Unburied Dead Strew Lorraine
By Philip Gibbs of The London Daily Chronicle.
DIJON, Sept. 26.—Although great interest is concentrated upon the northwest side of the line of of battle in France, it must not be forgotten that the east side is also of high importance. The operation of the French and German forces along the jagged frontier from north to south is of vital influence upon the whole field of war, and any great movement of troops in this direction affects the strategy of the Generals to command on the furthermost wings.
It was a desire to know something of what had been happening in the east which led me to travel to the extreme right. Few correspondents have been in this part of the field since the beginning of the war. It is far from their own line of communications. For this reason there have been no detailed narratives of the fighting in Lorraine, and a strange silence has brooded over those battlefields. The spell of it has been broken only by official bulletins telling in a line or two the uncertain result of the ceaseless struggle for mastery.
Here are regiments of young men who have the right already to call themselves veterans, for they have been fighting continually for six weeks in innumerable engagements, for the most part unrecorded in official dispatches. I had seen them answering the call to mobilization, singing joyously as they marched through the streets. Then they were smart fellows, clean shaven and spruce in their new blue coats and scarlet trousers. Now war has put its dirt upon them and seems to have aged them by fifteen years, leaving its ineffaceable imprint upon their faces. Their blue coats have changed to a dusty gray, but they are hard and tough for the most part, and Napoleon himself would not have wished for better fighting men.
Now for the first time since the beginning of the war there will be a little respite on the Lorraine frontier, and in the wooded country of the two lost provinces there will be time to bury the dead which incumber its fields. Words are utterly inadequate to describe the horrors of the region to the east of the Meurthe, in and around the little towns of Blamont, Badonviller, Cirey-les-Forges, Arracourt, Château-Salins, Morhauge, and Baudrecourt, where for six weeks there has been incessant fighting. After the heavy battle of Sept. 4, when the Germans were repulsed with severe losses after an attack in force, both sides retired for about twelve miles and dug themselves into lines of trenches which they still hold; but every day since that date there has been a kind of guerrilla warfare, with small bodies of men fighting from village to village and from wood to wood, the forces on each side being scattered over a wide area in advance of their main lines. This method of warfare is even more terrible than a pitched battle.
"It is absurd to talk of Red Cross work," said one of the French soldiers who had just come out of the trenches at Lunéville. "It has not existed as far as many of these fights are concerned How could it? A few litter-carriers came with us on some of our expeditions, but they were soon shot down, and after that the wounded just lay where they fell, or crawled away into the shelter of the woods. Those of us who were unhurt were not allowed to attend to our wounded comrades; it is against orders. We have to go on regardless of losses. My own best comrade was struck down by my side. I heard his cry and saw him lying there with blood oozing through his coat. My heart wept to leave him. He wanted me to take his money, but I just kissed his hand and went on, I suppose he died, for I could not find him when we retreated."
Where the Armies are Contending in Alsace-Lorraine.
Grand Duke Nicholas Nicholaievitch
The Russian Commander-in-Chief.
(Photo (C) by Underwood & Underwood.)
Gen. Rennenkampf
The Russian General Who Was Removed by the Grand Duke
[Transcriber: photo credit ineligible]
Another French soldier lay wounded at the edge of a wood ten miles from Lunéville. When he recovered consciousness he saw there were only dead and dying men around him. He remained for two days, unable to move his shattered limbs, and cried out for death to relieve him of his agony. At night he was numbed by cold; in the day thirst tortured him to the point of madness. Faint cries and groans came to his ears across the field. It was on the morning of the third day that French peasants came to rescue those who still remained alive.
There have been several advances made by the French into Lorraine, and several retirements. On each occasion men have seen new horrors which have turned their stomachs. There are woods not far from Nancy from which there comes a pestilential stench which steals down the wind in gusts of obscene odor. For three weeks and more dead bodies of Germans and Frenchmen have lain rotting there. There are few grave diggers. The peasants have fled from their villages, and the soldiers have other work to do; so that the frontier fields on each side are littered with corruption, where plague and fever find holding ground.
I have said that this warfare on the frontier is pitiless. This is a general statement of a truth to which there are exceptions. One of these was a reconciliation on the battlefield between French and German soldiers who lay wounded and abandoned near the little town of Blamont. When dawn came they conversed with each other while waiting for death. A French soldier gave his water bottle to a German officer who was crying out with thirst. The German sipped a little and then kissed the hand of the man who had been his enemy. "There will be no war on the other side," he said.
Another Frenchman, who came from Montmartre, found a Luxembourger lying within a yard of him whom he had known as a messenger in a big hotel in Paris. The young German wept to see his old acquaintance. "It is stupid," he said, "this war. You and I were happy when we were good friends in Paris. Why should we have been made to fight with each other?" He died with his arms around the neck of the soldier who told me the story, unashamed of his own tears.
I could tell a score of tales like this, told to me by men whose eyes were still haunted by the sight of these things; and perhaps one day they will be worth telling, so that people of little imagination may realize the meaning of this war and put away false heroics from their lips. It is dirty business, with no romance in it for any of those fine young Frenchmen I have learned to love, who still stay in the trenches on the frontier lines or march a little way into Lorraine and back again.
Some of those trenches on either side are still filled with men leaning forward with their rifles pointing to the enemy—quite dead, in spite of their lifelike posture.