My Year of the War Part 12

Doubtless you have noticed that wedge on the snake maps and have wondered about it, as I have. It looks so narrow that the French ought to be able to shoot across it from both sides. If so, why don't the Germans widen it?

Well, for one thing, a quarter of an inch on a map is a good many miles 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 Pretre.

At our feet, looking toward Metz, an ap.r.o.n 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 p.r.i.c.ked 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. Genevieve 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 s.p.a.ce against intrenched Germans and found the shoe on the other foot.

Now the fields in the foreground down to the woods' 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 s.p.a.ce. 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. Genevieve. 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. Genevieve was badly smashed by sh.e.l.l. So was the church in the village on the Plateau d'Amance, as are most churches in this district of Lorraine. 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 debris at its feet. After seeing as many ruined churches as I have, one becomes almost superst.i.tious at how often the figures of Christ escape. But I have also seen effigies of Christ blown to bits.

Anyone who, from an eminence, has seen one battle fought visualizes 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 j.a.panese 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 sh.e.l.ls that descended on it in late August and early September. Forty thousand sh.e.l.ls, it is estimated, fell there. One kicked up fragments of steel on the field like peanut-sh.e.l.ls 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 Brobdingnagian 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 magnetized by the thought of the recovery of the lost provinces. Their Alpine cha.s.seurs, 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 pa.s.ses? Pitiful, perhaps, because it failed, though not until it had taken Chateau-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 mobilizing Russians. Two million five hundred thousand men on their first line the Germans had, as we know now, against the French twelve hundred thousand and Sir John French's army fighting one against four. 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; 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 Epinal and of Toul lies the Trouee 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 realization 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 out-ranging the French, to demoralize the French infantry. But the French infantry called the big sh.e.l.ls 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 viewpoint 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 sh.e.l.ls. 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; manoeuvring troops across 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 required; skill equivalent to German skill; the skill which you cannot command in a month after calling for a million volunteers, but which grows through years of organization.

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 seems its due, that may be because he was too busy to take the Press into his confidence. 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 characterizes 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 pa.s.sed 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 sh.e.l.ls into Nancy. The same report tells how the Kaiser folded his cloak around him and walked 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 artillery and machine-guns 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 everything!

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 sh.e.l.l-pits. At one point we crossed a communication trench, where soldiers could go and come to the guns and the infantry positions without being exposed to sh.e.l.l-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 battles.h.i.+p 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 shouldn't get c.o.c.ky thinking they were safe It's necessary to keep your hand in even in the winter."

"Don't you get lonesome?"

"No, we s.h.i.+ft 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-pa.s.ser on my person, the American Amba.s.sador 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.