Part 4 (2/2)

Once beyond this sign we came out suddenly upon an open plateau, upon trenches. Northward the slope descended to a valley at our feet. It was cut and seamed by trenches, and beyond the trenches stood the posts that carried the barbed-wire entanglements. Here and there, amidst the trenches, there were graves. I went down to the barbed-wire entanglements and examined them curiously. They at least were real.

Once thousands of men had come up out of the little woods a quarter of a mile below; they had come on in that famous ma.s.sed attack, they had come on in the face of machine gun and ”seventy-fives.” They had just reached the wires, which marked high water. In the woods below, the Bois de Facq, in the fields by the river 4,000 Germans had been buried.

[Ill.u.s.tration: GERMAN LORRAINE (map)]

Looking out from the trenches the whole country unfolded. Northward the little village of Atton slept under the steep slope of Cote-de-Mousson, a round pinnacle crowned with an ancient chateau.

From the hill the German artillery had swept the ground where I stood.

Below the hill to the west was Pont-a-Mousson, the city of 150 bombardments, which the Germans took when they came south and lost later. Above it was the Bois-le-Pretre, in which guns were now booming occasionally. Far to the north was another hill, just visible, and its slope toward us was cut and seamed with yellow slashes: Those were the French trenches, then of the second or third line; beyond there was still another hill, it was slightly blurred in the haze, but it was not over five miles away, and it was occupied by the Germans. From the slope above me on a clear day it is possible to see Metz, so near are French and German lines to the old frontier.

Straight across the river to the west of us was another wood, with a glorious name, the Forest of the Advance Guard. It swept to the south of us. In that wood the Germans had also planted their guns on the day of battle. They had swept the trenches where I stood from three sides.

Plainly it had been a warm corner. But the French had held on. Their commander had received a verbal order to retreat. He insisted that it should be put in writing, and this took time. The order came. It had to be obeyed, but he obeyed slowly. Reluctantly the men left the trenches they had held so long. They slipped southward along the road by which we had come. But suddenly their rear guards discovered the Germans were also retreating. So the French came back and the line of St. Genevieve was held, the northern door to Nancy was not forced.

Looking down again it was not difficult to reconst.i.tute that German a.s.sault, made at night. The thing was so simple the civilian could grasp it. A road ran through the valley and along it the Germans had formed; the slope they had to advance up was gentle, far more gradual than that of San Juan. They had been picked troops selected for a forlorn hope, and they had come back four times. The next morning the whole forest had been filled with dead and dying. Not less than a division--20,000 men--had made the terrible venture. Now there was a strange sense of emptiness in the country; war had come and gone, left its graves, its trenches, its barbed-wire entanglements; but these were all disappearing already. On this beautiful spring morning it was impossible to feel the reality of what happened here, what was happening now, in some measure, five miles or more to the north.

Nature is certainly the greatest of all pacifists; she will not permit the signs of war to endure nor the mind to believe that war itself has existed and exists.

From St. Genevieve we went to the Grand Mont d'Amance, the most famous point in all the Lorraine front, the southeast corner of the Grand Couronne, as St. Genevieve is the northern. Here, from a hill some 1,300 feet high, one looks eastward into the Promised Land of France--into German Lorraine. In the early days of August the great French invasion, resting one flank upon this hill, the other upon the distant Vosges, had stepped over the frontier. One could trace its route to the distant hills among which it had found disaster. In these hills the Germans had hidden their heavy guns, and the French, coming under their fire without warning, unsupported by heavy artillery, which was lacking to them, had broken. Then the German invasion had rolled back. You could follow the route. In the foreground the little Seille River could be discerned; it marked the old frontier. Across this had come the defeated troops. They had swarmed down the low, bare hills; they had crossed and vanished in the woods just at my feet; these woods were the Forest of Champenoux. Into this forest the Germans had followed by the thousand, they were astride the main road to Nancy, which rolled white and straight at my feet. But in the woods the French rallied. For days there was fought in this stretch of trees one of the most terrible of battles.

As I stood on the Grand Mont I faced almost due east. In front of me and to the south extended the forest. Exactly at my feet the forest reached up the hill and there was a little cl.u.s.ter of buildings about a fountain. All was in ruins, and here, exactly here, was the high water mark of the German advance. They had occupied the ruins for a few moments and then had been driven out. Elsewhere they had never emerged from the woods; they had approached the western sh.o.r.e, but the French had met them with machine guns and ”seventy-fives.” The brown woods at my feet were nothing but a vast cemetery; thousands of French and German soldiers slept there.

In their turn the Germans had gone back. Now, in the same woods, a French battery was sh.e.l.ling the Germans on the other side of the Seille. Under the gla.s.s I studied the little villages unfolding as on a map; they were all destroyed, but it was impossible to recognize this. Some were French, some German; you could follow the line, but there were no trenches; behind them French sh.e.l.ls were bursting occasionally and black smoke rose just above the ground. Thousands of men faced each other less than four miles from where I stood, but all that there was to be detected were the sh.e.l.l bursts; otherwise one saw a pleasant country, rolling hills, mostly without woods, bare in the spring, which had not yet come to turn them green. In the foreground ran that arbitrary line Bismarck had drawn between Frenchmen forty-six years before--the frontier--but of natural separation there was none.

He had cut off a part of France, that was all, and one looked upon what had been and was still a bleeding wound.

I asked the French commandant about the various descriptions made by those who have written about the war. They have described the German attack as mounting the slope of the Grand Mont, where we stood. He took me to the edge and pointed down. It was a cliff almost as steep as the Palisades. ”C'est une blague,” he smiled. ”Just a story.” The Germans had not charged here, but in the forest below, where the Nancy road pa.s.sed through and enters the valley of the Amezeule. They had not tried to carry but to turn the Grand Mont. More than 200,000 men had fought for days in the valley below. I asked him about the legend of the Kaiser, sitting on a hill, waiting in white uniform with his famous escort, waiting until the road was clear for his triumphal entrance into the capital of Lorraine. He laughed. I might choose my hill; if the Emperor had done this thing the hill was ”over there,”

but had he? They are hard on legends at the front, and the tales that delight Paris die easily on the frontiers of war.

But since I had asked so much about the fighting my commandant promised to take me in the afternoon to the point where the struggle had been fiercest, still farther to the south, where all the hills break down and there is a natural gateway from Germany into France, the beginning of the famous Charmes Gap, through which the German road to Paris from the east ran, and still runs. Leaving Nancy behind us, and ascending the Meurthe valley on the eastern bank, turning out of it before Saint Nicholas du Port, we came presently to the most completely war-swept fields that I have ever seen. On a perfectly level plain the little town of Haraucourt stands in sombre ruins. Its houses are nothing but ashes and rubble. Go out of the village toward the east and you enter fields pockmarked by sh.e.l.l fire. For several miles you can walk from sh.e.l.l hole to sh.e.l.l hole. The whole country is a patchwork of these sh.e.l.l holes. At every few rods a new line of old trenches approaches the road and wanders away again. Barbed-wire entanglements run up and down the gently sloping hillsides.

Presently we came out upon a perfectly level field. It was simply torn by sh.e.l.l fire. Old half-filled trenches wandered aimlessly about, and beyond, under a gentle slope, the little village of Courbessaux stood in ruins. The commandant called my attention to a bit of woods in front.

”The Germans had their machine guns there,” said he. ”We didn't know it, and a French brigade charged across this field. It started at 8:15, and at 8:30 it had lost more than 3,000 out of 6,000. Then the Germans came out of the woods in their turn, and our artillery, back at Haraucourt, caught them and they lost 3,500 men in a quarter of an hour.” Along the roadside were innumerable graves. We looked at one.

It was marked: ”Here 196 French.” Twenty feet distant was another; it was marked: ”Here 196 Germans.” In the field where we stood I was told some 10,000 men are buried. They were buried hurriedly, and even now when it rains arms and legs are exposed.

Two years had pa.s.sed, almost two years, since this field had been fought for. The Germans had taken it. They had approached Haraucourt, but had not pa.s.sed it. This was the centre and the most vital point in the Lorraine battle. What Foch's troops had done about La Fere Champenoise, those of Castelnau had done here. The German wave had been broken, but at what cost? And now, after so many months, the desolation of war remained. But yet it was not to endure. Beside the very graves an old peasant was ploughing, guiding his plough and his horses carefully among the tombs. Four miles away more trenches faced each other and the battle went on audibly, but behind this line, in this very field where so many had died, life was beginning.

Later we drove south, pa.s.sing within the lines the Germans had held in their great advance, we travelled through Luneville, which they had taken and left unharmed, save as sh.e.l.l fire had wrecked an eastern suburb. We visited Gerbeviller, where in an excess of rage the Germans had burned every structure in the town. I have never seen such a headquarters of desolation. Everything that had a shape, that had a semblance of beauty or of use, lies in complete ruin, detached houses, a chateau, the blocks in the village, all in ashes. Save for Sermaize, Gerbeviller is the most completely wrecked town in France.

You enter the village over a little bridge across the tiny Mortagne.

Here some French soldiers made a stand and held off the German advance for some hours. There was no other battle at Gerbeviller, but for this defence the town died. Never was death so complete. Incendiary material was placed in every house, and all that thoroughness could do to make the destruction complete was done. Gerbeviller is dead, a few women and children live amidst its ashes, there is a wooden barrack by the bridge with a post-office and the inevitable postcards, but only on postcards, picture postcards, does the town live. It will be a place of pilgrimage when peace comes.

From Gerbeviller we went by Bayon to the Plateau of Saffais, the ridge between the Meurthe and the Moselle, where the defeated army of Castelnau made its last and successful stand. The French line came south from St. Genevieve, where we had been in the morning, through the Grand Mont, across the plain by Haraucourt and Corbessaux, then crossed the Meurthe by Dombasle and stood on the heights from Rossieres south. Having taken Luneville, the Germans attempted to cross the Meurthe coming out of the Forest of Vitrimont.

Standing on the Plateau of Saffais and facing east, the whole country unfolded again, as it did at the Grand Mont. The face of the plateau is seamed with trenches. They follow the slopes, and the village of Saffais stands out like a promontory. On this ridge the French had ma.s.sed three hundred cannon. Their army had come back in ruins, and to steady it they had been compelled to draw troops from Alsace.

Mulhausen was sacrificed to save Nancy. Behind these crests on which we stood a beaten army, almost routed, had in three days found itself and returned to the charge.

In the shadow of the dusk I looked across the Meurthe into the brown ma.s.s of the Forest of Vitrimont. Through this had come the victorious Germans. They had debouched from the wood; they had approached the river, hidden under the slope, but, swept by the h.e.l.l of this artillery storm, they had broken. But few had lived to pa.s.s the river, none had mounted the slopes. There were almost no graves along these trenches. Afterward the Germans had in turn yielded to pressure from the south and gone back. Before the Battle of the Marne began the German wave of invasion had been stopped here in the last days of August. A second terrific drive, coincident with the Marne, had likewise failed. Then the Germans had gone back to the frontier. The old boundary line of Bismarck is now in many instances an actual line of fire, and nowhere on this front are the Germans more than three or four miles within French territory.

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