point in all the Lorraine front, the southeast corner of the Grand
Couronne, as St. Genevieve is the northern. Here, from a hill some
1,300 feet high, one looks eastward into the Promised Land of
France--into German Lorraine. In the early days of August the great
French invasion, resting one flank upon this hill, the other upon the
distant Vosges, had stepped over the frontier. One could trace its
route to the distant hills among which it had found disaster. In these
hills the Germans had hidden their heavy guns, and the French, coming
under their fire without warning, unsupported by heavy artillery,
which was lacking to them, had broken. Then the German invasion had
rolled back. You could follow the route. In the foreground the little
Seille River could be discerned; it marked the old frontier. Across
this had come the defeated troops. They had swarmed down the low, bare
hills; they had crossed and vanished in the woods just at my feet;
these woods were the Forest of Champenoux. Into this forest the
Germans had followed by the thousand, they were astride the main road
to Nancy, which rolled white and straight at my feet. But in the woods
the French rallied. For days there was fought in this stretch of trees
one of the most terrible of battles.
As I stood on the Grand Mont I faced almost due east. In front of me
and to the south extended the forest. Exactly at my feet the forest
reached up the hill and there was a little cluster of buildings about
a fountain. All was in ruins, and here, exactly here, was the high
water mark of the German advance. They had occupied the ruins for a
few moments and then had been driven out. Elsewhere they had never
emerged from the woods; they had approached the western shore, but the
French had met them with machine guns and "seventy-fives." The brown
woods at my feet were nothing but a vast cemetery; thousands of French
and German soldiers slept there.
In their turn the Germans had gone back. Now, in the same woods, a
French battery was shelling the Germans on the other side of the
Seille. Under the glass I studied the little villages unfolding as on
a map; they were all destroyed, but it was impossible to recognize
this. Some were French, some German; you could follow the line, but
there were no trenches; behind them French shells were bursting
occasionally and black smoke rose just above the ground. Thousands of
men faced each other less than four miles from where I stood, but all
that there was to be detected were the shell bursts; otherwise one saw
a pleasant country, rolling hills, mostly without woods, bare in the
spring, which had not yet come to turn them green. In the foreground
ran that arbitrary line Bismarck had drawn between Frenchmen forty-six
years before--the frontier--but of natural separation there was none.
He had cut off a part of France, that was all, and one looked upon
what had been and was still a bleeding wound.
I asked the French commandant about the various descriptions made by
those who have written about the war. They have described the German
attack as mounting the slope of the Grand Mont, where we stood. He
took me to the edge and pointed down. It was a cliff almost as steep
as the Palisades. "C'est une blague," he smiled. "Just a story." The
Germans had not charged here, but in the forest below, where the Nancy
road passed through and enters the valley of the Amezeule. They had
not tried to carry but to turn the Grand Mont. More than 200,000 men
had fought for days in the valley below. I asked him about the legend
of the Kaiser, sitting on a hill, waiting in white uniform with his
famous escort, waiting until the road was clear for his triumphal
entrance into the capital of Lorraine. He laughed. I might choose my
hill; if the Emperor had done this thing the hill was "over there,"
but had he? They are hard on legends at the front, and the tales that
delight Paris die easily on the frontiers of war.
But since I had asked so much about the fighting my commandant
promised to take me in the afternoon to the point where the struggle
had been fiercest, still farther to the south, where all the hills
break down and there is a natural gateway from Germany into France,
the beginning of the famous Charmes Gap, through which the German road
to Paris from the east ran, and still runs. Leaving Nancy behind us,
and ascending the Meurthe valley on the eastern bank, turning out of
it before Saint Nicholas du Port, we came presently to the most
completely war-swept fields that I have ever seen. On a perfectly
level plain the little town of Haraucourt stands in sombre ruins. Its
houses are nothing but ashes and rubble. Go out of the village toward
the east and you enter fields pockmarked by shell fire. For several
miles you can walk from shell hole to shell hole. The whole country is
a patchwork of these shell holes. At every few rods a new line of old
trenches approaches the road and wanders away again. Barbed-wire
entanglements run up and down the gently sloping hillsides.
Presently we came out upon a perfectly level field. It was simply torn
by shell fire. Old half-filled trenches wandered aimlessly about, and
beyond, under a gentle slope, the little village of Courbessaux stood
in ruins. The commandant called my attention to a bit of woods in
front.
"The Germans had their machine guns there," said he. "We didn't know
it, and a French brigade charged across this field. It started at
8:15, and at 8:30 it had lost more than 3,000 out of 6,000. Then the
Germans came out of the woods in their turn, and our artillery, back
at Haraucourt, caught them and they lost 3,500 men in a quarter of an
hour." Along the roadside were innumerable graves. We looked at one.
It was marked: "Here 196 French." Twenty feet distant was another; it
was marked: "Here 196 Germans." In the field where we stood I was told
some 10,000 men are buried. They were buried hurriedly, and even now
when it rains arms and legs are exposed.
Two years had passed, almost two years, since this field had been
fought for. The Germans had taken it. They had approached Haraucourt,
but had not passed it. This was the centre and the most vital point in
the Lorraine battle. What Foch's troops had done about La Fere
Champenoise, those of Castelnau had done here. The German wave had
been broken, but at what cost? And now, after so many months, the
desolation of war remained. But yet it was not to endure. Beside the
very graves an old peasant was ploughing, guiding his plough and his
horses carefully among the tombs. Four miles away more trenches faced
each other and the battle went on audibly, but behind this line, in
this very field where so many had died, life was beginning.
Later we drove south, passing within the lines the Germans had held in
their great advance, we travelled through Luneville, which they had
taken and left unharmed, save as shell fire had wrecked an eastern
suburb. We visited Gerbeviller, where in an excess of rage the Germans
had burned every structure in the town. I have never seen such a
headquarters of desolation. Everything that had a shape, that had a
semblance of beauty or of use, lies in complete ruin, detached houses,
a chateau, the blocks in the village, all in ashes. Save for Sermaize,
Gerbeviller is the most completely wrecked town in France.
You enter the village over a little bridge across the tiny Mortagne.
Here some French soldiers made a stand and held off the German advance
for some hours. There was no other battle at Gerbeviller, but for this
defence the town died. Never was death so complete. Incendiary
material was placed in every house, and all that thoroughness could do
to make the destruction complete was done. Gerbeviller is dead, a few
women and children live amidst its ashes, there is a wooden barrack by
the bridge with a post-office and the inevitable postcards, but only
on postcards, picture postcards, does the town live. It will be a
place of pilgrimage when peace comes.
From Gerbeviller we went by Bayon to the Plateau of Saffais, the ridge
between the Meurthe and the Moselle, where the defeated army of
Castelnau made its last and successful stand. The French line came
south from St. Genevieve, where we had been in the morning, through
the Grand Mont, across the plain by Haraucourt and Corbessaux, then
crossed the Meurthe by Dombasle and stood on the heights from
Rossieres south. Having taken Luneville, the Germans attempted to
cross the Meurthe coming out of the Forest of Vitrimont.
Standing on the Plateau of Saffais and facing east, the whole country
unfolded again, as it did at the Grand Mont. The face of the plateau
is seamed with trenches. They follow the slopes, and the village of
Saffais stands out like a promontory. On this ridge the French had
massed three hundred cannon. Their army had come back in ruins, and to
steady it they had been compelled to draw troops from Alsace.
Muelhausen was sacrificed to save Nancy. Behind these crests on which
we stood a beaten army, almost routed, had in three days found itself
and returned to the charge.
In the shadow of the dusk I looked across the Meurthe into the brown
mass of the Forest of Vitrimont. Through this had come the victorious
Germans. They had debouched from the wood; they had approached the
river, hidden under the slope, but, swept by the hell of this
artillery storm, they had broken. But few had lived to pass the river,
none had mounted the slopes. There were almost no graves along these
trenches. Afterward the Germans had in turn yielded to pressure from
the south and gone back. Before the Battle of the Marne began the
German wave of invasion had been stopped here in the last days of
August. A second terrific drive, coincident with the Marne, had
likewise failed. Then the Germans had gone back to the frontier. The
old boundary line of Bismarck is now in many instances an actual line
of fire, and nowhere on this front are the Germans more than three or
four miles within French territory.
If you should look at the map of the wholly imaginary Battle of Nancy,
drawn by Colonel Boucher to illustrate his book, published before
1910, a book describing the problem of the defence of the eastern
frontier, you will find the lines on which the French stood at Saffais
indicated exactly. Colonel Boucher had not dreamed this battle, but
for a generation the French General Staff had planned it. Here they
had expected to meet the German thrust. When the Germans decided to go
by Belgium they had in turn taken the offensive, but, having failed,
they had fought their long-planned battle.
Out of all the region of war, of war to-day and war yesterday, one
goes back to Nancy, to its busy streets, its crowds of people
returning from their day's work. War is less than fifteen miles away,
but Nancy is as calm as London is nervous. Its bakers still make
macaroons; even Taube raids do not excuse the children from punctual
attendance at school. Nancy is calm with the calmness of all France,
but with just a touch of something more than calmness, which forty-six
years of living by an open frontier brings. Twenty-one months ago it
was the gauge of battle, and half a million men fought for it; a new
German drive may approach it at any time. Out toward the old frontier
there is still a German gun, hidden in the Forest of Bezange, which
has turned one block to ashes and may fire again at any hour.
Zeppelins have come and gone, leaving dead women and children behind
them, but Nancy goes on with to-day.
And to-morrow? In the hearts of all the people of this beautiful city
there is a single and a simple faith. Nancy turns her face toward the
ancient frontier, she looks hopefully out upon the shell-swept Grand
Couronne and beyond to the Promised Land. And the people say to you,
if you ask them about war and about peace, as one of them said to me:
"Peace will come, but not until we have our ancient frontier, not
until we have Metz and Strassburg. We have waited a long time, is it
not so?"
THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS, GARDEN CITY, NEW YORK.
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