An icy gale swept across the white crest of the plateau on this January day, but it was nothing to the gale of shells that descended on it in late August and early September. Forty thousand shells, it is estimated, fell there. One kicked up fragments of steel on the field like peanut-shells after a circus has gone. Here were the emplacements of a battery of French soixante-quinze within a circle of holes torn by its adversaries' replies to its fire; a little farther along, concealed by shrubbery, the position of another battery which the enemy had not located.
So that was it! The struggle on the immense landscape, where at least a quarter of a million men were killed and wounded, became as simple as some Brobdingnagian football match. Before the war began the French would not move a man within five miles of the frontier lest it be provocative; but once the issue was joined they sprang for Alsace and Lorraine, their imagination magnetized by the thought of the recovery of the lost provinces. Their Alpine chasseurs, mountain men of the Alpine and the Pyrenees districts, were concentrated for the purpose.
I recalled a remark I had heard: "What a pitiful little offensive that was!" It was made by one of those armchair "military experts" who look at a map and jump at a conclusion. They appear very wise in their wordiness when real military experts are silent for want of knowledge. Pitiful, was it? Ask the Germans who faced it what they think. Pitiful, that sweep over those mountain walls and through the passes? Pitiful, perhaps, because it failed, though not until it had taken Château-Salins in the north and Mulhouse in the south. Ask the Germans if they think that it was pitiful! The Confederates also failed at Antietam and at Gettysburg, but the Union army never thought of their efforts as pitiful.
The French fell back because all the weight of the German army was thrown against France, while the Austrians were left to look after the slowly mobilizing Russians. Two million five hundred thousand men on their first line the Germans had, as we know now, against the French twelve hundred thousand and Sir John French's army fighting one against four. To make sure of saving Paris as the Germans swung their mighty flanking column through Belgium, Joffre had to draw in his lines. The Germans came over the hills as splendidly as the French had gone. They struck in all directions toward Paris. In Lorraine was their left flank, the Bavarians, meant to play the same part to the east that von Kluck played to the west. We heard only of von Kluck; nothing of this terrific struggle in Lorraine.
From the Plateau d'Amance you may see how far the Germans came and what was their object. Between the fortresses of Epinal and of Toul lies the Trouée de Mirecourt—the Gap of Mirecourt. It is said that the French had purposely left it open when they were thinking of fighting the Germans on their own frontier and not on that of Belgium. They wanted the Germans to make their trial here—and wisely, for with all the desperate and courageous efforts of the Bavarian and Saxon armies they never got near the gap.
If they had forced it, however, with von Kluck swinging on the other flank, they might have got around the French army. Such was the dream of German strategy, whose realization was so boldly and skilfully undertaken. The Germans counted on their immense force of artillery, built for this war in the last two years and out-ranging the French, to demoralize the French infantry. But the French infantry called the big shells marmites (saucepans), and made a joke of them and the death they spread as they tore up the fields in clouds of earth.
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 viewpoint 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; manoeuvring troops across 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 required; skill equivalent to German skill; the skill which you cannot command in a month after calling for a million volunteers, but which grows through years of organization.
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 seems its due, that may be because he was too busy to take the Press into his confidence. 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.