La Forêt De Bois-Le-Pretre
Beginning at the right bank of the Meuse, a vast plateau of bare,
desolate moorland sweeps eastward to the Moselle, and descends to the
river in a number of great, wooded ridges perpendicular to the
northward-flowing stream. The town of Pont-à-Mousson lies an apron of
meadowland spread between two of these ridges, the ridge of Puvenelle
and the ridge of the Bois-le-Prêtre. The latter is the highest of all
the spurs of the valley. Rising from the river about half a mile to the
north of the city, it ascends swiftly to the level of the plateau, and
was seen from our headquarters as a long, wooded ridge blocking the
sky-line to the northwest. The hamlet of Maidières, in which our
headquarters were located, lies just at the foot of Puvenelle, at a
point where the amphitheater of Pont-à-Mousson, crowding between the two
ridges, becomes a steep-walled valley sharply tilted to the west.
The Bois-le-Prêtre dominated at once the landscape and our minds. Its
existence was the one great fact in the lives of some fifty thousand
Frenchmen, Germans, and a handful of exiled Americans; it had dominated
and ended the lives of the dead; it would dominate the imagination of
the future. Yet, looking across the brown walls and claret roofs of the
hamlet of Maidières, there was nothing to be seen but a grassy slope,
open fields, a reddish ribbon of road, a wreck of a villa burned by a
fire shell, and a wood. The autumn had turned the leaves of the trees,
seemingly without exception, to a leathery brown, and in almost all
lights the trunks of the trees were a cold, purplish slate. Such was the
forest which, battle-areas excepted, has cost more lives than any other
point along the line. The wood had been contested trench by trench,
literally foot by foot. It was at once the key to the Saint-Mihiel
salient and the city of Metz.
The Saint-Mihiel salient--"the hernia," as the French call it--begins at
the Bois-le-Prêtre. Pivoting on The Wood, the lines turn sharply inland,
cross the desolate plateau of La Woevre, attain the Meuse at
Saint-Mihiel, turn again, and ascend the river to the Verdunois. The
salient, as dangerous for the Germans as it is troublesome for the
French, represents the limit of a German offensive directed against Toul
in October, 1914. That the French retreated was due to the fact that the
plateau was insufficiently protected, many of the regiments having been
rushed north to the great battle then raging on the Aisne.
Only one railroad center lies in the territory of the salient,
Thiaucourt in Woevre. This pleasant little moorland town, locally famous
for its wine, is connected with Metz by two single-track railroad lines,
one coming via Conflans, and the other by Arnaville on the Moselle. At
Vilcey-sur-Mad, these lines unite, and follow to Thiaucourt the only
practicable railroad route, the valley of the Rupt (brook) de Mad.
Thus the domination of Thiaucourt, or the valley of the Rupt de Mad, by
French artillery would break the railroad communications between the
troops keeping the salient and their base of supplies, Metz. And the
fate of Metz itself hangs on the control of the Bois-le-Prêtre.
Metz is the heart of the German organization on the western front: the
railroad center, the supply station, the troop dépôt. A blow at Metz
would affect the security of every German soldier between Alsace and the
Belgian frontier. But if the French can drive the Germans out of the
Bois-le-Prêtre and establish big howitzers on the crest the Germans are
still holding, there will soon be no more Metz. The French guns will
destroy the city as the German cannon destroyed Verdun.
When the Germans, therefore, retired to the trenches after the battles
of September and October, 1914, they took to the ground on the heights
of the Bois-le-Prêtre, a terrain far enough ahead of Thiaucourt and Metz
to preserve these centers from the danger of being shelled. On the crest
of the highest ridge along the valley, admirably ambushed in a thick
forest, they waited for the coming of the French. And the French came.
They came, young and old, slum-dweller and country schoolmaster, rich
young noble and Corsican peasant, to the storming of the wood, upheld by
one vision, the unbroken, grassy slope that stretched from behind the
German lines to the town of Thiaucourt. In the trenches behind the slaty
trunks of the great ash trees, Bavarian peasants, Saxons, and
round-headed Wurttem-burgers, the olive-green, jack-booted Boches,
awaited their coming, determined to hold the wood, the salient, and the
city.
A year later the Bois-le-Prêtre (the Priest Wood), with its perfume of
ecclesiastical names that reminds one of the odor of incense in an old
church, had become the Bois de la Mort (the Wood of Death).
The house in which our bureau was located was once the summer residence
of a rich ironmaster who had fled to Paris at the beginning of the war.
If there is an architectural style of German origin known as the
"Neo-Classic," which affects large, windowless spaces framed in
pilasters of tile, and decorations and insets of omelet-yellow and
bottle-green glazed brick, "Wisteria Villa" is of that school. It stood
behind a high wall of iron spikes on the road leading from Maidières to
the trenches, a high, Germano-Pompeian country house, topped by a roof
rich in angles, absurd windows, and unexpected gables. There are huge,
square, French-roofed houses in New England villages built by local
richessîmes of Grant's time, and still called by neighbors "the Jinks
place" or the "Levi Oates place"; Wisteria Villa had something of the
same social relation to the commune of Maidières. Grotesque and ugly, it
was not to be despised; it had character in its way.
Our social center was the dining-room of the villa. Exclusive of the
kitchen range, it boasted the only stove in the house, a queerly shaped
"Salamandre," a kind of Franklin stove with mica doors. The walls were
papered an ugly chocolate brown with a good deal of red in it, and the
borders, doors, and fireplace frame were stained a color trembling
between mission green and oak brown. The room was rectangular and too
high for its width. There were pictures. On each side of the fireplace,
profiles toward the chimney, hung concave plaques of Dutch girls. To the
left of the door was a yellowed etching of the tower of the château of
Heidelberg, and to the right a very small oil painting, in an ornate
gilt frame three inches deep, of a beach by moonlight. About two or
three hundred books, bound in boards and red leather, stood behind the
cracked glass of a bookcase in the corner; they were very "jeune fille,"
and only the romances of Georges Ohnet appeared to have been read. The
thousand cupboards of the house were full of dusty knickknacks, old
umbrellas, hats, account-books, and huge boxes holding the débris of
sets of checkers, dominoes, and ivory chessmen. An enlarged photograph
of the family hung on the walls of a bedroom; it had been taken at
somebody's marriage, and showed the group standing on the front steps,
the same steps that were later to be blown to pieces by a shell. One saw
the bride, the groom, and about twenty relatives, including a boy in
short trousers, a wide, white collar, and an old-fashioned, fluffy bow
tie. Anxious to be included in the picture, the driver of the bridal
barouche has craned his neck forward. On the evidence of the costumes,
the picture had been taken about 1902.
Our bureau in the cellar of Wisteria Villa was connected directly with
the trenches. When a man had been wounded, he was carried to the poste
de secours in the rear lines, and it was our duty to go to this trench
post and carry the patient to the hospital at the nearest rail-head. The
bureau of the Section was in charge of two Frenchmen who shared the
labor of attending to the telephone and keeping the books.
A hundred yards beyond Wisteria Villa, at a certain corner, the
principal road to the trenches divided into three branches, and in order
to interfere as much as possible with communications, the Germans daily
shelled this strategic point. A comrade and I had the curiosity to keep
an exact record of a week's shelling. It must be remembered that the
corner was screened from the Germans, who fired casually in the hope of
hitting something and annoying the French. The cannons shelling the
corner were usually "seventy-sevens," the German quick-firing pieces
that correspond to the French "seventy-fives."
Monday, ten shells at 6.30, two at 7.10, five at 11.28, twenty at
intervals between 2.15 and 2.45, a swift rafale of some sixteen at 4.12,
another rafale of twenty at 8, and occasional shells between 9 and
midnight.
Tuesday, two big shells at mid-day.
Wednesday, rafales at 9.14, 11, 2.18, 4.30, and 6.20.
Thursday--no shells.
Friday, twelve at intervals between 10.16 and 12.20. Solitary big shell
at 1.05. Another big shell at 3. Some fifteen stray shells between 5 and
midnight.
Saturday--no shells.
Sunday--About five shells an hour between 4 in the afternoon and
midnight.
I give the number of shells falling at this corner as a concrete
instance of what was happening at a dozen other points along the road.
The fire of the German batteries was as capricious as the play of a
search-light; one week, the corner and three or four other points would
catch it, the next week the corner and another set of localities. And
there were periods, sometimes ten days to two weeks long, when hardly a
shell was fired at any road. Then, after a certain sense of security had
begun to take form, a rafale would come screaming over, blow a horse and
wagon to pieces, and leave one or two blue figures huddled in the mud.
But the French replied to each shell and every rafale, in addition to
firing at random all the day and a good deal of the night. There was
hardly a night that Wisteria Villa did not rock to the sound of French
guns fired at 2 and 3 in the morning. But the average day at
Pont-à-Mousson was a day of random silences. The war had all the
capricious-ness of the sea--of uncertain weather. There were hours of
calm in the day, during which the desolate silence of the front flooded
swiftly over the landscape; there were interruptions of great violence,
sometimes desultory, sometimes beginning, in obedience to a human will,
at a certain hour. The outbreak would commence with the orderliness of a
clock striking, and continue the greater part of the day, rocking the
deserted town with its clamor. Hearing it, the soldiers en repos would
say, talking of The Wood, "It sings (ça chante)," or, "It knocks (ça
tape) up there to-day." The smoke of the bursting shells hung over The
Wood in a darkish, gray-blue fog. But since The Wood had a personality
for us, many would say simply, "Listen to The Wood."
The shell expresses one idea--energy. The cylinder of iron, piercing the
air at a terrific speed, sings a song of swift, appalling energy, of
which the final explosion is the only fitting culmination. One gets,
too, an idea of an unbending volition in the thing. After a certain time
at the front the ear learns to distinguish the sound of a big shell from
a small shell, and to know roughly whether or not one is in the danger
zone. It was a grim jest with us that it took ten days to qualify as a
shell expert, and at the end of two weeks all those who qualified
attended the funeral of those who had failed. Life at The Wood had an
interesting uncertainty.
A quarter of a mile beyond the corner, on the slope of Puvenelle
opposite The Wood, stood Montauville, the last habitable village of the
region. To the south of it rose the wooded slopes of Puvenelle; to the
north, seen across a marshy meadow, were the slope and the ridge of the
Bois-le-Prêtre. The dirty, mud-spattered village was caught between the
leathery sweeps of two wooded ridges. Three winding roads, tramped into
a pie of mire, crossed the grassy slope of The Wood, and disappeared
into the trees at the top. Though less than a mile from the first German
line, the village, because of its protection from shells by a spur of
the Bois-le-Prêtre, was in remarkably good condition; the only building
to show conspicuous damage being the church, whose steeple had been
twice struck. It was curious to see pigeons flying in and out of the
belfry through the shell rents in the roof. Here and there, among the
uncultivated fields of those who had fled, were the green fields of some
one who had stayed. A woman of seventy still kept open her grocery shop;
it was extraordinarily dirty, full of buzzing flies, and smelled of
spilled wine.
"Why did you stay?" I asked her.
"Because I did not want to leave the village. Of course my daughter
wanted me to come to Dijon. Imagine me in Dijon, I, who have been to
Nancy only once! A fine figure I should make in Dijon in my sabots!"
"And you are not afraid of the shells?"
"Oh, I should be afraid of them if I ever went out in the street. But I
never leave my shop."
And so she stayed, selling the three staples of the French front,
Camembert cheese, Norwegian sardines, and cakes of chocolate. But
Montauville was far from safe. It was there that I first saw a man
killed. I had been talking to a sentry, a small young fellow of
twenty-one or two, with yellow hair and gray-blue eyes full of
weariness. He complained of a touch of jaundice, and wished heartily
that the whole affaire--meaning the war in general--was finished. He was
very anxious to know if the Americans thought the Boches were going to
win. Some vague idea of winning the war just to get even with the Boches
seemed to be in his mind. I assured him that American opinion was
optimistic in regard to the chances of the Allies, and strolled away.
Hardly had I gone ten feet, when a "seventy-seven" shell, arriving
without warning, went Zip-bang, and, turning to crouch to the wall, I
saw the sentry crumple up in the mud. It was as if he were a rubber
effigy of a man blown up with air, and some one had suddenly ripped the
envelope. His rifle fell from him, and he, bending from the waist,
leaned face down into the mud. I was the first to get to him. The young,
discontented face was full of the gray street mud, there was mud in the
hollows of the eyes, in the mouth, in the fluffy mustache. A chunk of
the shell had ripped open the left breast to the heart. Down his sleeve,
as down a pipe, flowed a hasty drop, drop, drop of blood that mixed with
the mire.
Several times a day, at stated hours, the numbers of German missiles
that had fallen into the trenches of the Bois-le-Prêtre, together with
French answers to them, would be telephoned to headquarters. The soldier
in charge of the telephone was an instructor in Latin in a French
provincial university, a tall, stoop- shouldered man, with an
indefinite, benevolent smile curiously framed on thin lips. Probably
very much of a scholar by training and feeling, he had accepted his
military destiny, and was as much a poilu as anybody. During his leisure
hours he was busy writing a "Comparison of the Campaign on the Marne and
the Aisne with Caesar's battles against the Belgian Confederacy." He had
a paper edition of the Gallic Wars which he carried round with him. One
day he explained his thesis to me. He drew a plan with a green pencil on
a piece of paper.
"See, mon ami," he exclaimed, "here is the Aisne, Caesar's Axona; here
is Berry-au-Bac; here was Caesar, here were the invaders, here was
General French, here Foch, here Von Kluck. Curious, isn't it--two
thousand years afterward?" His eyes for an instant filled with dreamy
perplexity. A little while later I would hear him mechanically
telephoning. "Poste A--five 'seventy-seven' shells, six mines, twelve
trench shells; answer--ten 'seventy-five' shells, eight mines, eighteen
trench shells; Poste B--two 'seventy-seven' shells, one mine, six
grenades; answer--fifteen 'seventy-five' shells; Poste C--one 'two
hundred and ten' shell, fifty mines; answer--sixty mines; Poste D--"
At Dieulouard I had entered the shell zone; at Pont-à-Mousson, I crossed
the borders of the zone of quiet; at Montauville began the last
zone--the zone of invisibility and violence. Civilian life ended at the
western end of the village street with the abruptness of a man brought
face to face with a high wall. Beyond the village a road was seen
climbing the grassy slope of Puvenelle, to disappear as it neared the
summit of the ridge in a brown wood. It was just an ordinary hill road
of Lorraine, but the fact that it was the direct road to the trenches
invested this climbing, winding, silent length with extraordinary
character. The gate of the zone of violence, every foot of it bore some
scar of the war, now trivial, now gigantic--always awesome in the power
and volition it revealed. One passed from the sight of a brown puddle,
scooped in the surface of the street by an exploding shell, to a view of
a magnificent ash tree splintered by some projectile. It is a very rare
thing to see a sinister landscape, but this whole road was sinister. I
used to discuss this sinister quality with a distinguished French artist
who as a poilu was the infirmier, or medical service man, attached to a
squad of engineers working in a quarry frequently shelled. In this
frightful place we discussed la qualité du sinistre dans l'art (the
sinister in art) as calmly as if we were two Parisian critics sitting on
the benches of the Luxembourg Gardens. As the road advanced into the
wood, there was hardly a wayside tree that had not been struck by a
shell. Branches hung dead from trees, twigs had been lopped off by stray
fragments, great trunks were split apart as if by lightning. "Nature as
Nature is never sinister," said the artist; "it is when there is a
disturbance of the relations between Nature and human life that you have
the sinister. Have you ever seen the villages beyond Ravenna overwhelmed
by the bogs? There you see the sinister. Here Man is making Nature
unlivable for Man." He stroked his fine silky beard meditatively--"This
will all end when the peasants plant again." As we talked, a shell,
intended for the batteries behind, burst high above us.
Skirting the ravine, now wooded, between Puvenelle and the
Bois-le-Prêtre, the road continued westward till it emerged upon the
high plateau of La Woevre; the last kilomètre being in full view of the
Germans entrenched on the ridge across the rapidly narrowing, rising
ravine. Along this visible space the trees and bushes by the roadside
were matted by shell fire into an inextricable confusion of destruction,
and through the wisps and splinters of this ruin was seen the ridge of
the Bois-le-Prêtre rapidly attaining the level of the moor. At length
the forest of Puvenelle, the ravine, and the Bois-le-Prêtre ended
together in a rolling sweep of furzy fields cut off to the west and
north by a vast billow of the moor which, like the rim of a saucer,
closed the wide horizon. Continuing straight ahead, the Puvenelle road
mounted this rise, dipped and disappeared. Halfway between the edge of
the forest of Puvenelle and this crest stood an abandoned inn, a
commonplace building made of buff-brown moorland stone trimmed with red
brick. Close by this inn, at right angles to the Puvenelle road, another
road turned to the north and likewise disappeared over the lift in the
moor. At the corner stood a government signpost of iron slightly bent
back, bearing in gray-white letters on its clay-blue plaque the
legend--Thiaucourt, 12 kilomètres Metz, 25 kilomètres.
There was not a soul anywhere in sight; I was surrounded with evidences
of terrific violence--the shattered trees, the shell holes in the road,
the brown-lipped craters in the earth of the fields, the battered inn;
but there was not a sign of the creators of this devastation. A
northwest wind blew in great salvos across the mournful, lonely plateau,
rippling the furze, and brought to my ears the pounding of shells from
behind the rise. When I got to this rim a soldier, a big, blond fellow
of the true Gaulois type with drooping yellow mustaches, climbed slowly
out of a hole in the ground. The effect was startling. I had arrived at
the line where the earth of France completely swallows up the army. This
disappearance of life in a decor of intense action is one of the most
striking things of the war. All about in the surface of the earth were
little, square, sooty holes that served as chimneys, and here and there
rectangular, grave-like openings in the soil showing three or four big
steps descending to a subterranean hut. Fifty feet away not a sign of
human life could be distinguished. Six feet under the ground, framed in
the doorway of a hut, a young, black-haired fellow in a dark-brown
jersey stood smiling pleasantly up at us; it was he who was to be my
guide to the various postes and trenches that I had need to know. He
came up to greet me.
"Better bring him down here," growled a voice from somewhere in the
earth. "There have been bullets crossing the road all afternoon."
"I am going to show him the Quart-en-Réserve first."
The Quart-en-Réserve (Reserved Quarter) was the section of the
Bois-le-Prêtre which, because of its situation on the crest of the great
ridge, had been the most fiercely contested. We crept up on the edge of
the ridge and looked over. An open, level field some three hundred yards
wide swept from the Thiaucourt road to the edges of the Bois-le-Prêtre;
across this field ran in the most confused manner a strange pattern of
brown lines that disappeared among the stumps and poles of the haggard
wood to the east. To the northwest of this plateau, on the road ahead of
us, stood a ruined village caught in the torment of the lines. Here and
there, in some twenty or thirty places scattered over the scarred
plateau, the smoke of trench shells rose in little curling puffs of
gray-black that quickly dissolved in the wind.
"The Quart is never quiet," said my guide. "It is now half ours, half
theirs."
Close to the ground, a blot of light flashed swifter than a stroke of
lightning, and a heavier, thicker smoke rolled away.
"That is one of ours. We are answering their trench shells with an
occasional 'one hundred and twenty."
"How on earth is it that everybody is not killed?"
"Because the regiment has occupied the Quart so long that we know every
foot, every turn, every shelter of it. When we see a trench shell
coming, we know just where to go. It is only the newcomers who get
killed. Two months past, when a new regiment occupied the Quart during
our absence en repos, it lost twenty-five men in one day."
The first trench that I entered was a simple trench about seven feet
deep, with no trimmings whatsoever, just such a trench as might have
been dug for the accommodation of a large water conduit. We walked on a
narrow board walk very slippery with cheesy, red-brown mire. From time
to time the hammer crash of a shell sounded uncomfortably near, and bits
of dirt and pebbles, dislodged by the concussion, fell from the wall of
the passage. The only vista was the curving wall of the long
communication trench and the soft sky of Lorraine, lit with the pleasant
sunlight of middle afternoon, and islanded with great golden-white cloud
masses. My guide and I might have been the last persons left in a world
of strange and terrible noises. The boyau (communication trench) began
to turn and wind about in the most perplexing manner, and we entered a
veritable labyrinth. This extraordinary, baffling complexity is due
primarily to the fact that the trenches advance and retreat, rise and
fall, in order to take advantage of the opportunities for defense
afforded by every change in the topography of the region. I remember one
area along the front consisting of two round, grassy hills divided by a
small, grassy valley whose floor rose gently to a low ridge connecting
the two heights. In this terrain the defensive line began on the first
hill as a semicircle edging the grassy slopes presented to the enemy,
then retreated, sinking some forty feet, to take advantage of the
connecting link of upland at the head of the ravine, and took
semicircular form again on the flat, broad summit of the second hill. In
the meadows at the base of these hills a brook flowing from the ravine
had created a great swamp, somewhat in the shape of a wedge pointing
outward from the mouth of the valley. The lines of the enemy, edging
this tract of mire, were consequently in the shape of an open V. Thus
the military situation at this particular point may be pictorially
represented by a salient semicircle, a dash, and another salient
semicircle faced by a wide, open V. Imagine such a situation complicated
by offensive and counter-offensive, during which the French have seized
part of the hills and the German part of the plain, till the whole
region is a madman's maze of barbed wire, earthy lines, trenches,--some
of them untenable by either side and still full of the dead who fell in
the last combat,--shell holes, and fortified craters. Such was something
of the situation in that wind-swept plain at the edge of the
Bois-le-Prêtre. I leave for other chapters the account of an average day
in the trenches and the story of the great German attack, preferring to
tell here of the general impressions made by the appearance of the
trenches themselves. Two pictures stand out, particularly, the dead on
the barbed wire, and the village called "Fey au Rats" at night.
"The next line is the first line. Speak in whispers now, for if the
Boches hear us we shall get a shower of hand-grenades."
I turned into a deep, wide trench whose floor had been trodden into a
slop of cheesy, brown mire which clung to the big hobnailed boots of the
soldiers. Every foot or so along the parapet there was a rifle slit,
made by the insertion of a wedge-shaped wooden box into the wall of
brownish sandbags, and the sentries stood about six feet apart. The
trench had the hushed quiet of a sickroom.
"Do you want to see the Boches? Here; come, put your eye to this rifle
slit."
A horizontal tangle of barbed wire lay before me, the shapeless gully of
an empty trench, and, thirty-five feet away, another blue-gray tangle of
barbed wire and a low ripple of the brownish earth. As I looked, one of
the random silences of the front stole swiftly into the air. French
trench and German trench were perfectly silent; you could have heard the
ticking of a watch.
"You never see them?"
"Only when we attack them or they attack us."
An old poilu, with a friendly smile revealing a jagged reef of yellow
teeth, whispered to me amiably:--
"See them? Good Lord, it's bad enough to smell them. You ought to thank
the good God, young man, that the wind is carrying it over our heads."
"Any wounded to-day?"
"Yes; a corporal had his leg ripped up about half an hour ago."
At a point a mile or so farther down the moor I looked again out of a
rifle box. No Man's Land had widened to some three hundred feet of
waving furze, over whose surface gusts of wind passed as over the
surface of the sea. About fifty feet from the German trenches was a
swathe of barbed wire supported on a row of five stout, wooden posts. So
thickly was the wire strung that the eye failed to distinguish the
individual filaments and saw only the rows of brown-black posts filled
with a steely purple mist. Upon this mist hung masses of weather-beaten
blue rags whose edges waved in the wind.
"Des camarades" (comrades), said my guide very quietly.
A month later I saw the ruined village of Fey-en-Haye by the light of
the full golden shield of the Hunters' Moon. The village had been taken
from the Germans in the spring, and was now in the French lines, which
crossed the village street and continued right on through the houses.
"The first village on the road to Metz" had tumbled, in piles and mounds
of rubbish, out on a street grown high with grass. Moonlight poured into
the roofless cottages, escaping by shattered walls and jagged rents, and
the mounds of débris took on fantastic outlines and cast strange
shadows. In the middle of the village street stood two wooden crosses
marking the graves of soldiers. It was the Biblical "Abomination of
Desolation."
Looking at Fey from the end of the village street, I slowly realized
that it was not without inhabitants. Wandering through the grass,
scurrying over the rubbish heaps, running in and out of the crumbling
thresholds were thousands and thousands of rats.
Across the bright sky came a whirring hum, the sound of the motors of
aeroplanes on the way to bombard the railroad station at Metz. I looked
up, but there was nothing to be seen. The humming died away. The bent
signpost at the corner of the deserted moorland road, with its arrow and
its directions, somehow seemed a strange, shadowy symbol of the
impossibility of the attainment of many human aspirations.