BATTLE OF THE GRAND COURONNÉ. III
The attempt to reach Nancy from the north was to be carried out by a
detachment of the Metz army. In the earlier stages of the campaign, that
army, or a part of it, had marched westwards towards Verdun, probably
with the idea of joining up with the Crown Prince of Prussia’s
command—that fatal illusory missing-link on which hinged so much of the
German plan—or else of filling up the gap which at that time broke the
continuity of the lines across what has since become the base of the St.
Mihiel triangle, from Pont-à-Mousson to Fresnes in the direction of
Verdun. After General de Castelnau’s army had retired to its position on
the Grand Couronné, a considerable portion of the Metz force wheeled
round facing south, with Pont-à-Mousson as their base. The opportunity
certainly seemed a good one. Whatever was the precise object which the
troops from Metz originally had in view, it was well worth while to
sacrifice it for the moment, in order to take the extreme left of the
French force from the flank and in the rear almost before they had taken
up their new position after their exhausting retreat. Instead of being
able to strengthen the main line of General de Castelnau’s defence
against the Crown Prince of Bavaria, the French on their exposed flank
had to turn their attention to a new enemy coming up behind them from
the north. Fortunately, that part of the line was under the command of
General Foch, a leader whose reputation has gone on steadily increasing
since the war began. The Germans were full of confidence. To them, no
doubt, and perhaps also to the much smaller body of French troops whose
business it was to check them, there seemed to be excellent grounds for
the boastful cries of “Sainte Généviève to-night: to-morrow Nancy,” with
which, on the morning of the 22nd, they set off on their march up the
valley of the Moselle.
Ste. Généviève is a village that lies about five miles south-east of
Pont-à-Mousson, and rather less south-west of Nomeny, on the line of
hills that runs from Nancy along the valley down to Metz, rising a
little way back from the right bank of the river. As soon as the Germans
turned off the road to their left to climb up to the French outpost at
Ste. Généviève, which they were obliged to reduce before they could
march further south, they began to find trouble. A thick belt of wire
entanglements which the French had prepared to the left of their
trenches and about half a mile in front of them obliged the attacking
force to make the final advance from their own left front up a steep and
exposed pitch. They did not, however, move forward at once. There was no
need to take unnecessary risks, or they thought there was not, and for
two whole days, with field artillery and a few heavier guns, which fired
in all some four thousand shells on the village, they prepared the way
with the now fashionable preliminary bombardment. The French had only
one infantry regiment in Ste. Généviève, but they were well sheltered in
their trenches, and in the two days they lost no more than three men
killed and about twenty wounded. The batteries in support were also
well-concealed—too well for the German aeroplanes, which failed to
locate them—and they allowed the enemy to waste their ammunition without
firing a shot in return. That must have been a severe test of their
powers of self-restraint, but they knew that the crisis was extremely
serious, and that in all probability the fate of Nancy depended on their
standing firm.
[Illustration:
Pierre Petit phot.
GENERAL FOCH.
]
On the evening of the 24th the German commander, possibly deceived by
their silence and imagining that the infantry had been crushed by the
bombardment, gave the order for the attack. In massed columns his
formidable little army of 12,000 men, four German soldiers for every
Frenchman in front of them, advanced up the hill, still supported by the
fire of their artillery. Then at last, when they had come to a
convenient range, the 75’s opened on their closely formed ranks. Most of
the work fell on one particular battery from Toul, as the others were so
placed that they could not fire effectively without endangering their
own infantry. For three hours they pounded the Germans, cutting them up
badly, and then, when he had fired the last shell, the commandant of the
battery ordered his men to join the infantry in a last resolute effort
to check the assault.
Crouching low as they came up the slope, the Germans now advanced in
earnest. The infantry had been ordered to let them get within three
hundred yards. When they reached that distance the French officers
shouted at the top of their voices the command which, at that period of
the war, always seemed to inspire the Germans with terror, “_En avant à
la baïonette!_” But the command was a ruse. The regiment had been warned
that, when it was given, they were not to charge but to fire a
succession of volleys from the trenches. As soon as the Germans heard
the order snapping along the ranks and the bugles sounding the charge,
the front ranks hurriedly rose from their crouching positions and with
fixed bayonets advanced to meet the attack. That was their undoing. The
first volley caught them just as they reached the wire entanglements two
hundred yards in front of the trenches and mowed them down in hundreds.
They fell in such dense masses that the men coming on from behind
climbed and jumped over their bodies and the first line of entanglements
at the same time. But they could get no further. Four separate times
they came on to the assault over the open with fine courage, and each
time they were checked by the withering fire from the Lebels, till at
last, almost at nightfall, they gave up the attempt, and fell back on
Pont-à-Mousson, leaving four thousand dead in front of those murderous
trenches. For the moment their demoralization was complete. In the
darkness some of them lost their way, and stumbling over the wire
entanglements in front of Loisy-sur-Moselle, fell into the river and
were drowned. This time, when the survivors reached Atton, the village
south of Pont-à-Mousson, which they had passed through so confidently
two days before, there were no longer shouts of “_Nancy demain!_” They
had made their attack in overwhelming force and they had failed, and for
Ste. Généviève they had coined a new and more expressive name. They
called it, in bitter memory of the losses which they had suffered there,
“The Hole of Death.”
On the same day that the force from Metz started on their disastrous
expedition, the battle was raging fiercely all along the line which was
being attacked by the German Sixth Army under the Crown Prince of
Bavaria, from Mont St. Jean, a little south and east of Ste. Généviève,
to Dombasle on the Meurthe. In that twenty-mile stretch there were many
Holes of Death, many desperate encounters, and many uncounted acts of
corporate and individual gallantry on both sides. But for coolness and
forethought and disciplined restraint as well as for mere courage in
what might have seemed to officers and men an almost hopeless position,
the defence of Ste. Généviève must rank with the very first achievements
of the army of heroes that fought and won in front of Nancy.
At first on this section of the line the most furious fighting was on
the right, along the Marne-Rhine canal, round Haraucourt and Dombasle,
which, on the 22nd, was actually occupied for a time by the enemy,
though they were quickly driven out and forced to retire on the heights
and woods of Crévic. The next day there was the same kind of
give-and-take struggle along the ridge north of the Dombasle-Lunéville
road, round the farm of Léomont, and along a front north and south of
it, from Crévic to the forest of Vitrimont. On the 25th, still a little
further north, between Drouville and Courbesseau, a strong German
position was attacked by five French regiments. For some reason,
however, they were not properly supported by their artillery, and
suffered severely, one regiment losing sixty-five per cent. in killed
and wounded. But, although for the time being that particular attack
failed and had to be given up, the general run of the battle, all
through the last week of August and the first few days of September, was
slightly but surely in favour of the French. That, always bearing in
mind the disastrous retreat which it followed, was the amazing wonder of
it. It is true that the final retreat of the Germans to the frontier did
not take place till September 12th, when the Battle of the Marne had
been won, and that the movement to their rear of the Crown Prince of
Bavaria’s and von Heeringen’s armies was therefore in a sense part of
the general retirement of the whole German line with which it coincided.
But it is also true that on the day when the Battle of the Marne began,
at the end of that first fortnight of fierce charge and counter-charge,
in the forests and hedgeless fields and ruined and smoking villages of
Lorraine, the enemy, though they were still there, had been beaten
almost to a standstill. That, at least, was the case on September 5th
along the whole right half of the front, north and south of the Meurthe,
from Gerbéviller through the forest of Vitrimont, past Crévic as far as
Haraucourt. Further north it was a few days later before the attack was
finally rolled back. The batteries of Amance drew the German battalions
like a magnet, and it was here and in the forest of Champenoux that the
final fury of the assault spent itself.
Before that, at Drouville, Courbesseau, Cerceuil, Réméréville, Hoéville,
Erbéviller, Champenoux (into which the guns on Amance poured shells at
the rate of between 2500 and 3000 rounds a day for a fortnight), and
other small hamlets round the forest, most of which, like Réméréville,
_n’existent plus_, there had been a long series of hand-to-hand
struggles and trench warfare, during which day and night the roar of the
guns and the rattle of the mitrailleuses and rifles, was almost
continuous. In the trenches the men got so used to the turmoil that
though they slept through it peacefully in their off-moments, they
missed it when it stopped. It was the sudden lulls and not the noise
that they found startling. As a young officer who was wounded at
Réméréville said to me one day when he was talking of the night on which
he was knocked over, “The silence woke me.” “The shells,” wrote another,
“keep falling all round, but there are so many that one takes no notice
of them. Even the horses don’t move, which pretty well proves that there
is nothing heroic in keeping cool.” In a way, of course, that is true
enough. It is all, as he said, a matter of luck, and the less one thinks
about getting hit the better, though the fact remains that men have
imagination and horses have not, which does make a difference. But,
imagination or no imagination, men who are used to fire certainly do
become extraordinarily fearless and even contemptuous about its effect.
I was talking one day—not in Lorraine, but on the Champagne front—to the
commandant of a battery of 75’s, which were trying to put out of action
a German machine gun about three miles off which was worrying the
infantry in a particular trench in front. He pointed to the corner of a
wood two or three hundred yards behind us round which were coming about
twenty men, mounted and on foot. “They don’t seem to mind a bit,” he
said, “about getting hit. They all know that the German gunners can see
the rise at that corner and that they have got the range of it to a
yard, and yet—now look,” he added quickly. A shell, three shells
together, whistled over our heads. There was a roar, a column of brown
smoke thirty feet high shot up into the air at the exposed corner,
apparently right in the middle of the group. The horses bucked a little,
and one of them screamed, but a second or two later the men on foot, who
had thrown themselves flat on their faces when they heard the shells
coming, got up and came slowly sauntering past us quietly smoking their
pipes, and the commandant went on with his conversation—which was
interrupted twice again in the next few minutes by exactly the same
abrupt interlude. “Nothing can teach them,” he said. “They know that
these big German shells have a way of bursting straight up and down
instead of laterally, the corner is a short cut, and they prefer to take
the risk. After all, the Boches may not shoot—and they don’t care.”
In Lorraine, at the moment of which I was talking, the men were not so
used to fire as they are by this time; they were exposed, not to
occasional shells like those nine which between them only wounded one
horse and spoilt one helmet, but to a constant rain of them, and they
were fighting a great and all-important battle, without the sense of
security conveyed by an elaborate system of deep trenches and
shell-proof _abris_. Also they were wearing the old _képis_ and the
conspicuous dark blue coats and red trousers in which France has won or
lost all her battles since the days of Napoleon. The famous new cloth of
_tricolor_ blue was still on the looms of England, and steel helmets
were undreamt of, or many lives that were lost in front of Nancy would
have been saved. Compared with the German corps in their uniforms of
invisible grey, the French soldiers were in those days at a distinct
disadvantage.
But neither did they care. Death had no terrors for them, and as for
their wounds, there would be time enough to think about them afterwards,
and then only because they fretted and fretted until they were healed so
that they might go out and meet the hated Boche again. Now they had
their work cut out for them. Very largely it was individual work, for in
these scattered fights in the woods and village streets and the shallow
concealing hollows which in many places furrow the rolling plain small
bodies of infantry as well as cavalry patrols were often thrown on their
own resources. Young lieutenants and sergeants and corporals and even
privates constantly had to assume responsibility and think and act for
themselves in sudden emergencies—a style of fighting which, when it
came, was much better suited to the temper and genius of the French
soldier than that of the more strictly disciplined German—and no one
will ever know the number of unrecorded acts of gallantry and
quick-witted coolness which helped to swell the general tide of the
French success.
But one more combined effort was wanted before the victory was complete.
There was still that one part of the line round Champenoux where the
French were acting purely on the defensive. Erbéviller, Réméréviller,
and most of the villages round the forest where so much blood had been
spilt, are on the east and south of it, and Amance, in front of which
the final struggle took place, on the west. Here, where the main and
probably the most seasoned body of the German troops were concentrated,
our Allies had been slowly driven back. But they had behind them the
plateau of Amance—barely six miles, remember, from the outskirts of
Nancy. It was the key to the position. The whole of the battle was in
reality and in the end directed to the defending or the gaining of this
particular point. At all costs it had to be taken. At all hazards it had
to be held. The violent struggles in the villages on the other side of
the forest had been only a preliminary to the grand general attack which
was to come, first from the south and then from the north and east. Up
till then the splendid batteries from Toul, by which it was manned, had
taken only a comparatively distant part in the battle, in support of the
infantry in front of them. Now they were to defend the hill itself at
close quarters. The last two days of August were a time of trying
suspense for them. The hill and the men on it were surrounded by a thick
mist. Instinctively they felt that the enemy were drawing nearer, that
the attack was coming. But they could see nothing. All the practical
work they could do was to put the finishing touches to the entrenchments
which they had been constructing since their arrival, and occasionally
to shell at a venture the roads along which the enemy might be
approaching. The Germans, meanwhile, had been getting their heavy guns
into position, and on September 1st the bombardment, which lasted for a
week, began. On the 4th enemy airmen flew over the plateau, and though
they kept very high they were able more or less to make out the
positions of the batteries. The fire then became more severe than ever,
and at one time most of the men serving the French guns were ordered to
take cover in the village behind the hill. But there as well they were
quickly detected by the enemy airplanes and captive balloons, and were
followed by a volley of shells which sent the villagers scuttling to
their cellars or flying over the plains towards Nancy. As for the
troops, they made a dash back to the plateau, through a very hot fire,
and once more got into their trenches, managing to take their wounded
with them. Fortunately the guns had been well concealed, and were
undamaged, so that when at last there was a lull in the storm,
presumably because the Germans concluded that they were silenced for
good, they were able to come out into the open again and soon had them
once more in full action.
The rest of the engagement was very much a repetition of the affair at
Ste. Généviève on a larger scale. But there was one big difference. In
spite of the gravity of the situation on the Marne the Kaiser had
journeyed to the eastern front to give to his armies there the
encouragement of his presence and authority—or for another reason.
Exactly when he arrived no one seems to know, but he was certainly in
Lorraine on September 8th, that is to say, the day before his first five
armies began their retreat from the Marne. That seems to me to be a fact
of some significance. On the 8th and even on the 9th the line of the
first five German armies still stretched from near Paris south of
Compiègne across the Marne, well south of Epernay and Châlons, to a
point not so very far north of Bar le Duc, before it curved north of
Verdun on its left and came down again on the other side of the Meuse
almost to the Rupt de Mad, which flows north-east from near Commercy, to
fall into the Moselle at Metz. Then there was a gap of some miles where
neither French nor Germans had any considerable force, and after the
gap, on the east side of Rupt de Mad, the German line began again with
the Sixth and Seventh Armies.
On September 8th it was still possible that the first five German armies
might hold their ground against the French and English attack. On
September 8th it was still possible that the Sixth Army under the Crown
Prince of Bavaria might break through the opposition of General de
Castelnau’s army, and open up the way to Nancy and Toul. Nothing could
have been better timed. The Germans were a little late (say about three
weeks) in carrying out their original programme, but the correspondence
between the two parts of it was exact, almost to a minute. Only two
things were necessary to carry out the famous “hook” and begin the
encirclement of the main armies of the Allies: the first five armies
from von Kluck to the Crown Prince had to stand firm; the other two,
under von Heeringen and the Crown Prince of Bavaria (and the Kaiser) to
advance. It is not surprising that the Great War Lord chose to place
himself with the two armies which were to advance. It was (or it should
have been) even leaving out of account the possible triumphant entry
into Nancy, incomparably the more interesting and picturesque position.
Any soldier, let alone any War Lord, would have given all that he most
prized to lead the armies that were to carry out the actual work of
completing the circle by taking the French and English armies from Bar
le Duc to Paris in the rear. It is at least highly probable that that
was what was in the Kaiser’s mind. He went to Lorraine, not to encourage
the Bavarian armies in a forlorn hope, but to secure the front seat for
the display of the final tableau.
How nearly exact his calculations were will probably never be known. It
was certainly a case of touch and go whether they came off or not. In my
opinion what upset them more than almost anything else was the final
stand at Amance, in which guns and infantry both bore their full share.
For consider what they did, and above all when they did it. They were
put to the supreme test on September 8th, the day, let me recall, before
the retreat from the Marne began. The Kaiser himself gave the order for
the final assault. From the woods a mile away, headed by their fifes and
drums, wave upon wave of Germans advanced as steadily and as pompously
as if they were on parade, to the attack of the French infantry
positions on the side of the hill. The French guns were silent. There
was nothing to show whether they had been put out of action by the
preliminary bombardment or were only biding their time. Except the music
of the bands there was not a sound, for the infantry also reserved their
fire till the enemy were within two hundred yards. Then their time had
come. With their bayonets fixed and with shouts of “_Vive la France!_”
they sprang suddenly from the trenches and charged. The two lines met
with a desperate shock, and after a violent hand-to-hand struggle it was
the German ranks which broke. As they fled to the shelter of the forest
the 75’s came into action, and firing at short range mowed them down
rank by rank. But they were splendidly gallant. They fought like
knights, not like the savages who had sacked and burnt the villages of
Lorraine and the Vosges. There were always others ready to take the
places of the men who fell. Six times they advanced towards that deadly
hill, and six times they were driven back to the sheltering woods. At
some places at its base the bodies were piled up five or six feet high,
and when the survivors took cover behind the heaps of dead and wounded
the 75’s still raked them through and through, smothering dead and
living in a horrible mire of flesh and blood, while the 155’s, firing
over the heads of the front ranks, finished off the work further back.
The losses were enormous. Thousands of German dead were left lying on
the plain, and in the evening they asked and were granted a few hours’
truce to bury them. The victory was complete. There was no longer any
risk of a German advance. Nancy was inviolate. The Grand Plan had broken
down.
But supposing the defeat had been a victory? Then, I think, after the
preliminary walk-over into Nancy, an army could have been sent forward
to Bar-le-Duc, large enough, even if it could not bring about the
rounding up of the Allies, to form a serious menace to Sarrail and
Langle de Cary, and perhaps even to have altered the whole course of the
Battle of the Marne. It is true that Toul and the Meuse stood in the
way. But the garrison of Toul had been seriously weakened by the
withdrawal of the guns and troops that had taken part in the defence of
Nancy, and in any case the Germans might have walked round it, as they
did round Verdun, supposing that they had not the guns to blow it to
pieces as they had the forts of Liége.
But after all these are unprofitable speculations. What has been has
been, and the operations in front of Nancy, though comparatively little
attention has been drawn to them, were obviously of such vital
importance in the huge general battle which saved France that there is
no need of “if’s” and “an’s” to prove it. At the same time it is well
worth while to notice how the two great victories of the Marne and the
Grand Couronné reacted on each other. Each was an indispensable part of
the homogeneous plans of German invasion and French defence. If the
armies of the east, by their stand in front of Nancy, helped to make the
victory of the Marne possible, the victory of the Marne certainly helped
them to finish off the work they had begun so well. Even after their
repulse at Amance, when a sadder if not a wiser Kaiser had motored back
to Germany, the enemy were still uncomfortably close to Nancy. The
French believe that they took advantage of the four hours’ truce which
was granted them on the evening of the 8th to place two heavy guns in
position at Cerceuil. At all events, the next day, there the guns were,
and between eleven and twelve that night seventy of their shells crashed
into the streets of Nancy, damaging a few houses and killing six or
seven harmless civilians. People went to bed very early in those days,
and most of the inhabitants had been in bed and asleep for an hour or
two before the shelling began. A violent thunderstorm was raging at the
time, and it was not till the 75’s began to reply that the town woke up
and realized what was happening, and then, almost before there was time
to wonder seriously whether the bombardment was to be the prelude to a
German entry, the whole thing was over. The smart little 75’s had done
their work and silenced the heavier pieces from Essen, or the men who
were serving them, in less than an hour. The town heaved a sigh of
relief, not unmixed with indignation and contempt—and went to sleep
again.
The whole affair was singularly futile and pettish. It was like a little
boy throwing stones from a safe distance at an opponent whom he has
failed to beat in a fair stand-up fight, before he runs away. Possibly
the object was to damage the Cathedral, which was exactly in the line in
which most of the shells fell, as a parting message to the Nanceiens of
what they might expect another time. Or they may have hoped to start a
conflagration or an explosion by hitting the gasworks or the huge
boilers of some big works close beside them. That was a thought which
occurred to the young Yorkshire engineer in charge of the works (about
the only Englishman in the town at the moment), who at once went down
through the streets where the shells were falling and emptied the
boilers himself. But anyhow there was no military object in the
pyrotechnic display, since there were no soldiers sleeping in the town,
and the chief inconvenience it caused—a very real one—was that in some
of the hospitals the wounded had to be carried down from the upper wards
to the ground-floor or the basement.
Whatever the meaning or no-meaning of the bombardment, it was the
beginning of the end, and a sign that the Germans were going. It was a
habit of theirs always to destroy before they retired. Many of the acts
of incendiarism were, so to speak, parting shots, or exhibitions of
temper on a large scale. But they fought, too, with desperate if sullen
courage. The retirement had now become almost general and once more the
unfortunate villages in the path of the receding Army Corps were deluged
by the double baptism of fire. Before the enemy were finally driven out
of the forest of Champenoux the French had to charge them again and
again, and whole regiments were decimated on both sides. But step by
step, all along the line from Pont-à-Mousson, which was evacuated on
September 10th, to the Vosges, they were forced steadily eastwards—from
Champenoux along the Château-Salins road, and through the group of
villages on the edge of the forest past Arracourt; from Velaine and
Creceuil past Courbesseau and Serres; from Harraucourt and Dombasle
along the canal, past Crévic and Maixe and Einville, from which some of
them went north along the road to Vic and others kept along the banks of
the canal to the forest of Parroy; and south of the canal and south of
the Meurthe, through Lunéville and on each side of it, past Gerbéviller
and Baccarat and Raon l’Etape and St. Dié—in all cases back towards the
frontier which they had crossed in triumph three long weeks before.
Except for a narrow strip on the edge of Lorraine and a rather larger
tract in the Department of the Vosges west of the Donon, the occupation
was at an end. The attack on the Epinal-Verdun line by way of Nancy had
completely failed. The Kaiser and his men had looked at the promised
land and turned their backs on it, leaving misery and disaster—and
perhaps 50,000 dead—behind them, but carrying with them in their hearts
the greatest disappointment of the first part of the war. The Germans
are rather fond of mixing metaphors; for once let me imitate them. They
had nibbled greedily at the Thistle of Nancy, but the Mailed Fist was
not quite long enough to reach it.
But the French troops, the men who had turned defeat into victory, had
suffered horribly. In one division, 22,000 strong on August 23rd, only
8000 men capable of fighting were left on September 10th. Still, dead
and living, they had done their work: de Castelnau and Pau, Foch and the
XXth Army Corps, Dubail and Bigot, the men and guns of the Toul garrison
and the whole of the armies that stood in that deadly breach, had
covered themselves with undying glory and had written in letters of
blood on the plains of Lorraine and in the spurs of the Vosges one of
the most splendid chapters in the history of France and the world.
The whole of the country over which they fought is now one vast
cemetery. There are graves everywhere, by the roadside, in the woods, in
the middle of exposed plateaux, in remote corners of fields, in the
steep passes of the Vosges, in the trenches and village gardens where
the dead men fought each other and died—long green mounds, carefully
fenced and tended, where hundreds of broken bodies lie side by side in
the last sleep of life, lonely little neglected heaps of earth, marked
only by a rough cross of sticks and a tattered and weather-beaten
_képi_. You cannot get away from them and their silence.
While the battle was still raging the life of the countryside never
seemed to come to an end altogether. Somewhere near, sometimes in the
very places over which the shells were screaming, there were always—when
they were not hiding in the cellars—old men and boys at work in the
fields, children playing on the doorsteps, and dazed and anxious women
occupied in household tasks. On the day of judgment, up to the very
moment when the last trump sounds, I believe there will still be women
washing clothes in the Meuse and the Moselle and the Mortagne and the
Meurthe and all the other rivers of Lorraine and France which through
all these terrible months have run red with the blood of France and
Germany and their Allies—British and Belgians, Australians and
Canadians, Sikhs and Ghurkas, Algerians and Moroccans.
Now, where the battle has rolled back, it is the turn of the dead. They
lie in the midst of life, and the living can never forget them. The last
time that I stood by one of these resting-places, covered already with
green grass, it was an autumn evening, cold and dreary. We were on
ground from which the enemy had been driven back with huge slaughter on
both sides. Almost as far as one could see the face of nature was
hideously scarred with an intricate network of saps and trenches. What
had once been happy homes were piles of brown rubble and gaping walls
and spires. What had once been green woods were stiff rows of shattered
leafless stumps. It was a flat country, but in front, a little further
on, there was a ragged man-made dune, thirty or forty feet high and ten
times as long, enclosing a deep crater in which were lying hundreds of
mangled bodies, some of them with their limbs sticking through the
surface, killed and buried or half buried by the same appalling
explosion in one dreadful moment of eternity. Far beyond, but not so far
that it was out of range of the guns, the horizon, where the enemy lay
concealed, loomed up grim and threatening against the evening sky. To me
the horizon on the Lorraine frontier, seen from far off, always had that
dark and ominous look. The vague and dreamlike mystery of what lay
beyond that silent line of low dark hills, the thought of the
preparations that might be going on behind it, the feeling that no
Frenchman or Englishman could go up to it and live, and most of all, I
think, the knowledge that across the road on which one stood, and all
the other roads and railways that once were thoroughfares between the
two countries for all the world to use, a line was now drawn which no
man might pass, always seemed to make of the frontier a dreadful symbol
of the war and its menace of evil to come. Close at hand it is
different. When you reach the impassable line of the furthest trench or
the tall barrier of sandbags on the other side of which the enemy, in
the same trench, is lying behind a similar barrier twenty yards away,
the sense of mystery and foreboding melts away. There is no cure for a
fit of the blues like a visit to the front. For after all, the line is
not impassable. It has been crossed and pushed back before, and it will
be crossed and pushed back again. All along it, where you had let
yourself think there was only the foe, there is an underground world
swarming with French soldiers, watching and fighting, or ready to fight,
day and night, up to any move that the enemy may attempt to make, and
sworn and resolved for France and freedom to push on to the end. And
that is the view that all of us have got to take when the horror of the
war and its limitless and frowning horizon is upon us. We must get right
up to our difficulties and meet them face to face. We must work and
watch and pray, like the men in the trenches—for they do pray in the
trenches—and leave the rest to God.
But that day I was four or five miles back from the front, and the
weight of that horror of the horizon was heavy upon me. Man goeth forth
to his work and to his labour until the evening. It was evening now, and
getting dark, yet still the cruel unending work went on. Behind me quick
red flashes of flame showed the position of the nearer French batteries,
which till then one could only guess at from the sound of the guns. Far
off in front brilliant flares shot up into the darkness over the
trenches, that the men on both sides might be able to go on watching and
killing all through the night. After all, was God in His heaven? Was all
right with the world? I thought of General de Castelnau, the winner of
that great victory in Lorraine, and his three dead sons. I thought of
all those French and German lying there dead behind me, and the
husbandless wives, and fatherless children, and brotherless sisters, and
friendless friends, and sonless mothers, whose agonized prayers for
their young lives had been answered by those silent graves. I thought of
the killing that was going on through the night, and the killing that
was still to come for weary months and perhaps for weary years. And then
I thought of something else, of the splendid heroism and self-sacrifice
of the women who prayed and suffered and the men who fought and fell,
and of some words that I had seen before the light faded, written over
one of the graves that I had passed—it makes no difference that the man
buried there was a German, for surely German soldiers as well as French
believe that they are fighting for the right—“Be thou faithful unto
death, and I will give thee a crown of life.” And that, it seems to me,
when you get right up face to face with death, instead of standing and
looking at it afar off, is the only possible meaning of the Battle of
the Grand Couronné, and all the battles and all the horrors and all the
suffering of the whole war. For all of us, even for the enemy, even for
those who do not fight, it is a war of redemption, and the greatest and
most hopeful war of redemption that the world has ever seen, and it will
be won by those whose faith in what is right lasts up to death and
beyond it.