CHAPTER VIIIOCCUPATIONS OF MULHOUSE
Encouraged by their success at Altkirch, the French set out early next morning for Mulhouse, ten miles further down the valley of the Ill. The troops which had descended the previous day on Thann also advanced by way of Cernay, and along the twelve-mile front between Thann and Altkirch the whole way to Mulhouse no trace of the Germans was seen except their deserted entrenchments. At one o’clock a small patrol of dragoons trotted up to the Hotel de Ville, and after a momentary halt clattered away again to report that not a single German soldier was left in the town. As a matter of fact, they were not, however, very far off, and the dragoons had hardly disappeared when a squad of Bavarian infantry marched into the principal square, seized a tramway car which was standing in front of the town-hall, and forced the driver to follow the dragoons, breaking the windows of the car as they went to make convenient rests for their rifles. By chance, however, they took the Brunstatt or south road out of the town, whereas the dragoons had gone west along the Dornach road, so that after a short and fruitless journey, they thought it wiser to turn back and join the main bodyon the further side of the town, once more leaving it empty of all but the civilian inhabitants, who by this time were in a state of the wildest excitement. After that there was another long wait till after six o’clock, and then, at last, a couple of platoons of dragoons and Chasseurs-à-cheval came riding in along the Dornach road, and the whole population turned out to greet them and the main body, which followed a quarter of an hour behind them, with the same extravagant manifestations of delight and enthusiasm as at Altkirch on the previous day.
That was on the Saturday evening, during which the French took up their position on the heights at Rixheim, about two miles east of the town, their front protected by the road and railway which curve down southwards to Basle, the Germans being a few miles north of them along the Rhone-Rhine canal towards Neu-Brisach and also in the Hardt (a big forest about twenty miles long between Mulhouse and the Rhine) on their right.
Next day, though some of the wiser of the townspeople were shaking their heads over the smallness of the French force, the rejoicings continued until the middle of the afternoon, when suddenly, between three and four o’clock, the guns on each side began firing, covering and resisting the advance of the XIVth German Army Corps, which was directed on Mulhouse through the Hardt Forest by the road from Mulheim and two other roads further north. The battle continued through the evening and all night till six o’clock on Monday morning. The artillery duel was at its heightat about two a.m., and before that time a number of shells had fallen in the town, across which the batteries posted on the left flank of the French were firing. For the Germans the disadvantage of the position was that after leaving the shelter of the forest they had to advance for about two miles over an open plain, where they were exposed to the fire not only of the 75’s on the heights of Rixheim, but of the French infantry on the slopes below them, and here they lost heavily. Their numbers were, however, so superior that they were able to press on without paying any attention to their losses, whereas the French, for the opposite reason, ran a great chance of being surrounded and cut off from their line of retreat on Belfort. They fought on, however, with much determination (at one time only the embankment of the railway to Basle separated the front lines of the two forces) till six o’clock in the morning, when, after a series of skirmishes in the streets of Mulhouse, they were finally withdrawn in good order and most fortunately were able to fall back on Belfort. They probably owed their escape to the fact that the German plans had not been carried out exactly as had been intended. Besides the XIVth Army Corps, the XVth were also to have joined in the attack, coming by train from Strassburg to Colmar, and from there down to Cernay, where they hoped to catch the French after they had been driven westwards by the XIVth. The only flaw in the execution of this scheme was that the XIVth started too soon and had finished their part of the work before the XVth arrived on the scene. At seven o’clock on the morning of Monday, August 10th, they marched into the town,and the French occupation—a dream the realization of which lasted for just thirty-six hours—was over.
Exactly what the intention of the Frenchhaut-commandementwas I do not pretend to know, though it is improbable that they could have seriously contemplated the permanent occupation of an open town like Mulhouse, and any attempt at a further advance through the Hardt Forest on the strongly entrenched positions on each side of the Rhine with the inadequate forces at their disposal would have been madness. The probability is that the enemy, fully informed by some of the German-born Alsatians with whom the district swarmed of the pitiful smallness of the French army, deliberately fell back in the hopes of luring it on to destruction, while the French, on the other hand, intoxicated by the welcome which they had received and the ease with which they had marched twenty-five miles into the enemy’s country in two days, thought of nothing but the moral triumph of the recapture of Mulhouse. They made their advance with far too small a force and much too quickly, and they neglected the vital precaution, all the more necessary because they were so few, of entrenching step by step the ground which they had won. At all events, we have it on the authority of the French Commander-in-Chief that the Alsace part of the offensive was badly carried out by the General Officer in charge of it, and that he was at once relieved of his command.
For the French, therefore, the net result of the first occupation of the town, beyond the temporary moral effect which it produced in France, was nil. For theloyalist inhabitants of Alsace it was the beginning of an organized system of terrorism by which the Germans, after burning the food and forage storehouses of Mulhouse when they left it on August 8th, endeavoured to create through the length and breadth of the country a paralyzing dread of the cruel weight of the mailed fist.
In Mulhouse itself the time that followed was also one of great hardship for many of the inhabitants. The enemy were furious at the welcome given to the French troops by the Alsatians (after forty-four years of the beneficent sway of the Fatherland), and they punished what they chose to consider their base and inexplicable ingratitude by treating all whom they suspected of French leanings in the true Savernian manner. To discover them was an easy matter. The two elements of the true Alsatians and the German colonists (whom the natives of the old French stock still persist in callingimmigrés) have never really amalgamated, and the town was therefore thickly peopled with German sympathisers, only too eager to act as informers against their fellow-citizens.
But it was the foreigners resident in Mulhouse who at that time suffered the worst treatment at the hands of the enemy. Directly after the retreat of the French, several scores of them, men of all ages (from boys of fourteen to old men of over eighty) were peremptorily rounded up in the town barracks, and carried off to Germany as prisoners, leaving behind them practically all their possessions except the clothes in which they stood up. Before their departure, after they had been left for many anxious hours herded together without any food, they were suddenly told to form themselves intoranks, and the first batch were lined up, in front of some soldiers with loaded rifles, with their backs to the wall. Not unnaturally they concluded that they were to be shot, and some of them even gripped the hands of those standing near them in a last farewell. But it was only the torture of the anticipation of death, not death itself, that they were to suffer, though I suppose none of them will ever forget the time of agonized suspense that they went through before they were brusquely ordered by the officer in command to fall out, with the explanation that he had meant to show them exactly what would happen to them if they gave any trouble, and that now they knew. Afterwards, when they were on their way to their first prison-camp, one young fellow who had just married a girl-wife, who was forcibly torn away from his side, driven half crazy by his sufferings, made a feeble attempt at an assault on the guard, and was at once shot. The rest of them, after a long journey in cattle trucks, were kept in prison-camps in the interior of Germany for periods of varying length up to about six months, in many cases insufficiently fed and clothed, and as a rule it was the Englishmen among them who were the most harshly treated and set to do the most ignominious and disagreeable tasks. All of them during their journey east and on their arrival at Rastadt were constantly jeered at and insulted, not only by the populace, but by their guards.
Five days were enough to effect the reorganization of the force which had been forced to retire from Mulhouse, and on August 14th, this time under the command of General Pau, and strongly supported bythe field army of the territory of Belfort, the French resumed the offensive. On that day Thann was taken for the second time, and with this place and Dannemarie and Guebwiller, a few miles further north, as his base, General Pau once more drove the enemy back on Mulhouse. But whereas on the previous occasion the main attack had been made from the south, by Altkirch, this time the advance was rather from west to east, with the left flank gradually swinging round from the north, with the object of cutting the Germans off from their line of retreat on the bridges of the Rhine and forcing them southwards towards the Swiss frontier. The French left was directed on Colmar (about twenty miles due north of Mulhouse) and Neu-Brisach, and the right wing on Altkirch, and advancing from west to east they quickly swept the enemy back on Mulhouse for the second time.
On the morning of August 19th the town was once more in a seething state of unrest and suppressed excitement. The loyalist inhabitants knew nothing of what was happening, except that the German soldiery were obviously ill at ease. Most of the crowd were collected in front of the chief hotel, where the soldiers kept pushing them back with their rifles in order to keep a clear passage for the strings of throbbing motor-cars which were ready waiting for the swarm of military and civil officials who kept hurrying backwards and forwards carrying the papers and valuables which were to accompany them in their flight to the Rhine. No policemen were to be seen. They were changing from their uniforms into mufti. Transformed into innocent-looking civilians,their service to the Fatherland was to stay behind in Mulhouse and keep their eyes open for such information as might be useful to the military chiefs, supposing that during the coming occupation the French succeeded in making good their footing in the town. An hour after the procession of cars had at last started, with intervals of a few yards between them, the barracks were clear and not a soldier was left in thetown.town.Then there was a further long wait. The German agents and spies kept quiet and bided their time. The real Alsatians, the overwhelming majority of the townsfolk, were so wrought up with the feeling that they were rid of the Germans—this time as they hoped for ever—and so rapturously looking forward to the entry of the French troops, that nearly all of them went on standing about in the streets for hour after hour right through the day. They did not even go into their houses to eat their lunch, but bought what they could from enterprising street-merchants who went about with baskets of food, and ate it where they stood.
At last, at five o’clock, the first Frenchmen appeared, a handful of Chasseurs-à-cheval, who rode in not from the west, from which quarter they were expected, but by the Basle road at the other side of the town, where they must have passed dangerously close to the enemy. Like the patrol which had been the heralds of the first occupation, they were merely a scouting party, and, having established the fact that the Germans had retired, quickly rode off again to make their report to the Staff. The people, who had followed them in a body, then split up into two main detachments, andstreamed out to Dornach and Brunstatt, on the Thann and Altkirch roads, the Germans having meanwhile massed their forces two or three miles to the east and south-east of the town, from which they were in full view, at Rixheim, Habsheim, and Zimmersheim close to the Basle railway, just about where the French had taken up their position after the first occupation.
This time, however, there was to be no triumphant entry—at least not as yet. The enemy meant to make a fight for it, and so far as that day, August 18th, was concerned, the faithful population of Mulhouse had had their long wait for nothing.
During the night a big change was made in the disposition of the German troops. From their lines on the Basle railway they advanced above and below the town till they occupied a position of considerably more than a semicircle round it from Pfastatt and Lutterbach on the north to Brubach, Brunstatt, and Hochstatt on the south, and some of them were even at Dornach, to the west of the town. The French line, which was much straighter, extended from Illfurth on the south, by Zillisheim and Morschweiler to Reichweiler on the north, where it slightly outflanked the German right at Pfastatt.
Early on the morning of the 19th the greater part of the German force in Dornach advanced to Lutterbach, and there was a general flight of the villagers, carrying their household goods and driving in front of them as much as they could of their cattle and even poultry. At ten o’clock the French batteries on the rising ground at Morschweiler opened fire, and the battle soon became general all along the line. All day long the artilleryduel continued, and after a time the French gunners became so confident of their own superiority, and so indifferent to the bad shooting of the enemy, that they advanced into the open and worked their guns as calmly and with as little regard for cover as if they were engaged in ordinary training manœuvres in time of peace. All day long, too—for the fighting was at very close quarters—one hand-to-hand infantry engagement after another between two sets of men who fought with desperate dash and tenacity, resolved on the one hand to advance, on the other to stand firm, for the honour of their respective countries, caused a vast amount of bloodshed. On the left, near the big engineering works, commonly known as “The Red Sea,” a body of French skirmishers advanced early in the engagement to within forty yards of a German company which was posted on the road in front, and killed and wounded half of them almost before they could reply. The rest fled to the shelter of the neighbouring houses, and there was a helter-skelter fight along the street, and in and out of doors and windows and gates and outhouses. Half of a battalion which was sent to support the routed men was wiped out by the artillery, and the other half refused to advance. A little further south, at Hochstatt, the 35th and 42nd French regiments suffered severely in the same way at the hands of the German gunners. In the afternoon, however, the 75’s altogether dominated the guns opposed to them, their fire ceased, and except for stray rifle shots here and there, the battle seemed to be over, large numbers of the enemy having been driven to take refuge in Mulhouse.
One more effort was made, but it was their last. A strong body of reinforcements were sent out of the town, and, by using a large building which till then had been sacred to the Red Cross as a redoubt, managed to keep the fighting going on for some time longer. But driven out of this refuge by infantry and artillery fire, they were once more compelled to retire to Mulhouse. Soon afterwards Dornach, where the bulk of the fighting took place, was captured, and by five o’clock the French, having surrounded and captured twenty-four guns and a large number of prisoners in the outlying suburbs, entered the town for the second time in less than a fortnight. This time there was no question of the enemy having retired of their own free will in order to entice them to advance further than was prudent. They had been beaten fairly and squarely in one of the few pitched battles of the war, and were flying in confusion to the shelter of the Hardt Forest and the Rhine. It was a great moment for General Pau’s army and for France, even though the engagement, compared with the events which were to take place in Lorraine and Belgium, was a comparatively small one. But unfortunately it was a moment that did not last. Twenty-four hours after France knew that the tricolour was once more floating in Mulhouse, it learnt also of the defeat at Morhange, and although there was no immediate connexion between Morhange and the evacuation of Mulhouse (only five days after its recapture), the gravity of the crisis on the more important fields further north completely out-shadowed the really considerable triumph in Alsace.