Verdun to the Vosges: Impressions of the War on the Fortress Frontier of France

by Gerald Campbell

On the exposed part of the frontier guarded by these armies the opening period of the war lasted for three weeks. At the end of that time, on August 24th, the French were in apparently desperate straits. Their extreme left was driven back at Charleroi, in the centre they were just beginning, with a defeated army, the defence of Nancy, and on the right they had been obliged by the imminent danger on the left, to withdraw their forces from Mulhouse for the second time. But up till then, or at least till the disaster at Morhange on August 20th, they had on the Eastern sector done much better than they probably expected. The Verdun army, though not strong enough to adopt an effectively vigorous offensive, had been able to keep the enemy from attacking its forts, and south of Metz the commands of de Castelnau and Dubail had advanced well into German territory.

In the Metz, Verdun, Longwy triangle, bisected by the valley of the Orne running directly east from Verdun to the Moselle, the fighting was at first not very important. Conflans, Maugiennes, Spincourt, and several other towns and villages were early victims of German savagery, both sides scored moderate local successes, and the net result was that the enemy secured no advantage except what was due to their surprise invasion of the strip of territory from which the French withdrew their troops on the eve of the war. They would have advanced further and more quickly (as they confidently expected to do) but for two unforeseen obstacles. In the first place, there was the Verdun field-force, which, instead of falling back under the protection of its forts, persisted in coming out into the open; in the second, there was Longwy. Its defender, Colonel Darche, had only one battalion under his command, and consequently was not strong enough to follow the example of the Verdun field-army. But with his slender force he could and did hold up a whole German army till August 27th, three weeks after the Crown Prince had arrogantly summoned him to surrender. That officer’s failure to take the town at the first time of asking was a bitter disappointment to the Germans, as his army was intended to form the connecting-link between the two great offensives through Belgium and Lorraine, and orders had actually been given to German reservists to report themselves at Verdun in the second week of August. It was the first of the many misfortunes which have since dogged his footsteps, and it is not surprising that it brought him into disfavour with his Imperial father. For the heroic resistance of Longwy, like the defence of Liége and of Nancy, was one of the determining incidents of the early part of the war.

In the meantime, while Verdun and Longwy were proving that “its dogged as does it,” to the south of them the characteristic élan of the French troops was having its fling from the Moselle to Mulhouse, along a front of over a hundred miles. The strengthening of the forces in this region and the consequent weakening of the armies on the Belgian frontier was partly, as I have said, due to political considerations. But there were also sound military reasons for this distribution of the available forces, and for the subsequent French offensive in Alsace and Lorraine. For forty-four years the garrison and field armies of the rival pairs of fortresses—Verdun and Metz, Toul and Saarburg, Epinal and Strassburg—had been waiting like kennelled watchdogs, ready, once they were let loose, to fly at one another’s throats. Primarily the French troops were intended not for attack—which was the German métier—but for defence. Both by training and tradition they were the frontier force of the Republic. In time of peace they held the post of honour on the vulnerable border-line between Luxembourg and the Swiss frontier, always ready for war, as their ancestors before them had been for generations. Most of the best generals of France had served their apprenticeship in one of these famous frontier army corps, and ever since 1870 officers and men, nearly all of them children of the soil, had been bound more and more closely together, at first by the war-cry of la revanche, and later by the nobler feeling that, when the threatened and expected invasion came, the task and the glory of repelling it would be theirs. They were the flower of the French army, and they looked upon the post of honour as their birthright.

When the blow fell at last there were several reasons which justified General Joffre in using them for purposes of offence instead of in the rôle[rôle] which French and Germans alike expected of them. Being a soldier and not a politician, he realized that he could not afford to wait and see. It was a clear gain that his action should be the exact opposite of what the Germans looked for. They were so overwhelmingly sure of their military superiority that they practically counted on a walk-over. Besides Verdun, other towns far behind the line of the frontier fortresses, such as Besançon and Dijon, were the appointed rendezvous at an early date in August of the German soldiers who could not be ready to join the colours at the outset, and even the officials who were to have governed these towns after their expected conquest had received their commissions well in advance of the declaration of war. The Kaiser and his advisers had made the common mistake of despising the enemy they were sent to attack. Both in morale and in men the armies of the east proved far stronger than they had expected.

The consequent upsetting of their original plan of campaign was in itself a strong vindication of General Joffre’s policy. But he had another object in view. The first point was to have enough troops on the eastern frontier to prevent the Germans from breaking through the line of fortresses. The second—no less important, once the march through Belgium had begun—was to keep a large part of the enemy’s forces busily employed at a distance from the northern theatre of operations. That was the reason and the justification of the offensive in Alsace and Lorraine.

Up to a point this forward movement of the French was successful. From Metz the frontier runs south-east for about sixty miles, up the valley of the river Seille, to the Donon, a mountain just over 3000 feet high at the north end of the Basses Vosges, and from there, a trifle west of south along the crests of the range and across the Trouée of Belfort for about the same distance to Pfetterhausen on the Swiss frontier. The Vosges half of this line, practically parallel with the course of the Rhine, is divided into three sections, from the Donon to the Climont (12 miles), from the Climont to the Col de Schlucht (20 miles), and from the Col de Schlucht to the Ballon d’Alsace (18 miles).

In the northern section the range is broken by the valley of the Bruche, commanded from the north by the Donon, which runs from south-west to north-east past Saales and Schirmeck towards Strassburg.

In the central section, steep on the French side, but on the east sloping gently down to the valley of the Ill, the chief passes are Ste. Marie aux Mines and the Col du Bonhomme, with a narrow wooded crest seven miles long at an average altitude of 3000 feet between them.

In the southern section the slope is easier on the French side and more abrupt on the east, and besides the Col de Schlucht the chief pass is the Col de Bussang. The summit and eastern slopes of the range command, of course, an uninterrupted view across the plain to the Rhine, about fifteen miles from the foothills. Strassburg is a little lower down the Rhine than the level of the Donon. Colmar lies about the centre of the plain, midway between the level of the Col du Bonhomme and the Col de Schlucht, and nearly all the towns which have so far played a part in the war are in or on a level with the third section—Munster, Guebweiler, Soulty, St. Amarin, and Thann in the Vosges valleys between the Schlucht and the Ballon d’Alsace, and the rest—Cernay, Dannemarie, Altkirch, Mulhouse, and Pfetterhausen—south of the Ballon in the plain opposite to the Trouée of Belfort, which is called the Sundgau.

It was intended that the French offensive should be carried out along the whole of this frontier line south of Metz, but especially in the plains north and east of the Vosges. The Belfort army was to advance into Alsace, occupy Mulhouse, cut the bridges of the Rhine below Basle (at Huningue, Neuenburg, and Vieux Brisach) and flank the main advance of the first and second armies in Lorraine.