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

by Gerald Campbell

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Before I was carried away into this digression by the admiration which every one must feel for these brave soldier-priests of France, I was talking of the way in which, on the eastern half of the front, the chief energy of the war of the trenches has been concentrated at certain definite points or “craters of death.” West of the Vosges these points are all in the plain of the Woevre and the Hauts de Meuse, that is to say, along the sides of the St. Mihiel salient. The chief of them are at Les Eparges, on the north side of the angle, in the Forest of Apremont at the angle itself, and near Pont-à-Mousson at the eastern extremity of its southern side. At, and to a lesser extent between, these points the French and the Germans have now been at it, hammer and tongs, for more than a year. I use the expression “hammer and tongs” designedly, because I can think of no other that so well expresses the position. St. Mihiel and the Camp des Romains are situated at the hinge of the tongs, Les Eparges and Pont-à-Mousson towards the extremities of the two legs. With the object of squeezing the legs closer and closer together, so as to crush the German forces between them or at least to force them to retire on Metz, the French have been hammering away at these places for months past, in accordance with sound dynamic principles. At the same time from the Forest of Apremont they have pounded even more vigorously at the Camp des Romains. Dynamically the process of applying the force of the hammer at the St. Mihiel end of the tongs is not so advantageous, but it is, as I have tried to show, necessary. Force must be met by an equivalent force if it is desired to prevent motion in a particular direction, and they have at least so far succeeded in their object as to produce a state of equilibrium.

La Woevre.

The position is one of great interest. What the Germans were trying to do at the end of September, 1914, they were still aiming at a year later, and, for all that one can foresee, the situation may be unchanged up to the time when this book is published, or even later. They wanted, and they still want, to cross the Meuse at St. Mihiel and in a sense complete the investment of Verdun. At any time since their first attempt at this manœuvre failed they might have repeated it, or would have repeated it if they could. If they had succeeded the consequences for the French and the whole of the Allies’ line would have been just as serious as at the beginning. Never was there a clearer case of “As you were,” and the fact that the point of danger for the French and the point of opportunity for the Germans was at the angle of the salient has made the situation there more pregnant with possibilities than at almost any other part of the front. The unsatisfactory side of it for our Allies is that because of their failure to turn the enemy out of the Camp des Romains they have not been able to put an end to the occupation of the Woevre, and that to a certain extent the menace of a forward movement still exists. On the other hand, the menace has always been held well in check, and the legs of the tongs are sensibly nearer to each other than they were fifteen months ago.

Through the closing months of 1914 and the whole of the following year a steady pressure was kept up on both sides of the salient by part of the Verdun garrison force and of the Third Army on the north side, that is to say, from the Meuse eastwards, and by part of the Toul garrison and of the Second Army operating from the south towards the Rupt de Mad. As the result of this general pressure, supplemented by occasional offensive movements in greater force, the enemy were driven back slightly on both their fronts.

The first of these offensive movements was made directly on St. Mihiel from the west. An attack was made on the German troops occupying the left bank of the river, and at first it had every appearance of being successful. The enemy were driven out of the suburb and barracks of Chauvoncourt and retired across the Meuse. Following in hot pursuit, the leading French troops took possession of the barracks—and fell into a trap. The ground had been mined by the Germans before their retreat, and the French paid the consequences of their impetuous advance. Practically the whole of the force that had entered the barracks was destroyed, and in the confusion the enemy successfully counter-attacked and remained masters of Chauvoncourt, which they still hold.

The next attack, a much bigger and brilliantly successful affair, was made at Les Eparges, twelve or thirteen miles north of St. Mihiel and the same distance south-east of Verdun. One of its objects was to defeat the enemy’s project of investing Verdun by driving him further back in the direction of Vigneulles, which lies about mid-way between the two fronts of the salient, and at the same time to threaten his position in the Forest of La Mortagne, to the west of the road from Vigneulles to Les Eparges. The operations, which began on February 17th and lasted till April 10th, were carried out with great determination by the French, and in the end they not only pushed their trenches forward a considerable distance, but were able to occupy a much safer and more commanding position. Before the advance was made the Germans had constructed a very strong redoubt, to the east of the village of Les Eparges, which was the main objective of the attack.[attack.] After a careful preparation first by saps and mines, and then by sustained artillery fire, it was gallantly stormed and then evacuated and finally retaken, after a fierce hand-to-hand struggle, on February 19th. For the next six or seven weeks there was continual fighting on more or less the same ground till, at the beginning of April, the Crown Prince, who had returned from one of his prolonged and mysterious absences to the command of the Fifth Army, had the mortification of adding yet another to the list of his failures, and the French finally and conclusively gained the upper hand. They had fought with extraordinary dash and courage, and had suffered severely. But the result was well worth the cost. The position which they now hold commands a wide view northwards and eastwards over the plain of the Woevre. From the east side of the Forest of Amblonville, in which they have their main cantonments, the ground falls with a fairly steep descent till it rises again to the long bare spur of Les Eparges, over a thousand feet high, looking out over the plain. They are no longer exposed to the risk of an unexpected attack, as it is impossible for the enemy to concentrate troops in the ravines and behind the slopes which separate the forest from Les Eparges without being seen. The other main advantages which the French have gained on this side of the wedge are that they have made some advance on the two main roads, six or seven miles apart, which run between Verdun and Metz, one along the valley of the Orne past Etain, the other from Fresnes in the direction of Mars-la-Tour. They have also made a slight move forward on the centre of the German line at Lamorville, a few miles to the north of St. Mihiel.

On the southern side of the wedge the chief French efforts have been made at the two extremities of the line, at the Bois d’Ailly and the Bois Brulé, in the Forest of Apremont, and, fourteen and twenty-one miles further east, at the Bois de Mort-Mare, directly south of Thiaucourt, and the Bois le Prêtre, a little to the west of Pont-à-Mousson. The approach to the Forest of Apremont from the Meuse is one of the many places on this part of the front where the French side of the low hills behind the trenches are for miles honeycombed with cave-dwellings. They have been there so long now that they have become part of the landscape and look as if they had always belonged to it. I suppose when the war is over they will still be left for the edification of the cheap trippers and tourists of the world. What will not be left for them to see, for it is gone already, is the Bois Brulé. In the height of summer you can walk for hours along the trenches, through acres of what was once a green forest, and see never a leaf. Nothing is left of the trees but shattered stumps, cut clean off by the shells close to the ground. That gives one some idea of the severity of the endless duel of the guns. At the east end of the wood the hill on which it stands drops down sharply into the plain, and through the loopholes in the front trenches (where you do not linger for more than a few seconds at a time) you look down on the brown roofs of the village of Apremont, three or four hundred feet below you. It is full of Germans, though they never show themselves. But their advanced trenches are much closer than that, on the top of the reverse slope of the hill, in some places at the regulation nearest distance of about fifteen yards. Behind the hill, that is to say, on the south or French side of it, and as far as one can see to the east, the plain stretches out flat and unbroken (except by the lines of French and German trenches cut across it), backed on the south by a series of long, straight, level-topped hills, écheloned one behind the other, and ending far away to the right in the blue haze where the heights of the Moselle begin. That is where Pont-à-Mousson lies, and Bois le Prêtre, the greater part of it another dreary forest of stumps, through which the battle raged backwards and forwards again and again for months—or is it centuries?—till at last the whole of it was won and kept for France by her splendid soldiers.

And that is what they are doing all along the line. The progress is slow, but what changes there are in the position of the trenches are in favour of the French. Foot by foot they are winning back the land which was ravished from them at the beginning, and the longer the struggle for the possession of the Woevre goes on the surer it becomes that the occasional offensive movements of the French are assaults and those of the German attempts at sallies. The St. Mihiel salient is still a nuisance, but it has almost, if not quite, ceased to be a danger, and sooner or later it is practically certain that the prolonged attempt to cross the Meuse will have to be abandoned, and that not a single German will be left in France from Verdun to the Vosges.