They Shall Not Pass

by Frank H. Simonds

Presently we came to a long stretch of road walled in on the river side by brown canvas, exactly the sort of thing that is used at football games to shut out the non-paying public. But it had another purpose here. We were within the vision of the Germans, across the river, on the heights behind the forest, which outlined itself at the skyline; there were the Kaiser's troops and that forest was the Bois-le-Prêtre, the familiar incident in so many communiqués since the war began. Thanks to the canvas, it was possible for the French to move troops along this road without inviting German shells. Yet it was impossible to derive any large feeling of security from a canvas wall, which alone interposed between you and German heavy artillery.

We passed through several villages and each was crowded with troops; cavalry, infantry, all the branches represented; it was still early and the soldiers were just beginning their day's work; war is so completely a business here. Transport wagons marched along the roads, companies of soldiers filed by. Interspersed with the soldiers were civilians, the women and children, for none of the villages are evacuated. Not even the occasional boom of a gun far off could give to this thing the character of real war. It recalled the days of my soldiering in the militia camp at Framingham in Massachusetts. It was simply impossible to believe that it was real. Even the faces of the soldiers were smiling. There was no such sense of terribleness, of strain and weariness as I later found about Verdun. The Lorraine front is now inactive, tranquil; it has been quiet so long that men have forgotten all the carnage and horror of the earlier time.

We turned out of the valley and climbed abruptly up the hillside. In a moment we came into the centre of a tiny village and looked into a row of houses, whose roofs had been swept off by shell fire. Here and there a whole house was gone; next door the house was undisturbed and the women and children looked out of the doors. The village was St. Geneviève, and we were at the extreme front of the French in August, and against this hill burst the flood of German invasion. Leaving the car we walked out of the village, and at the end of the street a sign warned the wayfarer not to enter the fields, for which we were bound: "War—do not trespass." This was the burden of the warning.

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 massed 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.

Looking out from the trenches the whole country unfolded. Northward the little village of Atton slept under the steep slope of Côte-de-Mousson, a round pinnacle crowned with an ancient château. From the hill the German artillery had swept the ground where I stood. Below the hill to the west was Pont-à-Mousson, the city of 150 bombardments, which the Germans took when they came south and lost later. Above it was the Bois-le-Prêtre, 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. Geneviève was held, the northern door to Nancy was not forced.

Looking down again it was not difficult to reconstitute that German assault, 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. Geneviève we went to the Grand Mont d'Amance, the most famous point in all the Lorraine front, the southeast corner of the Grand Couronné, as St. Geneviève 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 cluster 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 shore, 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.