Beyond Vauchamps we came upon a scene where there had been heavy artillery fighting. The fields were plowed up by innumerable shells and many dead horses were strewn along the gutters, with here and there a dead soldier who had fallen in the road and been hurriedly thrown aside so that he should not hinder traffic.
The highway was elevated a bit above the level country which stretched on either side, and at one spot we saw where two German guns had fought from behind this slight protection. They had been placed in holes sunk a few inches into the ground, and the loose earth had been piled up to form a little mound in front, preventing bullets from flying under the gun shield. Empty cartridge cases were strewn about and a pile of unused ammunition was stacked up like cordwood. The German guns had been in sight of a French battery across the fields and a direct-fire artillery duel had taken place between the two. The craters of thirty-two French shells were within twenty paces of the emplacements and the ground was strewn with splinters and shrapnel cases. There were several very dead German artillerymen who had evidently been working the guns when direct hits had been made upon the material of the battery. No limbers or caissons had been with the guns, but a caisson had been placed in a field about two hundred yards behind, and men ran up and down across the field carrying ammunition in wicker baskets, each of which holds three shells. We picked up four of these shell baskets as curiosities and managed to find room for them in our machine.
As we advanced we became more and more convinced of the correctness of Capt. Parker’s theory that there had been a big focal center of the battle somewhere still to the east of us, and that the actions along the rest of the line of contact from Paris to Lorraine had occurred with reference to this vortex.
It is characteristic of the limited knowledge which troops in battle have of what goes on outside of their immediate geographical vicinity, that we ran almost into the great battle area for which we were searching before anyone gave us a hint of its location. It was at Vertus that we were told by a French officer that terrific fighting had taken place in the upland plateau to the south of us, around a place called Fère Champenoise; that the Germans had there made their main attack with close to a quarter of a million men; that a frightful battle had raged, a battle in which the Germans were at first, during some thirty-six hours, victorious, but that, with the arrival of reinforcements, the Ninth French Army under General Foch had turned the tide and finally routed them. The officers said that the fighting and slaughter had been frightful; that the combined casualties of the two sides were close to two hundred thousand on a front of something over twenty miles and a depth of about fifteen miles. They said that the battle area was contained roughly within a circumference drawn through the villages of Champaubert, Coligny, Pierre-Morains, Clamanges, Sommesous, Gourgançon, Corroy, and Sézanne.
“THE DEAD WERE SCATTERED FAR AND WIDE”
[Our automobile on one of the battlefields of the Marne]
As we conferred with the officers a constant stream of reinforcements for the French army was passing, coming from Fère Champenoise and marching toward Ay and Epernay; regiments of infantry, ammunition trains, caissons, transports, and cavalry, all marching endlessly toward the booming guns to the northward.