Ah, it took more than artillery to beat back the best troops of France in a country like this—a country of rolling hills and fenceless fields cut by many streams and set among thick woods, where infantry on a bank or at a forest’s edge with rifles and rapid-firers and guns kept their barrels cool until the charge developed in the open. Some of these forests are only a few acres in extent; others are hundreds of acres. In the dark depths of one a frozen lake was seen glistening from our position on the Plateau d’Amance.
“Indescribable that scene which we witnessed from here,” said an officer, who had been on the plateau throughout the fighting. “All the splendid majesty of war was set on a stage before you. It was intoxication. We could see the lines of troops in their retreat and advance, batteries and charges shrouded in shrapnel smoke. What hosts of guns the Germans had! They seemed to be sowing the whole face of the earth with shells. The roar of the thing was like that of chaos itself. It was the exhilaration of the spectacle that kept us from dropping from fatigue. Two weeks of this business! Two weeks with every unit of artillery and infantry always ready, if not actually engaged!”
The general in command was directing not one but many battles, each with a general of its own; manœuvring troops across the streams and open places, seeking the cover of forests, with the aeroplanes unable to learn how many of the enemy were hidden in the forests on his front, while he tried to keep his men out of angles and make his movements correspond with those of the divisions on his right and left. Skill this requires; skill equivalent to German skill; the skill which you cannot organise in a month after calling for a million volunteers, but which grows through years of organisation.
Shall I call the general in chief command General X? This is according to the custom of anonymity. A great modern army like the French is a machine; any man, high or low, only a unit of the machine. In this case the real name of X is Castelnau. If it lacks the fame which may seem its due, that may be because he was not operating near a transatlantic cable end. Fame is not the business of French generals nowadays. It is war. What counted for France was that he never let the Germans get near the gap at Mirecourt.
Having failed to reach the gap, the Germans, with that stubbornness of the offensive which characterises them, tried to take Nancy. They got a battery of heavy guns within range of the city. From a high hill it is said that the Kaiser watched the bombardment. But here is a story. As the German infantry advanced toward their new objective they passed a French artillery officer in a tree. He was able to locate that heavy battery and able to signal its position back to his own side. The French concentrated sufficient fire to silence it after it had thrown forty shells into Nancy. The same report tells how the Kaiser folded his cloak around him and walked down in silence from his eminence, where the sun blazed on his helmet. It was not the Germans’ fault that they failed to take Nancy. It was due to the French.
Some time a tablet will be put up to denote the high-water mark of the German invasion of Lorraine. It will be between the edge of the forest of Champenoux and the heights. When the Germans charged from the cover of the forest to get possession of the road to Nancy, the French guns and mitrailleuses which had held their fire turned loose. The rest of the story is how the French infantry, impatient at being held back, swept down in a counter-attack, and the Germans had to give up their campaign in Lorraine as they gave up their campaign against Paris in the early part of September. Saddest of all lost opportunities to the correspondent in this war is this fighting in Lorraine. One had only to climb a hill in order to see it all!
In half an hour, as the officer outlined the positions, we had lived through the two weeks’ fighting; and, thanks to the fairness of his story—that of a professional soldier without illusions—we felt that we had been hearing history while it was very fresh.
“They are very brave and skilful, the Germans,” he said. “We still have a battery of heavy guns on the plateau. Let us go and see it.”
We went, picking our way among the snow-covered shell pits. At one point we crossed a communicating trench, where soldiers could go and come to the guns and the infantry positions without being exposed to shell fire. I noticed that it carried a telephone wire.
“Yes,” said the officer; “we had no ditch during the fight with the Germans, and we were short of telephone wire for a while; so we had to carry messages back and forth as in the old days. It was a pretty warm kind of messenger service when the German marmites were falling their thickest.”