ALSACE-LORRAINE
THE GLORY OF VERDUN
Before we left Strasbourg on our way to the "front de Champagne,"
armed with General Gouraud's maps and directions, an hour or two of
most interesting conversation threw great light for me on that other
"field of victory"--Alsace-Lorraine.
We brought an introduction to Dr. Pierre Bucher, a gentleman in whom
Alsatian patriotism, both before the war and since the Armistice, has
found one of its most effective and eloquent representatives. A man of
a singularly winning and magnetic presence,--with dark, melancholy
eyes, and the look of one in whom the flame of life has burnt in the
past with a bitter intensity, fanned by winds of revolt and suffering.
Before the war Dr. Bucher was a well-known and popular doctor in
Strasbourg, recognised by Alsatian and German alike as a champion of
the French spirit and French traditions in the lost provinces. He
belonged to that _jeunesse_ of the nineties, which, in the absence of
any reasonable grounds for expecting a reversal of the events of 1871,
came to the conclusion that autonomous liberties would be at any rate
preferable to the naked repression, at the hands of Bismarck and
Manteuffel, of the eighties and early nineties. The young men of his
date decided that the whole government of the province could not any
longer be left to the German bureaucrat, and a certain small number of
them entered the German administration, which was imposed on the
province after 1871 and had been boycotted thence-forward up to nearly
the end of the century by all true Alsatians. But this line of action,
where it was adopted, was taken entirely without prejudice to the
national demand, which remained as firm as ever, supposing
circumstances should ever admit of reunion with France.
Two causes in particular contributed to the irreconcilable attitude of
the provinces:--first, the liberal tendencies of the population, the
general sympathy, especially in Alsace, with the revolutionary and
Napoleonic doctrines of Liberal France from 1789 onward; and secondly,
the amazing lack of political intelligence shown by their new masters.
"Even if you could ever have annexed us with success"--said Dr. Bucher
long before the war, to a German publicist with whom he was on
friendly terms--"you came, as it was, a hundred years too late. We had
taken our stand with France at the Revolution. Her spirit and her
traditions were ours. We were not affected by her passing fits of
reaction, which never really interfered with us or our local life.
Substantially the revolutionary and Napoleonic era laid the
foundations of modern France, and on them we stand. They have little
or nothing in common with an aristocratic and militarist Germany. Our
sympathies, our traditions, our political tendencies are all
French--you cannot alter them."
"But, finally--what do you expect or wish for?" said the German man of
letters, after he and Dr. Bucher had talked through a great part of
the night, and the German had listened to the Alsatian with an evident
wish to understand Alsatian grievances.
Dr. Bucher's answer was prompt and apparently unexpected.
"Reunion with France," he said quietly--"no true Alsatian wishes
anything else."
The German first stared and then threw himself back with a
good-natured laugh.
"Then indeed there's nothing to be done." (_Dann ist ja freilich gar
nichts zu machen!_)
The tone was that of a strong man's patience with a dreamer; so
confident did the Germans feel in their possession of the
"Reichsland."
But whatever chance the Germany of Bismarck and William II. might have
had of winning over Alsace-Lorriane--and it could never have been a
good one--was ruined by the daily and tyrannous blundering of the
German Government. The prohibition of the teaching of French in the
primary schools, the immediate imposition of German military service
on the newly-annexed territories, the constant espionage on all those
known to hold strong sympathies with France, or views antagonistic to
the German administration, the infamous passport regulations, and a
hundred other grievances, deepened year by year the regret for France,
and the dislike for Germany. After the first period of "protestation,"
marked by the constant election of "protesting" deputies to the
Reichstag, came the period of repression--the "graveyard peace" of the
late eighties and early nineties--followed by an apparent acquiescence
of the native population. "Our young people in those years no longer
sang the 'Marseillaise,'" said Dr. Bucher. Politically, the Alsatians
despaired and--"we had to live together, _bon gré, mal gré_. But deep
in our hearts lay our French sympathies. When I was a young student,
hating my German teachers, the love for France beat in my pulses, like
a ground wave" (_comme une vague de fond_).
Then after 1900 the Germans "changed greatly." They became every year
richer and more arrogant; Germany from beyond the Rhine developed
every year an increasing _appétit_ for the native wealth and commerce
of Alsace; and the methods of government became increasingly
oppressive and militarist. By this time some 400,000 native Alsatians
had in the course of years left the country, and about the same number
of immigrant Germans had taken their places. The indifference or
apathy of the old population began again to yield to more active
feelings. The rise of a party definitely "Anti-Allemand," especially
among the country people, made itself felt. And finally came, in Dr.
Bucher's phrase, the period of "la haine" after the famous Saverne
incident in 1912. That extraordinary display of German military
insolence seemed to let loose unsuspected forces.
"All of a sudden, and from all sides, there was an explosion of fury
against the Germans."
And as the Doctor spoke, his sensitive, charming face kindling into
fire, I remembered our slow passage the day before, through the
decorated streets of the beautiful old town of Saverne, in the wake of
a French artillery division, and amid what seemed the spontaneous joy
of a whole population!
Through all these years Dr. Bucher was a marked man in the eyes of the
German authorities, but he was careful to give them no excuse for
violence, and so great was his popularity, owing clearly to his
humanity and self-devotion as a doctor, that they preferred to leave
him alone. The German prefect once angrily said to him: "You are a
real _poison_ in this country, Herr Doctor!"--and not very long before
the war a German official to whom he was applying for leave to invite
M. Andre Tardieu to lecture in Strasbourg, broke out with pettish
exasperation: "For twenty years you have been turning my hair grey, M.
le Docteur!"--and permission was refused. At the outbreak of war, he
naturally escaped from Strasbourg, and joined the French army; while
during the latter part of the struggle, he was French military attache
at Berne, and, as I understand, the head of a most successful secret
service. He was one of the first Frenchmen to re-enter Strasbourg, and
is now an invaluable _liaison_ official between the restored French
Government and the population.
The practical difficulty of the moment, in January last, was how to
meet the Alsatian impatience to get rid of their German masters, bag
and baggage, while at the same time maintaining the ordinary services.
Every night, meetings were being held in the Strasbourg squares to
demand the immediate departure of the Germans. "_Qu'ils
partent--qu'ils partent tous--et tout de suite!_" The French officials
could only reply that if an immediate clearance were made of the whole
German administration--"we can't run your trains--or carry your
posts--or deliver your goods." But the German employés were being
gradually and steadily repatriated--no doubt with much unavoidable
hardship to individuals. Strasbourg contained then about 65,000
Germans out of 180,000. Among the remaining German officials there was
often a curious lack of realisation of what had happened to Germany
and to them. "The Germans are very _gauche_--their tone is still just
the same!" And the Doctor described a scene he had witnessed in one of
the bureaux of the prefecture only the day before. A German official
was at his desk. Enter an Alsatian to make an inquiry about some point
in a bankruptcy case. The German answered him with the curt rudeness
which was the common official tone in old days, and finally,
impatiently told the applicant to go. The Alsatian first opened his
eyes in astonishment, and then--suddenly--flamed up. "_What!_--you
think nothing is changed?--that you are the masters here as you used
to be--that you can treat us as you used to treat us? We'll show you?
We are the masters now. Get out of that chair!--Give it me!--while I
talk to you. Behave civilly to me, _ou je vais vous flanquer un coup
dans le dos!_" And the Alsatian went threateningly forward. But the
German looked up--grew white--and said slowly--"Monsieur--you are
right! I am at your service. What is your business?"
I asked about the amount of inter-marriage that had taken place during
the forty years. Dr. Bucher thought it had been inconsiderable--and
that the marriages, contracted generally between German subalterns and
girls of the inn-keeping or small farming class, had been rarely
happy. The Alsatian strain was the stronger, and the wife's relations
despised the German intruder. "Not long before the war I came upon two
small boys fighting in a back street." The boy that was getting the
worst of it was abusing the other, and Dr. Bucher caught the
words--"dirty Prussian!" (_sale Prussien!_) The boy at whom this was
hurled, stopped suddenly, with a troubled face, as though he were
going to cry. "No--no!--not me!--not me! _my father!_" Strange, tragic
little tale!
As to the Church, a curious situation existed at that moment in
Strasbourg. The Archbishop, a good man, of distinguished German birth,
was respected and liked by his clergy, who were, however, French in
sympathies almost to a man. The Archbishop, who had naturally excused
himself from singing the victors' Te Deum in the Cathedral, felt that
it would be wiser for him to go, and proposed to Rome that he should
resign his see. His clergy, though personally attached to him, were
anxious that there should be no complications with the French
Government, and supported his wish to resign. But Rome had refused.
Why? No doubt because the whole position of the Church and of
Catholicism in these very Catholic provinces represents an important
card in the hand of the Vatican, supposing the Papacy should desire at
any time to reopen the Church and State question with Republican
France. What is practically the régime of the Napoleonic Concordat
still obtains in the recovered provinces. The clergy have always been
paid by the State, and will be still paid, I understand, in spite of
the Combes laws, by a special subvention, for the distribution of
which the bishops will be responsible. And M. Clemenceau, as the
French Prime Minister, has already nominated one or more bishops, as
was the case throughout France itself up to 1905.
Everything indeed will be done to satisfy the recovered provinces that
can be done. They are at present the spoiled children of France; and
the poor devastated North looks on half enviously, inclined to think
that "Paris forgets us!"--in the joy of the lost ones found. But Paris
knows very well that there are difficulties ahead, and that the French
love of symmetry and logic will have to make substantial concessions
here and there to the local situation. There are a number of
institutions, for instance, which have grown up and covered the
country since 1871, which cannot be easily fitted to the ordinary
_cadre_ of French departmental government. The department would be too
small a unit. The German insurance system, again, is far better and
more comprehensive than the French, and will have, in one way or
another, to be taken over.
But my own strong impression is that goodwill, and the Liberal _fond_,
resting on the ideas of 1789, which, in spite of their Catholicism,
has always existed in these eastern provinces (Metz, however, has been
much more thoroughly Germanised than Strasbourg since the annexation),
will see France through. And meanwhile the recovery of these rich and
beautiful countries may well comfort her in some degree for her
desolate fields and ruined towns of the North and Centre. The capital
value of Alsace-Lorraine is put roughly at a thousand millions, and
the Germans leave behind them considerable additions to the wealth of
the province in the shape of new railway-lines and canals, fine
stations, and public buildings, not to speak of the thousands of
fruit-trees with which, in German fashion, they have lined the
roads--a small, unintentional reparation for the murdered fruit-trees
of the North.
* * * * *
A few days after our Strasbourg visit we drove, furnished with General
Gouraud's notes and maps, up into the heart of the "front de
Champagne." You cross the wide, sandy plains to the north of Châlons,
with their scanty pine-woods, where Attila met his over-throw, and
where the French Army has trained and manoeuvred for generations. And
presently, beyond the great military camp of pre-war days, you begin
to mount into a region of chalk hills, barren and lonely enough before
the war, and now transformed by the war into a scene which almost
rivals the Ypres salient and Verdun itself in tragic suggestiveness.
Standing in the lonely graveyard of Mont Muret, one looks over a
tortured wilderness of trenches and shell-holes. Close by are all the
places famous through years of fighting--Souain, Navarin Farm, Tahure,
the Butte de Tahure, and, to the north-west, Somme-Py, Ste. Marie-Py,
and so on to Moronvilliers and Craonne. In the south-western distance
I could just descry the Monts de Champagne, while turning to the north
one faced the slopes of Notre Dame des Champs, and recalled the
statement of General Gouraud that on that comparatively open ground
the fiercest fighting of last October had taken place.
And now, not a soul, not a movement! Everywhere lay piles of unused
shell, German and French, small heaps of hand-grenades and bundles of
barbed wire. The camouflaged battery positions, the deep dug-outs and
strong posts of the enemy were all about us; a dead horse lay not far
away; and in front, the white crosses of the graveyard. A grim scene,
under the January sky! But in the very middle of the little cemetery
some tender hand had just recently fastened a large bunch of white
narcissus to one of the crosses. We had passed no one that I could
remember on the long ascent; yet the flowers were quite fresh and the
thought of them--the only living and beautiful thing for miles in that
scarred wilderness, over which a creeping fog was beginning to
gather--stayed with me for days.
The Champagne-battle-field is indeed deeply interwoven with the whole
history of the war. The flower of the French Army and almost all the
leading French Generals--Castelnau, Pétain, Nivelle, Gouraud, have
passed through its furnace. But famous as it is, and for ever
associated with the remarkable and fascinating personality of General
Gouraud, which gives to it a _panache_ of its own, it has not the
sacredness of Verdun.
We had spent the day before the expedition to Champagne at St. Mihiel
and Verdun. To St. Mihiel I will return in my next chapter. Verdun I
had never seen, and the impression that it makes, even in a few hours,
is profound. In March, 1916, I well remember at Havre, at Boulogne, at
St. Omer, how intent and absorbed a watch was kept along our front
over the news from Verdun. It came in hourly, and the officers in the
hotels, French and English, passed it to each other without much
speech, with a shrug, or a look of anxiety, or a smile, as the case
might be. When we arrived on March 6th at the Visitors' Château at
G.H.Q.--then, of course, at St. Omer--our first question was:
"Verdun?" "All right," was the quick reply. "We have offered help, but
they have refused it."
No--France, heroic France, trod that wine-press alone; she beat back
her cruel foe alone; and, at Verdun, she triumphed alone. Never,
indeed, was human sacrifice more absolute; and never was the spiritual
force of what men call patriotism more terribly proved. "The _poilu_
of Verdun," writes M. Joseph Reinach, "became an epic figure"--and the
whole battle rose before Europe as a kind of apocalyptic vision of
Death and Courage, staged on a great river, in an amphitheatre of
blood-stained hills. All the eyes in the world were fixed on this
little corner of France. For a Frenchman--"Verdun was our first
thought on waking, and was never absent from us through the day."
The impression made by the battle--or rather, the three battles--of
Verdun does not depend on the numbers engaged. The British Battle of
the Somme, and the battles of last year on the British front far
surpassed it in the number of men and guns employed. From March 21st
last year to April 17th, the British front was attacked by 109
divisions, and the French by 25. In the most critical fighting at
Verdun, from February 21st to March 21st, the French had to face 21
divisions, and including the second German attack in June and the
triumphant French advance in December, the total enemy forces may be
put at 42 divisions. But the story is incomparable! Everything
contributed--the fame of the ancient fortress, the dynastic and
political interests involved, the passion of patriotism which the
struggle evoked in France, the spendthrift waste of life on the part
of the German Command.
After the French rally, indeed, from the first terrific bombardment,
which nearly gave the German Command its coveted prey, the thing
became a duel, watched by all Europe, between Pétain and the Crown
Prince; between the dynastic interests of the Hohenzollerns, served by
a magnificent army, and the finest military and patriotic traditions
of France. From day to day the public in this country watched the
fluctuations of the struggle with an interest so absorbing that the
names of Douaumont, Vaux, Mort Homme, Cumières, the Goose's Crest,
came to ring in our ears almost as the names of Hougoumont, La Haye
Sainte, La Belle Alliance, rang in those of an earlier time.
Verdun, from a distance, produces the same illusion as Rheims. The
Cathedral and the town are apparently still in being. They have not
lost their essential outlines, and the veils of grey and purple haze
between the spectator and the reality disguises what both have
suffered. Then one draws nearer. One enters the famous fortress,
through the old Vauban fortifications, and over the Vauban
bridge--little touched, to all appearance. And presently, as one
passes along the streets, one sees that here is not a town, but only
the ghost, the skeleton of a town. The roofless, windowless houses, of
which the streets still keep, as in Rheims, their ancient lines, stare
at you like so many eyeless skulls--the bare bones of a city. Only the
famous citadel, with its miles of underground passages and rooms, is
just as it was before the battle, and as it will be, one may hope,
through the long years to come; preserved, not for any active purpose
of war, but as the shrine of immortal memories. Itself, it played a
great part in the struggle. For here, in these dormitories and
mess-rooms and passages so far underground that even the noise of the
fierce struggle outside never reached them, it was possible for troops
worn out by the superhuman ordeal of the battle, to find complete
rest--_to sleep_--without fear.
We entered through a large mess-room full of soldiers, with, at its
further end, a kitchen, with a busy array of cooks and orderlies. Then
someone opened a door, and we found ourselves in a small room, very
famous in the history of the war. During the siege, scores of visitors
from Allied and neutral countries--statesmen, generals, crowned
heads--took luncheon under its canopy of flags, buried deep
underground, while the storm of shell raged outside. There, in the
visitors' book, one might turn to the two signatures--one of them then
only a fortnight old--that all France knows:
"March, 1916--_On les aura! Pétain_"
"January, 1918--_On les a! Pétain_"
A courteous Commandant, telephoned to from below, came from some upper
region to greet us and to show us something of the endless labyrinth
of rooms, passages and dormitories, which during the siege often
sheltered thousands of men. The veteran Colonel Duhay, who was in
command of the citadel during the greater part of the year-long
battle--a splendid, square-built tower of a man--I saw later in Paris.
It was ill-luck not to have been able to walk with him over the tragic
battle-field itself, for few men can have memories of it at once so
comprehensive and so close. From the few words I had with him I retain
a shuddering impression as of a slaughter-house; yet nothing could be
cheerfuller or humaner than the broad soldier-face. But our talk
turned on the losses of Verdun, and although these losses--_i.e._, the
proportion of death to the square yard--were probably exceeded in
several later battles, in none, it seems to me, has the massacre of
men on both sides left so terrible a mark on the survivors. There came
a time when the French were sick of slaying, and the German dead were
piled mètres high on the slopes of Mort Homme and Cumières; in those
weeks at the end of May, when the Germans, conscious that their
prestige had suffered irreparably in the hundred days--which were to
have been four!--of desperate and indecisive fighting, were at the
opening of that fierce last effort which gave them Fort Vaux and its
hero-commander, Commandant Raynal, on June 7th--put them in
short-lived possession of Thiaumont and Fleury later--and was then
interrupted at the end of the month by the thunder of the Allied
attack on the Somme.
After leaving the citadel and the much-injured cathedral, beneath the
crypt of which some of the labyrinthine passages of the old fortress
are hewn, we drove through the eastern section of the battle-field,
past what was once Fort Souville, along an upper road, with Vaux on
our right, and Douaumont on the northern edge of the hill in front of
us; descending again by Froide Terre, with the Côte de Poivre beyond
it to the north; while we looked across the Meuse at the dim lines of
Mort Homme, of the Bois des Corbeaux and the Crête de l'Oie, of all
that "chess-board" of hills which became so familiar to Europe in
those marvellous four months from February to June, 1916. Every yard
of these high slopes has been fought over again and again, witnessing
on the part of the defenders a fury of endurance, a passion of
resolve, such as those, perhaps, alone can know who hear through all
their being the mystic call of the soil, of the very earth itself, the
actual fatherland, on which they fight. "_We are but a moment of the
eternal France_:"--such was once the saying of a French soldier, dying
somewhere amid these broken trenches over which we are looking. What
was it, asks M. Reinach, that enabled the French to hold out as they
did? _Daring_, he replies--the daring of the leaders, the daring of
the troops led. The word hardly renders the French "_audace_" which is
equally mis-translated by our English "audacity." "_Audace_" implies a
daring which is not rashness, a daring which is justified, which is,
in fact, the military aspect of a great nation's confidence in itself.
It was the spirit of the "Marseillaise," says M. Reinach again--it was
the French soul--_l'ame française_--the soul of country and of
freedom, which triumphed here.
And not for France alone. At the moment when the attack on Verdun
began, although the British military power was strengthening month by
month, and the Military Service Act of May, 1916, which put the
finishing touch to Lord Kitchener's great work, was close at hand, the
French Army was still not only the principal, but the essential
element in the Western campaign. France, at Verdun, as in the Battle
of the Marne, was defending not only her own freedom, but the freedom
of Europe. A few months later, when the British Army of the Somme went
over its parapets at daybreak on July 1st, Verdun was automatically
relieved, and it was clear to all the world that Britain's
apprenticeship was past, and that another great military power had
been born into Europe, on whom, as we now know, the main
responsibilities of final victory were to rest. But at Verdun France
fought for _us_--for England and America no less than for herself; and
that thought must always deepen the already deep emotion with which
English eyes look out upon these tortured hills.
That dim line on the eastern ridge, which marks the ruins of Fort
Vaux, stands indeed for a story which has been entrusted by history to
the living memory of France's Allies, hardly less than to that of
France herself. As we pause among the crumbling trenches and
shell-holes to look back upon the height of Vaux, I seem to see the
lines of French infantry creeping up the hill, through the
communication trenches, in the dark, to the relief of their comrades
in the fort; the runners--eager volunteers--assuring communications
under the incessant hail of shell; the carrier-pigeons, when the fort
is altogether cut off, bringing their messages back to Headquarters;
the red and green signal lights shooting up from the ridge into the
night. One of these runners, when the siege was nearing its end,
arrived at an advance post, having by a miracle got through a terrible
barrage unhurt. "You might have waited a few instants," said the
Colonel, kindly. But the runner, astonished, showed the envelope. "My
Colonel, look--it is written--'_urgent!_'"
That was the spirit. Or listen to this fragment from the journal of
Captain Delvert, defending one of the redoubts that protect Fort Vaux:
"Six o'clock--the bombardment has just begun again. The
stretcher-bearer, L----, has just been leaning a few
moments--worn out--against the wall of my dug-out. His good,
honest face is hollow, his eyes, with their blue rims, seem
starting out of his head. '_Mon Capitaine_, I'm used up. There
are only three stretcher-bearers left. The others are dead or
wounded. I haven't eaten for three days, or drunk a drop of
water.' His frail body is only held together by a miracle of
energy. Talk of heroes--here is a true one!
"Eight o'clock. We are relieved.
"Eleven o'clock. Message from the Colonel. 'Owing to
circumstances the 101st cannot be relieved.'
"_Merci!_
"What a disappointment for my poor fellows! Lieutenant X---- is
lost in admiration of them. I daresay--but I have only
thirty-nine of them left."
Eighteen hours later.
"The order for relief has come. We shall leave our dead behind us
in the trench. Then-comrades have carefully placed them out of
the passage-way.... There they are--poor sentinels, whom we leave
behind us, in a line on the parados, in their blood-stained
uniforms--solemn and terrible guardians of this fragment of
French soil, which still in death they seem to be holding against
the enemy."
But the enemy advances inexorably, and within the fort the dead and
dying multiply.
"Captain Tabourot fought like a lion," says another witness. "He
was taller than any of us. He gave his orders briefly, encouraged
us, and placed us. Then he plunged his hand into the bag of bombs,
and, leaning back, threw one with a full swing of the arm, aiming
each time. That excited us, and we did our best."
But meanwhile the enemy is stealing up behind, between the trench and
the fort. Captain Tabourot is mortally hit, and is carried into the
dressing-station within the fort. Commandant Raynal, himself wounded,
comes to see him. "No word of consolation, no false hope. The one
knows that all is over; the other respects him too deeply to attempt a
falsehood." A grasp of the hand--a word from the Commandant: "Well
done, _mon ami_!" But the Captain is thinking of his men. "_Mon
Commandant_--if the Boches get through, it is not the fault of my
company. They did all they could." Then a last message to his wife.
And presently his name is carried through the dark by a carrier-pigeon
down to the Headquarters below: "The enemy surrounds us. I report to
you the bravery of Captain Tabourot, seriously wounded. We are holding
out." And a few hours later: "Captain Tabourot of the 142nd has died
gloriously. Wound received in defending the north-eastern breach.
Demand for him the Legion of Honour."
For five days the heroic defence goes on. All communications are cut,
the passages of the fort are choked with wounded and dying men, the
water is giving out. On the 4th, a wounded pigeon arrives at
Headquarters. It brings a message, imploring urgently for help.
"This is my last pigeon." The following day communication is partly
re-established, and a few fragmentary messages are received. "The
enemy"--signals the fort--"is working on a mine to the west of the
fort. Turn on the guns--quick." ... "We don't hear your artillery. Are
attacked by gas, and flame throwers. Are at the last extremity." Then
one message gets through from below--"Courage! we shall soon attack."
The fort waits, and at night another fragmentary message comes from
Raynal asking for water and relief. "I am nearly at the end of my
powers. The troops--men and officers--have in all circumstances done
their duty.... You will come, no doubt ... before we are completely
exhausted. _Vive la France!_"
But death and thirst--thirst, above all--are victors. On the 6th, a
few hours before the inevitable end, Marshal Joffre flashed his
message to the heights--in the first place, a message of thanks to
troops and Commander for their "magnificent defence," in the next,
making Commandant Raynal a Commander of the Legion of Honour.
On the 7th a last heroic effort was made to relieve the fort. It
failed, and Raynal--wounded, with a handful of survivors--surrendered,
the Germans, in acknowledgment of the heroism of the defence, allowing
the Commandant to retain his sword.
What manner of men were they that fought this fight? What traditions
did they represent? What homes did they come from?
M. Henri Bordeaux, himself an eye-witness, to whose admirable and
moving book on _The Last Days of Fort Vaux_, I am indebted for the
preceding details, to some extent answers the question by quoting a
letter, addressed by his mother to the stretcher-bearer, Roger Vamier,
decorated in 1915 by General Joffre himself.
"_Et toi, mon trésor_--you must have a great deal to do.... Well,
do all you can to save those poor wounded!--left there in the snow
and blood. My blood boils to be staying on here, when there is so
much to do over there, in picking up those poor fellows. Why won't
they have a woman?--there, where she could really help! It is the
business of mothers to pick up those poor lads, and give them a
good word. Well, you must replace the mothers, you, _mon chéri_,
you must do all you can--do the impossible--to help. I see you
running--creeping along--looking for the wounded. If I could
only be there too!--Yes, it is my place, _mon petit_, near you.
Courage, courage!--I know it is the beginning of the end--and
the end will be grand for all those who have fought in the just
cause."
A month later thousands of English, Scotch, Welsh and Irish lads, men
from Canada, South Africa, New Zealand, and Australia, were passing on
the Somme through a similar furnace of death and suffering to that
borne by the French at Verdun. But the English ways of expression are
not the French; and both differ from the American. The instinct for
ringing and dramatic speech rarely deserts the Frenchman--or
Frenchwoman. It is present in the letter written by Roger Vamier's
mother, as in the _Ordres du Jour_ of Castelnau or Pétain. Facility of
this kind is not our _forte_. Our lack of it suggests the laughter in
that most delightful of recent French books, _Les Silences du Colonel
Bramble_, which turns upon our national taciturnities and our
minimising instinct in any matter of feeling, an instinct which is
like the hiding instinct, the protective colouring of birds--only
anxious to be mistaken for something else. The Englishman, when
emotion compels him, speaks more readily in poetry than prose; it is
the natural result of our great poetic tradition; and in the
remarkable collections of war poetry written by English soldiers we
have the English counterpart to the French prose utterance of the
war--so much more eloquent and effective, generally, than our own.
* * * * *
One more look round the slopes over which the light is fading. The
heroism of the defence!--that, here, is the first thought. But on the
part of the attackers there was a courage no less amazing, though of
another sort; the effect of an iron discipline hypnotising the
individual will, and conferring on the soldier such superhuman power
of dying at another man's will as history--on such a scale--has
scarcely seen equalled. In the first battle of Verdun, which lasted
forty-eight days (February 21st to April 9th), the German casualties
were over 200,000, with a very high proportion of killed. And by the
end of the year the casualties at Verdun, on both sides, had reached
700,000. Opinion in Germany, at first so confident, wavered and
dropped. Why not break off? But the dynasty was concerned. Fortune,
_toute entière à sa proie attachée_, drove the German Army again and
again through lanes of death, where the French 75's worked their
terrible will--for no real military advantage. "On the 10th of March,"
says M. Henri Bordeaux, "the enemy climbed the northern slopes of Fort
Vaux. He was then from two to three hundred mètres from the
counter-scarp. He took three months to cross these two to three
hundred mètres--three months of superhuman effort, and of incredible
losses in young men, the flower of the nation." The German strategic
reserves were for the first time seriously shaken, and by the end of
this wonderful year Pétain, Nivelle, and Mangin between them had
recovered from the assailants all but a fraction of what had been lost
at Verdun. Meanwhile, behind the "shield" of Verdun, which was thus
attracting and wasting the force of the enemy, the Allied Armies had
prepared the great offensive of the summer. Italy struck in the
Trentino on the 25th of June, Russia attacked in June and July, the
British attacked on the Somme on July 1st. The "wearing-down" battle
had begun in earnest. "Soldiers of Verdun," said Marshal Joffre, in
his order of the 12th of June, "the plans determined on by the
Coalition are in full work. It is your heroic resistance that has made
this possible. It was the indispensable condition, and it will be the
foundation, of our coming victories." "Germany"--says M.
Reinach--"during ten months had used her best soldiers in furious
assaults on Verdun.... These troops, among the finest in the world,
had in five of these months gained a few kilometres of ground on the
road to the fortress. This ground, watered with blood as no field of
carnage had ever been, which saw close upon 700,000 men fall, was lost
in two actions (October 24th--November 3rd and December 15th--18th),
and Germany was brought back to within a few furlongs of her starting
point.... Douaumont and Louvemont were certainly neither Rocroy nor
Austerlitz; but Verdun, from the first day to the last, from the rush
stemmed by Castelnau to the battles won by Nivelle and Mangin; Verdun,
with her mud-stained _poilu_, standing firm in the tempest, who said:
"They shall not pass!" _(passeront pas!_), and they have not passed;
Verdun, for the Germans a charnel-house, for us a sanctuary, was
something greater by far."
With these thoughts in mind we dropped down the long hill to Verdun
again, and so across the bridge and on to that famous road, the _Voie
Sacrée_, up which Pétain, "the road-mender" (_Le Cantonnier_), brought
all his supplies--men, food, guns, ammunition--from Bar-le-Duc by
motor-lorry, passing and repassing each other in a perpetual
succession--one every twenty seconds. The road was endlessly broken
up, sometimes by the traffic, sometimes by shell, and as endlessly
repaired by troops specially assigned to the task. And presently we
are passing the Moulin des Regrets, where Castelnau and Pétain met on
the night of the 25th, and the resolution was taken to counter-attack
instead of withdrawing. Verdun, indeed, is the classic illustration of
the maxim that attack is the best defence, or, as the British
Commander-in-Chief puts it in his latest dispatch, that "defensive
success in battle can be gained only by a vigorous offensive." The
long battle on the Meuse, "the greatest single action in history," was
in one aspect a vast school, in which a score of matters belonging to
the art of war were tested, illustrated, and explained, with the same
general result as appears throughout the struggle, a result insisted
on by each great commander, British or French, in turn; _i.e._, that
in the principles of war there is nothing new to be learnt.
Discipline, training, co-operation, attack; these are the unchanging
forces the great general has at command. It depends on his own genius
what he makes of them.
Verdun fades behind us, and we are on our way to the Marne. In the
strange isolation of the car, passing so quickly, as the short winter
twilight comes on, through country one has never seen before and will
perhaps never see again, the war becomes a living pageant on the
background of the dark. Then, with the lights of Château-Thierry,
thought jumps in a moment from the oldest army in the war to the
youngest. This old town, these dim banks of the Marne, have a long
history. But in the history of last year, and the closing scenes of
the Great War, they belong specially to America. This is American
ground.
To realise what that means, we must retrace our steps a little.