of ground. The Germans cannot spread their wedge because they would
have to climb the walls of an alley. That was a fact as clear to the
eye as the valley of the Hudson from West Point. The Germans occupy an
alley within an alley, as it were. They have their own natural defences
for the edges of their wedge; or, where they do not, they lie cheek by
jowl with the French in such thick woods as the Bois le Prêtre.
At our feet, looking toward Metz, an apron of cultivated land swept
down for a mile or more to a forest edge. This was cut by lines of
trenches; whose barbed wire protection pricked a blanket of snow.
“Our front is in those woods,” explained the colonel who was in command
of the point.
“A major when the war began and an officer of reserves,” _mon
capitaine_, who had brought us out from Paris, explained about the
colonel. We were soon used to hearing that a colonel had been a major
or a major a captain before the Kaiser had tried to get Nancy. There
was quick death and speedy promotion at the great battle of Lorraine,
as there was at Gettysburg and Antietam.
“They charged out of the woods, and we had a battalion of reserves--
here are some of them--_mes poilus_!”
He turned affectionately to the bearded fellows in scarfs who had come
out of the shelter. They smiled back. Now, as we all chatted together,
officer-and-man distinction disappeared. We were in a family party.
It was all very simple to _mes poilus_, that first fight. They had been
told to hold. If Ste. Geneviève were lost, the Amance plateau was in
danger, and the loss of the Amance plateau meant the fall of Nancy.
Some military martinets say that the soldiers of France think too much.
In this case thinking may have taught them responsibility. So they
held; they lay tight, these reserves, and kept on firing as the Germans
swarmed out of the woods.
“And the Germans stopped there, monsieur. They hadn’t very far to
go, had they? But the last fifty yards, monsieur, are the hardest
travelling when you are trying to take a trench.”
They knew, these _poilus_, these veterans. Every soldier who serves in
Lorraine knows. They themselves have tried to rush out of the edge of
a woods across an open space against intrenched Germans, and found the
shoe on the other foot.
Now the fields in the foreground down to the wood’s edge were bare of
any living thing. You had to take _mon capitaine’s_ word for it that
there were any soldiers in front of us.
“The _Boches_ are a good distance away at this point,” he said. “They
are in the next woods.”
A broad stretch of snow lay between the two clumps of woods. It was not
worth while for either side to try to get possession of the intervening
space. At the first movement by either French or Germans the woods
opposite would hum with rifle fire and echo with cannonading. So, like
rival parties of Arctic explorers waiting out the Arctic winter, they
watched each other. But if one force or the other napped, and the other
caught him at it, then winter would not stay a brigade commander’s
ambition. Three days later in this region the French, by a quick
movement, got a good bag of prisoners to make a welcome item for the
daily French official bulletin.
“We wait and the Germans wait on spring for any big movement,” said the
colonel. “Men can’t lie out all night in the advance in weather like
this. In that direction--” He indicated a part of the line where the
two armies were facing each other across the old frontier. Back and
forth they had fought, only to arrive where they had begun.
There was something else which the colonel wished us to see before we
left the hill of Ste. Geneviève. It appealed to his Gallic sentiment,
this quadrilateral of stone on the highest point where legend tells
that “Jovin, a Christian and very faithful, vanquished the German
barbarians 366 A.D.”
“We have to do as well in our day as Jovin in his,” remarked the
colonel.
The church of Ste. Geneviève was badly smashed by shell. So was the
church in the village on the Plateau d’Amance. Most churches in this
district of Lorraine are. Framed through a great gap in the wall of the
church of Amance was an immense Christ on the cross without a single
abrasion, and a pile of _débris_ at its feet. After seeing as many
ruined churches as I have, one becomes almost superstitious at how
often the figures of Christ escape. But I have also seen effigies of
Christ blown to bits.
Any one who, from an eminence, has seen one battle fought visualises
another readily when the positions lie at his feet. Looking out on the
field of Gettysburg from Round Top, I can always get the same thrill
that I had when, seated in a gallery above the Russian and the Japanese
armies, I saw the battle of Liao-yang. In sight of that Plateau
d’Amance, which rises like a great knuckle above the surrounding
country, a battle covering twenty times the extent of Gettysburg raged,
and one could have looked over a battle-line as far as the eye may see
from a steamer’s mast.
An icy gale swept across the white crest of the plateau on this January
day, but it was nothing to the gale of shells that descended on it
in late August and early September. Forty thousand shells, it is
estimated, fell there. One kicked up fragments of steel on the field
like peanut shells after a circus has gone. Here were the emplacements
of a battery of French _soixante-quinze_ within a circle of holes
torn by its adversaries’ replies to its fire; a little farther along,
concealed by shrubbery, the position of another battery which the enemy
had not located.
“So that was it!” The struggle on the immense landscape, where at least
a quarter of a million men were killed and wounded, became as simple
as some Brobdignagian football match. Before the war began the French
would not move a man within five miles of the frontier lest it be
provocative: but once the issue was joined they sprang for Alsace and
Lorraine, their imagination magnetised by the thought of the recovery
of the lost provinces. Their Alpine chasseurs, mountain men of the
Alpine and the Pyrenees districts, were concentrated for the purpose.
I recalled a remark I had heard: “What a pitiful little offensive that
was!” It was made by one of those armchair “military experts,” who
look at a map and jump at a conclusion. They appear very wise in their
wordiness when real military experts are silent for want of knowledge.
Pitiful, was it? Ask the Germans who faced it what they think.
Pitiful, that sweep over those mountain walls and through the passes?
Pitiful, perhaps, because it failed, though not until it had taken
Château-Salins in the north and Mulhouse in the south. Ask the Germans
if they think that it was pitiful! The Confederates also failed at
Antietam and at Gettysburg, but the Union army never thought of their
efforts as pitiful.
The French fell back because all the weight of the German army was
thrown against France, while the Austrians were left to look after the
slowly mobilising Russians. Two million five hundred thousand men on
their first line the Germans had, as we know now, against the French
twelve hundred thousand. To make sure of saving Paris as the Germans
swung their mighty flanking column through Belgium, Joffre had to
draw in his lines. The Germans came over the hills as splendidly as
the French had gone. They struck in all directions toward Paris. In
Lorraine was their left flank, the Bavarians, meant to play the same
part to the east that von Kluck played to the west. We heard only of
von Kluck and the British retreat from Mons; nothing of this terrific
struggle in Lorraine.
From the Plateau d’Amance you may see how far the Germans came and what
was their object. Between the fortresses of Épinal and of Toul lies the
Troueé de Mirecourt--the Gap of Mirecourt. It is said that the French
had purposely left it open when they were thinking of fighting the
Germans on their own frontier and not on that of Belgium. They wanted
the Germans to make their trial here--and wisely, for with all the
desperate and courageous efforts of the Bavarian and Saxon armies they
never got near the gap.
If they had forced it, however, with von Kluck swinging on the other
flank, they might have got around the French army. Such was the dream
of German strategy, whose realisation was so boldly and skilfully
undertaken. The Germans counted on their immense force of artillery,
built for this war in the last two years and outranging the French, to
demoralise the French infantry. But the French infantry called the big
shells “_marmites_” (saucepans), and made a joke of them and the death
they spread as they tore up the fields in clouds of earth.
Ah, it took more than artillery to beat back the best troops of France
in a country like this--a country of rolling hills and fenceless
fields cut by many streams and set among thick woods, where infantry
on a bank or at a forest’s edge with rifles and rapid-firers and guns
kept their barrels cool until the charge developed in the open. Some of
these forests are only a few acres in extent; others are hundreds of
acres. In the dark depths of one a frozen lake was seen glistening from
our position on the Plateau d’Amance.
“Indescribable that scene which we witnessed from here,” said an
officer, who had been on the plateau throughout the fighting. “All
the splendid majesty of war was set on a stage before you. It was
intoxication. We could see the lines of troops in their retreat and
advance, batteries and charges shrouded in shrapnel smoke. What hosts
of guns the Germans had! They seemed to be sowing the whole face of the
earth with shells. The roar of the thing was like that of chaos itself.
It was the exhilaration of the spectacle that kept us from dropping
from fatigue. Two weeks of this business! Two weeks with every unit of
artillery and infantry always ready, if not actually engaged!”
The general in command was directing not one but many battles, each
with a general of its own; manœuvring troops across the streams and
open places, seeking the cover of forests, with the aeroplanes unable
to learn how many of the enemy were hidden in the forests on his front,
while he tried to keep his men out of angles and make his movements
correspond with those of the divisions on his right and left. Skill
this requires; skill equivalent to German skill; the skill which you
cannot organise in a month after calling for a million volunteers, but
which grows through years of organisation.
Shall I call the general in chief command General X? This is according
to the custom of anonymity. A great modern army like the French is a
machine; any man, high or low, only a unit of the machine. In this case
the real name of X is Castelnau. If it lacks the fame which may seem
its due, that may be because he was not operating near a transatlantic
cable end. Fame is not the business of French generals nowadays. It is
war. What counted for France was that he never let the Germans get near
the gap at Mirecourt.
Having failed to reach the gap, the Germans, with that stubbornness of
the offensive which characterises them, tried to take Nancy. They got
a battery of heavy guns within range of the city. From a high hill it
is said that the Kaiser watched the bombardment. But here is a story.
As the German infantry advanced toward their new objective they passed
a French artillery officer in a tree. He was able to locate that heavy
battery and able to signal its position back to his own side. The
French concentrated sufficient fire to silence it after it had thrown
forty shells into Nancy. The same report tells how the Kaiser folded
his cloak around him and walked down in silence from his eminence,
where the sun blazed on his helmet. It was not the Germans’ fault that
they failed to take Nancy. It was due to the French.
Some time a tablet will be put up to denote the high-water mark of the
German invasion of Lorraine. It will be between the edge of the forest
of Champenoux and the heights. When the Germans charged from the cover
of the forest to get possession of the road to Nancy, the French guns
and mitrailleuses which had held their fire turned loose. The rest of
the story is how the French infantry, impatient at being held back,
swept down in a counter-attack, and the Germans had to give up their
campaign in Lorraine as they gave up their campaign against Paris in
the early part of September. Saddest of all lost opportunities to the
correspondent in this war is this fighting in Lorraine. One had only to
climb a hill in order to see it all!
In half an hour, as the officer outlined the positions, we had lived
through the two weeks’ fighting; and, thanks to the fairness of his
story--that of a professional soldier without illusions--we felt that
we had been hearing history while it was very fresh.
“They are very brave and skilful, the Germans,” he said. “We still have
a battery of heavy guns on the plateau. Let us go and see it.”
We went, picking our way among the snow-covered shell pits. At one
point we crossed a communicating trench, where soldiers could go and
come to the guns and the infantry positions without being exposed to
shell fire. I noticed that it carried a telephone wire.
“Yes,” said the officer; “we had no ditch during the fight with the
Germans, and we were short of telephone wire for a while; so we had to
carry messages back and forth as in the old days. It was a pretty warm
kind of messenger service when the German _marmites_ were falling their
thickest.”
At length he stopped before a small mound of earth not in any way
distinctive at a short distance on the uneven surface of the plateau.
I did not even notice that there were three other such mounds. He
pointed to a hole in the ground. I had been used to going through a
manhole in a battleship turret, but not through one into a field-gun
position before aeroplanes played a part in war.
“_Entrez, monsieur!_”
And I stepped down to face the breech of a gun whose muzzle pointed out
of another hole in the timbered roof covered with earth.
“It’s very cosy!” I remarked.
“Oh, this is the shop! The living-room is below--here!”
I descended a ladder into a cellar ten feet below the gun level, where
some of the gunners were lying on a thick carpet of perfectly dry straw.
“You are not doing much firing these days?” I suggested.
“Oh, we gave the _Boches_ a couple this morning so they wouldn’t get
cocky thinking they were safe. It’s necessary to keep your hand in even
in the winter.”
“Don’t you get lonesome?”
“No, we shift on and off. We’re not here all the while. It is quite
warm in our salon, monsieur, and we have good comrades. It is war. It
is for France. What would you?”
Four other gun positions and four other cellars like this! Thousands
of gun positions and thousands of cellars! Man invents new powers of
destruction and man finds a way of escaping them.
As we left the battery we started forward, and suddenly out of the dusk
came a sharp call. A young corporal confronted us. Who were we and
what business had we prowling about on that hill? If there had been no
officer along and I had not had a _laisser-passer_ on my person, the
American Ambassador to France would probably have had to get another
countryman out of trouble.
The incident shows how thoroughly the army is policed and how surely.
Editors who wonder why their correspondents are not in the front line
catching bullets, please take notice.
It was dark when we returned to the little village on the plateau where
we had left our car. The place seemed uninhabited with all the blinds
closed. But through one uncovered window I saw a room full of chatting
soldiers. We went to pay our respects to the colonel in command, and
found him and his staff around a table covered with oilcloth in the
main living-room of a villager’s house. He spoke of his men, of their
loyalty and cheerfulness, as the other commanders had, as if this were
his only boast. These French officers have little “side”; none of that
toe-the-mark, strutting militarism which some soldiers think necessary
to efficiency. They live very simply on campaign, though if they do get
to town for a few hours they enjoy a good meal. If they did not, madame
at the restaurant would feel that she was not doing her duty to France.
XIII
SMILES AMONG RUINS
Elation in the cause--From Nancy southward--A giant Frenchman--
Personnel of the French machine--_Déjeuner_--Father Joffre’s
boarding establishment--A thrifty army--Responsibility in
a democracy--Determination for final peace--“Rural free
delivery” at the front--A card-indexed army--Their families--
Battlefields that saved Paris--Souvenirs aplenty--Ruthless
“military advantage”--A shattered farmhouse--Helping the
farmers--Construction of trenches--In the front line
trench--Watchful waiting--The Lorraine country--Widespread
destruction--Another “Louvain”--A brave and great Sister--
Thrilling attacks--“It was for France!”--His Honour, the
Mayor--The tricolour in Lorraine.
Scorched piles of brick and mortar where a home has been ought to make
about the same impression anywhere. When you have gone from Belgium to
French Lorraine, however, you will know quite the contrary. In Belgium
I suffered all the depression which a nightmare of war’s misery can
bring; in French Lorraine I found myself sharing something of the
elation of a man who looks at a bruised knuckle with the consciousness
that it broke a burglar’s jaw.
A Belgian repairing the wreck of his house was a grim, heartbreaking
picture; a Frenchman of Lorraine repairing the wreck of his house had
the light of hard-won victory, of confidence, of sacrifice made to a
great purpose, of freedom secure for future generations, in his eyes.
The difference was this: The Germans were still in Belgium; they were
out of French Lorraine for good.
“What matters a shell-hole through my walls and my torn roof!” said a
Lorraine farmer. “Work will make my house whole. But nothing could ever
have made my heart and soul whole while the Germans remained. I saw
them go, monsieur; they left us ruins, but France is ours!”
I had thought it a pretty good thing to see something of the Eastern
French front; but a better thing was the happiness I found there. _Mon
capitaine_ had come out from the Ministry of War in Paris; but when we
set out from Nancy southward, we had a different local guide, a major
belonging to the command in charge of the region which we were to
visit. He was another example which upsets certain popular notions of
Frenchmen as gesticulating, excitable little men. Some six feet two in
height, he had an eye that looked straight into yours, a very square
chin, and a fine forehead. You had only to look at him and size him up
on points to conclude that he was all there; that he knew his work.
“Well, we’ve got good weather for it to-day, monsieur,” said a voice
out of a goatskin coat, and I found we had the same chauffeur as
before. These French privates talk to you and you talk to them. They
are not simply moulds of flesh in military form who salute and salute
and salute. They take an interest in your affairs and you take an
interest in theirs; they make you feel like home folks.
The sun was shining--a warm winter sun like that of a February thaw
in our Northern States--glistening on the snowy fields and slopes
among the forests and tree-clad hills of the mountainous country. Faces
ambushed in whiskers thought it was a good day for trimming beards and
washing clothes. The sentries along the roads had their scarfs around
their necks instead of over their ears. A French soldier makes ear
muffs, chest protector, nightcap, and a blanket out of the scarf which
wife or sister knits for him. If any woman who reads this knits one to
send to France she may be sure that the fellow who received it will get
every stitch’s worth out of it.
To-day, then, it was war without mittens. You did not have to sound the
bugle to get soldiers out of their burrows or their houses. Our first
stop was at our own request, in a village where groups of soldiers were
taking a sun bath. More came out of the doors as we alighted. They were
all in the late twenties or early thirties, men of a reserve regiment.
Some had been clerks, some labourers, some farmers, some employers,
when the war began. Then they were _piou-pious_, in French slang; then
all France prayed god-speed to its beloved _piou-pious_. Then you knew
the clerk by his pallor; the labourer by his hard hands; the employer
by his manner of command. Now they were _poilus_--bearded, hard-eyed
veterans; you could not tell the clerk from the labourer or the
employer from the peasant.
Any one who saw the tenderfoot pilgrimage to the Alaskan gold field in
’97-’98 and the same crowd six months later will understand what had
happened to these men. The puny had put on muscle; the city dweller had
blown his lungs; the fat man had lost some adipose; social differences
of habit had disappeared. That gentleman used to his bath and linen
sheets and the hard living farmer or labourer--all had had to eat the
same kind of food, do the same work, run the same risks in battle, and
sleep side by side in the houses where they were lodged and in the
dugouts of the trenches when it was their turn to occupy them through
the winter. Any “snob” had his edges trimmed by the banter of his
comrades. Their beards accentuated the likeness of type. A cheery lot
of faces and intelligent, these, which greeted us with curious interest.
“Perhaps President Wilson will make peace,” one said.
“When?” I asked.
A shrug of the shoulder, a gesture to the East, and the answer was:
“When we have Alsace-Lorraine back.”
Under a shed their _déjeuner_ was cooking. This meal at noon is the
meal of the day to the average Frenchman, who has only bread and coffee
in the morning. They say he objects to fighting at luncheon time. That
is the hour when he wants to sit down and forget his work and laugh and
talk and enjoy his eating. The Germans found this out and tried to take
his trenches at the noon hour. This interference with his gastronomic
habits made him so angry that he dropped the knife and fork for the
bayonet and took back any lost ground in a ferocious counter-attack.
He would teach those “_Boches_” to leave him to eat his _déjeuner_ in
peace.
That appetising stew in the kettles in the shed once more proved
that Frenchmen know how to cook. I didn’t blame them for objecting
to being shot at by the Germans when they were about to eat it. The
average French soldier is better fed than at home; he gets more meat,
for a hungry soldier is usually a poor soldier. It is a very simple
problem with France’s fine roads to feed that long line when it is
stationary. It is like feeding a city stretched out over a distance
of four hundred and fifty miles; a stated number of ounces each day
for each man and a known number of men to feed. From the railroad head
trucks and autobusses take the supplies up to the distributing points.
At one place I saw ten Paris autobusses, their signs painted out in a
steel-grey to hide them from aeroplanes, and not one of them had broken
down through the war. The French take good care of their equipment and
their clothes; they waste no food. As a people is, so is their army,
and the French are thrifty by nature.
Father Joffre, as the soldiers call him, is running the next largest
boarding establishment in Europe after the Kaiser and the Czar. And
he has a happy family. It seemed to me that life ought to have been
utterly dull for this characteristic group of _poilus_, living crowded
together all winter in a remote village. Civilians sequestered in this
fashion away from home are inclined to get grouchy on one another.
One of the officers in speaking of this said that early in the autumn
the reserves were pretty homesick. They wanted to get back to their
wives and children. Nostalgia, next to hunger, is the worst thing for a
soldier. Commanders were worried. But as the winter wore on the spirit
changed. The soldiers began to feel the spell of their democratic
comradeship. The fact that they had fought together and survived
together played its part; and individualism was sunk in the one thought
that they were there for France. The fellowship of a cause taught them
patience, brought them cheer. And another thing was the increasing
sense of team play, of confidence in victory, which holds a ball team,
a business enterprise, or an army together. Every day the organisation
of the army was improving; every day that indescribable and subtle
element of satisfaction that the Germans were securely held was growing.