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

by Gerald Campbell

Of all the people whom the annihilation lie was intended to influence—and did influence—by far the most important was the Emperor William himself. Englishmen must always remember that he is the son of an English mother, and that at heart he is a pacifist and a Christian, even though the God in whom he quite sincerely believes is the God of the Old Testament. But he is also a hegemonist. He constantly sees (or saw) himself and his country and his army playing the big rôle on the world’s stage, and the cunning and unscrupulous advisers by whom he is surrounded took advantage of that weakness in his nature to make him believe that Germany’s salvation could only be secured by Germany’s domination of Europe. Themselves they never made any secret of their determination to bring about the war, nor of their object in doing so. Wretched creatures like Bernhardi and Tannenberg frankly proclaimed that they were out for plunder—the plunder of the world; that they could only secure it by crushing the rest of Europe in a world’s war; and that in order to bring about and win that war Germany would deliberately refuse to fetter her actions by the universally accepted canons of right and wrong. The whole scheme was so monstrous that in spite of the nakedness of these threats—and God knows they were numerous enough—very few Englishmen or Frenchmen could bring themselves to believe that they were made in earnest, and the result was that, sheltered behind the prevailing feeling of incredulity excited in other countries by the utterances of the Pan-Germanist extremists, the rest of the war-party were able to go on quietly with their preparations for war without calling into being any corresponding activity on our part. And then, when at last the moment for which they had all been waiting had arrived—as soon, that is to say, as the men appointed for the task had convinced the Kaiser that Germany was in mortal danger—the war was declared.

After that only one more step was necessary to complete his downfall. Being a man of humane instincts and not a degraded savage like some of his advisers, he had to be persuaded—and he has allowed himself to be persuaded—that the surest means of shortening the war, and therefore of curtailing as far as was possible its inevitable horrors, was to make it more horrible still by instituting the Hunnish system of terrorism—of which the examples given in this book can convey only the very feeblest impression.

There is nothing immoral in a fight between an elephant and a tiger, or even in a leopard’s pursuit of goats and other small deer—the neutral states and the helpless villagers of the jungle. The lions roaring after their prey do seek their meat from God. Attila and the Huns, whose methods the Kaiser ordered his soldiers to imitate in the war in China—even then the poison was working in his mind—were not, like the Emperor William and the Germans, an enlightened and semi-civilized state. The cruel ferocity of the modern Huns is infinitely more cruel and criminal than theirs was, because they call themselves Christians and have undoubtedly got a kind of Kultur. Every vile thing that they have done they have done deliberately and with their eyes open, and for that reason sooner or later their punishment is sure. For nations, like men and women, cannot for ever continue to sin with impunity against the light.

Still, at the beginning, because they were ready and also unscrupulous and we were neither, they scored a great advantage over us, and it was only because we and the French had the enormous moral stimulus that we were fighting for the right that we were able to throw them back from the Marne and the Grand Couronné. For the inequality of men and material—but especially material—was still great, and I take it that if the positions had been reversed, if the Allies had been the aggressors and Germany the object of our iniquitous invasion, we could not have made nearly as good a showing as they did. The positions being, however, as they were, we were the better men, and, with the single exception that they were allowed to push forward the St. Mihiel salient through the gap between the armies in the Woevre, everywhere in the west we drove them many miles back from the advanced positions which they had reached at the end of their first irresistible rush.

Then, along the whole line, including the two sides of the St. Mihiel triangle, we were brought up short by far the strongest and most elaborate system of earth entrenchments that the world had ever seen. It was a perfectly legitimate means of making war, and although, like every other step in the campaign, it had been devised by the enemy as part of their grand plan for destroying the French, from a military point of view they deserved every credit for having thought it out. They were the first people to see that no soldiers could stand up for any length of time in the open, or with only the protection of the shallow ditches which used to be called trenches, against modern weapons. Thanks to their foresight they had invented or perfected a simple means of defence infinitely stronger than the strongest and most modern fortress. We all know now that compared to a properly constructed trench with well-disposed shell-proof shelters the bastions and casemates and cupolas of such places as Toul and Verdun, which till the war was well under way were considered the dernier cri in fortifications, are as flimsy as a Gladstone bag compared to a fire-proof safe. But it was the Germans who taught us, and all that we could do—but we did it—was to set to work resolutely to play them at their own game.

Not, unfortunately, to fight them with their own weapons, or at least with their own shells. It took us all, especially our own country, which has always borne a strong family resemblance to its ancient King Ethelred, a very long time to learn that particular lesson. The French were quicker and more adaptable. Their main difficulty, thanks to shortsighted and ignoble political squabbles before the war, was that when war began they were very short of big guns, as a consequence of which in the earlier engagements their pieces were constantly outranged, sometimes by as much as two miles, by those opposed to them. But they had, and still have, one gun which, for its size, was far superior to any possessed by Germany, though they had produced a colourable imitation of it.

To every French civilian, and to every French soldier, no matter to what arm of the service he belongs, the Soixante-Quinze is the real hero of the war. And in one sense they are not far wrong. For without it not the most splendid courage and most dashing exploits of the chasseurs-alpins, chasseurs-à-pied, and all the splendid French and African regiments of their armies could have held out against the German advance, much less have rolled it back.

In the year 1894, in the month of July, the then German Military Attaché in Paris, Colonel Schwartz Koppen, was for some time considerably worried and puzzled during his morning rides in the Bois de Boulogne by the frequency of the reports of artillery fire, which he heard coming from the direction of Mont Valérien. He would have been still more worried if he could have looked into the future and seen what those sounds betokened for his countrymen twenty years ahead. They were due to the experimental firing of the new gun invented by Colonel Duport (who, like most inventors, got nothing for his trouble), which was being put through its paces under the auspices of General Mercier, the Minister of War, largely owing to the public-spirited action of another Minister, now President of the Republic. For it was M. Raymond Poincaré, at that time Minister of Finance, who proposed in the Chamber a vote of credit for “Repairs to artillery material,” which really meant (as the members of the Chamber were well aware) the construction of twenty-four guns of 75 millimetres calibre, the first of their race, and the actual disturbers of Colonel Schwartz Koppen’s morning peace of mind.

How long it was before he found out that his ears, though not his eyes, had assisted at a first appearance of some military and historical importance, I do not know, but at all events the Germans were at the time so much occupied with the subject of their own new 77 mm. field-gun that the genesis of its slightly smaller rival apparently escaped their notice.

After that, in spite of the efforts of General Deltoye, nothing further was done about the Soixante-Quinze for two or three years, when General Billot, Minister for War in the cabinet of M. Méline, took the matter in hand, and enough money was voted for their manufacture on a large scale. But once that was done no time was lost, and in 1897 the first Soixante-Quinzes, considerably improved by Colonel Sainte-Claire Deville and Colonel Rimailho, the inventor of the 155, were served out to the artillery of the army corps of the north-east. Apparently the moment chosen for their début could not have been more happily timed: the revival of the Dreyfus case had just suggested to the minds of the war-party in Germany that the golden opportunity for declaring war, while France was torn by internal strife, had arrived, and it is said that it was only the reports of the foreign military attachés on the great superiority of the 75 mm. to the 77 mm. in stability and rapidity and precision of fire that caused them to change their minds. Since then they have been able to introduce certain improvements into their own gun, modelled on the chief features of the Soixante-Quinze, but it still remains an inferior weapon.