Longueval and High Wood Ridge, which the British were later to win after
a struggle which left nothing of woods or villages or ridges except
shell-craters. Naturally, the Germans had not restricted their original
defenses to the ridge itself, any more than the French had theirs to the
hills immediately in front of Verdun. They had placed their original
first-line trenches along the series of advantageous positions on the
slope and turned every bit of woods and every eminence into a strong
point on the way back to the second line, whose barbed-wire
entanglements rusted by long exposure were distinct under the glasses.
A German officer stood on the parapet looking out in our direction,
probably trying to locate the British infantry advance which was hugging
a fold in the ground and resting there for the time being. I imagined
how beaver-like were the Germans in the second line strengthening their
defenses. I scanned all the slopes facing us in the hope of seeing a
German battery. There must be one under those balls of black smoke from
high explosives from British guns and another a half mile away under the
same kind of shower.
"They withdrew most of their guns behind the ridge overnight," said an
officer, "in order to avoid capture in case we made another rush."
On the other side of this natural wall they would be safe from any
except aerial observation, and the advanced British batteries, though
all in the open, were in folds in the ground, or behind bluffs, or just
below the skyline of a rise where they had found their assigned position
by the map. How much a few feet of depression in a field, a slightly
sunken road, the grade of a gentle slope, which hid man or gun from view
counted for I did not realize that day as I was to realize in the fierce
fight for position which was to come in succeeding weeks.
It was easy to understand why the Germans had made a strong point in the
first line where I was standing, for it was a position which, in
relation to both the British and the German trenches, would instantly
appeal to the tactical eye. Here they had emplaced machine guns manned
by chosen desperate men which had given the British charge its worst
experience over a mile front. I could see all the movement over a broad
area to the rear which, however, the rise under my feet hid from the
ridge where the German officer stood. The advantage which the Germans
had after their retreat from the Marne was brought home afresh once you
were on conquered ground. A mile more or less of depth had no
sentimental interest to them, for they were on foreign soil. They had
chosen their positions by armies, by corps, by battalions, by hundreds
of miles and tens of miles and tens of yards with the view to a command
of observation and ground. This was a simple application of the formula
as old as man; but it was their numbers and preparedness that permitted
its application and wherever the Allies were to undertake the offensive
they must face this military fact, which made the test of their skill
against frontal positions all the stiffer and added tribute to success.
The scene in front reminded one of a great carpet which did not lie flat
on the floor but was in undulations, with the whole on an incline toward
Longueval and High Wood Ridge. The Ridge I shall call it after this,
for so it was in capital letters to millions of French, British and
German soldiers in the summer of 1916. And this carpet was peopled with
men in a game of hide and seek with death among its folds.
No vehicle, no horse was anywhere visible. Yet it was a poignantly live
world where the old trench lines had been a dead world--a world alive in
the dots of men strung along the crest, in others digging new trenches,
in messengers and officers on the move, in clumps of reserves behind a
hillock or in a valley. Though bursting shrapnel jackets whipped out the
same kind of puffs as always from a flashing center which spread into
nimbus radiant in the sunlight and the high explosives sent up the same
spouts of black smoke as if a stick of dynamite had burst in a coal box,
the shell fire seemed different; it had a quality of action and
adventure in comparison with the monotonous exhibition which we had
watched in stalemate warfare. Death now had some element of glory and
sport. It was less like set fate in a stationary shambles.
Directly ahead was a bare sweep of field of waste wild grass between the
German communication trenches where wheat had grown before the war, and
the British firing-line seemed like heads fastened to a greenish
blanket. Holding the ground that they had gained, they were waiting on
something to happen elsewhere. Others must advance before they could go
farther.
The battle was not general; it raged at certain points where the Germans
had anchored themselves after some recovery from the staggering blow of
the first day. Beyond Fricourt the British artillery was making a
crushing concentration on a clump of woods. This seemed to be the
hottest place of all. I would watch it. Nothing except the blanket of
shell-smoke hanging over the trees was visible for a time, unless you
counted figures some distance away moving about in a sort of detached
pantomime.
Then a line of British infantry seemed to rise out of the pile of the
carpet and I could see them moving with a drill-ground steadiness toward
the edge of the woods, only to be lost to the eye in a fold of the
carpet or in a changed background. There had been something workmanlike
and bold about their rigid, matter-of-fact progress, reflective of
man-power in battle as seen very distinctly for a space in that field of
baffling and shimmering haze. I thought that I had glimpses of some of
them just before they entered the woods and that they were mixing with
figures coming out of the woods. At any rate, what was undoubtedly a
half company of German prisoners were soon coming down the slope in a
body, only to disappear as if they, too, were playing their part in the
hide and seek of that irregular landscape with its variation from white
chalk to dark green foliage.
Khaki figures stood out against the chalk and melted into the fields or
the undergrowth, or came up to the skyline only to be swallowed into the
earth probably by the German trench which they were entering. I wondered
if one group had been killed, or knocked over, or had merely taken cover
in a shell-crater when a German "krump" seemed to burst right among
them, though at a distance of even a few hundred yards nothing is so
deceiving as the location of a shell-burst in relation to objects in
line with it. The black cloud drew a curtain over them. When it lifted
they were not on the stage. This was all that one could tell.
What seemed only a platoon became a company for an instant under
favorable light refraction. The object of British khaki, French blue and
German green is invisibility, but nothing can be designed that will not
be visible under certain conditions. A motley such as the "tanks" were
painted would be best, but the most utilitarian of generals has not yet
dared to suggest motley as a uniform for an army. It occurred to me how
distinct the action would have been if the participants had worn the
blue coats and red trousers in which the French fought their early
battles of the war.
All was confused in that mixture of haze and shell-smoke and maze of
trenches, with the appearing and disappearing soldiers living patterns
of the carpet which at times itself seemed to move to one's tiring,
intensified gaze. Each one was working out his part of a plan; each was
a responsive unit of the system of training for such affairs.
The whole would have seemed fantastic if it had not been for the sound
of the machine guns and the rifles and the deeper-throated chorus of the
heavy guns, which proved that this was no mesmeric, fantastic spectacle
but a game with death, precise and ordered, with nothing that could be
rehearsed left to chance any more than there was in the regulation of
the traffic which was pressing forward, column after column, to supply
the food which fed the artillery-power and man-power that should crush
through frontal positions.
IX
WHEN THE FRENCH WON
A big man's small quarters--General Foch--French capacity for
enjoying a victory--Winning quality of French as victors--When the
heart of France stood still--The bravery of the race--Germany's
mistaken estimate of France--Why the French will fight this war to a
finish--French and Germans as different breeds as ever lived
neighbor--The democracy of the French--_Élan_--"War of movement."
The farther south the better the news. There was another world of
victory on the other side of a certain dividing road where French and
British transport mingled. That world I was to see next on a day of
days--a holiday of elation.
A brief note, with its permission to "circulate within the lines,"
written in a bold hand in the chateau where General Foch directed the
Northern Group of French Armies, placed no limitation on freedom of
movement for my French friend and myself.
Of course, General Foch's chateau was small. All chateaux occupied by
big commanders are small, and as a matter of method I am inclined to
think. If they have limited quarters there is no room for the intrusion
of anyone except their personal staff and they can live with the
simplicity which is a soldier's barrack training.
Joffre, Castelnau and Foch were the three great names in the French Army
which the public knew after the Marne, and of the three Foch has,
perhaps, more of the dash which the world associates with the French
military type. He simplified victory, which was the result of the same
arduous preparation as on the British side, with a single gesture as he
swept his pencil across the map from Dompierre to Flaucourt. Thus his
army had gone forward and that was all there was to it, which was enough
for the French and also for the Germans on this particular front.
"It went well! It goes well!" he said, with dramatic brevity. He had
made the plans which were so definite in the bold outline to which he
held all subordinates in a coördinated execution; and I should meet the
men who had carried out his plans, from artillerists who had blazed the
way to infantry who had stormed the enemy trenches. There was no
mistaking his happiness. It was not that of a general, but the common
happiness of all France.
Victory in France for France could never mean to an Englishman what it
meant to a Frenchman. The Englishman would have to be on his own soil
before he could understand what was in the heart of the French after
their drive on the Somme. I imagined that day that I was a Frenchman.
By proxy I shared their joy of winning, which in a way seemed to be
taking an unfair advantage of my position, considering that I had not
been fighting.
There is no race, it seems to me, who know quite so well how to enjoy
victory as the French. They make it glow with a rare quality which
absorbs you into their own exhilaration. I had the feeling that the
pulse of every citizen in France had quickened a few beats. All the
peasant women as they walked along the road stood a little straighter
and the old men and old women were renewing their youth in quiet
triumph; for now they had learned the first result of the offensive and
might permit themselves to exult.
Once before in this war at the Marne I had followed the French legions
in an advance. Then victory meant that France was safe. The people had
found salvation through their sacrifice, and their relief was so
profound that to the outsider they seemed hardly like the French in
their stoic gratitude. This time they were articulate, more like the
French of our conception. They could fondle victory and take it apart
and play with it and make the most of it.
If I had no more interest in the success of one European people than
another, then as a spectator I should choose that it should be to the
French, provided that I was permitted to be present. They make victory
no raucous-voiced, fleshy woman, shrilly gloating, no superwoman, cold
and efficient, who considers it her right as a superior being, but a
gracious person, smiling, laughing, singing in a human fashion, whether
she is greeting winning generals or privates or is looking in at the
door of a chateau or a peasant's cottage.
An old race, the French, tried out through many victories and defeats
until a vital, indescribable quality which may be called the art of
living governs all emotions. Victory to the Germans could not mean half
what it would to the French. The Germans had expected victory and had
organized for it for years as a definite goal in their ambitions. To the
French it was a visitation, a reward of courage and kindly fortune and
the right to be the French in their own world and in their own way,
which to man or to State is the most justifiable of all rights.
Twice the heart of France had stood still in suspense, first on the
Marne and then at the opening onslaught on Verdun; and between the Marne
and Verdun had been sixteen months when, on the soil of their France and
looking out on the ruins of their villages, they had striven to hold
what remained to them. They had been the great martial people of Europe
and because Napoleon III. tripped them by the fetish of the Bonaparte
name in '70, people thought that they were no longer martial. This puts
the world in the wrong, as it implies that success in war is the test of
greatness. When the world expressed its surprise and admiration at
French courage France smiled politely, which is the way of France, and
in the midst of the shambles, as she strained every nerve, was a little
amused, not to say irritated, to think that Frenchmen had to prove again
to the world that they were brave.
Whether the son came from the little shops of Paris, from stubborn
Brittany, the valley of the Meuse, or the vineyards, war made him the
same kind of Frenchman that he was in the time of Louis XIV. and
Napoleon, fighting now for France rather than for glory as he did in
Napoleon's time; a man cured of the idea of conquest, advanced a step
farther than the stage of the conqueror, and his courage, though slower
to respond to wrath, the finer. He had proven that the more highly
civilized a people, the more content and the more they had to lose by
war, the less likely they were to be drawn into war, the more
resourceful and the more stubborn in defense they might
become--especially that younger generation of Frenchmen with their
exemplary habits and their fondness for the open air.
If France had been beaten at the Marne, notice would have been served on
humanity that thrift and refinement mean enervation. We should have
believed in the alarmists who talk of oriental hordes and of the vigor
of primitive manhood overcoming art and education.
The Germans could not give up their idea that both the French and the
English must be dying races. The German staff had been well enough
informed to realize that they must first destroy the French Army as the
continental army most worthy of their steel and, at the same time, they
could not convince themselves that France was other than weak. She loved
her flesh-pots too well; her families would yield and pay rather than
sacrifice only sons.
At any time since October, 1914, the French could have had a separate
peace; but the answer of the Frenchman, aside from his bounden faith to
the other Allies, was that he would have no peace that was given--only a
peace that was yielded. France would win by the strength of her manhood
or she would die. When the war was over a Frenchman could look a German
in the face and say, "I have won this peace by the force of my blows;"
or else the war would go on to extermination.
At intervals in the long, long months of sacrifice France was very
depressed; for the French are more inclined than the English to be up
and down in their emotions. They have their bad and their good days.
Yet, when they were bluest over reports of the retreat from the Marne or
losses at Verdun they had no thought of making terms. Depression merely
meant that they would all have to succumb without winning. Thus, after
the weary stalling and resistance of the blows at Verdun, never making
any real progress in driving the enemy out of France, ever dreaming of
the day when they should see the Germans' backs, France had waited for
the movement that came on the Somme.
The people were always talking of this offensive. They had heard that it
was under way. Yet, how were they to know the truth? The newspapers gave
vague hints; gossip carried others, more concrete, sometimes correct but
usually incorrect; and all that the women and the old men and the
children at home could do was to keep on with the work. And this they
did; it is instinct. Then one morning news was flashed over France that
the British and the French had taken over twenty thousand prisoners. The
tables were turned at last! France was on the march!
"Do you see why we love France?" said my friend T----, who was with me
that day, as with a turn of the road we had a glimpse of the valley of
the Somme. He swung his hand toward the waving fields of grain, the
villages and plots of woods, as the train flew along the metals between
rows of stately shade trees. "It is France. It is bred in our bones. We
are fighting for that--just what you see!"
"But wouldn't you take some of Germany if you could?" I asked.
"No. We want none of Germany and we want no Germans. Let them do as they
please with what is their own. They are brave; they fight well; but we
will not let them stay in France."
Look into the faces of the French soldiers and look into the faces of
Germans and you have two breeds as different as ever lived neighbor in
the world. It would seem impossible that there could be anything but a
truce between them and either preserve its own characteristics of
civilization. The privilege of each to survive through all the centuries
has been by force of arms and, after the Marne and Verdun, the Somme put
the seal on the French privilege to survive. If there be any hope of
true internationalism among the continental peoples I think that it can
rely on the Frenchman, who only wants to make the most of his own
without encroaching on anybody's else property and is disinterested in
human incubation for the purpose of overwhelming his neighbors. True
internationalism will spring from the provincialism that holds fast to
its own home and does not interfere with the worship by other countries
of their gods.
All this may seem rambling, but to a spectator of war indulging in a
little philosophy it goes to the kernel of the meaning of victory to the
French and to my own happiness in seeing the French win. Sometimes the
Frenchman seems the most soldierly of men; again, a superficial observer
might wonder if the French Army had any real discipline. And there,
again, you have French temperament; the old civilization that has
defined itself in democracy. For the French are the most democratic of
all peoples, not excluding ourselves. That is not saying that they are
the freest of all peoples, because no people on earth are freer than the
English or the American.
An Englishman is always on the lookout lest someone should interfere
with his individual rights as he conceives them. He is the least
gregarious of all Europeans in one sense and the French the most
gregarious, which is a factor contributing to French democracy. It is
his gregariousness that makes the Frenchman polite and his politeness
which permits of democracy. An officer may talk with a private soldier
and the private may talk back because of French politeness and equality,
which yield fellowship at one moment and the next slip back into the
bonds of discipline which, by consent of public opinion, have tightened
until they are as strict as in Napoleon's day. Gregariousness was
supreme on this day of victory; democracy triumphant. Democracy had
proved itself again as had English freedom against Prussian system.
Vitality is another French possession and this means industry. The
German also is industrious, but more from discipline and training than
from a philosophy of life. French vitality is inborn, electrically
installed by the sunshine of France.
When a battery of French artillery moves along the road it is
democratic, but when it swings its guns into action it is military. Then
its vitality is something that is not the product of training, something
that training cannot produce. A French battalion moving up to the
trenches seems not to have any particular order, but when it goes over
the parapet in an attack it has the essence of military spirit which is
coördination of action. No two French soldiers seem quite alike on the
march or when moving about a village on leave. Each seems three beings:
one a Frenchman, one a soldier, a third himself. German psychology left
out the result of the combination, just as it never considered that the
British could in two years submerge their individualism sufficiently to
become a military nation.
There is a French word, _élan_, which has been much overworked in
describing French character. Other nations have no equivalent word;
other races lack the quality which it expresses, a quality which you
get in the wave of a hand from a peasant girl to a passing car, in the
woman who keeps a shop, in French art, habits, literature. To-day old
Monsieur Élan was director-general of the pageant.
This people of apt phrases have one for the operations before the trench
system was established; it is the "war of movement." That was the word,
movement, for the blue river of men and transport along the roads to the
front. We were back to the "war of movement" for the time being, at any
rate; for the French had broken through the German fortifications for a
depth of four to five miles in a single day.
X
ALONG THE ROAD TO VICTORY
A thrifty victory--Seventeen-inch guns asleep--A procession of guns
that gorged the roads--French rules of the road--Absence of system
conceals an excellent system--Spoils of war--The Colonial Corps--The
"chocolates"--"Boches"--Dramatic victors--The German line in front of
the French attack--Galloping _soixante-quinzes_.
Anyone with experience of armies cannot be deceived about losses when he
is close to the front. Even if he does not go over the field while the
dead of both sides are still lying there, infallible signs without a
word being spoken reflect the truth. It was shining in panoplies of
smiles with the French after the attack of July 1st. Victory was sweet
because it came at slight cost. Staff officers could congratulate
themselves on having driven a thrifty bargain. Casualty clearing
stations were doing a small business; prisoners' inclosures a driving
one.
"We've nothing to fire at," said an officer of heavy artillery. "Our
targets are out of reach. The Germans went too fast for us; they left us
without occupation."
Where with the British I had watched the preparations for the offensive
develop, the curtain was now raised on the French preparations, which
were equally elaborate, after the offensive had gone home. General
Joffre had spared more guns from Verdun for the Somme than optimism had
supposed possible. Those immense fellows of caliber from twelve to
seventeen-inch, mounted on railway trucks, were lions asleep under their
covers on the sidings which had been built for them. Their tracks would
have to be carried farther forward before they roared at the Germans
again.
Five miles are not far for a battalion to march, though an immense
distance to a modern army with its extensive and complicated plant. Even
the aviators wanted to be nearer the enemy and were looking for a new
park. Sheds where artillery horses had been sheltered for more than a
year were empty; camps were being vacated; vast piles of shells must
follow the guns which the tractors were taking forward. The nests of
spacious dugouts in a hillside nicely walled in by sandbags had served
their purpose. They were beyond the range of any German guns.