CHAPTER XII
BATTLE OF THE GRAND COURONNÉ. I
By this brilliant series of hand-to-hand, town-to-town struggles, Dubail’s army, operating in the Bonhomme-Donon-Gerbéviller triangle, had prevented the enemy from penetrating westwards between Epinal and Toul. At the same time, on their left, de Castelnau’s men were fighting the desperate battle of the Grand Couronné of Nancy. Their line, continuing in the same direction as the valley of the Mortagne, ran from Gerbéviller across the Meurthe west of Lunéville to Crévic, and on to Amance, north of the Nancy-Château-Salins road, and some distance beyond it. It was a real pitched battle which lasted for nearly three weeks, and was one of the most important of the whole war. For on its result depended not only the fate of Nancy and of Toul but of all the other armies further north. In order to get an idea of one part of it we can hardly do better than to take our stand at the point which we have reached with the Second Army, to the west of Gerbéviller, on the Bayon-Lunéville road. From there, through the eyes of a French officer of dragoons who found time after he was wounded at Héraménil to publish an excellent little book on La Victoire de Lorraine (Berger-Levrault: Nancy), we shall be able to follow in some detail the part of the battle which was fought to the west of Lunéville south of the Nancy-Lunéville road. That was where the battle was fiercest in its early stages. The section on the other side of the Nancy road we will leave till later. It was there that the XXth Army Corps held the line northwards up to Amance, and that the victory was finally won.
At one o’clock on the morning of August 19th our dragoon officer’s regiment started from near Altkirch, where they had formed part of General Pau’s army, for some uncertain destination further west. The Colonel, of course, knew where they were bound, but he kept his own counsel, and the junior officers could only speculate. Clearly, however, since they were being withdrawn from one successful offensive, they were wanted to smash the Germans somewhere else, either in Lorraine over the border, which was over-run (they believed) by French cavalry, or in Belgium, where report said that the enemy had been pulled up short in front of Liége.
THE LORRAINE
FRONTIER.
After an interminable train journey by Belfort, Lure and Epinal, they reached Charmes in the middle of the night, rested for a few hours, and then started towards Lunéville. This time they felt there could be no doubt. They were making for the frontier, and next day would certainly see them in the annexed province. It was a long march, but the sun was shining brightly on the forest of Charmes, the valley of the Moselle on their left, and the hills of Lorraine in front of them, and everyone was in the best of spirits. Then suddenly there came an unexpected check. An orderly rode up to the Colonel with despatches, the regiment was halted at a little village on the road half way between Bayon and Lunéville, and there they spent the rest of the afternoon and the night of the 21st in ignorant inaction. Next morning everything was changed. The sunshine had gone out of the air, a steady drizzle was falling, and when the Colonel informed his officers that they were to be attached to an infantry division which was to organize a line of defence behind Lunéville they could hardly believe their ears and began to wonder anxiously why, instead of continuing the march to the frontier, they were ordered to fall back on Einvaux, on the south side of the Bayon-Lunéville road.
It was still raining when they reached the road, and they were obliged to halt to let a long convoy, which was passing along it across their front from east to west, go by. They waited five minutes, ten minutes, half an hour, and still the stream of men and horses poured on and on, an odd jumble of peasants’ carts, farm-carts, tradesmen’s carts, and every imaginable kind of country vehicle, plodding along drearily through the rain, the soldiers who were driving them huddled under the awnings, and all the ammunition and provision carts piled high with wounded. It must at least, they thought, be the convoy of a whole Army Corps. But why was all this mass of men and vehicles hurrying along in the mud, away from Lunéville, towards Bayon? Their hearts began to misgive them. They asked some of the drivers what it all meant, but no one seemed to understand and no one answered, until at last they stopped a non-commissioned officer and from him learnt part of the incredible truth—that the triumphant army which had invaded Lorraine was in full retreat.
After that they waited no longer. The melancholy string of carts which stretched along the road in both directions as far as they could see was halted to let them through, and they continued their march to their cantonments at Einvaux, five or six miles south of the road. There the young dragoon officer was at once given his marching orders. He was to take with him half a dozen troopers, cross the Meurthe and the forest of Vitrimont as far as the Lunéville-Nancy road, and try and get in touch with the enemy, who were pressing hard on the heels of the retreating troops.
When he reached the Bayon-Lunéville road again he had on each side of him two railways running nearly due north and south and cutting the road (which to the east crosses the Mortagne at Lamath, and then turns northward past Xermaménil, Rehanviller, and Hériménil to Lunéville) at a distance of about three miles apart. The one on the right curves away behind to Gerbéviller, the one on the left to Bayon, eventually to meet some distance to the south at Epinal. In front, to the north, both of them join the railway which runs from Lunéville to St. Nicolas-du-Port round the lower edge of the forest of Vitrimont, following closely the course of the Meurthe. On the further side of the forest the road from Lunéville to Dombasle, St. Nicolas-du-Port, and Nancy stretches across from right to left, and, as you see it on the map, the whole area composed of the forest and the ground beyond, as far as the Lunéville-Nancy road, is shaped like a feeding-cup, with Lunéville for the handle and Dombasle for the spout. North-west of Lunéville, along the Dombasle road, comes first the Faubourg de Nancy, and then two miles and four miles further on the villages of Vitrimont and Hudiviller, with the farm of Léomont midway between them, standing up on much higher ground just to the north of the road. In the parallelogram between the two railways south of the forest (which is about five miles long by two and a half deep) there are two villages, first Mont (with a bridge over the Mortagne), and then a little further west Blainville, both of them on a road which runs parallel to the Meurthe and quite close to it. At the point where this road crosses the Dombasle-Bayon railway there is another small village called Damelevières, and, also on this railway and a mile south of it, the village of Charmois. Taking a wider view of the whole terrain, the Lunéville-Dombasle road and the railway running round the forest with the two railways south of it and the stretch of the Bayon-Lunéville road between them form a rough figure of eight. To the west of the lower half of it trenches had been dug that morning on the plateau south of the Meurthe by the troops under the command of General Bigot, one of General Dubail’s brigadiers. The plateau of Saffais, midway between the Meurthe and the Moselle, was occupied by the 64th division, and on their right another division, the 74th, guarded the gap between Saffais and the Mortagne. Between them they formed a curtain of troops which was to play a very important part in the coming battle, which was fought chiefly over the ground covered by the figure of eight, but partly also further south, below the Bayon-Lunéville road, as far as the line between Bayon and Gerbéviller.
When the little party of dragoons once more reached the road, at the level crossing where it cuts the line from Epinal to Nancy, it was still covered with a dense mass of fugitives. This time it was not merely a procession of carts but of the army itself, the soldiers of the XVth and XVIth Army Corps. It was the final stage of the retreat which had begun after their defeat in front of Morhange and Saarburg by the armies of Metz, of the Crown Prince of Bavaria, and of General von Heeringen. For two days, by all the roads that cross the frontier between Vic and Réchicourt and meet on the south-east side of Lunéville, they had come crowding along to this harbour of refuge, the angle between the Mortagne and the Meurthe, where they were to find sanctuary behind the curtain of troops prepared by General Dubail and General Bigot. Infantry of the line, chasseurs, artillery, young men of the active army, territorials, troops of peasants, women and children and old men, some in carts and some on foot, all mixed up in inextricable confusion with the soldiers and regimental wagons, the drivers flogging their worn-out horses in the vain effort to make them move faster, the men on foot, almost as many of them wounded as not, too tired or too weak to get out of the way, marching anyhow without any formation or any attempt to keep to their own companies, splashing along in a slough of mud, wet to the bone by the ceaseless rain, without discipline, without courage, almost without thought, the tragic procession filed slowly by, away from the enemy, away from the frontier that they had been sent to defend.