The three weeks’ battle was now well under way. On the first day the opening rush of the German attack had spent itself in vain against the French right wing south of the Meurthe. The fire of Morhange had done its work. It had forged a tough line of Ironsides, which the Bavarian corps could neither bend nor break, and during the night they began to fall back toward the Mortagne leaving masses of dead behind them. A French cavalry patrol, sent out early on the morning of the 15th along the Bayon-Lunéville road to reconnoitre, got as far as Lamath, on the left bank of the river, before they found the enemy. During the day the village was gallantly carried by a battalion of Chasseurs-Alpins. Further south, in the triangle beyond the road and the forest of Vacquenat, the enemy held on more persistently to the ground which they had gained, and on the 25th and 26th at Einvaux, Clayeures, Réménoville, Rozelieures and other villages between the two rivers they were only driven back step by step as the result of most determined and gallant efforts on the part of the French. The loss of life on both sides was very great. A little stream which flows through Réménoville into the Mortagne was so choked with dead that the cavalry found it impossible to water their horses in it. All over the field of battle, especially in the woods, the air was tainted with the smell of putrefying bodies. But death and wounds had no effect on the morale of the two French Army Corps. Now that they had made their stand they were irresistible. They were constantly attacking instead of being attacked, and retreat was everywhere turned into advance. At the same time the chief weight of the German counter-attack—for though they were retiring they were always trying to make ground—was gradually shifted southwards away from the Bayon road towards Gerbéviller and Moyen, higher up the river, probably in the hope of breaking through between the XVth corps and the First Army on their right. But no breach was made. On the 27th a Colonial Regiment was fighting a little to the west of the martyred town. They had suffered severely and had lost two colonels since the 24th. A third came to join them, reported himself to the brigadier, rode forward towards his men and was knocked over and killed by a shell before he had been ten minutes in command. But still his men and all the other regiments fought on, the batteries continually shifted their positions from one place to another with wonderful mobility, some of the villages where the fighting was hottest were taken and retaken two or three times over, and step by step the long line of French bayonets forced the enemy back towards and at some points beyond the two rivers.
At last, on September 4th, though the battle was still far from won, the great attack had been so effectively checked that it was found possible to move the XVth corps across to the Argonne, to help General Sarrail and the Third Army in their struggle against the Crown Prince. From the moment when they had assumed the offensive on August 25th, they had fought with extraordinary courage. In two days one regiment alone, the 112th of the line, had forty-eight officers killed and wounded out of sixty-one. But losses had no effect on them now. The past was wiped out, and both during the defence of Nancy, and later on in the Heights of the Meuse and the Argonne, especially at Vassincourt, they took a prominent share in the victories by which General Sarrail relieved the pressure on Verdun. From every point of view the story of what they did and suffered and the way in which—like a ship on her maiden voyage—they found themselves after their first defeat, was and is one of the most significant features of the war. For it means that France cannot and will not be beaten. The steadying support and fellowship which they received in the hour of crisis from the sorely pressed corps on either side of them, their own heroic recovery, and the confident and confidence-inspiring leadership of the generals under whose command they redeemed themselves from the reproach of their momentary failure, all point to the same conclusion—the invincible solidarity of the whole of the French armies. On August 20th the chain of the eastern armies snapped at its weakest point. By the 25th the jagged ends of the broken link had been welded together and it was firmly joined up, stronger than it had ever been, with those on each side of it. Morhange might have been the beginning of another Sedan. Instead it was the prelude to the glorious triumph of the Battle of the Grand Couronné of Nancy.
CHAPTER XIII
BATTLE OF THE GRAND COURONNÉ. II
All towns are feminine by rights, but Nancy, I think, more than any that I have ever known. In its municipal arms the chief feature is a Scotch thistle. The emblem should belong rather to the gallant armies of the east, and especially to the famous XXth Army Corps, which was the backbone of General de Castelnau’s army. During all that long three weeks, while the XVth and XVIth with part of General Dubail’s army were checking the attack south of the Meurthe, along a front of about fifteen miles, the XXth held a still longer line on the north side of the river, from Dombasle nearly as far as Pont-à-Mousson. To all of them, but particularly to the men of the 26th, or Nancy Regiment, and the 11th Division, long and proudly known as the Division de Fer, the town appealed as a beloved and graceful and beautiful woman. She was their mother and their sister and their bride. She was in deadly danger from the covetous assaults of the Germans and the German Emperor, and they alone stood between her and ruin. For, woman-like, she had no defences of her own—fortunately for her and for France. When Bismarck interfered in 1874 to prevent the construction of fortifications round the town by threatening to renew the war of 1870, he was unconsciously working against the interest of his country instead of for it. If Nancy had been encircled by a ring of stereotyped forts, like Toul and Verdun, it is highly probable that after the rapid retreat from Morhange the French would have fallen back on the protection of their guns, and that Nancy would have been overtaken by the same fate as Liége. It was because her defenders did not, because they could not, put their trust in forts, that the town was saved. For the success of the Allies, for their delivery in the hour of their deadliest peril from almost certain disaster, that meant everything. To the south, as we have seen, the enemy had swept across the difficult barrier of the Vosges and continued their triumphant advance right up to the moment when the battle for the defence of the town began. To the north the whole of the rest of their line swung across Belgium and part of France as far as Compiègne, and even far south of Verdun on each side of it, like a bar (though never a straight nor a rigid bar) hinged to a fixed point. And, with the not quite parallel exception of Verdun, the only part of the line that remained firm, the immovable pivot which those three weeks of persistent and frenzied sapping on three sides was powerless to undermine, was the open and unprotected town of Nancy. Its defenders, or, at all events, the rank and file of them, knew almost nothing of what was happening elsewhere. They were fighting in the dark with their backs to the wall. But they knew what their own job was, and they did it, always, it seems to me, from the way they talk about it, with that feeling that they were standing in front of a helpless woman, whose honour they must defend at any and every cost. And when finally they had saved the town, when the fear of a barbarous assault like those which had wrecked and ravished one after the other of the towns and villages of Lorraine was at an end, they called it—still from that personal objective point of view—Nancy l’Inviolée.
The German conception of its importance was more strictly military. The Kaiser himself appears to have cherished some imperially sentimental notions on the subject of its capture. No doubt if he could have ridden in triumph into the beautiful Place Stanislas at the head of the White Cuirassiers of the Guard (who were on the spot in readiness), like a Cæsar or a Roman general swaggering along the Via Sacra, he would have felt extremely pleased with himself, and the moral effect on the people of both countries would have been immense. But it was also obvious that through Nancy lay the way to the barrier of the frontier fortresses. Until General de Castelnau’s army had been disposed of the project of smashing the forts of Toul was only an idle dream. To that end the whole force of the German left wing, except the troops (chiefly Landwehr) which were held up in Alsace, was concentrated on this one point. The march of von Heeringen’s men from the south-west along the valleys of the Mortagne, the Meurthe, and the Vesouze, we have already followed, up to the time of their check by de Castelnau’s right. At the same time an even fiercer attack was made on his left, from the east, north-east, and north by the Crown Prince of Bavaria’s army and some additional troops of the Metz garrison army.
Before the Germans spread out into battle formation the four main lines of the whole of their advance on Nancy were from Pont-à-Mousson, Château-Salins, Cirey, and St. Dié. If we substitute London for Nancy, the relative positions and distances of these places will be approximately represented by Waltham Cross, Brentford, Sittingbourne, and the village of Sandhurst (half-way between Tunbridge Wells and Rye). Or, to put the matter still more simply, the enemy advanced in directions which coincide almost exactly with those of the Great Northern, the Great Eastern, the London, Chatham, and Dover, and the South-Eastern Railways; and they were not finally checked till they had reached a point nearer to Nancy than Walthamstow is to Charing Cross.
For the people of Nancy the prospect was sufficiently alarming. It is not surprising that at that time some of them, though not many, migrated to what they thought were safer quarters. But they need have had no fears. To the north-east and east of the town, in the quadrant of the circle between Pont-à-Mousson and Lunéville, the legionaries of the XXth corps were to prove an impenetrable barrier. Once they had crossed the boundary river, the Seille, in the general retreat, there was no favourable position in which to make a stand until they came to the ring-fence of wooded heights which long before the war was christened by some French strategist the Grand Couronné of Nancy. The term is, as a matter of fact, rather a stretch of the imagination. If you stand at the top of any high building in the town and look eastwards towards the frontier (which is as near to Nancy as Wimbledon to Hyde Park Corner) you see, with one or two unimportant exceptions, no hills at all. The ground for the most part is flat and unbroken, rising in a gentle slope to the horizon five miles away. (Once and once only a body of German cavalry came over the rise, and, till they were driven back, were visible for a short time from the town.) On that side the Couronné consists only of the Forests of Champenoux and St. Paul, about seven miles north-east of the town, north and south of the Château-Salins road, the woods of Crévic and Einville north of the Marne-Rhone canal, a low ridge beyond Léomont on the north side of the last two or three miles of the road to Lunéville, and the Forest of Vitrimont south of the road. To the west of the town, and to the north in the direction of Metz, the Couronné is, however, well marked, and a semicircle of hills, about one thousand feet high, broken only by the valley of the Meurthe, stands high up above it, and sweeps round to the north-east, where the wooded Plateau of Amance carries on the curve almost as far as the forest of Champenoux.
The position defended by the left wing of General de Castelnau’s army extended from Ste. Généviève, a few miles south-east of Pont-à-Mousson, past the heights of Mont St. Jean, La Rochette, and Amance (the rock on which the attack broke), and then by Laneuvelotte and Cerceuil across the plain to Dombasle, just east of St. Nicholas-du-Port and west of the forest of Vitrimont, in a line which is almost parallel to the course of the Meurthe below Nancy, and about five miles in front of it. From Dombasle, south of the river, it was continued in a slightly concave curve, as we saw in the last chapter, through Saffais, across the Bayon-Lunéville road, to Gerbéviller on the Mortagne.
In the prolonged battle which was fought along that front—of course very many times as large as the field of Waterloo—the losses of the enemy in killed alone probably amounted to nearly 50,000. Every scrap of the ground between it and the frontier, that is to say, a length of about thirty miles and a depth varying from five or six to well over twenty, was fought over at least twice and in many places still oftener. Everywhere there are long wide stretches of ground so torn and ploughed by shells that it seems impossible that any single soul could have gone through that awful fire and come out alive. On the heights of Frescati above the Lunéville road as far west as the farm of Léomont (in the last chapter we saw it flaming against the evening sky from the other side of the forest of Vitrimont), all round the forest itself, particularly near the now ruined building called the Faisanderie, and from there right away up the line past Crévic and Maixe and Courbesseau and Réméréville, the ghastly ruin of the battlefield south of the river was repeated over and over again. In some places it was not so bad as in others. But that is all you can say. In the worst it is beyond belief. Trenches in the modern sense of the word hardly existed; what there were were comparatively rare and shallow. The slaughter was therefore much greater than it ever is in these later times, except when an offensive movement is being carried out. The villages and churches and scattered cottages and farms were battered and pounded by the shells of both sides till nothing of them was left but heaped-up ruins. Here, as elsewhere, many of them were burnt, and always for the same miserable and lying excuse. At Réméréville, near the forest of Champenoux, the epitaph of the murdered village, composed and signed by “Un Allemand,” was still chalked up on the blackboard in the little schoolhouse when we first saw it: “Réméréville n’existe plus, parce qu’on a tiré sur les troupes Allemandes. Ainsi soit il fait sur toutes les endroits pareilles.” His French was not, perhaps, of the best, but his conclusion was correct enough. Réméréville n’existe plus. In some of the villages, where incendiarism had not done its destructive work, there is hardly a square inch of house-wall, except where gaping holes were torn by the shells, that is not pitted with bullet marks. There is hardly a wall enclosing a yard or a compound or a farm that was not loopholed for purposes of defence, and when the wall ran all round an enclosure it was loopholed on all four sides. That shows exactly what the fighting in a large number of cases was like. Both French and Germans held the farms and the other isolated buildings like block-houses, and resisted attack sometimes from all four quarters at once. There was no getting away from them. Death, surrender, or victory were the only alternatives. Both sides showed extraordinary bravery, but it was the French, because of what depended on their success, and because they were being attacked, who put most fire into their fighting. They knew that they could not afford to give way. They were fighting in their own country, in the homes of their own kith and kin. Day after day and night after night long convoys of wounded jolted slowly and painfully past them, back to the hospitals of Nancy, where for all the preparations that had been made there was sometimes not room for them all to be admitted at once, and for a long time they lay on their stretchers in the corridors, and once or twice even in streets and squares of the town under the open sky, before they could be cared for. Almost more melancholy still were the troops of homeless refugees who were forced to turn their faces in the same direction, carrying with them in their hands, or piled in confusion on their ricketty carts, the poor little household gods that they wanted to save from the clutch of the marauding German or his cruel fires. But not all of them escaped. Some were too dazed by the suddenness of the invasion, or too old, or too young, or too feeble. Of these many were remorselessly butchered by the German soldiery, drunk or sober. Yet their deaths were not in vain. Wretched, uncounted, unconsidered victims of the war, they, too, had a hand in the victory. For if any one thing had still been needed to nerve the armies of Lorraine to do all that armed men can do for the defence of their country, it was the sight of the blighted homes and murdered bodies of these unfortunates. That was why France, and especially France’s soldiers in the field, realized long before England the deadly importance of putting every ounce of their strength into the war. They had no need of newspaper reports and blue books and recruiting appeals to awake them. They saw with their own eyes. “In Nomeny,” one of them wrote in a letter home, “the dead bodies of the inhabitants are more or less everywhere; on the staircases, in the cellars, on the piles of rubbish, in the open street. In one heap there were five corpses, two of which were children, and a little farther on were lying three young girls. Our impression was that these unfortunates had been shot down, and not killed by shells. In what were once the streets there are pigs wandering about and feeding on human flesh. Whenever we catch one we shoot it and bury it at once. Nothing is left of this charming little town but dangerous panels of walls, which every now and then tumble down. You can still make out the lines of the streets. The few houses that are left have been stripped and pillaged. You walk about on linen undergarments. The furniture has been disembowelled”—the word exactly describes what one sees in one house after another—“the doors torn off their hinges. On the floors there is a litter of clothes, letters, burst mattresses and eiderdowns, fragments of furniture, shattered pottery, broken food, dung, and other rubbish, so that you cannot set foot on the boards of the floor.”
In letters, by word of mouth, with our own eyes, M. Lamure and I heard and saw over and over again similar stories and similar sights. I did not see the scene which was described to a French officer by an old maidservant in a house near Lunéville, where a party of German officers, some of them stark-naked except for their helmets, some of them dressed in the nightgowns and undergarments of the ladies of the house, danced with one another in a drunken carouse, and defiled the beds and the other linen which they left in the drawers of the clothes-chests; I quote it because the French officer who had it from the heart-broken old family servant who saw it happen seems to me to be an absolutely reliable witness. But there is a deeper reason than that for repeating it. It is typical of the extraordinary vein of bestiality which even before the war was known to run through certain strata—and certain of the higher strata—of German society. We are always asking and wondering who is going to win the war—even, in some of our darker hours, the most optimistic of us. The answer is written in these ravaged villages and towns of Lorraine and other parts of France. When to the mere wanton destructiveness of war is added the particular form of bestiality of which disgusting traces have been found by the French in many houses which had escaped the flames, it is practically certain that the roots of it must lie deep down in a bed of rottenness digged and prepared long before the war began. A nation, the cultivated circles of which are to any serious extent tainted with the unnatural vice of which this filthiness is a sure sign—even if its existence and its toleration had not already been notorious in Germany—is intrinsically corrupt and has in its organization the seeds of death, no matter how highly it may have developed its Kultur and commerce and physical and military science. Germany has grown with extraordinary rapidity and to extraordinary proportions in an extraordinarily short period of time, like a rank weed, forced in an ultra-scientific hothouse. Outwardly her structure is in many respects a marvel and even a thing of beauty. But with this canker at the core she cannot be a healthy organization. You cannot gather figs of thistles. The war has brought the canker (which is in the whole body, though it does not poison the whole of it) to the surface. Perhaps the war, which Germany has brought on herself, is the surgeon’s knife that will finally eradicate it, as it must without doubt excise other tumours from the bodies of all the nations engaged in it. But the difference between Germany and the others is that they have entered upon the war with cleaner hands and cleaner minds, and that cleanness, because the world is continually being purified, is going to win in the long run. For even if it were the other way, if Germany were going to win this particular war, which is, after all, only a moment in the history of time, that could make no difference in the final result. Right must triumph and the world must progress, and the Allies, since they have right on their side, are fighting not only in its defence and the defence of their countries, but to give Germany a chance after the war of redeeming herself. For it is as certain that only her own people can purify her and make her what she is meant to be as it is that not the united powers of the whole world can wipe her as a nation off the map of Europe. Of course, individual soldiers and individual politicians think and speak differently. There are many people in France and England with whom the last sentence of the following paragraph, which was written by a French soldier in the armies of the east on August 26th, 1914, is a fixed creed. “We will make these barbarians pay dear,” he wrote, “for their robberies and their proud folly. In front of us there is nothing but miles of ruins, burnt villages, and corpses of old men and children. Truly this race is not worthy to have produced Goethe, Schiller, and Wagner. This time she must disappear from the map of the civilized world.”