But only for the time being, and only for two days. That was the marvel of it. By their failure—in face of the impossible task by which they were confronted—they had thrown the whole scheme of the eastern campaign out of gear. The XXth Army Corps under General Foch, which had the position on their left at Morhange, was forced to retire with them, and worse still would have befallen the corps from the Midi and the Pyrenees if it had not been for the steadying influence of the men of Lorraine and the magnificent rearguard action which they fought as they retreated steadily and in perfect order to their position in front of Nancy, marching by the roads to the north of Lunéville and the Meurthe. Much the same thing had happened on the right, as we have already seen. The advanced regiments of Dubail’s army, finding their left uncovered, were also obliged to give up their successful offensive and fall back on Baccarat, Raon l’Etape, and St. Dié, leaving to the enemy the strategical advantage of the positions on the crests of the Vosges, and at the same time prolonging their line westwards to the angle between the Mortagne and the Meurthe, so as to stand between the fugitives and the pursuing Germans and join in the one object that now mattered—the defence of Nancy.
That, then, was how the scene was staged for the first act of the Battle of the Grand Couronné on August 23rd. There was no question of the defence of Lunéville. It might possibly have been attempted, and successfully attempted, by the men whom we have just seen straggling along the road to Bayon. But they were not ready for so great a task yet. So the town was abandoned. The enemy marched into it without any resistance on the 23rd, and the line was drawn further back, behind Lunéville and behind the Mortagne instead of in front of them. On the left, from the Meurthe to Amance, were Foch and his men, the XXth Army Corps with its heart of gold—the famous 11th Division de Fer. Of them we need have no fear. What man can do they will do. But those others, who have retired in confusion behind Bigot’s covering troops, prolonging, between the Meurthe and the Mortagne, the line occupied by the XXth—what of them? This of them, not in my own words, but as they were seen by the young lieutenant of dragoons whom we left on his way to the Meurthe to look for the enemy—
“Ils se sont reformés avec une souplesse meridionale étonnante. Et ce fut un sujet d’admiration sans pareil, que de voir ces soldats hier encore battus, découragés, revenir ardents à la bataille deux jours après, leurs regiments reformés, les brigades dans la main du chef—lutter en héros—et vaincre!” And again: “Ce sont ces mêmes troupes qui, dans trois jours, reformées, vont contribuer à l’héroïque défense[l’héroïque défense] de la trouée, et ne laisseront pas un seul instant branler la muraille vivante dressée contre l’envahisseur: chaque soldat deviendra un rampart infranchissable. Miles murus erit.”
On the right, too, then, as well as on the left, France had an army of heroes, all the more invincible because they were thirsting to blot out the memory of Morhange. They were to have the chance they wanted. From all directions through the forest of Vitrimont and along the roads south of Lunéville the enemy’s vanguard was converging on the angle between the two rivers. The rain of heavy shells which all day long had been speeding up the French retreat was continued now to cover the German advance. Far off across the forest, from the plateau where the farm of Léomont crowns the ridge that runs along the north side of the Nancy road, the 75’s of the XXth corps were firing at the big German batteries behind Lunéville. Suddenly, as the dragoons advanced towards the Meurthe, the farm burst into flames, which shot up like a huge bonfire into the crimson evening sky, streaked with the screaming shells and specked with the white puffs of the shrapnel which littered farm and road and plateau with wounded and dying men. At Mont, the little village where the two rivers meet, a battalion of Chasseurs Alpins, who had just come through the forest, were engaged in blowing up the bridge over the Meurthe. They told them that not a Frenchman was left on the other side, and warned them not to go on, as the forest was full of German scouts. The lieutenant’s orders, however, were to see, and not only to hear, where the enemy were, so, as his men were ready for anything, they crossed the river by a ford five hundred yards lower down, and advanced along one of the numerous rides through the forest till a brisk fusillade put the matter beyond a doubt. Then they rode back, without a scratch, to make their report, first to the Colonel, and then to the General at Bayon. The night and the next day passed without any vigorous action on the part of the enemy, though some of their patrols crossed the Meurthe. They were probably themselves not too fresh after their long forced march from beyond the frontier, and wanted to collect their strength and their forces for the grand attack.
On August 24th the storm burst at last. From Damelevières and Mont on the near side of the forest of Vitrimont, from Lunéville along the Bayon road, and out of the two smaller forests of Vacquenat and Clairlieu, which, from Lamath on the Mortagne, stretch along each side of it up to the most western of the two railways, the enemy came pouring on, battalion after battalion, regiment after regiment, till they had nearly got up to the concave sweep of the French defensive position, extending from the Sappais plateau eastwards across the road and railway in the direction of Gerbéviller. At the same time the German guns began to speak, and along the whole French front a hurricane of explosive shells and shrapnel ploughed and tore up a belt of ground over a mile deep. An hour after midday, in brilliant sunshine this time, no longer under the depressing rain, the French batteries opened fire and went on firing all through the afternoon and night, after a time without any sustained reply from the enemy except for one general cannonade before sundown.
Photograph by Libert-Fernand, Nancy.
Farm of Leomont—Meurthe et Moselle
If you are standing on the outskirts of a modern battle—say at a distance of a mile from the nearest battery, for a civilian is not likely to get much closer in these days—you hear what I may call the symphony of it far better than those who are actually taking part in the fighting, who are deafened to all other sounds but the guns that fire and the shells that burst near them, and the rifles of their own company. To the spectator, when heavy guns, field guns, rifles, and machine guns are all booming and banging and rattling at the same time, the noise is so tremendous that it seems that it must be beyond the limits of human endurance to face the storm of steel and fire. At the hottest moments it keeps changing curiously and horribly in character, volume, and tempo, rising and falling with alternating diminuendo and crescendo and hurrying and slackening pace. It is all extraordinarily relentless. Sometimes the deafening volleys of reports sound like the clattering of a clumsy, lumbering wagon, jolting heavily over the frozen ruts of a rough country lane; sometimes like the brisk hammering of thousands of carpenters and rivetters at work on thousands of wooden joists and steel plates; sometimes like the rumbling of hundreds of heavy goods-trains thundering and bumping over uneven points and meeting every now and then in hideous collision. Against the changing undercurrent and background of sound and confusion the different kinds of reports are always distinguishable—the heavy slow boom of the big guns, the sharp vicious bang of the field pieces, with their lightning-like velocity and shattering irresistible force, the shrieks of the shells, the whistle of the bullets, the crackling and spitting and spluttering snap of the lebels and mannlichers, the rapid pitiless tapping and rattling of the machine guns, and most awful of all, I think, the sudden unexpected silences, which make you hold your breath and wait—like a condemned murderer with the noose round his neck must wait on the scaffold—for the dreadful moment which you know will come when the storm will all begin over again da capo, and in the twinkling of an eye hundreds and hundreds of living vigorous men will be struck down dead. Mercifully few things are so false as the saying that every bullet has its billet. Otherwise not a man of the armies that fought in front of Nancy would be left.
Soon after the great battle, long before nature had begun to heal the gaping wounds that French and German had made in the bosom of the brown old earth, I or my French colleague or both of us visited most of the roads north and south of the Meurthe and north and west of the Mortagne which cross the ground on which it was fought. The whole country—the once happy villages, the wooded hills and wide rolling plains of grass and stubble fields with never a hedge and hardly a ditch—is one vast field of battle and one huge cemetery. From part of it the German flood of invasion was just beginning to recede. What was left of the towns and villages and farms, which had first withstood its advance like massive breakwaters and then been submerged as the tide of battle ebbed and flowed, looked much more like piles of rugged and weather-beaten rocks than human habitations. Everywhere the fields had been drenched with the blood of French and Germans. Everywhere they were scarred with deep shell-holes surrounded by great clods of brown earth scattered in all directions. It is a characteristic feature of the Lorraine country that in many places the roads, when they run between two belts of woodland, are bordered on each side by level stretches of grass, fifty or sixty yards wide. In these roadside glades—because roads lead to towns and villages, and because armies move more easily along them than over the soft fields—the shell-holes were so close together that often they were almost touching. In other places, where only a single line of trees marked the two sides of the road, trunk after trunk had been cut straight through by the shells, or whole rows of them ruthlessly felled to open up the line of fire. And everywhere there were blown-up bridges, broken telegraph poles, hanging wires, hop-gardens scorched and withered by sheets of fire, blackened corn-stooks rotting where they stood, ploughs and farm-carts twisted and smashed, festering bodies of dead horses in hideously ungainly attitudes, rifles, bayonets, caps, helmets, coats, saddles, haversacks, socks, shirts, boots, water-bottles, all kinds of things that men have made and used and worn, all manner of rubbish that once had form and beauty—a horrible unsightly jumble and litter of wreckage and decay, a tragedy of untellable noise and fury and suffering and death. And then there were the dead themselves—the pitiable little heaps of clothes, red or blue or grey, that once were men, that helped to make this tragedy and fell its victims. Most of them had been buried and hidden away in the shelter of the earth. But here and there they were still lying, sometimes prone on their faces as they fell, more often carefully laid on their backs, staring up at the sky with unseeing eyes. Some looked peaceful and at rest. Others had suffered horribly before they died, and their coal-black faces were twisted and drawn, and their outstretched arms and hands clutched at emptiness in an agony of intolerable pain.