CHAPTER IVGENERAL 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.
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 a
British Official PhotographThe 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 anordonnancedescends. 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. Buten revanchethe entering French, finding nothing left in the fine old house, even of themobilierwhich had been left there in 1871, discovered achâteaubelonging 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 200batteries secretesready—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 typedcompte-renduof 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.
CHAPTER VALSACE-LORRAINETHE 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 thatjeunesseof 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 increasingappétitfor 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 realpoisonin 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 invaluableliaisonofficial 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 verygauche—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 ordinarycadreof 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 Liberalfond, 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 apanacheof 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. "Thepoiluof 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 forus—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 onThe 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 theOrdres du Jourof Castelnau or Pétain. Facility of this kind is not ourforte. 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-stainedpoilu, 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, theVoie 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.