BATTLE OF THE GRAND COURONNÉ. I
By this brilliant series of hand-to-hand, town-to-town struggles,
Dubail’s army, operating in the Bonhomme-Donon-Gerbéviller triangle, had
prevented the enemy from penetrating westwards between Epinal and Toul.
At the same time, on their left, de Castelnau’s men were fighting the
desperate battle of the Grand Couronné of Nancy. Their line, continuing
in the same direction as the valley of the Mortagne, ran from
Gerbéviller across the Meurthe west of Lunéville to Crévic, and on to
Amance, north of the Nancy-Château-Salins road, and some distance beyond
it. It was a real pitched battle which lasted for nearly three weeks,
and was one of the most important of the whole war. For on its result
depended not only the fate of Nancy and of Toul but of all the other
armies further north. In order to get an idea of one part of it we can
hardly do better than to take our stand at the point which we have
reached with the Second Army, to the west of Gerbéviller, on the
Bayon-Lunéville road. From there, through the eyes of a French officer
of dragoons who found time after he was wounded at Héraménil to publish
an excellent little book on _La Victoire de Lorraine_ (Berger-Levrault:
Nancy), we shall be able to follow in some detail the part of the battle
which was fought to the west of Lunéville south of the Nancy-Lunéville
road. That was where the battle was fiercest in its early stages. The
section on the other side of the Nancy road we will leave till later. It
was there that the XXth Army Corps held the line northwards up to
Amance, and that the victory was finally won.
At one o’clock on the morning of August 19th our dragoon officer’s
regiment started from near Altkirch, where they had formed part of
General Pau’s army, for some uncertain destination further west. The
Colonel, of course, knew where they were bound, but he kept his own
counsel, and the junior officers could only speculate. Clearly, however,
since they were being withdrawn from one successful offensive, they were
wanted to smash the Germans somewhere else, either in Lorraine over the
border, which was over-run (they believed) by French cavalry, or in
Belgium, where report said that the enemy had been pulled up short in
front of Liége.
[Illustration:
THE LORRAINE
FRONTIER.
]
After an interminable train journey by Belfort, Lure and Epinal, they
reached Charmes in the middle of the night, rested for a few hours, and
then started towards Lunéville. This time they felt there could be no
doubt. They were making for the frontier, and next day would certainly
see them in the annexed province. It was a long march, but the sun was
shining brightly on the forest of Charmes, the valley of the Moselle on
their left, and the hills of Lorraine in front of them, and everyone was
in the best of spirits. Then suddenly there came an unexpected check. An
orderly rode up to the Colonel with despatches, the regiment was halted
at a little village on the road half way between Bayon and Lunéville,
and there they spent the rest of the afternoon and the night of the 21st
in ignorant inaction. Next morning everything was changed. The sunshine
had gone out of the air, a steady drizzle was falling, and when the
Colonel informed his officers that they were to be attached to an
infantry division which was to organize a line of defence behind
Lunéville they could hardly believe their ears and began to wonder
anxiously why, instead of continuing the march to the frontier, they
were ordered to fall back on Einvaux, on the south side of the
Bayon-Lunéville road.
It was still raining when they reached the road, and they were obliged
to halt to let a long convoy, which was passing along it across their
front from east to west, go by. They waited five minutes, ten minutes,
half an hour, and still the stream of men and horses poured on and on,
an odd jumble of peasants’ carts, farm-carts, tradesmen’s carts, and
every imaginable kind of country vehicle, plodding along drearily
through the rain, the soldiers who were driving them huddled under the
awnings, and all the ammunition and provision carts piled high with
wounded. It must at least, they thought, be the convoy of a whole Army
Corps. But why was all this mass of men and vehicles hurrying along in
the mud, away from Lunéville, towards Bayon? Their hearts began to
misgive them. They asked some of the drivers what it all meant, but no
one seemed to understand and no one answered, until at last they stopped
a non-commissioned officer and from him learnt part of the incredible
truth—that the triumphant army which had invaded Lorraine was in full
retreat.
After that they waited no longer. The melancholy string of carts which
stretched along the road in both directions as far as they could see was
halted to let them through, and they continued their march to their
cantonments at Einvaux, five or six miles south of the road. There the
young dragoon officer was at once given his marching orders. He was to
take with him half a dozen troopers, cross the Meurthe and the forest of
Vitrimont as far as the Lunéville-Nancy road, and try and get in touch
with the enemy, who were pressing hard on the heels of the retreating
troops.
When he reached the Bayon-Lunéville road again he had on each side of
him two railways running nearly due north and south and cutting the road
(which to the east crosses the Mortagne at Lamath, and then turns
northward past Xermaménil, Rehanviller, and Hériménil to Lunéville) at a
distance of about three miles apart. The one on the right curves away
behind to Gerbéviller, the one on the left to Bayon, eventually to meet
some distance to the south at Epinal. In front, to the north, both of
them join the railway which runs from Lunéville to St. Nicolas-du-Port
round the lower edge of the forest of Vitrimont, following closely the
course of the Meurthe. On the further side of the forest the road from
Lunéville to Dombasle, St. Nicolas-du-Port, and Nancy stretches across
from right to left, and, as you see it on the map, the whole area
composed of the forest and the ground beyond, as far as the
Lunéville-Nancy road, is shaped like a feeding-cup, with Lunéville for
the handle and Dombasle for the spout. North-west of Lunéville, along
the Dombasle road, comes first the Faubourg de Nancy, and then two miles
and four miles further on the villages of Vitrimont and Hudiviller, with
the farm of Léomont midway between them, standing up on much higher
ground just to the north of the road. In the parallelogram between the
two railways south of the forest (which is about five miles long by two
and a half deep) there are two villages, first Mont (with a bridge over
the Mortagne), and then a little further west Blainville, both of them
on a road which runs parallel to the Meurthe and quite close to it. At
the point where this road crosses the Dombasle-Bayon railway there is
another small village called Damelevières, and, also on this railway and
a mile south of it, the village of Charmois. Taking a wider view of the
whole terrain, the Lunéville-Dombasle road and the railway running round
the forest with the two railways south of it and the stretch of the
Bayon-Lunéville road between them form a rough figure of eight. To the
west of the lower half of it trenches had been dug that morning on the
plateau south of the Meurthe by the troops under the command of General
Bigot, one of General Dubail’s brigadiers. The plateau of Saffais,
midway between the Meurthe and the Moselle, was occupied by the 64th
division, and on their right another division, the 74th, guarded the gap
between Saffais and the Mortagne. Between them they formed a curtain of
troops which was to play a very important part in the coming battle,
which was fought chiefly over the ground covered by the figure of eight,
but partly also further south, below the Bayon-Lunéville road, as far as
the line between Bayon and Gerbéviller.
When the little party of dragoons once more reached the road, at the
level crossing where it cuts the line from Epinal to Nancy, it was still
covered with a dense mass of fugitives. This time it was not merely a
procession of carts but of the army itself, the soldiers of the XVth and
XVIth Army Corps. It was the final stage of the retreat which had begun
after their defeat in front of Morhange and Saarburg by the armies of
Metz, of the Crown Prince of Bavaria, and of General von Heeringen. For
two days, by all the roads that cross the frontier between Vic and
Réchicourt and meet on the south-east side of Lunéville, they had come
crowding along to this harbour of refuge, the angle between the Mortagne
and the Meurthe, where they were to find sanctuary behind the curtain of
troops prepared by General Dubail and General Bigot. Infantry of the
line, chasseurs, artillery, young men of the active army, territorials,
troops of peasants, women and children and old men, some in carts and
some on foot, all mixed up in inextricable confusion with the soldiers
and regimental wagons, the drivers flogging their worn-out horses in the
vain effort to make them move faster, the men on foot, almost as many of
them wounded as not, too tired or too weak to get out of the way,
marching anyhow without any formation or any attempt to keep to their
own companies, splashing along in a slough of mud, wet to the bone by
the ceaseless rain, without discipline, without courage, almost without
thought, the tragic procession filed slowly by, away from the enemy,
away from the frontier that they had been sent to defend.
But only for the time being, and only for two days. That was the marvel
of it. By their failure—in face of the impossible task by which they
were confronted—they had thrown the whole scheme of the eastern campaign
out of gear. The XXth Army Corps under General Foch, which had the
position on their left at Morhange, was forced to retire with them, and
worse still would have befallen the corps from the Midi and the Pyrenees
if it had not been for the steadying influence of the men of Lorraine
and the magnificent rearguard action which they fought as they retreated
steadily and in perfect order to their position in front of Nancy,
marching by the roads to the north of Lunéville and the Meurthe. Much
the same thing had happened on the right, as we have already seen. The
advanced regiments of Dubail’s army, finding their left uncovered, were
also obliged to give up their successful offensive and fall back on
Baccarat, Raon l’Etape, and St. Dié, leaving to the enemy the
strategical advantage of the positions on the crests of the Vosges, and
at the same time prolonging their line westwards to the angle between
the Mortagne and the Meurthe, so as to stand between the fugitives and
the pursuing Germans and join in the one object that now mattered—the
defence of Nancy.
That, then, was how the scene was staged for the first act of the Battle
of the Grand Couronné on August 23rd. There was no question of the
defence of Lunéville. It might possibly have been attempted, and
successfully attempted, by the men whom we have just seen straggling
along the road to Bayon. But they were not ready for so great a task
yet. So the town was abandoned. The enemy marched into it without any
resistance on the 23rd, and the line was drawn further back, behind
Lunéville and behind the Mortagne instead of in front of them. On the
left, from the Meurthe to Amance, were Foch and his men, the XXth Army
Corps with its heart of gold—the famous 11th Division de Fer. Of them we
need have no fear. What man can do they will do. But those others, who
have retired in confusion behind Bigot’s covering troops, prolonging,
between the Meurthe and the Mortagne, the line occupied by the XXth—what
of them? This of them, not in my own words, but as they were seen by the
young lieutenant of dragoons whom we left on his way to the Meurthe to
look for the enemy—
“Ils se sont reformés avec une souplesse meridionale étonnante. Et ce
fut un sujet d’admiration sans pareil, que de voir ces soldats hier
encore battus, découragés, revenir ardents à la bataille deux jours
après, leurs regiments reformés, les brigades dans la main du
chef—lutter en héros—et vaincre!” And again: “Ce sont ces mêmes troupes
qui, dans trois jours, reformées, vont contribuer à l’héroïque défense
de la trouée, et ne laisseront pas un seul instant branler la muraille
vivante dressée contre l’envahisseur: chaque soldat deviendra un rampart
infranchissable. _Miles murus erit._”
On the right, too, then, as well as on the left, France had an army of
heroes, all the more invincible because they were thirsting to blot out
the memory of Morhange. They were to have the chance they wanted. From
all directions through the forest of Vitrimont and along the roads south
of Lunéville the enemy’s vanguard was converging on the angle between
the two rivers. The rain of heavy shells which all day long had been
speeding up the French retreat was continued now to cover the German
advance. Far off across the forest, from the plateau where the farm of
Léomont crowns the ridge that runs along the north side of the Nancy
road, the 75’s of the XXth corps were firing at the big German batteries
behind Lunéville. Suddenly, as the dragoons advanced towards the
Meurthe, the farm burst into flames, which shot up like a huge bonfire
into the crimson evening sky, streaked with the screaming shells and
specked with the white puffs of the shrapnel which littered farm and
road and plateau with wounded and dying men. At Mont, the little village
where the two rivers meet, a battalion of Chasseurs Alpins, who had just
come through the forest, were engaged in blowing up the bridge over the
Meurthe. They told them that not a Frenchman was left on the other side,
and warned them not to go on, as the forest was full of German scouts.
The lieutenant’s orders, however, were to see, and not only to hear,
where the enemy were, so, as his men were ready for anything, they
crossed the river by a ford five hundred yards lower down, and advanced
along one of the numerous rides through the forest till a brisk
fusillade put the matter beyond a doubt. Then they rode back, without a
scratch, to make their report, first to the Colonel, and then to the
General at Bayon. The night and the next day passed without any vigorous
action on the part of the enemy, though some of their patrols crossed
the Meurthe. They were probably themselves not too fresh after their
long forced march from beyond the frontier, and wanted to collect their
strength and their forces for the grand attack.
On August 24th the storm burst at last. From Damelevières and Mont on
the near side of the forest of Vitrimont, from Lunéville along the Bayon
road, and out of the two smaller forests of Vacquenat and Clairlieu,
which, from Lamath on the Mortagne, stretch along each side of it up to
the most western of the two railways, the enemy came pouring on,
battalion after battalion, regiment after regiment, till they had nearly
got up to the concave sweep of the French defensive position, extending
from the Sappais plateau eastwards across the road and railway in the
direction of Gerbéviller. At the same time the German guns began to
speak, and along the whole French front a hurricane of explosive shells
and shrapnel ploughed and tore up a belt of ground over a mile deep. An
hour after midday, in brilliant sunshine this time, no longer under the
depressing rain, the French batteries opened fire and went on firing all
through the afternoon and night, after a time without any sustained
reply from the enemy except for one general cannonade before sundown.
[Illustration:
Photograph by Libert-Fernand, Nancy.
FARM OF LEOMONT—MEURTHE ET MOSELLE
]
If you are standing on the outskirts of a modern battle—say at a
distance of a mile from the nearest battery, for a civilian is not
likely to get much closer in these days—you hear what I may call the
symphony of it far better than those who are actually taking part in the
fighting, who are deafened to all other sounds but the guns that fire
and the shells that burst near them, and the rifles of their own
company. To the spectator, when heavy guns, field guns, rifles, and
machine guns are all booming and banging and rattling at the same time,
the noise is so tremendous that it seems that it must be beyond the
limits of human endurance to face the storm of steel and fire. At the
hottest moments it keeps changing curiously and horribly in character,
volume, and tempo, rising and falling with alternating diminuendo and
crescendo and hurrying and slackening pace. It is all extraordinarily
relentless. Sometimes the deafening volleys of reports sound like the
clattering of a clumsy, lumbering wagon, jolting heavily over the frozen
ruts of a rough country lane; sometimes like the brisk hammering of
thousands of carpenters and rivetters at work on thousands of wooden
joists and steel plates; sometimes like the rumbling of hundreds of
heavy goods-trains thundering and bumping over uneven points and meeting
every now and then in hideous collision. Against the changing
undercurrent and background of sound and confusion the different kinds
of reports are always distinguishable—the heavy slow boom of the big
guns, the sharp vicious bang of the field pieces, with their
lightning-like velocity and shattering irresistible force, the shrieks
of the shells, the whistle of the bullets, the crackling and spitting
and spluttering snap of the lebels and mannlichers, the rapid pitiless
tapping and rattling of the machine guns, and most awful of all, I
think, the sudden unexpected silences, which make you hold your breath
and wait—like a condemned murderer with the noose round his neck must
wait on the scaffold—for the dreadful moment which you know will come
when the storm will all begin over again _da capo_, and in the twinkling
of an eye hundreds and hundreds of living vigorous men will be struck
down dead. Mercifully few things are so false as the saying that every
bullet has its billet. Otherwise not a man of the armies that fought in
front of Nancy would be left.
Soon after the great battle, long before nature had begun to heal the
gaping wounds that French and German had made in the bosom of the brown
old earth, I or my French colleague or both of us visited most of the
roads north and south of the Meurthe and north and west of the Mortagne
which cross the ground on which it was fought. The whole country—the
once happy villages, the wooded hills and wide rolling plains of grass
and stubble fields with never a hedge and hardly a ditch—is one vast
field of battle and one huge cemetery. From part of it the German flood
of invasion was just beginning to recede. What was left of the towns and
villages and farms, which had first withstood its advance like massive
breakwaters and then been submerged as the tide of battle ebbed and
flowed, looked much more like piles of rugged and weather-beaten rocks
than human habitations. Everywhere the fields had been drenched with the
blood of French and Germans. Everywhere they were scarred with deep
shell-holes surrounded by great clods of brown earth scattered in all
directions. It is a characteristic feature of the Lorraine country that
in many places the roads, when they run between two belts of woodland,
are bordered on each side by level stretches of grass, fifty or sixty
yards wide. In these roadside glades—because roads lead to towns and
villages, and because armies move more easily along them than over the
soft fields—the shell-holes were so close together that often they were
almost touching. In other places, where only a single line of trees
marked the two sides of the road, trunk after trunk had been cut
straight through by the shells, or whole rows of them ruthlessly felled
to open up the line of fire. And everywhere there were blown-up bridges,
broken telegraph poles, hanging wires, hop-gardens scorched and withered
by sheets of fire, blackened corn-stooks rotting where they stood,
ploughs and farm-carts twisted and smashed, festering bodies of dead
horses in hideously ungainly attitudes, rifles, bayonets, caps, helmets,
coats, saddles, haversacks, socks, shirts, boots, water-bottles, all
kinds of things that men have made and used and worn, all manner of
rubbish that once had form and beauty—a horrible unsightly jumble and
litter of wreckage and decay, a tragedy of untellable noise and fury and
suffering and death. And then there were the dead themselves—the
pitiable little heaps of clothes, red or blue or grey, that once were
men, that helped to make this tragedy and fell its victims. Most of them
had been buried and hidden away in the shelter of the earth. But here
and there they were still lying, sometimes prone on their faces as they
fell, more often carefully laid on their backs, staring up at the sky
with unseeing eyes. Some looked peaceful and at rest. Others had
suffered horribly before they died, and their coal-black faces were
twisted and drawn, and their outstretched arms and hands clutched at
emptiness in an agony of intolerable pain.
The three weeks’ battle was now well under way. On the first day the
opening rush of the German attack had spent itself in vain against the
French right wing south of the Meurthe. The fire of Morhange had done
its work. It had forged a tough line of Ironsides, which the Bavarian
corps could neither bend nor break, and during the night they began to
fall back toward the Mortagne leaving masses of dead behind them. A
French cavalry patrol, sent out early on the morning of the 15th along
the Bayon-Lunéville road to reconnoitre, got as far as Lamath, on the
left bank of the river, before they found the enemy. During the day the
village was gallantly carried by a battalion of Chasseurs-Alpins.
Further south, in the triangle beyond the road and the forest of
Vacquenat, the enemy held on more persistently to the ground which they
had gained, and on the 25th and 26th at Einvaux, Clayeures, Réménoville,
Rozelieures and other villages between the two rivers they were only
driven back step by step as the result of most determined and gallant
efforts on the part of the French. The loss of life on both sides was
very great. A little stream which flows through Réménoville into the
Mortagne was so choked with dead that the cavalry found it impossible to
water their horses in it. All over the field of battle, especially in
the woods, the air was tainted with the smell of putrefying bodies. But
death and wounds had no effect on the morale of the two French Army
Corps. Now that they had made their stand they were irresistible. They
were constantly attacking instead of being attacked, and retreat was
everywhere turned into advance. At the same time the chief weight of the
German counter-attack—for though they were retiring they were always
trying to make ground—was gradually shifted southwards away from the
Bayon road towards Gerbéviller and Moyen, higher up the river, probably
in the hope of breaking through between the XVth corps and the First
Army on their right. But no breach was made. On the 27th a Colonial
Regiment was fighting a little to the west of the martyred town. They
had suffered severely and had lost two colonels since the 24th. A third
came to join them, reported himself to the brigadier, rode forward
towards his men and was knocked over and killed by a shell before he had
been ten minutes in command. But still his men and all the other
regiments fought on, the batteries continually shifted their positions
from one place to another with wonderful mobility, some of the villages
where the fighting was hottest were taken and retaken two or three times
over, and step by step the long line of French bayonets forced the enemy
back towards and at some points beyond the two rivers.
At last, on September 4th, though the battle was still far from won, the
great attack had been so effectively checked that it was found possible
to move the XVth corps across to the Argonne, to help General Sarrail
and the Third Army in their struggle against the Crown Prince. From the
moment when they had assumed the offensive on August 25th, they had
fought with extraordinary courage. In two days one regiment alone, the
112th of the line, had forty-eight officers killed and wounded out of
sixty-one. But losses had no effect on them now. The past was wiped out,
and both during the defence of Nancy, and later on in the Heights of the
Meuse and the Argonne, especially at Vassincourt, they took a prominent
share in the victories by which General Sarrail relieved the pressure on
Verdun. From every point of view the story of what they did and suffered
and the way in which—like a ship on her maiden voyage—they found
themselves after their first defeat, was and is one of the most
significant features of the war. For it means that France cannot and
will not be beaten. The steadying support and fellowship which they
received in the hour of crisis from the sorely pressed corps on either
side of them, their own heroic recovery, and the confident and
confidence-inspiring leadership of the generals under whose command they
redeemed themselves from the reproach of their momentary failure, all
point to the same conclusion—the invincible solidarity of the whole of
the French armies. On August 20th the chain of the eastern armies
snapped at its weakest point. By the 25th the jagged ends of the broken
link had been welded together and it was firmly joined up, stronger than
it had ever been, with those on each side of it. Morhange might have
been the beginning of another Sedan. Instead it was the prelude to the
glorious triumph of the Battle of the Grand Couronné of Nancy.