Hardly a "strong town" in these days, but certainly it made itself a name both at the beginning and the end of the war. At 10 o'clock on the night of the 25th of August an alarm was given; the Germans had made their way through wood roads, and tried to rush us in the camouflage of French uniforms and French words of command. Happily the 4th Guards Brigade was on the spot, although only just arrived, and received the enemy in unexpected fashion, so that by midnight the attack had collapsed, and a little more much-needed breathing-time was gained. A Landrecien told us, in 1919, how he had seen the Germans coming down "in their thousands," and how the Guards had stood up to them at the railway and road corner at which my photograph ([Plate 110]) was taken. In 1918 the tables were turned, and it was the German Guards who were trying to hold up our infantry, who captured the town on the 10th of October, after crossing the Sambre on rafts. It is of this attack that the story[43] is told of three tractor tanks, which made a bluff at a moment when the infantry were held up, and of which two got through and successfully made a way for the rifles.
South-west of the forest lies Le Cateau ([Plate 111]), at one end of the straight fifteen-mile road to Cambrai, south of which lie the villages of Caudry, Esnes, Ligny, and many others whose names we heard first in August, 1914, and again four years later. It was here that General Smith-Dorrien made the great stand of the 26th of August, which has been the subject of so much discussion, but which certainly gave the opportunity for most gallant fighting, both of infantry and artillery, while it held back—and, better still, greatly exhausted—the enemy. By the afternoon the position became untenable, and then followed the all-night march of the tired men towards St. Quentin. Le Cateau itself appears to be very little damaged.
On the "Roman road," running south from Le Cateau to the Cambrai-St. Quentin road, the villages are now much damaged, probably rather in 1918 than in 1914, and notices were still standing—"Do not halt on this road"—at places towards the south. Another souvenir of 1918 was a notice near Maurois, "Pip Squeaks 6.30 to-night!" A less agreeable reminiscence was a sugar factory, thoroughly gutted by the Germans in characteristic fashion, beside the road near Estrées, a village itself in ruins. Along this road, as in many places on the Somme, the route, now destitute of trees, is marked by short wooden posts on each side placed at short distances apart, their object being, of course, to keep lorries on the track in the dark, or at least to give them notice if they strayed from it. Here and there many of the posts on one side of the road seemed to be sloping in one direction, and those on the other side in the opposite direction. The obvious inference was that the slope of the posts was due to the frequency with which the lorries had run into them!
The Le Cateau battlefield was so quickly crossed both in 1914 and 1918 that many of its villages, some of which I had the opportunity of visiting while fighting was going on only a few miles farther north, are very little damaged, and the land surface generally is almost uninjured in comparison with its condition both farther north and farther south.
The 1st of September was the anniversary of Sedan, and the Germans had apparently hoped to celebrate the day in Paris. But on or about that day, perhaps the day before, Von Kluck had made the great turn to the south-east, which (whatever its original motive) eventually allowed the French to get on his flank across the Ourcq, and paved the way for the great victory on the Marne.
The Germans had progressed so far as to cross the Marne by the 4th of September, and had reached their farthest south position on the Petit Morin, which joins the Marne at La Ferté-sous-Jouarre. On the next day Joffre gave his orders for the commencement of the advance on the 6th, which at one blow turned the much-vaunted advance into a retreat, and postponed for ever the triumphal march of the Emperor through the Arc de Triomphe which was found to have been so elaborately arranged for. The bridge over the Marne at La Ferté-sous-Jouarre—close to which the photograph in [Plate 112] was taken—was blown up, and we failed to cross the river until two days later, after which came the great and complex battle which ended with the Germans back to the Aisne. But they still succeeded in holding, and were still to hold for four more years, all the hilly country between Rheims and Verdun, as well as Laon, St. Quentin, Péronne, and Cambrai, and also, for much of that time, the whole Somme region.
And so the war went on, until in May of 1918 Ludendorff played his last shot and swept down across the Aisne and the Vesle and the Tardenois country to the Marne once more,[44] and finally, in the Friedensturm (for the opening of which the Emperor came down specially on the 15th of July), crossed the river between Château Thierry (which is badly damaged), Dormans ([Plate 113]), and Montvoisin, and for a few days held a precarious and unhappy[45] footing on the south bank, his pontoon bridges being exposed to continual enfilade firing, and his communications only kept up very imperfectly in consequence. The ruin of the villages along the river here shows how hard the shelling had been at this time.
At length came the day when Foch could let his armies off the leash. No one can forget the thrill of that 18th of July, when the news came through in the early afternoon in the clubs and the newspapers that the advance for which we had hoped so long—and which we somehow knew with a singular certainty that Foch would make in his own time—had actually commenced. Some of us, whether more sanguine or more wise than others I cannot say, seemed to understand at once that the end had really begun, and the horrible black clouds of four years were broken up as suddenly and finally as when the sun bursts out after a thunderstorm, and the storm which was overhead a moment before is suddenly seen to be rolling away to the horizon. And when the late news at night and the early news the next morning allowed us to see something of Foch's intention, and how well things were progressing, we might well have ordered "joybells" if it had not been for our painful recollection of too early rejoicing over the Cambrai battle of 1917. But the joybells were within everyone, all the same. No doubt there is justification for the special celebration every year of Armistice Day. But to many of us the real day of relief, the day when the sun once more broke out on France and Britain and all the Allied lands, was the day on which Mangin astonished the Germans by suddenly walking through the western boundary of the salient which they had captured with so much effort and so much boastfulness.
The scheme of the Friedensturm was to encircle Rheims by simultaneous advances east and west of the impassable Montagne de Reims, the advances to meet at Epernay ([Plate 114]), and thereafter the valley of the Marne to provide the long-deferred route to Paris. On the east the advance was held up on the Vesle from the very start by General Gouraud's skilful "false front" tactics. Prunay was taken and retaken, and attempts made to secure a bridge-head at Sillery ([Plate 115]), six miles from the city, and due south of the Nogent de l'Abesse fort, while slight gains were made farther east; but practically no progress at all was effected.