VERDUN AND ST. MIHIEL
PARIS, January, 1916.
It is an old saying that the busiest man always seems to have the most
leisure. It is another way of complimenting him on his genius for
organization. When you visit a real man of affairs you seldom find him
surrounded by secretaries, stenographers, and a battery of telephones.
As a rule, there is nothing on his desk save a photograph of his wife
and a rose in a glass of water. Outside the headquarters of the general
there were no gendarmes, no sentries, no panting automobiles, no
mud-flecked chasseurs-a-cheval. Unchallenged the car rolled up an empty
avenue of trees and stopped beside an empty terrace of an apparently
empty chateau. At one end of the terrace was a pond, and in it floated
seven beautiful swans. They were the only living things in sight. I
thought we had stumbled upon the country home of some gentleman of
elegant leisure.
When he appeared the manner of the general assisted that impression. His
courtesy was so undisturbed, his mind so tranquil, his conversation so
entirely that of the polite host, you felt he was masquerading in the
uniform of a general only because he knew it was becoming. He glowed
with health and vigor. He had the appearance of having just come indoors
after a satisfactory round on his private golf-links. Instead, he had
been receiving reports from twenty-four different staff-officers. His
manner suggested he had no more serious responsibility than feeding
bread crumbs to the seven stately swans. Instead he was responsible for
the lives of 170,000 men and fifty miles of trenches. His duties were to
feed the men three times a day with food, and all day and night with
ammunition, to guard them against attacks from gases, burning oil,
bullets, shells; and in counter-attack to send them forward with the
bayonet across hurdles of barb-wire to distribute death. These were only
a few of his responsibilities.
[Illustration: The ruined village of Gerbeviller, destroyed after
their retreat by the Germans.
Captain Gabriel Puaux, of the General-Headquarters Staff, and Mr.
Davis.]
I knew somewhere in the chateau there must be the conning-tower from
which the general directed his armies, and after luncheon asked to be
allowed to visit it. It was filled with maps, in size enormous but rich
in tiny details, nailed on frames, pinned to the walls, spread over
vast drawing-boards. But to the visitor more marvellous than the maps
showing the French lines were those in which were set forth the German
positions, marked with the place occupied by each unit, giving the exact
situation of the German trenches, the German batteries, giving the
numerals of each regiment. With these spread before him, the general has
only to lift the hand telephone, and direct that from a spot on a map
on one wall several tons of explosive shells shall drop on a spot on
another map on the wall opposite. The general does not fight only at
long distance from a map. Each morning he visits some part of the fifty
miles of trenches. What later he sees on his map only jogs his memory.
It is a sort of shorthand note. Where to you are waving lines, dots, and
crosses, he beholds valleys, forests, miles of yellow trenches. A week
ago, during a bombardment, a brother general advanced into the first
trench. His chief of staff tugged at his cloak.
"My men like to see me here," said the general.
A shell killed him. But who can protest it was a life wasted? He made it
possible for every _poilu_ in a trench of five hundred miles to say:
"Our generals do not send us where they will not go themselves."
We left the white swans smoothing their feathers, and through rain drove
to a hill covered closely with small trees. The trees were small,
because the soil from which they drew sustenance was only one to three
feet deep. Beneath that was chalk. Through these woods was cut a runway
for a toy railroad. It possessed the narrowest of narrow gauges, and its
rolling-stock consisted of flat cars three feet wide, drawn by splendid
Percherons. The live stock, the rolling-stock, the tracks, and the trees
on either side of the tracks were entirely covered with white clay. Even
the brakemen and the locomotive-engineer who walked in advance of the
horses were completely painted with it. And before we got out of the
woods, so were the passengers. This railroad feeds the trenches,
carrying to them water and ammunition, and to the kitchens in the rear
uncooked food.
The French marquis who escorted "Mon Capitaine" of the Grand Quartier
General des Armees, who was my "guide philosopher and friend," to the
trenches either had built this railroad, or owned a controlling interest
in it, for he always spoke of it proudly as "my express," "my special
train," "my petite vitesse." He had lately been in America buying
cavalry horses.
[Illustration: _From a photograph, copyright by Medem Photo Service._
"Through these woods ran a toy railroad."
This picture shows President Poincare on the toy railroad en route to
the trenches.]
As for years he has owned one of the famous racing stables in France,
his knowledge of them is exceptional.
When last I had seen him he was in silk, on one of his own
thoroughbreds, and the crowd, or that part of it that had backed his
horse, was applauding, and, while he waited for permission to dismount,
he was smiling and laughing. Yesterday, when the plough horses pulled
his express-train off the rails, he descended and pushed it back, and,
in consequence, was splashed, not by the mud of the race-track but of
the trenches. Nor in the misty, dripping, rain-soaked forest was there
any one to applaud. But he was still laughing, even more happily.
The trenches were dug around what had been a chalk mine, and it was
difficult to tell where the mining for profit had stopped and the
excavations for defense began. When you can see only chalk at your feet,
and chalk on either hand, and overhead the empty sky, this ignorance may
be excused. In the boyaux, which began where the railroad stopped, that
was our position. We walked through an endless grave with walls of clay,
on top of which was a scant foot of earth. It looked like a layer of
chocolate on the top of a cake.
In some places, underfoot was a corduroy path of sticks, like the false
bottom of a rowboat; in others, we splashed through open sluices of clay
and rain-water. You slid and skidded, and to hold yourself erect pressed
with each hand against the wet walls of the endless grave.
We came out upon the "hauts de Meuse." They are called also the "Shores
of Lorraine," because to that province, as are the cliffs of Dover to
the county of Kent, they form a natural barrier. We were in the quarry
that had been cut into the top of the heights on the side that now faces
other heights held by the enemy. Behind us rose a sheer wall of chalk as
high as a five-story building. The face of it had been pounded by
shells. It was as undismayed as the whitewashed wall of a schoolroom at
which generations of small boys have flung impertinent spit-balls. At
the edge of the quarry the floor was dug deeper, leaving a wall between
it and the enemy, and behind this wall were the posts of observation,
the nests of the machine-guns, the raised step to which the men spring
when repulsing an attack. Below and back of them were the shelters into
which, during a bombardment, they disappear. They were roofed with great
beams, on top of which were bags of cement piled three and four yards
high.
Not on account of the sleet and fog, but in spite of them, the aspect of
the place was grim and forbidding. You did not see, as at some of the
other fronts, on the sign-boards that guide the men through the maze,
jokes and nicknames. The mess-huts and sleeping-caves bore no such
ironic titles as the Petit Cafe, the Anti-Boche, Chez Maxim. They were
designated only by numerals, businesslike and brief. It was no place
for humor. The monuments to the dead were too much in evidence. On every
front the men rise and lie down with death, but on no other front had I
found them living so close to the graves of their former comrades. Where
a man had fallen, there had he been buried, and on every hand you saw
between the chalk huts, at the mouths of the pits or raised high in a
niche, a pile of stones, a cross, and a soldier's cap. Where one officer
had fallen his men had built to his memory a mausoleum. It is also a
shelter into which, when the shells come, they dive for safety. So that
even in death he protects them.
I was invited into a post of observation, and told to make my entrance
quickly. In order to exist, a post of observation must continue to look
to the enemy only like part of the wall of earth that faces him. If
through its apparently solid front there flashes, even for an instant, a
ray of sunlight, he knows that the ray comes through a peep-hole, and
that behind the peep-hole men with field-glasses are watching him. And
with his shells he hammers the post of observation into a shambles.
Accordingly, when you enter one, it is etiquette not to keep the door
open any longer than is necessary to squeeze past it. As a rule, the
door is a curtain of sacking, but hands and bodies coated with clay, by
brushing against it, have made it quite opaque.
The post was as small as a chart-room, and the light came only through
the peep-holes. You got a glimpse of a rack of rifles, of shadowy
figures that made way for you, and of your captain speaking in a
whisper. When you put your eyes to the peep-hole it was like looking at
a photograph through a stereoscope. But, instead of seeing the lake of
Geneva, the Houses of Parliament, or Niagara Falls, you looked across a
rain-driven valley of mud, on the opposite side of which was a hill.
Here the reader kindly will imagine a page of printed matter devoted to
that hill. It was an extremely interesting hill, but my captain, who
also is my censor, decides that what I wrote was too interesting,
especially to Germans. So the hill is "strafed." He says I can begin
again vaguely with "Over there."
"Over there," said his voice in the darkness, "is St. Mihiel."
For more than a year you had read of St. Mihiel. Communiques, maps,
illustrations had made it famous and familiar. It was the town that gave
a name to the German salient, to the point thrust in advance of what
should be his front. You expected to see an isolated hill, a promontory,
some position of such strategic value as would explain why for St.
Mihiel the lives of thousands of Germans had been thrown upon the board.
But except for the obstinacy of the German mind, or, upon the part of
the Crown Prince the lack of it, I could find no explanation. Why the
German wants to hold St. Mihiel, why he ever tried to hold it, why if
it so pleases him he should not continue to hold it until his whole line
is driven across the border, is difficult to understand. For him it is
certainly an expensive position. It lengthens his lines of communication
and increases his need of transport. It eats up men, eats up rations,
eats up priceless ammunition, and it leads to nowhere, enfilades no
position, threatens no one. It is like an ill-mannered boy sticking out
his tongue. And as ineffective.
The physical aspect of St. Mihiel is a broad sweep of meadow-land cut in
half by the Meuse flooding her banks; and the shattered houses of the
Ferme Mont Meuse, which now form the point of the salient. At this place
the opposing trenches are only a hundred yards apart, and all of this
low ground is commanded by the French guns on the heights of Les
Paroches. On the day of our visit they were being heavily bombarded. On
each side of the salient are the French. Across the battle-ground of
St. Mihiel I could see their trenches facing those in which we stood.
For, at St. Mihiel, instead of having the line of the enemy only in
front, the lines face the German, and surround him on both flanks.
Speaking not as a military strategist but merely as a partisan, if any
German commander wants that kind of a position I would certainly make
him a present of it.
[Illustration: _From a photograph, copyright by Underwood and
Underwood._
A first-line trench outside of Verdun.
The trench enfilades the valley beyond, and the valley is covered with
barbed-wire and gun-pits.]
The colonel who commanded the trenches possessed an enthusiasm that was
beautiful to see. He was as proud of his chalk quarry as an admiral of
his first dreadnaught. He was as isolated as though cast upon a rock in
mid-ocean. Behind him was the dripping forest, in front the mud valley
filled with floating fogs. At his feet in the chalk floor the shells
had gouged out holes as deep as rain-barrels. Other shells were liable
at any moment to gouge out more holes. Three days before, when Prince
Arthur of Connaught had come to tea, a shell had hit outside the
colonel's private cave, and smashed all the teacups. It is extremely
annoying when English royalty drops in sociably to distribute medals
and sip a cup of tea to have German shells invite themselves to the
party. It is a way German shells have. They push in everywhere. One
invited itself to my party and got within ten feet of it. When I
complained, the colonel suggested absently that it probably was not a
German shell but a French mine that had gone off prematurely. He seemed
to think being hit by a French mine rather than by a German shell made
all the difference in the world. It nearly did.
At the moment the colonel was greatly interested in the fact that one of
his men was not carrying a mask against gases. The colonel argued that
the life of the man belonged to France, and that through laziness or
indifference he had no right to risk losing it. Until this war the
colonel had commanded in Africa the regiment into which criminals are
drafted as a punishment. To keep them in hand requires both imagination
and the direct methods of a bucko mate on a whaler. When the colonel was
promoted to his present command he found the men did not place much
confidence in the gas masks, so he filled a shelter with poisoned air,
equipped a squad with protectors and ordered them to enter. They went
without enthusiasm, but when they found they could move about with
impunity the confidence of the entire command in the anti-gas masks was
absolute.
The colonel was very vigilant against these gas attacks. He had equipped
the only shelter I have seen devoted solely to the preparation of
defenses against them. We learned several new facts concerning this
hideous form of warfare. One was that the Germans now launch the gas
most frequently at night when the men cannot see it approach, and, in
consequence, before they can snap the masks into place, they are
suffocated, and in great agony die. They have learned much about the
gas, but chiefly by bitter experience. Two hours after one of the
attacks an officer seeking his field-glasses descended into his shelter.
The gas that had flooded the trenches and then floated away still lurked
below. And in a moment the officer was dead. The warning was instantly
flashed along the trenches from the North Sea to Switzerland, and now
after a gas raid, before any one enters a shelter, it is attacked by
counter-irritants, and the poison driven from ambush.
I have never seen better discipline than obtained in that chalk quarry,
or better spirit. There was not a single outside element to aid
discipline or to inspire morale. It had all to come from within. It had
all to spring from the men themselves and from the example set by their
officers. The enemy fought against them, the elements fought against
them, the place itself was as cheerful as a crutch. The clay climbed
from their feet to their hips, was ground into their uniforms, clung to
their hands and hair. The rain chilled them, the wind, cold, damp, and
harsh, stabbed through their greatcoats. Their outlook was upon graves,
their resting-places dark caverns, at which even a wolf would look with
suspicion. And yet they were all smiling, eager, alert. In the whole
command we saw not one sullen or wistful face.
It is an old saying: "So the colonel, so the regiment."
But the splendid spirit I saw on the heights of the Meuse is true not
only of that colonel and of that regiment, but of the whole five hundred
miles of trenches, and of all France.
* * * * *
February, 1916.
When I was in Verdun, the Germans, from a distance of twenty miles, had
dropped three shells into Nancy and threatened to send more. That gave
Nancy an interest which Verdun lacked. So I was intolerant of Verdun
and anxious to hasten on to Nancy.
To-day Nancy and her three shells are forgotten, and to all the world
the place of greatest interest is Verdun. Verdun has been Roman,
Austrian, and not until 1648 did she become a part of France. This is
the fourth time she has been attacked--by the Prussians in 1792, again
by the Germans in 1870, when, after a gallant defense of three weeks,
she surrendered, and in October of 1914.
She then was more menaced than attacked. It was the Crown Prince and
General von Strantz with seven army corps who threatened her. General
Sarrail, now commanding the allied forces in Salonika, with three army
corps, and reinforced by part of an army corps from Toul, directed the
defense. The attack was made upon Fort Troyon, about twenty miles south
of Verdun. The fort was destroyed, but the Germans were repulsed. Four
days later, September 24, the real attack was made fifteen miles south
of Troyon, on the village of St. Mihiel. The object of Von Strantz was
to break through the Verdun-Toul line, to inclose Sarrail from the south
and at Revigny link arms with the Crown Prince. They then would have had
the army of Sarrail surrounded.
For several days it looked as though Von Strantz would succeed, but,
though outnumbered, Sarrail's line held, and he forced Von Strantz to
"dig in" at St. Mihiel. There he still is, like a dagger that has failed
to reach the heart but remains implanted in the flesh.
Von Strantz having failed, a week later, on October 3, the Crown Prince
attacked through the Forest of the Argonne between Varennes and Verdun.
But this assault also was repulsed by Sarrail, who captured Varennes,
and with his left joined up with the Fourth Army of General Langle. The
line as then formed by that victory remained much as it is to-day. The
present attack is directed neither to the north nor south of Verdun,
but straight at the forts of the city. These forts form but a part of
the defenses. For twenty miles in front of Verdun have been spread
trenches and barb-wire. In turn, these are covered by artillery
positions in the woods and on every height. Even were a fort destroyed,
to occupy it the enemy must pass over a terrain, every foot of which is
under fire. As the defense of Verdun has been arranged, each of the
forts is but a rallying-point--a base. The actual combat that will
decide the struggle will be fought in the open.
Last month I was invited to one of the Verdun forts. It now lies in the
very path of the drive, and to describe it would be improper. But the
approaches to it are now what every German knows. They were more
impressive even than the fort. The "glacis" of the fort stretched for a
mile, and as we walked in the direction of the German trenches there was
not a moment when from every side French guns could not have blown us
into fragments. They were mounted on the spurs of the hills, sunk in
pits, ambushed in the thick pine woods. Every step forward was made
cautiously between trenches, or through mazes of barb-wire and iron
hurdles with bayonet-like spikes. Even walking leisurely you had to
watch your step. Pits opened suddenly at your feet, and strands of
barbed-wire caught at your clothing. Whichever way you looked trenches
flanked you. They were dug at every angle, and were not farther than
fifty yards apart.
On one side, a half mile distant, was a hill heavily wooded. At regular
intervals the trees had been cut down and uprooted and, like a
wood-road, a cleared space showed. These were the nests of the
"seventy-fives." They could sweep the approaches to the fort as a
fire-hose flushes a gutter. That a human being should be ordered to
advance against such pitfalls and obstructions, and under the fire from
the trenches and batteries, seemed sheer murder. Not even a cat with
nine lives could survive.
[Illustration: A valley in Argonne showing a forest destroyed by
shells.
Owing to the attack on the Verdun sector, it is again under fire.]
The German papers tell that before the drive upon Verdun was launched
the German Emperor reproduced the attack in miniature. The whereabouts
and approaches to the positions they were to take were explained to the
men. Their officers were rehearsed in the part each was to play. But no
rehearsal would teach a man to avoid the pitfalls that surround Verdun.
The open places are as treacherous as quicksands, the forests that seem
to him to offer shelter are a succession of traps. And if he captures
one fort he but brings himself under the fire of two others.
From what I saw of the defenses of Verdun from a "certain place" three
miles outside the city to a "certain place" fifteen miles farther south,
from what the general commanding the Verdun sector told me, and from
what I know of the French, I believe the Crown Prince will find this
second attack upon Verdun a hundred per cent more costly than the first,
and equally unsuccessful.