"Yet again, the risk was great. If the enemy had succeeded in holding the Hindenburg position, he would have been little, if anything, worse off, territorially at any rate, than he had been before he began his great adventure of the spring. It was clearly a time for him to pull himself together and hold on at all costs.
"On the other hand and with all its difficulties, so favourable an opportunity of securing immediate and decisive victory, by pressing our advantage, could scarcely be expected to present itself again. The decision was therefore taken and was justified by success.
"After this battle, our chief anxieties lay rather in the ability of our supply system to keep pace with our Armies than in any resistance that the enemy could offer. In the succeeding battles our troops accomplished with comparative ease feats which earlier in the struggle it would have been madness to attempt; and in the final battle of the war, begun on the 4th November, the crossing of the Sambre and the clearing of the great Mormal Forest furnished a wonderful tribute to the complete ascendency which their earlier victories had enabled our troops to establish over the enemy."
CHAPTER IV
GENERAL GOURAUD AT STRASBOURG
The Maine—Verdun—Champagne—it is in connection with these three names that the French war consciousness shows itself most sensitive and most profound, just as the war consciousness of Great Britain vibrates most deeply when you test it with those other names—Ypres—Arras—the Somme—Cambrai. As is the name of Ypres to the Englishman, so is that of Verdun to the Frenchman, invested even with a more poignant significance, since the countryside where so many sons of France laid down their lives was their own adored mother-land, indivisibly part of themselves, as those grim, water-logged flats north and south of the Menin road could never be to a Lancashire or London boy. And no other French battle-field wears for a Frenchman quite the same aureole that shines for ever on those dark, riven hills of Verdun. But it seemed to me that in the feeling of France, Champagne came next—Champagne, associated first of all with Castelnau's victory in the autumn of 1915, then with General Nivelle's tragic check in 1917, with the serious crisis in the French Army in May and June of that year; and finally with General Gouraud's brilliant successes in the summer and autumn of 1918.
Six weeks ago I found myself in Strasbourg, where General Gouraud is in command of the Fourth Army, now stationed in Alsace. Through a long and beautiful day we had driven south from Metz, across the great fortified zone to the south of that town; with its endless trenches and wire-fields, its camouflaged roads, its railway stations packed with guns, its ammunition dumps and battery-emplacements, which Germany had prepared at the outset of the war, and which still awaited the Americans last November, had the Allies' campaign not ended when it did. There was a bright sun on all the wide and lovely landscape, on the shining rivers, the flooded spaces and the old towns, and magnificent clouds lay piled above the purple Vosges, to the south and east. We caught up a French division on the march, with long lines of lorries, artillery wagons, guns and field-kitchens, and as our car got tangled up with it in passing through the small towns and villages, we had ample time to notice the behaviour of the country-folk, and the reception given to the troops. Nothing, it seemed to me, could have been warmer and more spontaneous, especially as soon as we crossed the boundary of Alsace. The women came running out to their door-steps, the children formed a tumultuous escort, men and women peered smiling out of the covered country carts, and tradesmen left their counters to see the show.
British Official Photograph
The wonderful exploit of one Brigade of the 46th Division, consisting of the South Staffords and North Staffords Regts., who crossed the St. Quentin Canal, which is part of the Hindenburg Line, by swimming in life-belts. They gained their objectives and also captured two bridges which allowed the guns to be taken across. The Brigade is seen on the steep slope of the Canal.
At Metz I was conscious of a hostile and bitter element in the town, not to be wondered at when one remembers that Metz has a population of 25,000 immigrant Germans out of a population of less than 70,000. But in the country towns of Alsace and in Strasbourg itself, my own impression, for what it is worth, was everywhere an impression of solid and natural rejoicing in the new order of things. That there are a large number of Germans in Strasbourg and Alsace generally is, of course, true. There were some 450,000 before the war, out of a population of rather more than two millions, and there are now at a rough estimate about 300,000, of whom nearly 100,000 are to be found in Metz and Strasbourg. The whole administration of the two provinces, with very few exceptions, was a German administration, imported from Germany, and up to the outbreak of war, the universities and the schools—i.e., the whole teaching profession—were German, and many of the higher clergy. The leading finance of the provinces was German. And so on. But I cannot see any reason to doubt that the real feeling of the native population in the two provinces, whether in town or country, has remained throughout these forty-eight years strongly and passionately French. "Since when did you expect the French to come back?" asked M. Mirman, the present Commissioner of the French Republic at Metz, of an old peasant whom he came across not long ago on an official inspection. The old man's eyes kindled—"Depuis toujours!" he said—"I knew it would come, but I was afraid it mightn't come till I was dead, so I used to say to my son: 'If I am dead, and the French come back, you will go to the cemetery, you will knock three times on my grave—I shall hear!' And my son promised."