The fact is recalled here because it illustrates what in this campaign has proved a well-marked feature of German strategy. It has been proved, that is to say, that whenever the Germans found it necessary to resist very heavy pressure they seized some point capable of obstinate defence, and, even if pushed back to right and left, kept their grip as long as possible, using the position as a general hold-up along that section of the front.
Thus their grip on Condé and the Chivres bluff was essential to their retention of the Aisne ridge.
They had a similar position at Prunay on the railway between Rheims and Chalons. The village of Prunay is at the point where the theatre of hills narrows into the upper valley of the Vesle. The position jutted out like an angle from the German line, and it commanded the valley.
Figuratively taking these positions of Condé-sur-Aisne on the one side and Prunay on the other, we may imagine the German army like a man clinging to a couple of posts or railings and so defying the effort to move him.
That is the aspect of the matter so far as defensive tactics go. For offensive tactics grip on such positions is obviously a great aid to pressure on a hostile line lying between them. A military salient serves exactly the same purpose as a wedge. It is a device for splitting the opposition. Here, then, were two wedges in the Allied front, and the object was manifestly to break off the part of the front intervening. On that part of the front with Rheims as its main advanced base the Allied line, all the way round from beyond Noyon to Verdun, structurally depended.
Such was the German scheme. But the Allies on their part had a wedge or salient driven into the German front at Craonne, and as they were there two-thirds of the way along the road from Rheims to Laon, the main advanced base and communication centre of the German line, that salient was extremely awkward. They were intent, on their part, in hammering in their wedge, because it meant a collapse of the whole German right flank from the Aisne ridge to the Belgian frontier.
It is not difficult, therefore, to understand the fury of the resulting struggle. The best troops on both sides were engaged. In point of magnitude the fighting round Rheims was hardly less than the fighting which occurred later round Ypres.
The struggle in its acute phase lasted for fifteen days and nights without the slightest pause or intermission. In the tracks of the German retreat from the Marne great gaps among the vineyards, where rose mounds of earth, marked the common graves of the slain. Along the boundaries of woods appeared the blackened sites of the hecatombs. Nevertheless, many of the fallen still lay in the woods or among the vines, unburied and infecting the air. Through this country and these scenes marched the reinforcements of the 5th French army. In the opposite direction flowed a ceaseless stream of civilian fugitives—poor people carrying their few personal belongings strapped on their backs, or pushing them along in wheelbarrows; women carrying children in their arms, and with other children trailing at their skirts; a procession on foot and in vehicles of every sort.
Against Rheims the Germans employed much of the artillery and material and apparatus they had intended for the siege of Paris. On the eastern side of the theatre of hills behind the advanced island mass where stand the villages of Berru and Nogent l'Abbesse, they had mounted their huge mortars. From these positions and from others to the north-east they threw into Rheims an incessant crash of monster shells. Viewed from any of the villages of its circumference, this theatre of hills ten miles across presented during these days a spectacle at once grandiose and awful. The battle spread out round and below like a panorama of fire. Out of advanced positions among the woods on the south-west, across by Rheims, and to the north, hundreds of the French field guns searched the German positions with their terrible high explosive shells. At brief regular intervals amid the angry roar arose a deep resounding boom—the note of the enemy's great howitzers. The earth shook beneath the salvoes, for the French had also massed here their heaviest artillery. Amid the flash of bursting shells appeared here a village, there a mill a mass of flames, with the smoke drifting above it in a dense cloud. The roar was that of hurricane and earthquake rolled into one. And the uproar went on without ceasing through all the hours of daylight, and far into the night.
Furious and destructive as it was, however, the artillery duel was not the deadliest part. The great slaughter occurred when the armies came to grips. The Germans launched an attack upon Rheims from the north and an attack at the same time from the south-east. Of the first attack the immediate objective was the suburb of La Neuvillette. That place is on the great road from Rheims to Berry-au-Bac, and if it could be seized the French positions along the transverse gap would be endangered, and their position at Craonne made untenable. The immediate objective of the second attack was the fort of La Pompelle, commanding the great road to Chalons. To the French both communications were vital.