GENERAL GOURAUD AT STRASBOURG
The Maine--Verdun--Champagne--it is in connection with these three names
that the French war consciousness shows itself most sensitive and most
profound, just as the war consciousness of Great Britain vibrates most
deeply when you test it with those other names--Ypres--Arras--the
Somme--Cambrai. As is the name of Ypres to the Englishman, so is that
of Verdun to the Frenchman, invested even with a more poignant
significance, since the countryside where so many sons of France laid
down their lives was their own adored mother-land, indivisibly part of
themselves, as those grim, water-logged flats north and south of the
Menin road could never be to a Lancashire or London boy. And no other
French battle-field wears for a Frenchman quite the same aureole that
shines for ever on those dark, riven hills of Verdun. But it seemed to
me that in the feeling of France, Champagne came next--Champagne,
associated first of all with Castelnau's victory in the autumn of 1915,
then with General Nivelle's tragic check in 1917, with the serious
crisis in the French Army in May and June of that year; and finally
with General Gouraud's brilliant successes in the summer and autumn of
1918.
Six weeks ago I found myself in Strasbourg, where General Gouraud is
in command of the Fourth Army, now stationed in Alsace. Through a long
and beautiful day we had driven south from Metz, across the great
fortified zone to the south of that town; with its endless trenches
and wire-fields, its camouflaged roads, its railway stations packed
with guns, its ammunition dumps and battery-emplacements, which
Germany had prepared at the outset of the war, and which still awaited
the Americans last November, had the Allies' campaign not ended when
it did. There was a bright sun on all the wide and lovely landscape,
on the shining rivers, the flooded spaces and the old towns, and
magnificent clouds lay piled above the purple Vosges, to the south
and east. We caught up a French division on the march, with long lines
of lorries, artillery wagons, guns and field-kitchens, and as our car
got tangled up with it in passing through the small towns and
villages, we had ample time to notice the behaviour of the
country-folk, and the reception given to the troops. Nothing, it
seemed to me, could have been warmer and more spontaneous, especially
as soon as we crossed the boundary of Alsace. The women came running
out to their door-steps, the children formed a tumultuous escort, men
and women peered smiling out of the covered country carts, and
tradesmen left their counters to see the show.
[Illustration: _British Official Photograph_
The wonderful exploit of one Brigade of the 46th Division, consisting
of the South Staffords and North Staffords Regts., who crossed the St.
Quentin Canal, which is part of the Hindenburg Line, by swimming in
life-belts. They gained their objectives and also captured two bridges
which allowed the guns to be taken across. The Brigade is seen on the
steep slope of the Canal.]
At Metz I was conscious of a hostile and bitter element in the town,
not to be wondered at when one remembers that Metz has a population of
25,000 immigrant Germans out of a population of less than 70,000. But
in the country towns of Alsace and in Strasbourg itself, my own
impression, for what it is worth, was everywhere an impression of
solid and natural rejoicing in the new order of things. That there are
a large number of Germans in Strasbourg and Alsace generally is, of
course, true. There were some 450,000 before the war, out of a
population of rather more than two millions, and there are now at a
rough estimate about 300,000, of whom nearly 100,000 are to be found
in Metz and Strasbourg. The whole administration of the two provinces,
with very few exceptions, was a German administration, imported from
Germany, and up to the outbreak of war, the universities and the
schools--_i.e._, the whole teaching profession--were German, and many
of the higher clergy. The leading finance of the provinces was German.
And so on. But I cannot see any reason to doubt that the real feeling
of the native population in the two provinces, whether in town or
country, has remained throughout these forty-eight years strongly and
passionately French. "Since when did you expect the French to come
back?" asked M. Mirman, the present Commissioner of the French
Republic at Metz, of an old peasant whom he came across not long ago
on an official inspection. The old man's eyes kindled--"_Depuis
toujours!_" he said--"I knew it would come, but I was afraid it
mightn't come till I was dead, so I used to say to my son: 'If I am
dead, and the French come back, you will go to the cemetery, you will
knock three times on my grave--I shall hear!' And my son promised."
My present concern, however, is not with the Alsace-Lorraine question,
but with the brilliant Army Commander who now occupies what used to be
the Headquarters of the German Army Corps which held Alsace. My
acquaintance with him was due to a piece of audacity on my part. The
record of General Gouraud in Champagne, and at the Dardanelles, was
well known to me, and I had heard much of his attractive and romantic
personality. So, on arriving at our hotel after a long day's motoring,
and after consulting with the kind French Lieutenant who was our
escort, I ventured a little note to the famous General. I said I had
been the guest of the British Army for six days on our front, and was
now the guest of the French Army, for a week, and to pass through
Strasbourg without seeing the victor of the "front de Champagne" would
be tantalising indeed. Would he spare an Englishwoman, whose love for
the French nation had grown with her growth and strengthened with her
years, twenty minutes of his time?
The note was sent and I waited, looking out the while on the gay and
animated crowd that filled the Platz Gutenberg in front of the hotel,
and listening to the bands of children, shouting the "Marseillaise,"
and following every French officer as he appeared. Was there ever a
more lovely winter evening? A rosy sunset seemed to have descended
into the very streets and squares of the beautiful old town. Wisps of
pink cloud were tangled in the narrow streets, against a background of
intensely blue sky. The high-roofed burgher houses, with their
decorated fronts, had an "unsubstantial faery" look, under the strange
rich light; and the front of the Cathedral, with its single delicate
spire, soared, one suffusion of rose, to an incredible height above
the narrow street below.
"_Allons, enfants de la patri-e!_" But a motor-car is scattering the
children, and an _ordonnance_ descends. A note, written by the
General's own left hand--he lost his right arm in consequence of a
wound at the Dardanelles--invites us to dinner with him and his staff
forthwith--the motor will return for us. So, joyously, we made what
simple change we could, and in another hour or so we were waiting in
the General's study for the great man to appear. He came at once, and
I look back upon the evening that followed as one of the most
interesting that Fate has yet sent my way.
As he entered I saw a man of slight, erect figure, lame, indeed, and
with that sad, empty sleeve, but conveying an immediate and startling
impression as of some fiery, embodied force, dominating the slender
frame. He had a short beard, brown and silky, dark hair, and a pair of
clear blue eyes, shrewd, indeed, and penetrating, but singularly
winning. A soldier, a most modern soldier, yet with an infusion of
something romantic, a touch of thoughtful or melancholy charm that
recalled old France. He was dressed in a dark blue mess coat, red
breeches, and top boots, with three or four orders sparkling on his
breast. His manners were those of an old-fashioned and charming
courtesy.
As is well known, like Marshal Foch and General Castelnau, General
Gouraud is a Catholic. And like General Mangin, the great Joffre
himself, Gallieni, Franchet d'Esperey, d'Humbert, and other
distinguished leaders of the French Army, he made his reputation in
the French Colonial service. In Morocco, and the neighbouring lands,
where he spent some twenty-two years, from 1892 to 1914, he was the
right-hand of General Lyautey, and conspicuous no less for his
humanity, his peace-making, and administrative genius than for his
brilliant services in the field. When the war broke out General
Lyautey indeed tried for a time to keep him at his side. But the
impulse of the younger soldier was too strong; and his chief at last
let him go. Gouraud arrived in France just after the Marne victory,
and was at once given the command of a division in the Argonne. He
spent the first winter of the war in that minute study of the ground,
and that friendly and inspiring intercourse with his soldiers, which
have been two of the marked traits of his career, and when early in
1915 he was transferred to Champagne, as Commander of a Corps d'Armée,
he had time, before he was called away, to make a survey of the
battle-field east of Rheims, which was of great value to him later
when he came to command the Fourth French Army in the same district.
But meanwhile came the summons to the Dardanelles, where, as we all
remember, he served with the utmost loyalty and good will under
General Sir Ian Hamilton. He replaced General d'Amade on the 10th of
May, led a brilliant and successful attack on the 4th of June, and
was, alas! terribly wounded before the end of the month. He was
entering a dressing-station close to his headquarters to which some
wounded French soldiers had just been brought when a shell exploded
beside him. His aide-de-camp was knocked over, and when he picked
himself up, stunned and bewildered, he saw his General lying a few
yards away, with both legs and an arm broken. Gouraud, during these
few weeks, had already made his mark, and universal sympathy from
French and English followed him home. His right arm was amputated on
the way to Toulon; the left leg, though broken below the knee, was not
seriously injured, but the fracture of the right involved injury to
the hip, and led to permanent lameness.
Who would have imagined that a man so badly hurt could yet have
afterwards become one of the most brilliant and successful generals in
the French Army? The story of his recovery must rank with the most
amazing instances of the power of the human will, and there are
various touches connected with it in current talk which show the
temper of the man, and the love which has been always felt for him.
One of his old masters of the College Stanislas who went to meet him
at the station on his arrival at Paris, and had been till then unaware
of the extent of the General's wounds, could not conceal his emotion
at seeing him. "_Eh, c'est le sort des batailles_," said Gouraud
gaily, to his pale and stumbling friend. "One would have said he was
two men in one," said another old comrade--"one was betrayed to me by
his works; the other spoke to me in his words." The legends of him in
hospital are many. He was determined to walk again--and quickly. "One
has to teach these legs," he said impatiently, "to walk naturally, not
like machines." Hence the steeple-chases over all kinds of
obstacles--stools, cushions, chairs--that his nurses must needs
arrange for him in the hospital passages; and later on his determined
climbing of any hill that presented itself--at first leaning on his
mother (General Gouraud has never married), then independently.
He was wounded at the end of June, 1915. At the beginning of November
he was sent at the head of a French Military Mission to Italy, and on
his return in December was given the command of the Fourth French
Army, the Army of Champagne. There on that famous sector of the French
line, where Castelnau and Langle de Cary in the autumn of the same
year had all but broken through, he remained through the whole of
1916. That was the year of Verdun and the Somme. Neither the Allies
nor the enemy had men or energy to spare for important action in
Champagne that year; but Gouraud's watch was never surprised, and
again he was able to acquaint himself with every military feature, and
every local peculiarity of the desolate chalk-hills where France has
buried so many thousands of her sons. At the end of 1916, his old
chief, General Lyautey, now French Minister for War, insisted on his
going back to Morocco as Governor; but happily for the Army of
Champagne, the interlude was short, and by the month of May, Lyautey
was once more in Morocco and Gouraud in Champagne--to remain there in
command of his beloved Fourth Army till the end of the war.
* * * * *
Such then, in brief outline, was the story of the great man whose
guests we were proud to be on that January evening. Dinner was very
animated and gay. The rooms of the huge building was singularly bare,
having been stripped by the Germans before their departure of
everything portable. But _en revanche_ the entering French, finding
nothing left in the fine old house, even of the _mobilier_ which had
been left there in 1871, discovered a _château_ belonging to the Kaiser
close by, and requisitioned from it some of the necessaries of life.
Bordeaux drunk out of a glass marked with the Kaiser's monogram had a
taste of its own. In the same way, when on the British front we drew
up one afternoon, north of St. Omer, at a level crossing to let a
goods train go by, I watched the interminable string of German trucks,
labelled Magdeburg, Essen, Düsseldorf, and saw in them, with a bitter
satisfaction, the first visible signs of the Reparation and
Restitution to be.
The relations between the General and his Staff were very pleasant to
watch; and after dinner there was some interesting talk of the war. I
asked the General what had seemed to him the most critical moment of
the struggle. He and his Chief of the Staff looked at each other
gravely an instant and then the General said: "I have no doubt about
it at all. Not May 27th (the break through on the Aisne)--not March
21st (the break through at St. Quentin)--but May and June, 1917--'_les
mutineries dans l'armée_,' _i.e._, that bitter time of '_dépression
morale_,' as another French military critic calls it, affecting the
glorious French Army, which followed on General Nivelle's campaign on
the Aisne--March and April, 1917--with its high hopes of victory, its
initial success, its appalling losses, and its ultimate check. Many
causes combined, however--among them the leave-system in the French
Army, and many grievances as to food, billeting, and the like: and the
discontent was alarming and widespread. But," said General Gouraud,
"Pétain stepped in and saved the situation." "How?" one asked. "_Il
s'occupa du soldat_--(he gave his mind to the soldier)--that was all."
The whole leave-system was transformed, the food supply and the
organisation of the Army canteens were immensely improved--pay was
raised--and everything was done that could be done, while treating
actual mutiny with a stern hand, to meet the soldiers' demands. "In
our army," said General Gouraud, "a system of discipline like that of
the German Army is impossible. We are a democracy. We must have the
consent of the governed. In the last resort the soldier must be able
to say: '_J'obéis d'amitié._'"
That great result, according to General Gouraud, was finally achieved
by General Pétain's reforms. He gave as a proof of it that on the
night of the Armistice, he and his Staff, at Châlons, unable to sit
still indoors, went out and mingled with the crowd in the streets of
that great military centre, apparently to the astonishment and
pleasure of the multitude. "Everywhere along the line," said the
General, "the soldiers were cheering Pétain! '_Vive Pétain! Vive
Pétain!_'" Pétain was miles away; but it was the spontaneous
recognition of him as the soldiers' champion and friend.
Gouraud did not say, what was no doubt the truth, that the army at
Châlons were cheering Gouraud no less than Pétain. For one can rarely
talk with French officers about General Gouraud without coming across
the statement: "He is beloved by his army. He has done so much for the
soldiers." But not a word of his own share appeared in his
conversation with me.
The talk passed on to the German attack on the French front in
Champagne on July 15th, that perfectly-planned defence in which, to
quote General Gouraud's own stirring words to his soldiers: "You
broke the strength and the hopes of the enemy. That day Victory
changed her camp. She has been faithful to us ever since." It makes
one of the most picturesque stories of the war. The German offensive
which broke out, as we know, along the whole of their new Marne front
on July 15th, had been exactly anticipated for days before it began
by General Gouraud and his Staff. The Fourth French Army, which
Gouraud commanded, was lying to the north-east of Rheims, and the
German attack on the Monts de Champagne, already the scene in 1916
and 1917 of so much desperate fighting, was meant to carry the German
line down to the Marne that same day. Gouraud was amply informed by
his intelligence staff, and his air service, of the enemy preparations,
and had made all his own. The only question was as to the exact day
and hour of the attack. Then by a stroke of good fortune, at eight
o'clock on the very evening preceding the attack, twenty-seven prisoners
were brought in--of whom some are said to have been Alsatian--and
closely questioned by the Staff. "They told us," said Gouraud, "that
the artillery attack would begin at ten minutes past midnight, and the
infantry attack between three and four o'clock that very night. I
thereupon gave the order for our bombardment to begin at 11.30 p.m. in
order to catch the assembling German troops. I had 200 _batteries
secretes_ ready--of which the enemy had no idea--which had given
beforehand no sign of their existence. Then we sat with our watches in
our hands. Was it true--or not true? 12.5--12.6--12.8--12.9.--Probably
it was a mare's nest. 12.10--_Crac!_--the bombardment had begun. We
sprang to our telephones!" And presently, as the captured German
officers began to come in, their French captors were listening to
their bewildered astonishment "at the number of our batteries they had
never discovered, which were on none of their maps, and only revealed
themselves at the very moment of their own attack."
Meanwhile, the first French position was not intended to be held. The
advance posts were told to delay and break up the enemy as much as
possible, but the famous Monts were to be abandoned and the real
resistance was to be offered on a position intermediate between the
first and second position, and so densely held that no infiltration of
the enemy was to be possible. Everything happened, for once, really
"according to plan." The advance posts, whose order was "to sacrifice
themselves," and each member of which knew perfectly well the duty
laid upon him, held out--some of them--all day, and eventually fought
their way back to the French lines. But on the prepared line of
resistance the German attack was hopelessly broken, and men and
reserves coming on fast from behind, ignorant of what had happened to
the attacking troops, were mown down by the French artillery. "By
midday," says the typed _compte-rendu_ of operations, which, signed by
General Gouraud's own left hand, lies before me--"the enemy appeared
entirely blocked in all directions--and the battle-position fixed by
the General Commanding the Army was intact."
Gouraud's army had, in fact, according to the proclamation of its
General, broken the attack of fifteen German divisions, supported by
ten others. The success, moreover, was of the greatest strategical
importance. Thus secured on his right, Foch at once transferred troops
from the Fourth Army, in support of General Mangin's counter-attack of
the 18th, to the other side of the Marne salient, and Gouraud remained
firmly on the watch in the position he had so victoriously held, till
the moment came for his own advance in September.
I seem still to see him insisting--in spite of his lameness--on
bringing the Staff maps himself from his study, marking on them the
points where the fighting in the September advance was most critical,
and dictating to one of his Staff the itinerary it would be best for
us to take if we wished to see part, at least, of the battle-field.
"And you won't forget," he said, looking up suddenly, "to go and see
two things--the great cemetery at Châlons, and the little 'Cimetière
du Mont Muret.'" He described to me the latter, lying up in what was
the main fighting line, and how they had gathered there many of the
"unidentifiables"--the nameless, shattered heroes of a terrible
battle-field, so that they rest in the very ground where they gave
their lives. He might have told me,--but there was never a word of it,
and I only knew it later--that it was in that very scene of
desolation, from May, 1917, to March, 1918, that he lived among his
men, building up the spirit of troops that had suffered much,
physically and morally, caring for everything that concerned them,
restoring a shaken discipline and forging the army which a year later
was to fight with an iron steadiness under its brilliant chief.
To fight both in defence and attack. From July 15th to September 26th
Gouraud remained passive in Champagne. Then on September 26th, the day
before the British attack at Cambrai, he moved, with the First
American Army on his right, against the strong German positions to the
east of Rheims, which since the beginning of the war had barred the
French way. In a battle of sixteen days, the French captured the whole
of the fortified zone on this portion of the front, took 21,000
prisoners, 600 cannon and 3,500 machine guns. At the very same moment
Sir Douglas Haig was driving through the Hindenburg line, and up to
the west bank of the Selle, taking 48,000 prisoners and 600 guns;
while the Americans were pushing through the difficult forest country
of the Argonne, and along both sides of the Meuse.
The German strength was indeed weakening fast. Between July 16th and
the Armistice, the British took 188,700 prisoners, the French 137,000,
and the Americans 43,000.