BATTLE OF THE GRAND COURONNÉ. II
All towns are feminine by rights, but Nancy, I think, more than any that
I have ever known. In its municipal arms the chief feature is a Scotch
thistle. The emblem should belong rather to the gallant armies of the
east, and especially to the famous XXth Army Corps, which was the
backbone of General de Castelnau’s army. During all that long three
weeks, while the XVth and XVIth with part of General Dubail’s army were
checking the attack south of the Meurthe, along a front of about fifteen
miles, the XXth held a still longer line on the north side of the river,
from Dombasle nearly as far as Pont-à-Mousson. To all of them, but
particularly to the men of the 26th, or Nancy Regiment, and the 11th
Division, long and proudly known as the Division de Fer, the town
appealed as a beloved and graceful and beautiful woman. She was their
mother and their sister and their bride. She was in deadly danger from
the covetous assaults of the Germans and the German Emperor, and they
alone stood between her and ruin. For, woman-like, she had no defences
of her own—fortunately for her and for France. When Bismarck interfered
in 1874 to prevent the construction of fortifications round the town by
threatening to renew the war of 1870, he was unconsciously working
against the interest of his country instead of for it. If Nancy had been
encircled by a ring of stereotyped forts, like Toul and Verdun, it is
highly probable that after the rapid retreat from Morhange the French
would have fallen back on the protection of their guns, and that Nancy
would have been overtaken by the same fate as Liége. It was because her
defenders did not, because they could not, put their trust in forts,
that the town was saved. For the success of the Allies, for their
delivery in the hour of their deadliest peril from almost certain
disaster, that meant everything. To the south, as we have seen, the
enemy had swept across the difficult barrier of the Vosges and continued
their triumphant advance right up to the moment when the battle for the
defence of the town began. To the north the whole of the rest of their
line swung across Belgium and part of France as far as Compiègne, and
even far south of Verdun on each side of it, like a bar (though never a
straight nor a rigid bar) hinged to a fixed point. And, with the not
quite parallel exception of Verdun, the only part of the line that
remained firm, the immovable pivot which those three weeks of persistent
and frenzied sapping on three sides was powerless to undermine, was the
open and unprotected town of Nancy. Its defenders, or, at all events,
the rank and file of them, knew almost nothing of what was happening
elsewhere. They were fighting in the dark with their backs to the wall.
But they knew what their own job was, and they did it, always, it seems
to me, from the way they talk about it, with that feeling that they were
standing in front of a helpless woman, whose honour they must defend at
any and every cost. And when finally they had saved the town, when the
fear of a barbarous assault like those which had wrecked and ravished
one after the other of the towns and villages of Lorraine was at an end,
they called it—still from that personal objective point of view—_Nancy
l’Inviolée_.
The German conception of its importance was more strictly military. The
Kaiser himself appears to have cherished some imperially sentimental
notions on the subject of its capture. No doubt if he could have ridden
in triumph into the beautiful Place Stanislas at the head of the White
Cuirassiers of the Guard (who were on the spot in readiness), like a
Cæsar or a Roman general swaggering along the Via Sacra, he would have
felt extremely pleased with himself, and the moral effect on the people
of both countries would have been immense. But it was also obvious that
through Nancy lay the way to the barrier of the frontier fortresses.
Until General de Castelnau’s army had been disposed of the project of
smashing the forts of Toul was only an idle dream. To that end the whole
force of the German left wing, except the troops (chiefly Landwehr)
which were held up in Alsace, was concentrated on this one point. The
march of von Heeringen’s men from the south-west along the valleys of
the Mortagne, the Meurthe, and the Vesouze, we have already followed, up
to the time of their check by de Castelnau’s right. At the same time an
even fiercer attack was made on his left, from the east, north-east, and
north by the Crown Prince of Bavaria’s army and some additional troops
of the Metz garrison army.
Before the Germans spread out into battle formation the four main lines
of the whole of their advance on Nancy were from Pont-à-Mousson,
Château-Salins, Cirey, and St. Dié. If we substitute London for Nancy,
the relative positions and distances of these places will be
approximately represented by Waltham Cross, Brentford, Sittingbourne,
and the village of Sandhurst (half-way between Tunbridge Wells and Rye).
Or, to put the matter still more simply, the enemy advanced in
directions which coincide almost exactly with those of the Great
Northern, the Great Eastern, the London, Chatham, and Dover, and the
South-Eastern Railways; and they were not finally checked till they had
reached a point nearer to Nancy than Walthamstow is to Charing Cross.
For the people of Nancy the prospect was sufficiently alarming. It is
not surprising that at that time some of them, though not many, migrated
to what they thought were safer quarters. But they need have had no
fears. To the north-east and east of the town, in the quadrant of the
circle between Pont-à-Mousson and Lunéville, the legionaries of the XXth
corps were to prove an impenetrable barrier. Once they had crossed the
boundary river, the Seille, in the general retreat, there was no
favourable position in which to make a stand until they came to the
ring-fence of wooded heights which long before the war was christened by
some French strategist the Grand Couronné of Nancy. The term is, as a
matter of fact, rather a stretch of the imagination. If you stand at the
top of any high building in the town and look eastwards towards the
frontier (which is as near to Nancy as Wimbledon to Hyde Park Corner)
you see, with one or two unimportant exceptions, no hills at all. The
ground for the most part is flat and unbroken, rising in a gentle slope
to the horizon five miles away. (Once and once only a body of German
cavalry came over the rise, and, till they were driven back, were
visible for a short time from the town.) On that side the Couronné
consists only of the Forests of Champenoux and St. Paul, about seven
miles north-east of the town, north and south of the Château-Salins
road, the woods of Crévic and Einville north of the Marne-Rhone canal, a
low ridge beyond Léomont on the north side of the last two or three
miles of the road to Lunéville, and the Forest of Vitrimont south of the
road. To the west of the town, and to the north in the direction of
Metz, the Couronné is, however, well marked, and a semicircle of hills,
about one thousand feet high, broken only by the valley of the Meurthe,
stands high up above it, and sweeps round to the north-east, where the
wooded Plateau of Amance carries on the curve almost as far as the
forest of Champenoux.
The position defended by the left wing of General de Castelnau’s army
extended from Ste. Généviève, a few miles south-east of Pont-à-Mousson,
past the heights of Mont St. Jean, La Rochette, and Amance (the rock on
which the attack broke), and then by Laneuvelotte and Cerceuil across
the plain to Dombasle, just east of St. Nicholas-du-Port and west of the
forest of Vitrimont, in a line which is almost parallel to the course of
the Meurthe below Nancy, and about five miles in front of it. From
Dombasle, south of the river, it was continued in a slightly concave
curve, as we saw in the last chapter, through Saffais, across the
Bayon-Lunéville road, to Gerbéviller on the Mortagne.
In the prolonged battle which was fought along that front—of course very
many times as large as the field of Waterloo—the losses of the enemy in
killed alone probably amounted to nearly 50,000. Every scrap of the
ground between it and the frontier, that is to say, a length of about
thirty miles and a depth varying from five or six to well over twenty,
was fought over at least twice and in many places still oftener.
Everywhere there are long wide stretches of ground so torn and ploughed
by shells that it seems impossible that any single soul could have gone
through that awful fire and come out alive. On the heights of Frescati
above the Lunéville road as far west as the farm of Léomont (in the last
chapter we saw it flaming against the evening sky from the other side of
the forest of Vitrimont), all round the forest itself, particularly near
the now ruined building called the Faisanderie, and from there right
away up the line past Crévic and Maixe and Courbesseau and Réméréville,
the ghastly ruin of the battlefield south of the river was repeated over
and over again. In some places it was not so bad as in others. But that
is all you can say. In the worst it is beyond belief. Trenches in the
modern sense of the word hardly existed; what there were were
comparatively rare and shallow. The slaughter was therefore much greater
than it ever is in these later times, except when an offensive movement
is being carried out. The villages and churches and scattered cottages
and farms were battered and pounded by the shells of both sides till
nothing of them was left but heaped-up ruins. Here, as elsewhere, many
of them were burnt, and always for the same miserable and lying excuse.
At Réméréville, near the forest of Champenoux, the epitaph of the
murdered village, composed and signed by “Un Allemand,” was still
chalked up on the blackboard in the little schoolhouse when we first saw
it: “_Réméréville n’existe plus, parce qu’on a tiré sur les troupes
Allemandes. Ainsi soit il fait sur toutes les endroits pareilles._” His
French was not, perhaps, of the best, but his conclusion was correct
enough. _Réméréville n’existe plus._ In some of the villages, where
incendiarism had not done its destructive work, there is hardly a square
inch of house-wall, except where gaping holes were torn by the shells,
that is not pitted with bullet marks. There is hardly a wall enclosing a
yard or a compound or a farm that was not loopholed for purposes of
defence, and when the wall ran all round an enclosure it was loopholed
on all four sides. That shows exactly what the fighting in a large
number of cases was like. Both French and Germans held the farms and the
other isolated buildings like block-houses, and resisted attack
sometimes from all four quarters at once. There was no getting away from
them. Death, surrender, or victory were the only alternatives. Both
sides showed extraordinary bravery, but it was the French, because of
what depended on their success, and because they were being attacked,
who put most fire into their fighting. They knew that they could not
afford to give way. They were fighting in their own country, in the
homes of their own kith and kin. Day after day and night after night
long convoys of wounded jolted slowly and painfully past them, back to
the hospitals of Nancy, where for all the preparations that had been
made there was sometimes not room for them all to be admitted at once,
and for a long time they lay on their stretchers in the corridors, and
once or twice even in streets and squares of the town under the open
sky, before they could be cared for. Almost more melancholy still were
the troops of homeless refugees who were forced to turn their faces in
the same direction, carrying with them in their hands, or piled in
confusion on their ricketty carts, the poor little household gods that
they wanted to save from the clutch of the marauding German or his cruel
fires. But not all of them escaped. Some were too dazed by the
suddenness of the invasion, or too old, or too young, or too feeble. Of
these many were remorselessly butchered by the German soldiery, drunk or
sober. Yet their deaths were not in vain. Wretched, uncounted,
unconsidered victims of the war, they, too, had a hand in the victory.
For if any one thing had still been needed to nerve the armies of
Lorraine to do all that armed men can do for the defence of their
country, it was the sight of the blighted homes and murdered bodies of
these unfortunates. That was why France, and especially France’s
soldiers in the field, realized long before England the deadly
importance of putting every ounce of their strength into the war. They
had no need of newspaper reports and blue books and recruiting appeals
to awake them. They saw with their own eyes. “In Nomeny,” one of them
wrote in a letter home, “the dead bodies of the inhabitants are more or
less everywhere; on the staircases, in the cellars, on the piles of
rubbish, in the open street. In one heap there were five corpses, two of
which were children, and a little farther on were lying three young
girls. Our impression was that these unfortunates had been shot down,
and not killed by shells. In what were once the streets there are pigs
wandering about and feeding on human flesh. Whenever we catch one we
shoot it and bury it at once. Nothing is left of this charming little
town but dangerous panels of walls, which every now and then tumble
down. You can still make out the lines of the streets. The few houses
that are left have been stripped and pillaged. You walk about on linen
undergarments. The furniture has been disembowelled”—the word exactly
describes what one sees in one house after another—“the doors torn off
their hinges. On the floors there is a litter of clothes, letters, burst
mattresses and eiderdowns, fragments of furniture, shattered pottery,
broken food, dung, and other rubbish, so that you cannot set foot on the
boards of the floor.”
In letters, by word of mouth, with our own eyes, M. Lamure and I heard
and saw over and over again similar stories and similar sights. I did
not see the scene which was described to a French officer by an old
maidservant in a house near Lunéville, where a party of German officers,
some of them stark-naked except for their helmets, some of them dressed
in the nightgowns and undergarments of the ladies of the house, danced
with one another in a drunken carouse, and defiled the beds and the
other linen which they left in the drawers of the clothes-chests; I
quote it because the French officer who had it from the heart-broken old
family servant who saw it happen seems to me to be an absolutely
reliable witness. But there is a deeper reason than that for repeating
it. It is typical of the extraordinary vein of bestiality which even
before the war was known to run through certain strata—and certain of
the higher strata—of German society. We are always asking and wondering
who is going to win the war—even, in some of our darker hours, the most
optimistic of us. The answer is written in these ravaged villages and
towns of Lorraine and other parts of France. When to the mere wanton
destructiveness of war is added the particular form of bestiality of
which disgusting traces have been found by the French in many houses
which had escaped the flames, it is practically certain that the roots
of it must lie deep down in a bed of rottenness digged and prepared long
before the war began. A nation, the cultivated circles of which are to
any serious extent tainted with the unnatural vice of which this
filthiness is a sure sign—even if its existence and its toleration had
not already been notorious in Germany—is intrinsically corrupt and has
in its organization the seeds of death, no matter how highly it may have
developed its Kultur and commerce and physical and military science.
Germany has grown with extraordinary rapidity and to extraordinary
proportions in an extraordinarily short period of time, like a rank
weed, forced in an ultra-scientific hothouse. Outwardly her structure is
in many respects a marvel and even a thing of beauty. But with this
canker at the core she cannot be a healthy organization. You cannot
gather figs of thistles. The war has brought the canker (which is in the
whole body, though it does not poison the whole of it) to the surface.
Perhaps the war, which Germany has brought on herself, is the surgeon’s
knife that will finally eradicate it, as it must without doubt excise
other tumours from the bodies of all the nations engaged in it. But the
difference between Germany and the others is that they have entered upon
the war with cleaner hands and cleaner minds, and that cleanness,
because the world is continually being purified, is going to win in the
long run. For even if it were the other way, if Germany were going to
win this particular war, which is, after all, only a moment in the
history of time, that could make no difference in the final result.
Right must triumph and the world must progress, and the Allies, since
they have right on their side, are fighting not only in its defence and
the defence of their countries, but to give Germany a chance after the
war of redeeming herself. For it is as certain that only her own people
can purify her and make her what she is meant to be as it is that not
the united powers of the whole world can wipe her as a nation off the
map of Europe. Of course, individual soldiers and individual politicians
think and speak differently. There are many people in France and England
with whom the last sentence of the following paragraph, which was
written by a French soldier in the armies of the east on August 26th,
1914, is a fixed creed. “We will make these barbarians pay dear,” he
wrote, “for their robberies and their proud folly. In front of us there
is nothing but miles of ruins, burnt villages, and corpses of old men
and children. Truly this race is not worthy to have produced Goethe,
Schiller, and Wagner. _This time she must disappear from the map of the
civilized world._”
That she should disappear from the map of the civilized world is
obviously a wild impossibility. You cannot, even if you wished, wipe out
a nation of 65,000,000 people, nor even reduce them to a state of
unarmed defencelessness. Inevitably they would again become in course of
time a powerful menace to the peace and freedom of the rest of the
world. What we can do, and what, please God, we will do, is to beat them
thoroughly now, and then to believe that the German people themselves
will rise up and insist that in their own country an end shall be made
of the mad folly and the mad fools whose pride and selfishness and moral
uncleanness have brought this vile war on Germany and the suffering
world.
But that is to look far ahead, much further than was possible or
desirable for the defenders of Nancy. All that they had to think of was
the town and the country and the cause for which they were fighting. All
that they had to inspire them was the love of Lorraine and France, and
the detestation of what they saw in front of them in the track of the
Huns, which filled their hearts with rage and the burning desire for
vengeance. In that they were united with the whole people of Lorraine,
and because they were united they won. They had their mothers and their
wives and their sisters and their sweethearts at their backs. A great
deal has been said—but not nearly enough—of the part which the women of
France have played in the war. I will not try now to add my personal
tribute to the marvellous courage and unremitting self-sacrifice of the
section of the French people upon whom the war has borne most cruelly. I
will, instead, let one of them speak for herself, and for all the rest.
She was writing at the beginning of September, 1914, from Moyen Vic, on
the German side of the Lorraine frontier, to her brother at the front,
and this is what she said for herself and for another sister:—
“MY DEAR EDOUARD,—
“I hear the news that Charles and Lucien died on the 28th of
August. Eugène is dead too. Rose has disappeared.
“Mamma is crying. She says that you must be strong, and wishes you to
go and avenge them.
“I hope that your officers will not refuse you that. Jean has won the
Legion of Honour: you must follow his example.
“They have taken everything from us. Out of eleven who were fighting
eight are dead. My dear brother, do your duty, that is all we ask.
“God gave you your life: He has the right to take it back from you. It
is Mamma who says so.
“We embrace you with all our heart, though we should long to see you
first. The Prussians are here. The young Jandon is dead. They have
pillaged everything. I have just come back from Gerbéviller, which is
destroyed. The cowards!
“Go, my dear brother, make the sacrifice of your life. We have the
hope that we shall see you again, for some kind of a presentiment
makes us hope.
“We embrace you with all our heart. Adieu, and au revoir, if God
allows it.
“YOUR SISTERS.
“It is for us and for France. Think of your brothers and of grandpapa
in 1870.”
With women like that to encourage and inspire them, with those other
women, outraged and murdered, to avenge, with their woman-city of Nancy
and their mother-country France to defend, is it any wonder that the men
of Lorraine fought as they did, and won? “Thy love to me was wonderful,
passing the love of women.” Yes, but the courage of women—is there
anything in the world that passes that, or even equals it? I wonder.