From the Trenches: Louvain to the Aisne, the First Record of an Eye-Witness

by Geoffrey Winthrop Young

Of the excitement of watching its growth and passage through the north of France, at Rouen, Beauvais, and Amiens, I shall be able to speak more fully when the official details as to its composition are allowed to be made public. "Keep your eye on the west" is all we have been able to say as reassurance during the two long anxious weeks of assault upon the profound German trenches on the Aisne.

And now, certainly not too soon, when the Germans have extended themselves once again in desperate efforts to break through on the south at Soissons and Rheims, comes the threatening pressure of the new army upon their lines of communication to the north. Have their reinforcements, brought from Belgium and the Argonne, come up to check it in time?

Nor is this all. We have all deduced from the German activity lately the movement westward and northward of the French troops on our left wing, up past Clermont and Lassigny. This has of itself been gradually overlapping the German right. Now it forms a single enveloping arc with the forces pressing in upon St. Quentin.

It was only when the magnificent fighting on the Aisne made it clearer day by day that the Germans were fairly held in the south that such a movement of troops became justifiable. We could reconstruct now where these troops were drawn from, and the moves of the splendid game that the Allies have played. But that must wait until the game is played out.

Meanwhile that fearful sacrifice of life upon the Aisne two weeks ago, fighting unparalleled in history for severity, has gained its object. Time has been won for the one move that serves to hook the Germans out of their immense entrenchments. We start the third week of the battle with easier breath.

There have been many rumours that the Germans were really further south on the line of the Aisne than public information acknowledged. There were sections of the line about which nothing was known, and not only that mysterious west.

It is possible we may hear later that there were anxious days last week, when Rheims was not the southern boundary of the Germans, nor yet Soissons; and that some of the ground now slowly won at great cost has but been regained.

It was to clear this up that I spent to-day travelling behind the whole line from Rheims to south of Compiègne; approaching it at the vital points, so as to define the German position. Although there had been German cars imperilling the road, it proved to be only some of their reckless skirmishers. We got through, without a rumour of them, to the heights south of Rheims.

Passing thence east, it was not difficult to place, from sound and sight, that the Germans lay well east of the town; and that, with the duel taken to-day more easily on both sides, the French were assailing them upon the heights of Nogent l'Abbesse.