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

by Gerald Campbell

How nearly exact his calculations were will probably never be known. It was certainly a case of touch and go whether they came off or not. In my opinion what upset them more than almost anything else was the final stand at Amance, in which guns and infantry both bore their full share. For consider what they did, and above all when they did it. They were put to the supreme test on September 8th, the day, let me recall, before the retreat from the Marne began. The Kaiser himself gave the order for the final assault. From the woods a mile away, headed by their fifes and drums, wave upon wave of Germans advanced as steadily and as pompously as if they were on parade, to the attack of the French infantry positions on the side of the hill. The French guns were silent. There was nothing to show whether they had been put out of action by the preliminary bombardment or were only biding their time. Except the music of the bands there was not a sound, for the infantry also reserved their fire till the enemy were within two hundred yards. Then their time had come. With their bayonets fixed and with shouts of “Vive la France!” they sprang suddenly from the trenches and charged. The two lines met with a desperate shock, and after a violent hand-to-hand struggle it was the German ranks which broke. As they fled to the shelter of the forest the 75’s came into action, and firing at short range mowed them down rank by rank. But they were splendidly gallant. They fought like knights, not like the savages who had sacked and burnt the villages of Lorraine and the Vosges. There were always others ready to take the places of the men who fell. Six times they advanced towards that deadly hill, and six times they were driven back to the sheltering woods. At some places at its base the bodies were piled up five or six feet high, and when the survivors took cover behind the heaps of dead and wounded the 75’s still raked them through and through, smothering dead and living in a horrible mire of flesh and blood, while the 155’s, firing over the heads of the front ranks, finished off the work further back. The losses were enormous. Thousands of German dead were left lying on the plain, and in the evening they asked and were granted a few hours’ truce to bury them. The victory was complete. There was no longer any risk of a German advance. Nancy was inviolate. The Grand Plan had broken down.

But supposing the defeat had been a victory? Then, I think, after the preliminary walk-over into Nancy, an army could have been sent forward to Bar-le-Duc, large enough, even if it could not bring about the rounding up of the Allies, to form a serious menace to Sarrail and Langle de Cary, and perhaps even to have altered the whole course of the Battle of the Marne. It is true that Toul and the Meuse stood in the way. But the garrison of Toul had been seriously weakened by the withdrawal of the guns and troops that had taken part in the defence of Nancy, and in any case the Germans might have walked round it, as they did round Verdun, supposing that they had not the guns to blow it to pieces as they had the forts of Liége.

But after all these are unprofitable speculations. What has been has been, and the operations in front of Nancy, though comparatively little attention has been drawn to them, were obviously of such vital importance in the huge general battle which saved France that there is no need of “if’s” and “an’s” to prove it. At the same time it is well worth while to notice how the two great victories of the Marne and the Grand Couronné reacted on each other. Each was an indispensable part of the homogeneous plans of German invasion and French defence. If the armies of the east, by their stand in front of Nancy, helped to make the victory of the Marne possible, the victory of the Marne certainly helped them to finish off the work they had begun so well. Even after their repulse at Amance, when a sadder if not a wiser Kaiser had motored back to Germany, the enemy were still uncomfortably close to Nancy. The French believe that they took advantage of the four hours’ truce which was granted them on the evening of the 8th to place two heavy guns in position at Cerceuil. At all events, the next day, there the guns were, and between eleven and twelve that night seventy of their shells crashed into the streets of Nancy, damaging a few houses and killing six or seven harmless civilians. People went to bed very early in those days, and most of the inhabitants had been in bed and asleep for an hour or two before the shelling began. A violent thunderstorm was raging at the time, and it was not till the 75’s began to reply that the town woke up and realized what was happening, and then, almost before there was time to wonder seriously whether the bombardment was to be the prelude to a German entry, the whole thing was over. The smart little 75’s had done their work and silenced the heavier pieces from Essen, or the men who were serving them, in less than an hour. The town heaved a sigh of relief, not unmixed with indignation and contempt—and went to sleep again.

The whole affair was singularly futile and pettish. It was like a little boy throwing stones from a safe distance at an opponent whom he has failed to beat in a fair stand-up fight, before he runs away. Possibly the object was to damage the Cathedral, which was exactly in the line in which most of the shells fell, as a parting message to the Nanceiens of what they might expect another time. Or they may have hoped to start a conflagration or an explosion by hitting the gasworks or the huge boilers of some big works close beside them. That was a thought which occurred to the young Yorkshire engineer in charge of the works (about the only Englishman in the town at the moment), who at once went down through the streets where the shells were falling and emptied the boilers himself. But anyhow there was no military object in the pyrotechnic display, since there were no soldiers sleeping in the town, and the chief inconvenience it caused—a very real one—was that in some of the hospitals the wounded had to be carried down from the upper wards to the ground-floor or the basement.

Whatever the meaning or no-meaning of the bombardment, it was the beginning of the end, and a sign that the Germans were going. It was a habit of theirs always to destroy before they retired. Many of the acts of incendiarism were, so to speak, parting shots, or exhibitions of temper on a large scale. But they fought, too, with desperate if sullen courage. The retirement had now become almost general and once more the unfortunate villages in the path of the receding Army Corps were deluged by the double baptism of fire. Before the enemy were finally driven out of the forest of Champenoux the French had to charge them again and again, and whole regiments were decimated on both sides. But step by step, all along the line from Pont-à-Mousson, which was evacuated on September 10th, to the Vosges, they were forced steadily eastwards—from Champenoux along the Château-Salins road, and through the group of villages on the edge of the forest past Arracourt; from Velaine and Creceuil past Courbesseau and Serres; from Harraucourt and Dombasle along the canal, past Crévic and Maixe and Einville, from which some of them went north along the road to Vic and others kept along the banks of the canal to the forest of Parroy; and south of the canal and south of the Meurthe, through Lunéville and on each side of it, past Gerbéviller and Baccarat and Raon l’Etape and St. Dié—in all cases back towards the frontier which they had crossed in triumph three long weeks before. Except for a narrow strip on the edge of Lorraine and a rather larger tract in the Department of the Vosges west of the Donon, the occupation was at an end. The attack on the Epinal-Verdun line by way of Nancy had completely failed. The Kaiser and his men had looked at the promised land and turned their backs on it, leaving misery and disaster—and perhaps 50,000 dead—behind them, but carrying with them in their hearts the greatest disappointment of the first part of the war. The Germans are rather fond of mixing metaphors; for once let me imitate them. They had nibbled greedily at the Thistle of Nancy, but the Mailed Fist was not quite long enough to reach it.

But the French troops, the men who had turned defeat into victory, had suffered horribly. In one division, 22,000 strong on August 23rd, only 8000 men capable of fighting were left on September 10th. Still, dead and living, they had done their work: de Castelnau and Pau, Foch and the XXth Army Corps, Dubail and Bigot, the men and guns of the Toul garrison and the whole of the armies that stood in that deadly breach, had covered themselves with undying glory and had written in letters of blood on the plains of Lorraine and in the spurs of the Vosges one of the most splendid chapters in the history of France and the world.

The whole of the country over which they fought is now one vast cemetery. There are graves everywhere, by the roadside, in the woods, in the middle of exposed plateaux, in remote corners of fields, in the steep passes of the Vosges, in the trenches and village gardens where the dead men fought each other and died—long green mounds, carefully fenced and tended, where hundreds of broken bodies lie side by side in the last sleep of life, lonely little neglected heaps of earth, marked only by a rough cross of sticks and a tattered and weather-beaten képi. You cannot get away from them and their silence.

While the battle was still raging the life of the countryside never seemed to come to an end altogether. Somewhere near, sometimes in the very places over which the shells were screaming, there were always—when they were not hiding in the cellars—old men and boys at work in the fields, children playing on the doorsteps, and dazed and anxious women occupied in household tasks. On the day of judgment, up to the very moment when the last trump sounds, I believe there will still be women washing clothes in the Meuse and the Moselle and the Mortagne and the Meurthe and all the other rivers of Lorraine and France which through all these terrible months have run red with the blood of France and Germany and their Allies—British and Belgians, Australians and Canadians, Sikhs and Ghurkas, Algerians and Moroccans.

Now, where the battle has rolled back, it is the turn of the dead. They lie in the midst of life, and the living can never forget them. The last time that I stood by one of these resting-places, covered already with green grass, it was an autumn evening, cold and dreary. We were on ground from which the enemy had been driven back with huge slaughter on both sides. Almost as far as one could see the face of nature was hideously scarred with an intricate network of saps and trenches. What had once been happy homes were piles of brown rubble and gaping walls and spires. What had once been green woods were stiff rows of shattered leafless stumps. It was a flat country, but in front, a little further on, there was a ragged man-made dune, thirty or forty feet high and ten times as long, enclosing a deep crater in which were lying hundreds of mangled bodies, some of them with their limbs sticking through the surface, killed and buried or half buried by the same appalling explosion in one dreadful moment of eternity. Far beyond, but not so far that it was out of range of the guns, the horizon, where the enemy lay concealed, loomed up grim and threatening against the evening sky. To me the horizon on the Lorraine frontier, seen from far off, always had that dark and ominous look. The vague and dreamlike mystery of what lay beyond that silent line of low dark hills, the thought of the preparations that might be going on behind it, the feeling that no Frenchman or Englishman could go up to it and live, and most of all, I think, the knowledge that across the road on which one stood, and all the other roads and railways that once were thoroughfares between the two countries for all the world to use, a line was now drawn which no man might pass, always seemed to make of the frontier a dreadful symbol of the war and its menace of evil to come. Close at hand it is different. When you reach the impassable line of the furthest trench or the tall barrier of sandbags on the other side of which the enemy, in the same trench, is lying behind a similar barrier twenty yards away, the sense of mystery and foreboding melts away. There is no cure for a fit of the blues like a visit to the front. For after all, the line is not impassable. It has been crossed and pushed back before, and it will be crossed and pushed back again. All along it, where you had let yourself think there was only the foe, there is an underground world swarming with French soldiers, watching and fighting, or ready to fight, day and night, up to any move that the enemy may attempt to make, and sworn and resolved for France and freedom to push on to the end. And that is the view that all of us have got to take when the horror of the war and its limitless and frowning horizon is upon us. We must get right up to our difficulties and meet them face to face. We must work and watch and pray, like the men in the trenches—for they do pray in the trenches—and leave the rest to God.

But that day I was four or five miles back from the front, and the weight of that horror of the horizon was heavy upon me. Man goeth forth to his work and to his labour until the evening. It was evening now, and getting dark, yet still the cruel unending work went on. Behind me quick red flashes of flame showed the position of the nearer French batteries, which till then one could only guess at from the sound of the guns. Far off in front brilliant flares shot up into the darkness over the trenches, that the men on both sides might be able to go on watching and killing all through the night. After all, was God in His heaven? Was all right with the world? I thought of General de Castelnau, the winner of that great victory in Lorraine, and his three dead sons. I thought of all those French and German lying there dead behind me, and the husbandless wives, and fatherless children, and brotherless sisters, and friendless friends, and sonless mothers, whose agonized prayers for their young lives had been answered by those silent graves. I thought of the killing that was going on through the night, and the killing that was still to come for weary months and perhaps for weary years. And then I thought of something else, of the splendid heroism and self-sacrifice of the women who prayed and suffered and the men who fought and fell, and of some words that I had seen before the light faded, written over one of the graves that I had passed—it makes no difference that the man buried there was a German, for surely German soldiers as well as French believe that they are fighting for the right—“Be thou faithful unto death, and I will give thee a crown of life.” And that, it seems to me, when you get right up face to face with death, instead of standing and looking at it afar off, is the only possible meaning of the Battle of the Grand Couronné, and all the battles and all the horrors and all the suffering of the whole war. For all of us, even for the enemy, even for those who do not fight, it is a war of redemption, and the greatest and most hopeful war of redemption that the world has ever seen, and it will be won by those whose faith in what is right lasts up to death and beyond it.