THE ATTACK ON THE RIVER FORTS
In following the course of the war in the eastern provinces up to this
point we have seen first of all how the tide of it ebbed and flowed for
five weeks along the line of the frontier, that is to say, the river
Seille and the range of the Vosges. Broadly speaking, the net result of
this five weeks of fighting was that on the left or northern section of
the line, from a point a little east of Nomeny nearly as far as the
Donon, the French had pushed the enemy back to the frontier; that in the
centre from near the Donon to about Ste. Marie aux Mines, half way along
the Vosges, the Germans still held a footing in France in the Department
of the Vosges; but that on the right of the line the French were a
little way across the frontier in Southern Alsace.
We have seen, secondly, that behind this first line there was another,
roughly parallel to it, running from Pont-à-Mousson past Dombasle and
Gerbéviller and then on to St. Dié in the direction of the channels of
the Moselle, the Meurthe, and the Mortagne, along which the Battle of
the Grand Couronné was fought.
Beyond this second line there was, and is, a third, which stretches from
Verdun along the valley of the Meuse to Toul, from which it is continued
to Epinal and Belfort—the line or barrier of the great frontier
fortresses. The whole of the war so far on the part of the invaders has
been a sustained and desperate attempt to get near enough to this
wall—against which the French had their backs—to batter it down. On
their left, on the Belfort-Epinal section, they had failed, in a
military sense, to get anywhere near it. In the centre, from Epinal to
Toul, they had equally failed, thanks to the resistance of Dubail and de
Castelnau, to come within striking distance. On the right, from Toul to
Verdun, they had for the third time failed, in so far that neither Toul,
which was protected by the armies in front of Nancy, nor Verdun, which
was defended twelve miles in advance by the Third Army under General
Sarrail, had ever fired more than an occasional shot at the enemy even
from any of their outlying forts.
On the other hand, as the result of the advance of the main German right
before the Battle of the Marne, the armies commanded by the Crown Prince
of Prussia and the Duke of Wurtemburg had succeeded in turning Verdun,
so that although the Germans had never got up to the wall of the
fortresses, much less broken through it, they had, on the Verdun-Toul
section, got to the farther side of it and the Meuse. There was a time,
before the point which we have now reached, and before the Battle of the
Marne, when, east and west of this stretch of the Meuse, two French
armies, part of General Sarrail’s force and part of the left wing of the
Second Army, with the Toul garrison force to help them, were actually
fighting back to back, on opposite sides of the river. But the more
important part of this double engagement—Sarrail against the Crown
Prince of Prussia—was on the west side of the Meuse, and does not
therefore belong, strictly speaking, to the scope of this book; the
fighting on the right bank, except that extending a few miles south of
Verdun on its east side, between part of its garrison army and part of
the garrison army of Metz, was not at first very serious. There was, as
I have said, at that time a gap of some miles, across the base of what
afterwards became the St. Mihiel triangle, in the otherwise continuous
line of the two opposing forces.
But in the period immediately following their defeat at the Grand
Couronné the enemy began to attack this part of the barrier of
fortresses with extraordinary vigour; on the rest of the line, the part
with which we have already dealt, they confined themselves on the whole
to the task of maintaining the positions to which, after their first
advance, they had been driven back, and it was the fighting which
resulted in the formation of the St. Mihiel wedge that became the really
interesting part of the eastern campaign.
Before, however, going on to talk about the St. Mihiel business, and the
attack on the northern half of the fortress line, something, I think,
ought to be said about another fortified position, the only one between
the great Verdun-Belfort fine and the frontier, the solitary fort of
Manonviller, a few miles east of Lunéville, which stood alone between it
and the enemy. The mystery of Manonviller also stands alone, or almost
alone, in the history of the war. I know very little about it; no one, I
fancy, knows much, except, perhaps, the high authorities and some
members of the garrison, and these last are prisoners in Germany. It was
supposed to be immensely strong and considerably feared by the Germans.
There are many stories about its fall which may or may not be true. Some
people say that the garrison only lost four or five killed and wounded,
that right at the beginning of the attack it was found that the
telephone communication with Toul had been cut off, and even that its
guns were never fired at all. But in any case it is certain that the
garrison of nine hundred men surrendered on August 28th after a two
days’ bombardment, probably carried out by two Austrian 305’s stationed
on the frontier at Avricourt, and that it was loudly whispered and
widely believed that there was something queer about the matter. Since
Longwy was able to hold out for three weeks there cannot, I am afraid,
be much doubt that there was something curious about the surrender of
its stronger sister-fort, which was swept out of the way of the German
advance like a sand-castle by the waves of the sea.
After the Battle of the Grand Couronné the army of the Crown Prince of
Bavaria occupied a front extending to the north-west from the frontier
opposite Lunéville, past Pont-à-Mousson and Thiaucourt in the direction
of Verdun, stopping some distance short of the point at which the left
of the Crown Prince of Prussia’s army began. The left wing, as far as
Thiaucourt, was kept busy in preventing the French from advancing on
Saarburg and Metz; the right, reinforced by part of the Metz army, began
at this time a determined forward movement across the plain of the
Woevre to the wooded Hauts de Meuse. They had two objects in view: to
break through the line of the fortresses between Verdun and Toul, and to
cross the river and join hands with the right wing of the Crown Prince’s
army so as to encircle Verdun.
The fortress of Toul is almost exactly half-way between Epinal and
Verdun, about forty miles from each. In the lower stretch of country,
the Trouée de Charmes, which had been so gallantly defended by the 75’s
and Chasseurs-à-pied of the First Army, there are no forts. Between Toul
and Verdun the French position was much stronger. East of the Meuse the
Hauts de Meuse slope gradually down to the river, broken at intervals by
a series of deep and precipitous ravines, guarded by numerous forts,
ancient and modern. On the north the district is bounded by the
Verdun-Metz railway, below which is the plain of the Woevre, and on the
south by the quick-flowing Rupt de Mad, which runs from near Commercy on
the Meuse north-east past Thiaucourt to Arnaville, where it falls into
the Moselle close to Metz. The chain of forts extends all along the
Meuse, on both sides of the stream. South of the Rupt de Mad, between
Commercy and the Moselle (which here takes a sharp bend north-east from
Toul, almost parallel to the Rupt de Mad, till it is joined at Frouard
by the Meurthe) the forts of Liouville, Gironville, Jouy, Lucey, Bruley,
and St. Michel, point their guns to the east and north, towards the
German frontier. Lower down, on the right bank of the river, the guns of
the Camp des Romains, a little south of St. Mihiel, like those of Forts
Genicourt and Troyon to the north of the town, command much of the
surrounding country and are ready to dispute (or rather were ready to
dispute) the passage of the river, and still further north are the
southern defences of Verdun, facing up the channel of the stream, on the
further or left bank of which the Fort des Paroches, close to St.
Mihiel, looks across the river to the east.
[Illustration:
Libert-Fernand, Nancy, phot.
REMEREVILLE—MEURTHE ET MOSELLE.
]
[Illustration:
Libert-Fernand, Nancy, phot.
CHÂTEAU DE HARAUCOURT—MEURTHE ET MOSELLE.
]
The real grand attack on this formidable position began about September
19th, I suppose when there were enough forces available. But before that
there was a determined assault on Fort Troyon—once again on September
8th, the date which was to have been pregnant with such glorious
possibilities for the Kaiser, the day of the most furious attack in
front of Nancy, the last day before the Germans began their retreat from
the Marne. It is worth going back to, for the defence of Troyon during
both of the two bombardments which it suffered was one of the most
gallant stands of the campaign. Earlier still the Crown Prince had tried
to bombard it in a feeble sort of way, but apparently without much
effect, for on September 8th, after the attack from the east had begun,
an officer of the garrison wrote to his wife, “Nous avons été
tranquilles pendant trente-sept jours,” that is to say, from the
beginning of the war.
Even the day before, so peaceful was the tranquillity, this same officer
had been out partridge-shooting. It looks as if it might be a fairly
good partridge country, though to English eyes there is rather a lack of
cover. The fort stands fairly high, and far off to the south, across the
bare sweep of the down-like grass and stubbles, you can see higher still
the jagged outline of the Camp des Romains, silhouetted against the sky
like the sand dunes at Sandwich on a slightly larger scale. (At that
time, of course, the Camp des Romains was still in the hands of the
French.) Troyon itself is not very large. Outside it looks the most
innocent thing in the world—a more or less quadrangular collection of
rounded gravel banks, thickly covered with grass. Inside there are—or
were—deep wide ramparts and ditches and vaults and walls of earth and
solid masonry and iron—and the guns (155’s) and the steel cupolas.
On the evening of the 7th the garrison received news that a strong
column coming from the direction of Metz (through the gap between the
French Second and Third and the German Fifth and Sixth Armies) had
reached Mouilly and St. Remy in the Hauts de Meuse, a little way south
of Les Eparges, and five miles north-east of Troyon, and the next
morning they were at Seuzey, nearly due east of the fort and only three
miles away. At eight o’clock the bombardment began, and by eleven the
German siege-mortars of 150 millimetres, concealed in deep ravines where
the French gunners could not get at them, had dropped one hundred and
eighty shells into the fort, which, though they only killed one man and
wounded four, had knocked out seven of the French guns. The garrison
were clearly in a bad position. All the French troops which had been on
that side of the Meuse had crossed the river to join the final stages of
the Battle of the Marne, so that they could count on no immediate
support, though they knew that a division of cavalry and a regiment of
artillery had left Toul early that morning. But there was no chance of
their arriving till next day. The Governor of Verdun telephoned soon
after the bombardment began to tell them that the success of the big
battle on the other side of the river depended on their holding out for
forty-eight hours; the commandant replied that they would—and prayed
that the gun cupolas might not be smashed. Then Verdun telephoned again
to say that they were sending an aeroplane to spot the enemy’s gun
positions for them, but as they could not show themselves on the
parapets that was cold comfort. At three, by which time four hundred
shells had fallen, there was a short breathing space of comparative
quiet, and they were able to take stock of the extensive damage done by
the shells, of which, fortunately, about one in four failed to burst.
Then came a third message to say that if the worst came to the worst the
men were to take shelter in the ammunition cellars, but that the fall of
the fort would be a grave disaster, and, in fact, that they positively
must hold out for the success of the operations across the Meuse.
From half-past four in the afternoon to half-past seven there was
another storm of shells, and then again a lull, and more stock-taking.
Even though the vaulted shelters in the fort are immensely solid, the
casualties were surprisingly light. Only eight more men had been
wounded, so that the total number of deaths caused by four hundred
shells was only one. There had been many hair-breadth escapes, but
though the defences were crumbling to pieces before their eyes—when they
could see for the blinding clouds of black smoke which hung about for
two or three minutes after each explosion—so far they were not
hopelessly broken in. In the bombardment of modern forts that is the
principal factor—since on their standing depends the lives of the
gunners—that and the resisting powers of the gun embrasures and cupolas,
which cannot, however, last for ever. Their destruction is only a matter
of time.
With that prospect in front of them, and also the practical certainty of
a night attack, perhaps by infantry as well, the garrison were quite
remarkably calm and resolute. Some of them even managed to snatch an
hour or two of sleep, and all were thirsty enough to drink, though only
one or two were able to eat anything.
During the night a brisk fusillade every twenty minutes or half-hour up
to three o’clock was all that they had to put up with, except for
several false alarms raised by the sentries of imaginary enemies trying
to cross the barbed-wire protections, which kept everybody’s nerves on
edge. The besiegers had evidently concluded that the fort was not yet
sufficiently broken up to make an infantry attack feasible. So at about
five, just after the fort of Les Paroches had rung up to say that they
could do nothing to help them, as their guns could not reach the German
positions, the 150’s began again, and one of the first shots hit an
ammunition store and exploded about twenty 90-millimetre shrapnel
shells. Then came another message (they must have found the telephone
rather a comfort in their isolated position), this time from Commercy,
to say that the 2nd Cavalry Division from Toul was well on the way to
relieve them, and had reached Buxerulles on the Commercy-Fresne road,
north-east of St. Mihiel, hardly more than twelve miles off. But it was
not till well on in the night, nearly twenty-four hours later, that the
Toul division at last arrived, and before that time the garrison had
gone through a still more severe bombardment.
The day began with a white flag incident, or rather with the appearance
of two German cavalrymen accompanied by a bugler, and carrying a large
flag of truce. The commandant went forward to speak to them—they had
stopped thirty yards the other side of the wire entanglements—and three
times they summoned him to surrender the fort. To the first summons he
answered simply, “Never”; to the second, “France has given me charge of
the fort and I will blow it up sooner than surrender it”; and to the
last, “F.... moi le camp, je vous ai assez vus ... A bientôt, à Metz!”
So that was the end of them and their mission.
Up to now the guns bombarding them, as far as the garrison could make
out, consisted of a battery of 150’s at the edge of the wood of
Lamorville, about five miles to the east of the fort, and a field
battery of 77’s, posted between one and two miles away on the reverse
side of Hill 259, called La Gouffière. There were also some infantry
engaged in digging trenches on the Signal of Troyon, close by, where the
commandant had shot his partridges on the 7th. (On the 8th, in one of
the lulls in the bombardment, he had two shots himself with 90 shrapnel
at the men on his partridge ground, and rather spoilt their excavating
work, but then the 150’s began again.) On the second day, after the
white flag and its bearers had taken their departure, the bombardment
began again, with greatly increased severity, as the enemy had now
brought up some 280’s and 305’s, but in spite of the extraordinary havoc
which they produced the plucky garrison still continued to serve their
guns as best they could without any thought of surrender. When night
fell there was another alarm of an infantry attack. This time there was
no doubt about it. They could make out a black mass of men advancing
towards the south cupola of the fort, and some of them were already busy
cutting the barbed wire in front of it. The commandant, whose diary of
the siege I have followed in this account, got his men together, ordered
most of them under cover, and then opened fire on the swarm of
assailants with machine-guns. That was too much for the Germans, and
they broke and fled, leaving the ground strewn with their dead and
wounded. Still later in the night he was knocked over and wounded in
several places by fragments of a 305 shell which fell only a yard behind
him. But as soon as his wounds were dressed he was up again, commanding
and encouraging his men, and still the fort held out through the dark
night, continually lit by the explosion of the bursting shells. And
then, at last, the division from Toul arrived (I presume that the
cavalry had had to wait at Buxerulles for the slower troops who were
following them), the enemy were forced to abandon the bombardment not a
moment too soon, and the commandant was carried off to hospital at
Verdun (where he received the Croix de Guerre), but not before he had
left fluttering on the crumbling parapet the flag of France. On the next
day, and the next, and the next, further fierce onslaughts on the fort
by large numbers of Germans were driven back with great slaughter by the
garrison, strongly reinforced by the cavalry division and a Toul battery
of 75’s, and the attack on Troyon was finally abandoned on the 13th. The
German losses in front of the fort, as the result of the five days’
fighting and a second unsuccessful attack which they made on it a week
later, were between seven and ten thousand men.
This splendid defence of Troyon was typical of what happened in several
of the Meuse forts when the enemy, on September 20th, resumed their
efforts, but with many more troops, to force their way across the Hauts
de Meuse to the river. Having reoccupied Thiaucourt, on the Rupt de Mad,
eight miles north-west of Pont-à-Mousson, they took up a position well
to the west of it, with a long front extending north and south in front
of St. Mihiel, through Heudicourt (eight miles north-east of the town)
along the Hauts de Meuse. The gap in the line of the German front
between the Fifth and Sixth Armies was now at last permanently filled
up, for the first time during the war.
From this forward position they began a systematic bombardment of
Troyon, les Paroches, the Camp des Romains, Liouville, and the other
river forts. Their base position behind this line reached from
Thiaucourt to Fresnes, on the edge of the Hauts de Meuse, seventeen
miles across the plain in the direction of Verdun, and ten miles short
of it. This position it is worth while to notice with some care, because
it forms the base of the triangle of which St. Mihiel (of which we shall
hear something) forms the apex. Its strength lay in the fact that it had
Metz, with its big supplies of stores and men, less than twenty miles
behind it, with direct railway communication; its weakness in its
exposure to flank attacks, on its right to the north by the garrison
army of Verdun, on its left by that of Toul and the left wing of de
Castelnau’s army. The driving force of the Metz supplies of men and
ammunition from the rear was strong enough to enable the centre of the
German line to push forward like the point of a wedge to St. Mihiel in
the west. But the lateral pressure of the two French forces on their
right and left flanks was also strong and compelled them, as the point
of the wedge advanced, to extend their forces on each side of it, facing
outwards in two almost opposite directions. And that was how the
original St. Mihiel triangle came to be formed, with a seventeen-mile
base from Thiaucourt to Fresnes, and two equal sides, each fourteen
miles long, from Fresnes to St. Mihiel on the north-west, and from St.
Mihiel to Thiaucourt on the south-east. Nearly parallel to this lower
side of the triangle, and five or six miles to the south of it, most of
the road from Commercy to Pont-à-Mousson, a distance of twenty-five
miles, was in the hands of the French. Their only railway ran along the
valley of the Meuse, from Commercy past St. Mihiel to Troyon, and as a
rule they were not able to use it except at night.
The Germans were better off. They commanded, to begin with, a line from
Metz along the Moselle to Arnaville, from which it turned westwards
along the Rupt de Mad to Thiaucourt. Half-way between these two places
it was joined by another line running due south from Briey, and as their
position was consolidated at least one other light railway was
constructed in the direction of St. Mihiel. There was also another
railway (a section of the Verdun-Commercy line) which runs south from
Fresnes along the east edge of the Hauts de Meuse to Heudicourt,
half-way between St. Mihiel and Thiaucourt, part of which was available
for German traffic, besides a fairly large supply of level roads all
through the district, and of these various facilities for transport they
made excellent use.
In the plain of the Woevre behind the Fresnes-Heudicourt line everything
worked with the precision of a huge machine. During and after the
bombardment of the river forts the scene was more like the surroundings
of an immense centre of industrial activity than the ordinary conception
of a battlefield. From their emplacements between the infantry lines
German and Austrian field-guns and siege artillery pounded away
incessantly at the forts with 8¼-inch, 12-inch, and even 16½-inch
shells. Observation balloons and occasional aeroplanes swayed and
hovered over the lines, and ragged fan-shaped columns of brown or white
smoke shot up into the air here and there as the charges of high
explosives and shrapnel from French or German guns fell and burst. But
apart from these inevitable and unconcealable signs of battle—noise and
pillars of smoke by day, noise and flashes of flame by night—all the
machinery of the fighting was hidden underground, and as far as eye
could see the plain looked unpeopled and deserted. Only in the rear the
supply trains constantly rolling up from the German base and the
methodical work of the men loading and firing the guns and recording the
effect of the shots, like shifts of artisans labouring round the
furnaces of a gigantic mill, spoke of life and energy. But in appearance
it was always the creative energy of a busy manufacturing district
rather than the destructive energy of war.
Inside the forts, the direct object for the time being of all this
system and activity, there were no illusions of this kind, nothing but
grim reality and red ruin. Troyon was hotly bombarded for the second
time till it had only four guns left capable of firing a shot, and still
the plucky garrison refused either to retire or surrender. The storm of
high explosives had only done part of its work. It had reduced Troyon
and Les Paroches and Liouville and some of the other forts to a
shapeless melancholy desolation of crumbling mounds and yawning pits,
littered with tons of rusty steel and shattered blocks of scattered
masonry and concrete, till they looked like discarded gravel-pits half
buried under scrap-heaps of iron waste. But, though their existence as
forts was at an end, the remains of them, with one exception, were still
in the hands of the French, protected no longer by their bastions and
the guns in their dismantled cupolas, but by the rifles of the men in
the trenches, the real flesh and blood rampart of the Republic.
Unfortunately, the one fort in which the enemy did set foot—the Camp des
Romains—was the most important of them all. It lies on a ridge nine
hundred feet high, barely a mile to the south of St. Mihiel, and
therefore at the apex of the triangular position occupied by the
opposing lines of trenches, and commands the whole of the surrounding
country except parts of the loops of the river immediately to the west
and north of it. Its capture, after a heroic resistance on the part of
the garrison, was finally brought about by the occupation of St. Mihiel
by the army of Metz.
Why that occupation—a particularly disastrous blow for our Allies—was
effected as easily as it was, it is not easy to understand. St. Mihiel,
or at least the Camp des Romains, was the crucial point of the Meuse
position. It was by this time quite obvious that the main object of the
Germans was almost at any cost to break through the fortress barrier and
cross the river so as to effect a junction with the Crown Prince’s army,
which now occupied a position in the Argonne between the Aire and the
Aisne, to the west of Verdun, extending eastwards to the north of that
fortress. If this scheme had succeeded it would have had the double
effect of completing the investment of Verdun with a ring instead of
only a horse-shoe of hostile armies, and at the same time of relieving
the pressure brought to bear on the Crown Prince’s army by the French
troops in the Argonne between St. Ménéhould and Clermont. It might even
have compelled these and the armies on their left to retire once more in
the direction of the Marne. Consequently it was of vital importance for
the French to concentrate every man they could spare at the point where
the German thrust was likely to be most vigorous, and to hold on to St.
Mihiel and the Camp des Romains like grim death.
Left to itself, the garrison could do next to nothing. It could account,
and did account, for a large number of the enemy in front of its earthen
ramparts. But sooner or later its doom was certain. Its fall was only a
question of days, or even of hours. Like all fixed forts, ancient or
modern, exposed to the fire of modern siege artillery, it was, in
itself, about as impregnable as an umbrella. It lay on the extreme left
of the French fine from the Meuse to Pont-à-Mousson. To the north it was
protected to a certain extent by St. Mihiel, supposing that St. Mihiel
contained any troops. But its real defences, on which the French had
spent a considerable sum of money before the war, consisted of a large
number of trenches, strengthened with concrete, some miles in advance of
it on the farther side of the Hauts de Meuse, between Les Eparges and
Thiaucourt. They occupied, that is to say, practically the whole of the
space which I have spoken of as the gap in the lines of the armies, and
which was partly accounted for by the fact that as the German Fifth Army
inclined slightly westwards, to keep in touch with the others which had
Paris as their principal objective, the French Third Army was to a
certain extent obliged to follow it, besides which for the time being
the French Second and the German Sixth Army were too much occupied with
their own affairs round Nancy to be able to extend very far in the
direction of Verdun. But the carefully prepared trenches were there all
the time, and, as far as it is possible to judge without knowing all the
circumstances, might and should have been held almost indefinitely,
instead of which the chief purpose they seem to have served was to act
as a shelter for the advancing Germans. By some further mischance or
miscalculation, at this particularly critical moment, two or three days
after the Germans had begun the general bombardment of the river forts,
St. Mihiel was suddenly left almost wholly denuded of troops, with the
result that on August 24th the enemy’s advance-guard walked into it
practically unopposed.
There are two or three possible explanations of the way in which this
regrettable mistake was brought about, in all of which there is probably
a certain amount of truth. The French may have made up their minds that
the enemy had for the moment given up the idea of making a determined
effort to cross the river. Or they may have still clung to the mistaken
belief that the fort on the height, chosen centuries ago by the Romans
as the most commanding strategic position of the district, was strong
enough to defend itself and look after the river as well. Or, thirdly,
they may have concluded that they had no choice in the matter, and that
the pressure nearer Metz, on the right flank of their line forming the
south side of the St. Mihiel triangle, was for the moment more dangerous
than that on their left, and that it was safe to move part of their
force on the Meuse across to the Moselle.
That, at all events, is what they did, on or near September 22nd. The
line in the south of the Woevre had already been considerably thinned by
the despatch of a certain number of troops westwards across the Meuse to
strengthen the right wing of the army in the Argonne during the Battle
of the Marne and the operations which followed it. The effect of the
removal of several additional battalions in the opposite direction, to
the north of Nancy (where they found that their presence was urgently
needed) was that St. Mihiel and the Camp des Romains were left almost
isolated, with practically no soldiers at all to guard the town.
The news was quickly carried to the enemy (not by journalists, since
there were none anywhere near, but by the spies who were particularly
thickly planted in that district of France) and while the French troops
which had moved eastwards were engaged to the north of Nancy, and the
Toul force from the south was pushing back the main body of the XIVth
German Army Corps in the direction of the Rupt de Mad, the extreme right
of the Army of Metz, as the result of a bold flank-march along the left
or north bank of the Mad, were able to advance nearly as far as St.
Mihiel.
The presence of their advance-guard was first observed on the 23rd by a
small patrol of French dragoons, who were attacked by a company of
German infantry lying in ambush in a little wood by the side of the road
about a mile from the town, and fell back on St. Mihiel after a slight
skirmish. The news of the approach of the enemy created a panic in the
town, and a large number of the inhabitants fled in the direction of
Commercy. Next morning a squadron of Uhlans rode in and took possession
of the place, cutting the telegraph and telephone wires, and carrying
off as “hostages” some forty of the inhabitants, who must have bitterly
regretted not having joined in the general exodus of the day before.
(Three months later M. Lamure received a letter on the subject of these
hostages from a sergeant attached to the Bureau de Police of one of the
eastern armies, who was anxious about some relations of his who were
among them, as nothing was known up till then of their fate. He was a
stranger to us, but he had heard of our existence, and had a pathetic
though gratifying belief that the correspondents of _The Times_ might be
able to give him the information which his own intelligence office could
not.)
The Uhlans were followed, some hours later, by the main body of the
German army, which turned off from the Vigneulles-St. Mihiel road
somewhere near Chaillon and made its appearance on the Meuse to the
north of St. Mihiel at a point where by the natural lie of the ground
and the intervening hills it was protected from the fire of the guns
both of Les Paroches and the Camp des Romains, which were in any case
busy fighting their own battles.
The Germans, or at least a part of them, had now penetrated as far as
the line which it had been the object of all their forces operating on
the eastern frontier to reach. Their first appearance on the Meuse,
which the other armies had crossed lower down to the north of Verdun
weeks before, should have been one of the dramatic moments of the war.
It had, however, been brought about so tamely and with so little
opposition at the last moment that it rather lost that character, and it
was not till an attempt to cross the river was made that the position
became really exciting. It was still about as unfavourable as it could
be for the French. Only a single battalion of Territorials, with no guns
and even no mitrailleuses, guarded the river at that point, against a
line of probably ten times their own number. The bridges had been
hastily destroyed as the enemy advanced, and from the left bank the
Territorials did their best to keep them from crossing the river, and
during the night of the 25th, by the light of their one searchlight,
successfully dealt with the persistent efforts of the German engineers
to build a pontoon-bridge. But the next morning the enemy opened fire on
them with some heavy batteries which they had brought up from
Thiaucourt, and, as the heights of the river prevented the guns in the
Camp des Romains from giving them any help, the Territorials were forced
to retire under a hot fire, picking up and carrying with them their
killed and wounded.
By midday the Germans were across the river, marching in the direction
of the valley of the Aire, a tributary of the Aisne, between it and the
Meuse, with the object of crossing it to attack General Sarrail in the
Forest of the Argonne. The position was critical, and for the French
airmen, who could see what was happening and gave due warning in
different directions, must have been intensely interesting. There seemed
a good chance that the Germans might really carry out the complete
investment of Verdun, which their newspapers had already announced as an
accomplished fact, and join hands at last with the army of the Crown
Prince. Driven northwards by General Sarrail after the Battle of the
Marne, past St. Menehould on the Aisne and Clermont on the Aire, left
and right of the Forest of the Argonne, that army, which consisted of
the XVIth, XVIIIth, and XXIst Army Corps, now occupied a position
extending from Varennes (also on the Aire and the east side of the
forest) eastwards in a flattened arc rather less than a semicircle which
passed about ten miles north of Verdun and then curved down to the east
of it in the direction of Fresnes. Opposite to the Crown Prince across
the forest from the Aisne towards the Meuse was General Sarrail with the
VIth and VIIIth Army Corps. Behind him, falling back from the Meuse on
his protection, was the Territorial battalion, which during the night
had prevented the Metz army from crossing the river below St. Mihiel,
and behind them again, hot on their heels, the pursuing Germans, with a
body of cavalry, detached by General Sarrail to head them off, advancing
to meet them, and, though at a considerable distance, another French
force, the XXth Army Corps, hurrying as fast as they could from the
Moselle to overtake them from behind. Meanwhile, the Toul garrison army,
which had advanced from the fortress, was keeping up the lateral
pressure on the stationary German force along the Rupt de Mad.
In contrast with the state of comparative immobility to which the
campaign was shortly afterwards reduced, the manœuvres of the two
forces were for the moment particularly lively. Looked at as a war game
played on a chess-board, the position was more or less as follows: The
French (White) had moved most of their pieces of value up towards the
top left-hand corner of the board, where they had the Germans (Black)
pretty well penned in front of them along the two back rows. Black,
however, was still able to threaten an attack on White’s King (Verdun)
at about the centre of their fourth row, though it was defended by a few
white pawns (its garrison army). Two rows lower down in the centre a
black castle (the Metz army at St. Mihiel) was only prevented from
checking White’s King by some white pawns (the southern forts of Verdun)
and, at the same time, threatened a move across the board to the left in
order to get behind the main mass of White’s pieces. To remove this
danger, and to guard a pawn (the Territorial battalion) to the left of
Black’s castle, White moved back one of his knights (Sarrail’s cavalry)
from the left-hand top corner, moved up one of his castles (the Toul
garrison force) from his back row, and brought across his Queen (the
XXth Army Corps) from the lower right-hand corner of the board, where it
had been trying to check Black’s King (Metz). As the result of these
three moves he was able to force Black’s castle back to its original
position near the centre of the board.
When the news of the occupation of St. Mihiel reached Lorraine the XXth
Army Corps, which had barely finished its work there of checking a
German advance from the direction of Metz, were at once ordered back to
the Meuse, and the advanced guard of their cavalry by a forced night
march managed to cross it at Lérouville just below Commercy, only five
hours behind the German army, and got in touch with them shortly
afterwards in the valley of the Aire. The dragoons at once engaged them
with machine-guns, and held them till first the artillery and then the
infantry of the corps came up and the battle became general. The Metz
force made three separate attacks on the position which the French had
taken up on the heights of the Aire, but were repulsed each time with
heavy losses, and during the night they fell back on the Meuse, still,
however, retaining a footing on the left bank of the river in the
western suburb of St. Mihiel and the barracks of Chauvoncourt. After
their battle of the day before in Lorraine the forced night march of the
XXth Corps and their successful engagement on the Heights of the Aire
were a magnificent performance, which had the satisfactory effect of
putting an end to the bold effort of the right wing of the Metz army to
effect the longed-for junction with the Crown Prince. What it
unfortunately did not do was to relieve St. Mihiel. As soon as the
Germans got back there they proceeded to entrench themselves strongly,
and from a position near the town began to bombard the French forts in
the Camp des Romains with their Austrian mammoths.
Concerning this artillery position M. Lamure was told an instructive
little story on one of the rather adventurous expeditions which he made
to the neighbourhood of St. Mihiel some weeks after the German
occupation had begun. So many stories of the same kind (including one, I
believe, about a tennis-court at Tooting) were published in the first
part of the war that one became rather shy of believing them, but I have
my reasons for thinking that this one is probably true. Anyhow, here it
is.
Two years before the war a German company, formed for the manufacture of
chemical produce, rented a large plot of ground close to St. Mihiel for
a term of thirty years. It was a big company and it had need of big
buildings with solid foundations. So a floor about two hundred and fifty
feet long by thirty wide was laid down in reinforced concrete. Then the
company, after announcing that its money had come to an end, and that it
could not proceed to put up the proposed buildings, was dissolved. But
the plot of ground and the concrete floor, which, before the workmen
left, was tidily covered up with a loose coating of earth, still
belonged to it. When the army of Metz arrived on the scene some one had
the curiosity or the intelligence to inquire what might be hidden under
this covering of earth, which was accordingly removed. And there, by the
greatest good luck in the world, they discovered not only the concrete
floor, but a number of holes in it which proved to be admirably adapted
for emplacements for the Austrian guns.
On the whole, I am inclined to back the story of the St. Mihiel concrete
floor against the Tooting tennis-court, though in any case it would only
add one more to the long list of undoubted cases in which German
settlers were planted in the Woevre district in order to render valuable
services to the Fatherland either before or during the war. The main
point is that from some position near St. Mihiel, whether prepared
beforehand or not, the big Austrian howitzers in a very short time
silenced the guns and smashed up the turrets and bastions of the Camp
des Romains fort, until at last the plucky garrison had no guns left to
shoot with, and were finally smoked out after trenches had been pushed
up close to the fort. When the asphyxiated survivors had recovered
enough to march out the Germans presented arms in recognition of the
fine courage they had shown in the defence, and though they were
naturally made prisoners the officers were allowed to keep their swords.
The destruction of Troyon, les Paroches, and the Camp des Romains was
followed, a day or two later, by that of Liouville, where the damage
done was particularly extensive. The holes ploughed by the big shells
were the largest I have seen, and for acres round the fort almost every
square yard of ground is littered with scraps of shell casing and rusty
iron.
As for the Camp des Romains, it was so badly hammered that the Germans
could not use it, even when they had taken it, and were obliged to
construct a new fort close to it. From that time all the subsequent
efforts of the French to dislodge them have been unavailing. Although
with St. Mihiel it is the only point which they have captured in the
line of the river forts between Toul and Verdun, and although since the
end of September, 1914, they have never advanced one foot beyond it, its
possession has been extremely useful to them, and a nasty thorn in the
side of the French. For though in position the Camp des Romains fort is
only the apex of the St. Mihiel triangle, it is in effect its base and
sides and area, since, without it, the triangle would not exist.