally they concluded that they were to be shot,
and some of them even gripped the hands of those standing near them in a
last farewell. But it was only the torture of the anticipation of death,
not death itself, that they were to suffer, though I suppose none of
them will ever forget the time of agonized suspense that they went
through before they were brusquely ordered by the officer in command to
fall out, with the explanation that he had meant to show them exactly
what would happen to them if they gave any trouble, and that now they
knew. Afterwards, when they were on their way to their first
prison-camp, one young fellow who had just married a girl-wife, who was
forcibly torn away from his side, driven half crazy by his sufferings,
made a feeble attempt at an assault on the guard, and was at once shot.
The rest of them, after a long journey in cattle trucks, were kept in
prison-camps in the interior of Germany for periods of varying length up
to about six months, in many cases insufficiently fed and clothed, and
as a rule it was the Englishmen among them who were the most harshly
treated and set to do the most ignominious and disagreeable tasks. All
of them during their journey east and on their arrival at Rastadt were
constantly jeered at and insulted, not only by the populace, but by
their guards.
Five days were enough to effect the reorganization of the force which
had been forced to retire from Mulhouse, and on August 14th, this time
under the command of General Pau, and strongly supported by the field
army of the territory of Belfort, the French resumed the offensive. On
that day Thann was taken for the second time, and with this place and
Dannemarie and Guebwiller, a few miles further north, as his base,
General Pau once more drove the enemy back on Mulhouse. But whereas on
the previous occasion the main attack had been made from the south, by
Altkirch, this time the advance was rather from west to east, with the
left flank gradually swinging round from the north, with the object of
cutting the Germans off from their line of retreat on the bridges of the
Rhine and forcing them southwards towards the Swiss frontier. The French
left was directed on Colmar (about twenty miles due north of Mulhouse)
and Neu-Brisach, and the right wing on Altkirch, and advancing from west
to east they quickly swept the enemy back on Mulhouse for the second
time.
On the morning of August 19th the town was once more in a seething state
of unrest and suppressed excitement. The loyalist inhabitants knew
nothing of what was happening, except that the German soldiery were
obviously ill at ease. Most of the crowd were collected in front of the
chief hotel, where the soldiers kept pushing them back with their rifles
in order to keep a clear passage for the strings of throbbing motor-cars
which were ready waiting for the swarm of military and civil officials
who kept hurrying backwards and forwards carrying the papers and
valuables which were to accompany them in their flight to the Rhine. No
policemen were to be seen. They were changing from their uniforms into
mufti. Transformed into innocent-looking civilians, their service to the
Fatherland was to stay behind in Mulhouse and keep their eyes open for
such information as might be useful to the military chiefs, supposing
that during the coming occupation the French succeeded in making good
their footing in the town. An hour after the procession of cars had at
last started, with intervals of a few yards between them, the barracks
were clear and not a soldier was left in the town. Then there was a
further long wait. The German agents and spies kept quiet and bided
their time. The real Alsatians, the overwhelming majority of the
townsfolk, were so wrought up with the feeling that they were rid of the
Germans—this time as they hoped for ever—and so rapturously looking
forward to the entry of the French troops, that nearly all of them went
on standing about in the streets for hour after hour right through the
day. They did not even go into their houses to eat their lunch, but
bought what they could from enterprising street-merchants who went about
with baskets of food, and ate it where they stood.
At last, at five o’clock, the first Frenchmen appeared, a handful of
Chasseurs-à-cheval, who rode in not from the west, from which quarter
they were expected, but by the Basle road at the other side of the town,
where they must have passed dangerously close to the enemy. Like the
patrol which had been the heralds of the first occupation, they were
merely a scouting party, and, having established the fact that the
Germans had retired, quickly rode off again to make their report to the
Staff. The people, who had followed them in a body, then split up into
two main detachments, and streamed out to Dornach and Brunstatt, on the
Thann and Altkirch roads, the Germans having meanwhile massed their
forces two or three miles to the east and south-east of the town, from
which they were in full view, at Rixheim, Habsheim, and Zimmersheim
close to the Basle railway, just about where the French had taken up
their position after the first occupation.
This time, however, there was to be no triumphant entry—at least not as
yet. The enemy meant to make a fight for it, and so far as that day,
August 18th, was concerned, the faithful population of Mulhouse had had
their long wait for nothing.
During the night a big change was made in the disposition of the German
troops. From their lines on the Basle railway they advanced above and
below the town till they occupied a position of considerably more than a
semicircle round it from Pfastatt and Lutterbach on the north to
Brubach, Brunstatt, and Hochstatt on the south, and some of them were
even at Dornach, to the west of the town. The French line, which was
much straighter, extended from Illfurth on the south, by Zillisheim and
Morschweiler to Reichweiler on the north, where it slightly outflanked
the German right at Pfastatt.
Early on the morning of the 19th the greater part of the German force in
Dornach advanced to Lutterbach, and there was a general flight of the
villagers, carrying their household goods and driving in front of them
as much as they could of their cattle and even poultry. At ten o’clock
the French batteries on the rising ground at Morschweiler opened fire,
and the battle soon became general all along the line. All day long the
artillery duel continued, and after a time the French gunners became so
confident of their own superiority, and so indifferent to the bad
shooting of the enemy, that they advanced into the open and worked their
guns as calmly and with as little regard for cover as if they were
engaged in ordinary training manœuvres in time of peace. All day
long, too—for the fighting was at very close quarters—one hand-to-hand
infantry engagement after another between two sets of men who fought
with desperate dash and tenacity, resolved on the one hand to advance,
on the other to stand firm, for the honour of their respective
countries, caused a vast amount of bloodshed. On the left, near the big
engineering works, commonly known as “The Red Sea,” a body of French
skirmishers advanced early in the engagement to within forty yards of a
German company which was posted on the road in front, and killed and
wounded half of them almost before they could reply. The rest fled to
the shelter of the neighbouring houses, and there was a helter-skelter
fight along the street, and in and out of doors and windows and gates
and outhouses. Half of a battalion which was sent to support the routed
men was wiped out by the artillery, and the other half refused to
advance. A little further south, at Hochstatt, the 35th and 42nd French
regiments suffered severely in the same way at the hands of the German
gunners. In the afternoon, however, the 75’s altogether dominated the
guns opposed to them, their fire ceased, and except for stray rifle
shots here and there, the battle seemed to be over, large numbers of the
enemy having been driven to take refuge in Mulhouse.
One more effort was made, but it was their last. A strong body of
reinforcements were sent out of the town, and, by using a large building
which till then had been sacred to the Red Cross as a redoubt, managed
to keep the fighting going on for some time longer. But driven out of
this refuge by infantry and artillery fire, they were once more
compelled to retire to Mulhouse. Soon afterwards Dornach, where the bulk
of the fighting took place, was captured, and by five o’clock the
French, having surrounded and captured twenty-four guns and a large
number of prisoners in the outlying suburbs, entered the town for the
second time in less than a fortnight. This time there was no question of
the enemy having retired of their own free will in order to entice them
to advance further than was prudent. They had been beaten fairly and
squarely in one of the few pitched battles of the war, and were flying
in confusion to the shelter of the Hardt Forest and the Rhine. It was a
great moment for General Pau’s army and for France, even though the
engagement, compared with the events which were to take place in
Lorraine and Belgium, was a comparatively small one. But unfortunately
it was a moment that did not last. Twenty-four hours after France knew
that the tricolour was once more floating in Mulhouse, it learnt also of
the defeat at Morhange, and although there was no immediate connexion
between Morhange and the evacuation of Mulhouse (only five days after
its recapture), the gravity of the crisis on the more important fields
further north completely out-shadowed the really considerable triumph in
Alsace.