CHAPTER XIFROM METZ TO VERDUN
Thereis something grim and forbidding about the name of Metz. The tragedy of shame and defeat with which it was connected during the Franco-Prussian War hangs round it like a sombre garment. I for one associated it always in my thoughts with a dark menacing fortress, the very stones of which cried aloud the tale of France’s humiliation and the ruthless might of her conquering foe. Historical events have the power of lending their own colour to the names of localities where great dramas have played themselves out. Sometimes the very nature of a place—I take three at random, Mycenae, Blois, Glencoe—harmonises completely with the sense of tragedy. No one could associate the shores of Lake Trasimene with the idea of trippers on the beach, or the plains of Borodino with swings and roundabouts. Yet to this rule, if it be a rule, Metz is a complete exception. Instead of a gloomy fortress it is a delightful French town, ideally situated in the basin of the Mosel. The Mosel breaks up at this point into several channels, and Metz disposes of itself in somewhat Venetian fashion among the various branches. The main portion of the town is situated on a low crest overlooking the stream. The crest falls away to the river below, gardens, houses, and terraces clinging to the slopes. To the west across the plain rises a range of hills. From the vantage point of the Esplanade—thebeautiful public gardens on the terraces above the Mosel—the view of the surrounding country is very fine. The fortifications of Metz, being of the latest type, are naturally not in evidence. But the distant hills which rise in such calm beauty from the plain are honeycombed with everything that is deadly in modern military equipment. Villages and vineyards may be on their surface, but the hand of man has been concerned there with other matters than those of the plough or winepress. No traveller surely can look at the hills beyond Metz without a catch in the throat? For through them runs the road to Gravelotte and Mars-la-Tour, and so beyond to a place of glory and endurance greater than theirs—Verdun, shattered and destroyed, but inviolate and unconquered in the midst of her ruins.
Few districts in Europe are so important in military history as the country which lies in the neighbourhood of Metz. We came by train from Saarbrücken, our car being under repair, and nearly every mile of the way had been a path of destiny for France in 1870. A French customs official, not a genial specimen of his kind, charged us roundly with having contraband concealed under the maps spread about the carriage. We assured him our business at the moment was concerned with history and geography and not illicit trading, and after shaking the offending sheets he disappeared with an unfriendly grunt.
The heights of Spicheren are within sight of Saarbrücken. Here on August 6, 1870, was fought one of the early battles in the Franco-Prussian War—an indecisive action which was to prove, however, a strand in the great coil spread round the French armies. To the east of Metz lies the fateful battlefield of August 14, when aftera desperate struggle centring in particular round Colombey and Nouilly, the French were forced to give way and the German pincers began to close in on the doomed city. The history of the 1870 war, that tale of heroism and mismanagement, is painful beyond bearing to read. It moves with the precision and inevitableness of a Greek tragedy—France, so sound at heart, yet superficially so rotten, matched against the supreme technical skill of a painstaking people guided by the wholly non-moral purpose of a Bismarck. From the conflict, as it was then, of the iron with the earthenware pot, only one end could result. Yet
“Nor kind nor coinage buysAught above its rate.”
“Nor kind nor coinage buysAught above its rate.”
“Nor kind nor coinage buys
Aught above its rate.”
Germany in the person of her rulers bartered in 1870 the first principles of justice and morality between states. To-day she is paying the price of that moral treachery on a level of humiliation to which 1870 held no parallel, while a ruined world also bears its testimony to the eternal truth that, as members one of another, the sin and failure of the one involves confusion and disaster for all.
Lorraine is a smiling land with rolling plains and hills. Villages, solid and well-built, lie among their orchards in the folds of the undulating fields. Important though the mineral wealth of the province, agriculture plays a part hardly second in value as regards its resources. The rich red soil is highly cultivated, and farming is carried on with the thoroughness one associates, alas, with continental methods alone. The red-tiled roofs of the farmhouses lend a sense of warmth and colour to the landscape. Especially beautiful is the contrast when the warm madder-coloured gables rise out of a foam of fruit blossom.Truly a land to win and to hold the affections of its children. To see it for the first time, no longer under alien rule but liberated and restored to the Motherland, was a glad experience of travel. Indefensible though the German rape of the protesting provinces in 1870, the case of Lorraine, predominantly and overwhelmingly French in population and sentiment, was perhaps the greater outrage. A people annexed against their will are not easy citizens to handle, as for over forty years French resistance passive and active taught Prussian officialism.
Thiers fought desperately for the retention of Metz in the peace negotiations following on the 1870 war. Bismarck, whose ends were attained by the war itself, was not implacable on the subject. Personally he favoured the payment of a larger indemnity in lieu of the city. Military opinion was violently hostile to this proposal, and with cynical indifference the Chancellor let the soldiers have their way. To visit Metz in 1920 is to realise how the soul of the city kept itself free and aloof, heavy though the material yoke imposed on it. The town is French in every respect. The Germans have added solid public buildings of practical value in the shape of an excellent railway station, post office, banks, etc. As a material proposition, Metz returns to France much richer than when torn away. But the purely French character of the streets and houses defied all efforts of the conqueror at any true absorption within the German Reich. The new buildings lie, like scorned and wealthy parvenus, on the outskirts. Within are narrow streets, tall houses and shuttered windows—all the indefinable genre and elegance which French taste and French architecture bring with them. When the hour of liberation came, Metzreverted to her natural allegiance with as little difficulty as a prisoner casts off some hated garment of servitude.
Sign painters must have driven a brisk trade after the Armistice. Not only have all the names of the streets become French again, but the names of shops have undergone a similar transformation. So hastily has the work been done in many cases that the half-obliterated German letters may be seen under the new paint. Business was clearly urgent in those early days and the transfer of names to the winning side permitted of no delay.
The fine fourteenth-century Gothic cathedral is a great adornment to Metz. The lofty windows, slender and austere, and the splendid glass still speak of the soul of the Middle Ages no less than of the skill and cunning hand of the mediaeval builder and craftsman. Yet not these abiding beauties but a freak decoration of the exterior is what attracts the average traveller to Metz Cathedral to-day. Under German rule the church had undergone a “thorough restoration,” ominous words which, as I have said elsewhere, are the knell of doom to many a fine building in Germany. French skill was apparently successful in staving off the barbarisms common in the Rhineland, and the interior has not suffered. But the addition of a Gothic west portal in 1903 gave William II. a priceless opportunity of masquerading among saints and holy men on the new façade. Such a chance possibly did not often come his way. Certainly he availed himself of it eagerly. He appears, therefore, on the façade in the guise of the prophet Daniel. The statue is well executed, though the sculptor, whether or not intentionally, has endowed the prophet with a sinister expression, especially when viewed from certain angles.The statue has been allowed to remain, but after the Armistice the hands were fettered with chains, and in that felon’s guise William II. still surveys the cathedral square from under the cowl of his prophet’s cloak.
I have referred in another chapter to the problem presented to Republican Germany by the redundance of Hohenzollern statues. Metz had been endowed with more than its fair share of Prussian effigies. “If you do not like your conquerors, you shall at least have plenty of them too look at” seems to have been the principle adopted. Hohenzollerns major and minor abounded therefore in every public place. A huge equestrian statue of William I. had been erected in the centre of the Esplanade. The Emperor, with whiskers of a particularly bristling and aggressive order, flourished a baton in the direction of the French border. It was certainly not by accident that the statue was designed to look across the hills to the west, and to convey a challenge to which France on her side was not slow to reply.
Whatever the embarrassments of a reformed Germany as regards its former reigning house, naturally they did not weigh with the people of Metz. The inhabitants after the Armistice roseen masse, tore down the statues of the Hohenzollerns, and generally destroyed every outer symbol of Prussian domination. The effigy of William I. was overthrown by an excited crowd, and pictures of the event show the monarch on the ground while men, women, and children shake their fists at the prostrate form. The plinth, stripped of its ornaments and inscriptions, was allowed to remain, and with every possible haste the temporary figure of a victorious poilu was erected in order to replace that of the Kaiser. This figure was no longerin situat the time of our visit, and the plinth awaits its permanent memorial. The hard-worked German phrase, “Von seinem dankbaren Volk,” is still visible though half effaced on the plinth, but on the west side looking towards Verdun the Hohenzollern devices have been replaced by the three electric words crisp with victory, “On les a.”
We English, who for centuries have never known the bitterness of alien conquest—among whom no tradition even survives of its sting and misery—can enter very faintly either into the anguish or the joy of countries conquered and then subsequently redeemed. Few stories of the war are more moving than the tales told of the entry of the French troops into Metz and Strasbourg. Indescribable enthusiasm prevailed among the French population. Not only were the liberating legions greeted with garlands and banners, but weeping men and women followed the French generals and prayed to be allowed to kiss their hands or touch the hem of their garments. On the Porte Serpinoise, the ancient gateway of the city, a long inscription has recently been erected which tells the tale of Metz in recent times from the treachery of Bazaine to the reunion with France in 1918. About this inscription there is little of the calm and measured language of the message usually carved in stone. The words are burning and passionate, torn from the heart of suffering, turned though it be at the last to joy. That the years of “separation cruelle” to which the gateway bears testimony were bitter indeed no one could doubt who has stood by the Porte Serpinoise and read its record of both defeat and victory. But has the world even yet laid to heart the moral of the German seizure of these provinces? Has France herself, greatest of all sufferers, appliedthe lesson to her own circumstances? Coming to Metz from Saarbrücken with a vivid recollection of all we had seen and heard there, I turned from the Porte Serpinoise with an uneasy question in my mind. When the first enthusiasms subside and the flowers and the garlands have faded, the practical business of life remains. The government of a mixed population is never an easy task, and the redeemed provinces will make heavy demands on the wisdom and generosity of France.
Alsace-Lorraine was in fact indulging in all the joys of a general strike at the time of our visit. Post, telegraph, railway service, everything was at a standstill the day after our arrival. The trouble had arisen apparently over the replacement of German employés, now French subjects, by other French workmen. The long and stubborn resistance offered by the provinces to German rule is sufficient proof of the healthy spirit of independence which inspires the population. But even under the new order, the people of Alsace-Lorraine are likely to show a spirit no less vigorous in all that concerns their local affairs. Bureaucratic interference even with the German side of the population may easily give rise to resentment throughout the whole community. German bureaucracy, heavy handed though it was, had the merit of being efficient. French administration would do well to avoid situations in which irritated citizens begin to make comparisons not always favourable to those at present in authority.
We hired a car which took us, or rather shook us, to Verdun. The road crosses some of the most famous of the 1870 battlefields, especially Gravelotte and Mars-la-Tour. The road first climbs the lofty ridge of hills lyingto the west of Metz, on the top of which lies an open plateau. Fortifications and defences were obvious everywhere. It was clear, from the masses of barbed-wire entanglements which we passed at various points, that the Germans had intended to defend Metz if necessary in the last war. Further, the road along which we travelled must have been their main artery of supply to Verdun. We saw the remains of their light railways running in various directions. Dumps of wire still remained and traces of dumps of ammunition. The light railways had been ploughed up by the returning peasantry. Yet as we approached the area of devastation an obvious question arose—why were these railways not preserved for the task of reconstruction and the demands on transport reconstruction involves?
We halted at the famous ravine of Gravelotte, where on August 18, 1870, the terrible struggle took place which decided the fate of Metz. Here, as everywhere else on the 1870 battlefields, all traces of the German monuments to the dead have disappeared. The graves in the cemeteries were untouched, but the eagles had been knocked off the monuments. Unquestionably the presence of these German memorials on land robbed from France presented the French Government with a difficult problem. No doubt many of the “Denkmals” were boastful and vainglorious, after the usual German fashion in these matters. Clearly they had no place on redeemed French soil. I could not feel, however, the situation had been handled very wisely as regards the memorials to the fallen soldiers. Nothing would have given me greater pleasure than to have pulled at the rope which dragged William I. from his plinth. The ignominious overthrow of statuesof kings and princes of a ruling house so directly responsible for the miseries of Europe is a symbol of victory over the evil principles for which they stood.
But the soldiers who died doing their duty do not belong to the same category as the men who plotted the war. Many of the monuments blown up were merely records of regiments who fought and fell, and had their historical value. Their destruction has caused great bitterness among the German section in the province, and no end is served by the further creation of bad blood between people who are forced to live together. The 1870 war and its terrible consequences are not to be wiped out by blowing up a few obelisks. The man who dies fighting bravely for his country, however much duped as to the righteousness of the cause for which he gives his life, has a claim to consideration at the hands of a generous foe. The dignified way out of the difficulty would have been for the French to call upon the Germans to remove their monuments. We felt this the more on reaching Mars-la-Tour, the scene of another fierce battle. The frontier fixed after 1870 ran between Gravelotte and Mars-la-Tour. On the Mars-la-Tour side of the frontier stands a wonderful French monument which commemorates the heroism and tragedy of 1870. A woman symbolising France holds in her arms a dying soldier, whose head she crowns with laurel. But she is in no way concerned with the agony gathered next her heart. Her eyes are fixed, not on the dying man, but grimly, steadily across the frontier. She looks across the hills of her own lost province, and the fixity of her gaze conveys a spiritual challenge to that other statue on the crest above the Mosel—the statue of William I. conquering and insolent. Further,from the hand of the dying man falls a musket. But two babes playing at the woman’s feet catch the musket before it lies in the dust and raise it once more in the air.
This monument, a striking example of its class, is executed with a full measure of French skill and artistic power. But there cannot be the least misunderstanding as to its meaning. Every line breathes revenge and a day of reckoning to come. Mars-la-Tour was occupied by the Germans in the first days of the recent war. It must, I think, be put to the credit of the military authorities that, during the four and a half years that this memorial was in their power, no damage of any kind was done to it.
Gravelotte and Mars-la-Tour are both dirty ramshackle villages, with middens out in the street blocking the entrance to the houses. Perhaps the inhabitants of frontier villages are inspired by a justifiable pessimism as to the futility of building decent dwelling-houses. Certainly the standard of life seems unusually low. Shortly after leaving Mars-la-Tour we began to pick up occasional signs of war, signs which, of course, multiplied as we entered the plain of the Woevre, and began to draw near the ridge of hills to the west on the far side of which Verdun lies. One battlefield is painfully like another. The destroyed villages and desolate fields told the same tale of death and suffering which is impressed on the long belt of devastation running across the Continent. Yet to me in future a cowslip field will always bring with it memories of Verdun. The familiar yellow flowers were growing in sheets by the roadside, striving, as it were, patheticallyto throw the cover of their freshness and grace across the stricken land.
The interest of Verdun, apart from its heroic defence, lies in the fact that the line of attack being very intensive was relatively small, and owing to the hilly and varied nature of the ground it is possible to visualise more or less accurately the various attacks and counter attacks. We approached Verdun from the south-west, a point from which the damage was relatively small. The whole of the Verdun ridge on which the forts are situated runs north and south, and commands the plain of the Woevre to the east and the valley of the Meuse to the west. All this district was formerly a great forest. On the southern slopes we found the trees practically intact. We turned to the right and, keeping along the top of the ridge, had our first view of the valley of the Meuse, and Verdun with its twin towers lying far below us in the plain.
Verdun, never a considerable city, has nevertheless emerged into fame on more than one occasion in the course of its long history. It gives its name to the one event of capital importance in the evolution of modern Europe. The Treaty of Verdun in 843 may be taken as the starting point of the long struggle between France and Germany. Under this Treaty the united empire of Charlemagne was broken up between his three grandsons. France and Germany parted company, never to meet again during the course of the next thousand years but on terms of fire and sword. Revolutionary France offered its own example of frightfulness at Verdun. The city was taken by the Prussians in 1792. The struggle was not of an embittered character, and some young ladies of the city not only welcomed the conquerors but presented themwith sweets. Fraternising with the enemy was not included apparently in the then revolutionary interpretation of fraternity, and three of the girls were sent to the scaffold when the French retook Verdun after Valmy. The little place sustained a siege of three weeks in 1870, and surrendered with the full honours of war after a gallant resistance.
But at Verdun as elsewhere the scale of events has been flung utterly out of focus by the recent struggle, to which history has no parallel. The town itself has suffered cruelly. Every other house is a ruin. But at least it never yielded, never bowed the head to the conqueror. How near, terribly near, the Germans came to complete success, we appreciated better on the spot than anything we had been led to believe by the official communiqués issued at the time. A discreet veil was flung over the German capture of Fort Douaumont. As a matter of fact not only was the fort taken, but the Germans penetrated for a mile and a half further westward beyond that point. One remaining fort alone lay between them and their prey. Heroic though the defence, it is clear that but for the Somme offensive and the diversion of forces it entailed, Verdun itself must have fallen.
Fort Vaux and Fort Douaumont are the central points of interest in the defence, but every yard of the district is full of poignant and tragic association. Trees and vegetation had disappeared before we reached Fort Vaux. The ground had become a mere crater field. It was almost impossible to believe that this blasted hillside and neighbouring ravines had once formed part of a beautiful forest. As to Douaumont, little of the fort remains beyond a heap of rubble and rubbish. Imagination stumblesand halts as to what the bombardment must have been which could blast fortress and land alike out of being. Still more impossible is it to gauge the human endurance which could survive any experience so hideous as the fighting which raged round these key points. Just below Douaumont is a trench where a French platoon was overwhelmed and enfiladed by German fire. The ground fell in, burying the men where they stood. The bodies have not been removed, and the tops of the rifles can still be seen sticking out of the ground. The trench is enclosed by barbed wire to keep the tourist at bay, but I hope that this gruesome sight may not be perpetuated for the benefit of the tripper. The tourist invasion of the battlefields is inevitable, but it is intolerable if they bring with them to soil which is sacred anything of the orange peel and ginger-beer bottle atmosphere. Two or three chars-à-bancs filled with visitors were already on the ground, early though the season. However, they were mercifully cowed into silence by the all-pervading desolation.
All the hillsides round Verdun are scarred with the marks of trenches. Every name, every ridge in the district is famous. We looked on a given heap of ruins and remembered with what anxiety and suspense the name of this or that obscure village filled half the world a few years since. There was a tangle of wire in many places, though much clearance of the battlefield has gone on. Here and there the roots of the unconquerable trees had begun to throw up a sort of scrub. Here and there coarse grass and coarser brambles were hiding the shell holes. But on the hillsides about Vaux and Douaumont, Froide Terre, Poivre, and Haudromont, there was no sign of life. The subsoil had been blasted out of existence,and vegetation had not been able up till then to reassert itself.
The area of destruction round Verdun extends for a long distance, and the general impression left by the ruined villages is painful in the extreme. In the area of moving battle the land is not destroyed, but the houses are mostly in ruins. The task of reconstruction is formidable indeed, and there were few signs in April 1920 that it was being grappled with on adequate lines. People were beginning to creep back, it is true, to their ruined homes, but under circumstances which seemed very undesirable. The ruins had been patched up in some places, and the owners were living among them in a state of indescribable and insanitary squalor. There were no signs of a big scheme of reparation, which should have aimed first and foremost at the scrapping of these small dirty centres and starting new villages on fresh sites. The average French village is apt to be a dirty place. The sanitary conditions left by a bombardment are better imagined than described.
I cannot help feeling that the inhabitants of the devastated areas have a most real grievance as regards this question of reconstruction. The French Government has wholly failed to deal with it up to the present on a big scale. Progress has been made with areas in the north; other districts, of which Verdun is an example, remain practically untouched. The French complain that they cannot get work-people or materials. I cannot say from what causes the deadlock springs, but the evidences of deadlock in the Verdun district are complete. One feels this state of affairs to be a terrible hardship for the poor people concerned. One of the reparation proposals put forward by the German Government is a scheme for rebuildingand re-equipping the devastated areas. It excites, naturally, a chorus of disapproval from greedy contractors and other people who would like the money allocated for houses, furniture, and implements to go into their pockets. But in the interests of the inhabitants—surely the paramount interest—any scheme which would deal promptly with the problems concerned with the return to normal life among the ruined villages should be examined closely.
Further, England and America ought not to miss their opportunities in this respect. The movement for the adoption by English centres of French towns and villages is wise and generous, and if widely spread through the United States as well as our own country should result in substantial assistance to the victims of the war. The basis of any adequate reparation scheme must be national. But destruction so great leaves ample scope for additional voluntary assistance. It is often whispered—one of the unfriendly whispers which circulate in corners—that the French are over-willing to let other people shoulder the burthen of the devastated areas. Whether or not the wealthy French could have made greater efforts on behalf of their compatriots, the position of England and America in this matter remains unaffected. They cannot err on the side of over-generosity. The sufferings of the poor and humble in the devastated areas have been atrocious. In so far as we render France every material assistance within our power, our position is the stronger if from time to time we are forced to cry halt about matters concerning her general policy. Between the Allies there may be, indeed there must be at times, differences which are fundamental as regards their outlook on post-war problems.But on one point there can only be complete unity of feeling and idea—sympathy for the innocent victims on whom the material brunt of the war has fallen in its most acute form; whole-hearted desire to make good the losses endured.