Part 4 (1/2)
The Germans have not made any gain of importance in nearly two months.
The French are very sure they will not come farther south. They are as confident as men could be. But if the Germans should come farther south and at last force the French to come back behind the river and to the hills above the town, they would only win a moral victory. The military situation would not be changed, unless they should also pierce the French lines on the west of the river, and this is absolutely unthinkable now.
If you think of Verdun city as a fortress you will put yourself in the eighteenth century. It is just an abandoned town, mostly ashes and completely ruined by a useless bombardment after the main German advance had been checked. If you think of Verdun as a fortified position, like Liege, which, if it fell, would bring disaster, as did the fall of Liege, you are thinking in terms of the situation before the war. The forts of this position have all been abandoned and the French are fighting in trenches in all points save one outside this circle of forts. If you think of Verdun as the gateway to anything, you are thinking of something that doesn't exist. It was a gateway to Central France, to the Plain of Chalons, from the German frontier before the Germans came down into the Plain of Chalons from the north through Belgium.
But if you think of Verdun as a place which has a great sentimental value for both the French and the Germans; if you think of it as a place which by reason of its importance in other days still preserves a value in the minds of the ma.s.s of the French and German publics, a town the taking of which would as a result of this wholly false appraisal be reckoned in Germany as a great victory, which would vastly encourage German ma.s.ses and would be accepted in France as a great defeat which would equally depress the French public, you will think of the battle for Verdun as it is.
If you go to Verdun you will see that the estimate that the world has placed upon it is illusory. You will see it is an abandoned town. You will see, as I did, that great and famous forts are without guns, and you will see, as I did, that the positions which the French have prepared behind the Meuse and above the town are vastly stronger than those which they have held successfully, in Lorraine or any other place where the attacks have been bitter, for nearly two years.
There are no forts, fortifications, fortresses, in this war. There are just trenches, and the Verdun sector is no exception. Verdun is not surrounded; it is not invested. I went to the town from Bar-le-Duc in an automobile without difficulty, and I ran back to Paris by another road, through Chalons, with equal ease. The Germans have never got within three miles of the town on any side; to the west of the River Meuse they are not within six miles of it. They are not gaining, and have not been gaining for weeks; they are merely fighting a desperate trench campaign, and the French are fighting back, retaking trenches on the east of the river, because they are in their last line on this bank of the river, but paying less attention to German trench gains on the west because the Germans are still far from the Charny Ridge, their main position.
If Verdun falls, that is, if the French are compelled under pressure or as a result of the cost of holding their present awkward position to go back behind the river, they will lose fifty or a hundred square miles of French territory, they will lose all the tremendous value of the moral ”lift” which the successful defence has brought, but they will lose nothing else; and when the Germans have taken Verdun, the ashes, the ruins, they will stop, because there is no object or value in further attack. They are fighting for moral values, and the French politician has overruled the French soldier and compelled him to accept battle on unfavorable ground for this same moral value, but against his military judgment. He has done it successfully. He expects and France expects that he will continue to do it successfully, but in the wholly remote contingency that he failed (I can only say that it is a contingency no longer considered in France), a loss in moral advantage would be the only consequence.
V
IN SIGHT OF THE PROMISED LAND--ON THE LORRAINE BATTLEFIELD
In the third week of August, 1914, a French army crossed the frontier of Alsace-Lorraine and entered the Promised Land, toward which all Frenchmen had looked in hope and sadness for forty-four years. The long-forgotten communiques of that early period of the war reported success after success, until at last it was announced that the victorious French armies had reached Sarrebourg and Morhange, and were astride the Stra.s.sburg-Metz Railroad. And then Berlin took up the cry, and France and the world learned of a great German victory and of the defeat and rout of the invading army. Even Paris conceded that the retreat had begun and the ”army of liberation” was crowding back beyond the frontier and far within French territory.
Then the curtain of the censors.h.i.+p fell and the world turned to the westward to watch the terrible battle for Paris. In the agony and glory of the Marne the struggle along the Moselle was forgotten; the Battle of Nancy, of Lorraine, was fought and won in the darkness, and when the safety of Paris was a.s.sured the world looked toward the Aisne, and then toward Flanders. So it came about that one of the greatest battles of the whole war, one of the most important of the French victories, the success that made the Marne possible, the rally and stand of the French armies about Nancy, escaped the fame it earned. Only in legend, in the romance of the Kaiser with his cavalry waiting on the hills to enter the Lorraine capital, did the battle live.
When I went to France one of the hopes I had cherished was that I might be permitted to visit this battlefield, to see the ground on which a great battle had been fought, that was still unknown country, in the main, for those who have written on the war. The Lorraine field was the field on which France and Germany had planned for a generation to fight. Had the Germans respected the neutrality of Belgium, it is by Nancy, by the gap between the Vosges and the hills of the Meuse, that they must have broken into France. The Marne was a battlefield which was reached by chance and fought over by hazard, but every foot of the Lorraine country had been studied for the fight long years in advance. Here war followed the natural course, followed the plans of the general staff prepared years in advance. Indeed, I had treasured over years a plan of the Battle of Nancy, contained in a French book written years ago, which might serve as the basis for a history of what happened, as it was written as a prophecy of what was to come.
When the Great General Staff was pleased to grant my request to see the battlefield of Nancy I was advised to travel by train to that town accompanied by an officer from the General Staff, and informed that I should there meet an officer of the garrison, who would conduct me to all points of interest and explain in detail the various phases of the conflict. Thus it fell out, and I have to thank Commandant Leroux for the courtesy and consideration which made this excursion successful.
In peace time one goes from Paris to Nancy in five hours, and the distance is about that from New York to Boston, by Springfield. In war all is different, and the time almost doubled. Yet there are compensations. Think of the New York-Boston trip as bringing you beyond New Haven to the exact rear of battle, of battle but fifteen miles away, with the guns booming in the distance and the aeroplanes and balloons in full view. Think also of this same trip, which from Hartford to Worchester follows the line of a battle not yet two years old, a battle that has left its traces in ruined villages, in shattered houses. On either side of the railroad track the graves descend to meet the embankments; you can mark the advance and the retreat by the crosses which fill the fields. The gardens that touch the railroad and extend to the rear of houses in the little towns are filled with graves. Each enclosure has been fought for at the point of the bayonet, and every garden wall recalls the Chateau of Hougoumont, at Waterloo.
All this was two years ago, but there is to-day, also. East of Bar-le-Duc the main line is cut by German sh.e.l.l fire now. From Fort Camp des Romains above St. Mihiel German guns sweep the railroad near Commercy, and one has to turn south by a long detour, as if one went to Boston by Fitchburg, travel south through the country of Jeanne d'Arc and return by Toul, whose forts look out upon the invaded land.
Thus one comes to Nancy by night, and only by night, for twenty miles beyond there are Germans and a German cannon, which not so long ago sent a sh.e.l.l into the town and removed a whole city block beside the railroad station. It is the sight of this ruin as you enter the town which reminds you that you are at the front, but there are other reminders.
As we ate our dinner in the cafe, facing the beautiful Place Stanislas, we were disturbed by a strange and curious drumming sound.
Going out into the square, we saw an aeroplane, or rather its lights, red and green, like those of a s.h.i.+p. It was the first of several, the night patrol, rising slowly and steadily, and then sweeping off in a wide curve toward the enemy's line. They were the sentries of the air which were to guard us while we slept, for men do sentry-go in the air as well as on the earth about the capital of Lorraine. Then the searchlights on the hills began to play, sweeping the horizon toward that same mysterious region where beyond the darkness there is war.
The next morning I woke with the sense of Fourth of July. Bang! Bang!
Bang! Such a barking of cannon crackers I had never heard. Still drowsy, I pushed open the French windows and looked down on the square. There I beheld a hundred or more men, women, and children, their eyes fixed on something in the air above and behind the hotel.
Still the incessant barking of guns, with the occasional boom of something more impressive. With difficulty I grasped the fact. I was in the midst of a Taube raid. Somewhere over my head, invisible to me because of the wall of my hotel, a German aeroplane was flying, and all the anti-aircraft guns were shooting at it. Was it carrying bombs?
Should I presently see or feel the destruction following the descent of these?
But the Taube turned away, the guns fired less and less frequently, the people in the streets drifted away, the children to school, the men to work, the women to wait. It was just a detail in their lives, as familiar as the incoming steamer to the commuters on the North River ferryboats. Some portion of war has been the day's history of Nancy for nearly two years now. The children do not carry gas masks to school with them as they do at Pont-a-Mousson, a dozen miles to the north, but women and children have been killed by German sh.e.l.ls, by bombs, brought by Zeppelins and by aeroplanes. There is always excitement of sorts in the district of Nancy.
After a breakfast, broken by the return of the aeroplanes we had seen departing the night before for the patrol, we entered our cars and set out for the front, for the near-front, for the lines a few miles behind the present trenches, where Nancy was saved but two years ago.
Our route lay north along the valley of the Meurthe, a smiling broad valley, marching north and south and meeting in a few miles that of the Moselle coming east. It was easy to believe that one was riding through the valley of the Susquehanna, with spring and peace in the air. Toward the east a wall of hills shut out the view. This was the shoulder of the Grand Couronne, the wall against which German violence burst and broke in September, 1914.
Presently we came to a long stretch of road walled in on the river side by brown canvas, exactly the sort of thing that is used at football games to shut out the non-paying public. But it had another purpose here. We were within the vision of the Germans, across the river, on the heights behind the forest, which outlined itself at the skyline; there were the Kaiser's troops and that forest was the Bois-le-Pretre, the familiar incident in so many communiques since the war began. Thanks to the canvas, it was possible for the French to move troops along this road without inviting German sh.e.l.ls. Yet it was impossible to derive any large feeling of security from a canvas wall, which alone interposed between you and German heavy artillery.
We pa.s.sed through several villages and each was crowded with troops; cavalry, infantry, all the branches represented; it was still early and the soldiers were just beginning their day's work; war is so completely a business here. Transport wagons marched along the roads, companies of soldiers filed by. Interspersed with the soldiers were civilians, the women and children, for none of the villages are evacuated. Not even the occasional boom of a gun far off could give to this thing the character of real war. It recalled the days of my soldiering in the militia camp at Framingham in Ma.s.sachusetts. It was simply impossible to believe that it was real. Even the faces of the soldiers were smiling. There was no such sense of terribleness, of strain and weariness as I later found about Verdun. The Lorraine front is now inactive, tranquil; it has been quiet so long that men have forgotten all the carnage and horror of the earlier time.
We turned out of the valley and climbed abruptly up the hillside. In a moment we came into the centre of a tiny village and looked into a row of houses, whose roofs had been swept off by sh.e.l.l fire. Here and there a whole house was gone; next door the house was undisturbed and the women and children looked out of the doors. The village was St.
Genevieve, and we were at the extreme front of the French in August, and against this hill burst the flood of German invasion. Leaving the car we walked out of the village, and at the end of the street a sign warned the wayfarer not to enter the fields, for which we were bound: ”War--do not trespa.s.s.” This was the burden of the warning.