In the Vosges themselves and in the Sundgau, ever since the retirement from Mulhouse, there has been continual fighting, sometimes of the most violent description, in which the Chasseurs Alpins and the Chasseurs-à-pied, splendidly supported by the French field artillery (supplemented during the latter part of last year with guns of heavier calibre), have done wonderfully fine work. They have not only successfully carried out their main task, which was to prevent the enemy from setting foot on the western slopes of the Vosges, but in the valleys of the Thur and the Doller and at other points along the line have gained a considerable amount of valuable ground. Further north, in the district of Senones, though they have not succeeded in penetrating again into the valley of the Bruche, they have kept the enemy well in check, and at the extreme right of the line, towards the Swiss frontier, have established themselves in a very strong position from which they are able to keep a watchful eye on Altkirch and Mulhouse, and at the same time to guard effectively against any attempt at either a straightforward or a roundabout attack on Belfort.
The main fighting has centred round Thann, Hartmannsweilerkopf, Cernay, Steinbach, the Ballon of Guebweiler, the valley of the Fecht, Reichackerkopf, and the valley of Münster, but from the Donon to Pfetterhausen on the Swiss frontier, especially on the southern section of this front, there is hardly any ground that has not been the scene of repeated combats, the net result of which is that the French have almost everywhere made slight advances. The summit of Hartmannsweilerkopf in particular, because it guards the entrance to the valley of St. Amarin, has been bathed in blood over and over again. Four or five times it has been taken and retaken, with dogged perseverance and extraordinary heroism, first by the French and then by the Germans, and the struggle for its possession still continues, though at present it is in the hands of the French. For both sides this famous mountain-top has been one of the most deadly of all those terrible “craters of death.”
Beyond this short general statement I shall not for the present attempt to follow the ins and outs of the campaign on this part of the line. Its strategical importance has been far greater than has appeared, and, once the weather conditions permit, there is always a chance of its developing into an attempt at a big offensive movement by one side or the other. But as regards the story of those heroic struggles we have had, I think, our fill of fighting. In the daily engagements on the plain of Alsace and among the fir-clad mountains of the Vosges the men of the armies of the east have shown the same enthusiastic devotion to their country, the same quiet disregard of danger and death, and the same cheerful endurance and unfailing confidence in the final triumph of right as their brother-soldiers who fought and died for the safety of Epinal and Nancy and Verdun and Toul. Higher praise than that they cannot have. The soldiers of France are the fearless sons of a great-hearted nation.
As I draw near to the end of this imperfect attempt to show the greatness of the debt which England owes to France, one other thought about them comes to me with increasing force. The French have played the game: they have fought the good fight like knights and gentlemen. That, more than almost anything else, is the reason why Englishmen have come to look upon them as something much more than Allies. Because of it they have forged a bond with us and our children’s children which Time itself will hardly be able to weaken. They are our brothers, not only in arms, but in all that civilization stands for. The Germans are—different. They are our enemies, not only because they are fighting against us, but much more because of the way in which they have fought. As a state, and, in cases that cannot be numbered, as individuals they have turned their backs upon principles and ideals by which all honourable nations and men must strive to rule their lives. Their scutcheon is blackened with arson and murder and pillage and rape. Their hands are red with the blood of the innocent. To the ends of the earth and of time they have made their name a byword and a reproach. But—worse than all this—they glory in their shame. They claim that their dishonour is honour and their wrong the right. Their eyes are holden that they cannot see. Some day they will be opened and they will see themselves and their crimes in all their revolting ugliness. For it is unbelievable that a whole nation of ordinary men and women can continue to allow themselves to be blinded by the false and cruel and iniquitous standards of a few devils in human form. But for the present all their sense of right and wrong is being eaten away by a foul and malignant cancer. Till that cancer has been cut out of their being by the sword they are a deadly danger to the whole world, for their success would infallibly spread its poison into every country on which, in their present condition, they were able to lay their hand. Till the sword has done its work, as firmly and as thoroughly as the surgeon’s scalpel, there is not one of the allied nations which can or will think of peace. Then and then only will come the end of the war.
CHAPTER THE LAST
GERMANY AND THE ALLIES
Once upon a time, in the careless, happy days before the war, a Royal Scotch Princess was married one fine morning to a Royal Irish Prince in a Royal English chapel. The chapel was ancient and small, and the young pair had so many friends that though not nearly all of them could be invited to the ceremony, they filled it to overflowing. Besides the Sovereign Head of both their houses and the State, there were present two Queens (I had almost said two fairy Godmothers) who walked down the chapel hand-in-hand looking as sweet and almost as young as the bride herself, I forget how many other princes and princesses, and scores and scores of the great lights of the land and especially of the legal profession (for where the country-to-be-ruled is there will the lawyers be gathered together). There were not many young people—the occasion was too important and the seats too few—and, except for the brothers and sisters and cousins of the two principals nearly all the guests were married and arrived in couples (like the animals coming into the ark out of the rain) dressed in their finest and full of their own or their ancestors’ importance. For to be there at all, you understand, you had to be SOMEBODY, or at least to the third and fourth generation SOMEBODY’S offspring, unless you belonged to that mischievous but necessary profession the British Press, the representatives of which, the only blot on this brilliant assembly, were crowded together in a narrow position of vantage so close to the highest and furthest back row of the seats of the mighty that the shadows of the aigrettes in front quivered and danced upon their note-books.
To the strains of the organ, appropriately tender and jubilant by turns, the chapel gradually filled with its distinguished audience, and almost the last to arrive before the Royal party were an old old servant of the State and his matronly spouse, who took their places on two of the gilded chairs immediately below the Press box. Before she shook out the folds of her dress for the last time the lady turned round and, staring straight into the face of the newspaper man behind her, at a range of about two feet, said to her husband in a loud, clear voice (he is rather deaf), “Oh, it’s only reporters.”
Until you have tried it you have no idea of the degree of polite contempt which can be put into that last word. And even when you have tried, and tried your hardest, you will still, if you are only an amateur at the game, fall far short of the dizzy height of scorn reached by this professional expert without any conscious effort at all. For pride of rank and contempt of her inferiors had become to her second nature.
Once upon a time the same great lady (or perhaps it was another) was on her way to the gilded chamber to which her husband had been raised, chiefly by his own forensic skill, but partly by the nimble pencils of the men who recorded his eloquent speeches for the public press. In the square outside there was a large and excited crowd, some sympathetic, some jeering and hostile, and for a moment her carriage was stopped while the police arrested a pale-faced, elderly woman who had been trying to exercise what she believed to be her legal right of asking for an audience with the representatives of her sovereign. Once more in the same high-pitched voice and with an even deeper tinge of scorn, she explained the situation to her companion: “It’s only one of those wretched suffragettes.”