Battle of the Grand Couronné of NANCY
Positions on Sept. 6, night
At midnight on the 4th, Prince Ruprecht endeavoured to broaden his attack southward by striking from Lunéville across the loop of the Meurthe. Here, the 74th Reserve Division was prepared, having dug three successive lines of trenches between Blainville and Mont. At Rehainviller and Xermamenil, the right bank of the Mortagne became untenable by reason of enfilade fire. The 16th Corps, therefore, withdrew to the west bank. Just before dawn on September 5, the XXI Corps succeeded in getting a small body of men across the river below Gerbéviller. During the afternoon, these were thrown back by a combined push of the 16th Corps from the north and the Dubail’s 8th Corps from the south. This success was confirmed and extended on September 6, when the 16th Corps passed the Mortagne, and drove the enemy out of Gerbéviller, and through the woods above the ruined town. Thus the line of the Mortagne, so essential to the French defence, was restored, and in such solid fashion that it might become the base of a thrust against the German flank about Lunéville.
None so happy was the outlook at Castelnau’s centre. During the morning of September 5, the Bavarians worked round the north end of Champenoux Forest as far as the foot of Mount Amance, where, after making five desperate assaults, they were stopped. In the evening, the 20th Corps was driven back to the line Vitrimont–Flainval–Crevic–Haraucourt–Buissoncourt: that is to say, half of the south horn of the crescent was overrun. The morrow witnessed a rally, the 70th Reserve Division touching Réméréville, the 39th Active carrying the village of Crevic and progressing toward Drouville, and the 11th reoccupying Vitrimont Forest. But the grey tide still beat upon the foot of Amance.
At this juncture, when it seemed that the plateau of Champenoux must be turned on both sides, and Castelnau’s centre pierced, a no less alarming threat appeared in the attempt to turn the whole Nancy system by the north. Two French reserve divisions had been set facing Metz on either side of the Moselle—the 73rd on the west, between Pont-à-Mousson and Dieulouard, the 59th before the Seille, from Loisy, by the sharp rise of Ste. Geneviève, to Meivrons, where it joined the 68th. A single battalion (of the 314th Regiment, 59 D.R.), and a single battery (of the 33rd, 9th Corps) were posted on the extremity, at Loisy and Ste. Geneviève, of this outer buttress of the Grand Couronné, when, at noon on September 5, amid a thunder of guns, columns of the German XXXIII Reserve Division were observed traversing Pont-à-Mousson, and marching south. The cannonade and the deployment occupied the rest of the day; and next morning the invasion seemed to have passed westward. In fact, it had made rapid way, although at material cost, on the left bank of the Moselle, passing Dieulouard and reaching Marbache, which is only 6 miles north of Nancy, and Saizerais, 8 miles from Toul. Few as they numbered, the guns and well-entrenched riflemen on the Ste. Geneviève spur, now an acute salient, were a thorn in the side of this success—a very troublesome thorn. At 7 p.m. a German force of about seven battalions debouched from the wooded lowland and began to mount the hillside. Hundreds of them had been mown down ere Captain Langlade and his eight remaining gunners would shift their hot pieces to a safer place behind. Commandant de Montlebert’s battalion conducted throughout the night a more than Spartan defence. Time after time, urged on by fife and drum, the grey ranks rose, only to break like spume in the moonlight before the trenches could be reached. It was one of the occasions when the deadly power of the “75’s” was shown to the full. At one o’clock in the morning the combat ceased: the assailants had withdrawn in a state of panic. They are said to have left 1200 dead behind them. The French battalion had lost 80 men.
A rare episode this: in general, the battle becomes more confused as the culmination is reached. Indeed, it is difficult to find an exact time or place of the climax. Each side saw its own trouble, but could hardly guess at the condition of the other. The last reserves of the 2nd Army were in play. Castelnau had warned the G.Q.G. that he might have to abandon Nancy, in order to cover Toul. The reply was an injunction to keep touch with Sarrail’s right in the direction of St. Mihiel, whither—failing Epinal, failing Charmes, failing Nancy—the enemy now seemed to be turning. On September 7, the German host gathered itself together for its last and greatest effort. The Emperor, escorted by his guard of Cuirassiers, left Metz by the Nancy highroad, crossed the frontier, and took his stand on a sunny hill near Moncel (probably by St. Jean Farm, at the corner of Morel Wood), to watch the bombardment of Mount Amance, which was to prepare the way for the breach of the French centre by way of the Amezule defile.[77] The gap was duly rushed at the first attempt, made by about ten battalions of infantry, in the morning. The left of the 68th Division fell back to the foot of Mount Amance, the right to Velaine, and the 70th Division to Cerceuil. The 20th Corps, ordered to move north and menace the German flank, was pushed aside; and by noon, the Bavarians had full possession of Champenoux Forest. This bulwark gone, everything depended upon Amance. Most of the artillery on the Grand Couronné (which included twenty 5-inch cannon, and eight 6-inch mortars) hashed upon its approaches; and here the momentary triumph expired. The authority of the Crown Prince, the presence of the Emperor, could effect no more. Old Castelnau began to hope; hearing that the Metz troops had further advanced toward Toul as far as Rozières, he unhesitatingly took the 2nd Cavalry Division out of the line, and sent it off to the neighbourhood of St. Mihiel, whither it was to be followed next day by the 73rd Reserve Division.
The struggle dragged on with an increasing appearance of exhaustion and deadlock. On September 8, the Bavarians tried twice to break through the front of the 20th Corps, without success. Again they bent to the slopes of Mount Amance; the poilus let them approach, then staggered out of their holes, and, in a spasm of battle-madness, swept them back. La Bouzule Farm, dominating the narrowest part of the Amezule defile, and other strong points, changed hands repeatedly. On the right, in face of Lunéville, the 74th Reserve Division carried Rehainviller by assault, and the 32nd and 31st Divisions pressed from Gerbéviller nearly to the Meurthe—a severe pin-prick in the German left flank. On September 9 there were obscure fragmentary combats in the glades of Champenoux and St. Paul which we cannot attempt to follow. It will be safe to suppose that the German Command was now governed by the news from the west. Whether the Nancy front could have held without that aid, it is impossible to say. Though Castelnau ordered a counter-offensive all along the line, his men could respond only feebly.
In the evening an armistice of four hours was arranged for the collection of wounded and the burial of dead. The French claimed to have found 40,000 German dead on the ground; the total losses will probably never be known. The Kaiser had left his observatory; the rebel heart of Metz leaped to see his disillusioned return. The defenders of Nancy could not know this; but there was a visible sign of failure, now easy to interpret: at midnight on September 8, amid a heavy thunderstorm, a German battery, told off for the purpose, threw eighty shells into Nancy—67 explosive shells and 14 shrapnel, to be precise, according to the diary of the officer responsible[78]—a silly outrage like the first bombardments of Rheims.
The “smashing blow” was failing at the same moment on the Ourcq, on the Marne, at Fère Champènoise, and here before the hill-bastion of the eastern marches. News ran slowly through the armies in those days; but some invigorating breeze of victory must soon have reached the trenches in Lorraine. For Prince Ruprecht it remained only to guard his main lines of retreat, in particular the roads from Nancy, Dombasle, and Lunéville to the frontier; and, as his troops had dug themselves well in, this was not difficult. Three French columns of assault, composed of relatively fresh troops, and supported by the 64th and 68th Reserve Divisions, after a powerful artillery preparation, advanced on the morning of September 10 against the Amezule and neighbouring positions; but they could not make much headway. On the morrow the order was repeated, to better effect, especially on the wings. That night the German retreat in Lorraine began. Castelnau’s men gazed incredulous into spaces suddenly calm and empty. “Our soldiers,” says one of them, “hungry, harassed, haggard, could hardly stand upright. They marched like spectres. Visibly, we were at our last breath. We could hold out only a few hours more. And then, O prodigy, calm fell, on the 12th, upon the whole of the stricken field. The enemy gave up, retreated for good, abandoned everything, Champenoux, so frantically contested, and the entire front he had occupied. He fell back in dense columns, without even a pretence of further resistance.” The grand adventure was finished.
Pont-à-Mousson, Nomeny, Réméréville, Lunéville, Baccarat, Raon-l’Etape, and St. Dié were evacuated in rapid succession. Before the war fell into the entrenched lines which were to hold with little change for four years, most of Lorraine up to the old frontier and a long slice of Alsace had been recovered. But with what wounds may be read, for instance, in the report of the French Commission of Inquiry into the devastation wrought by the enemy in the department of Meurthe and Moselle. As though the destruction of farmsteads and villages in course of the fighting were not sufficient, the Bavarian infantry had been guilty at many places of almost incredible acts of ferocity. At Nomeny, the 2nd and 3rd Bavarian regiments, after sacking the village, set it on fire, and then, as the villagers fled from their cellars, shot them down—old men, women, and children—50 being killed and many more wounded. At Lunéville, during the three weeks’ occupation, the Hôtel de Ville, the Synagogue, and about seventy houses were burned down with torches, petrol, and other incendiary apparatus; and 17 men and women were shot in cold blood in the streets. Under dire threats, signed shamelessly by General Von Fosbender, a “contribution” of 650,000 francs was paid by the inhabitants. On August 24, practically the whole of the small town of Gerbéviller was destroyed by fire (more than 400 houses), and at least 36 civilians, men and women, were slaughtered. At Baccarat, 112 houses were burned down, after the whole place had been pillaged under the supervision of General Fabricius, commanding the artillery of the XIV Baden Corps, and other officers. This feature of the campaign cannot be ignored in our chronicle. Good men had supposed war itself to be the uttermost barbarism; it was left to the disciplined armies of the Hohenzollern Empire to prove that educated hands may lower it to depths of wickedness unimagined by the Apache and the Bashi-Bazouk.