The instructions issued to General de Castelnau directed him everywhere to march forward and make direct attacks. The day of August 25, 1914, was a successful day for the French; everywhere the Germans were repulsed. From August 26 till September 2, 1914, the Second Army continued its attacks.
At this point the commander in chief having need of important forces at his center and at his right relieved the Second Army of much of its strength. This did not prevent it from engaging in the great Battle of Nancy and winning it. It was September 4, 1914, that this battle began and it continued till the 11th, the army sustaining the incessant assaults of the Germans on its entire front advanced from Grand Couronne. The German emperor was personally present at this battle. There was at Dieuze a regiment of white cuirassiers at whose head it was his intention to make a triumphal entry into Nancy. Heavy German artillery of every caliber made an enormous expenditure of ammunition; on the Grand Mont d'Amance alone, one of the most important positions of the Grand Couronne of Nancy, more than 30,000 howitzer shells were fired in two days. The fights among the infantry were characterized on the entire front by an alternation of failure and success, every point being taken, lost and retaken at intervals.
The struggle attained to especial violence in the Champenoux Forest. On September 5, 1914, the enemy won Maixe and Remereville, which they lost again in the evening, but they were unable to dislodge the French from the ridge east of the forest of Champenoux. The Mont d'Amance was violently bombarded; a German brigade marched on Pont-à-Mousson. The French retook Crevic and the Crevic Wood.
On the 7th the Germans directed on Ste. Geneviève, north of the Grand Couronne, a very violent attack, which miscarried. Ste. Geneviève was lost for a time, but it was retaken on the 8th; more than 2,000 Germans lay dead on the ground. The same day the enemy threw themselves furiously on the east front, the Mont d'Amance, and La Neuvelotte. South of the Champenoux Forest the French were compelled to retire; they were thrown back on the ridge west of the forest. On the 9th a new bombardment of Mont d'Amance, a struggle of extreme violence, took place on the ridge west of the forest of Champenoux, the French gaining ground. General Castelnau decided to take the direct offensive, the Germans giving signs of great fatigue. On the 12th they retired very rapidly. They evacuated Lunéville, a frontier town, where they left a great quantity of arms and ammunition. The French began immediately to pursue them, the Germans withdrawing everywhere over the frontier.
[CHAPTER VII]
SIEGE AND FALL OF NAMUR
When the Germans occupied Brussels on August 20, 1914, we observed that corps after corps did not enter the city, but swept to the south. This was Von Kluck's left wing moving to attack the Allies on the Sambre-Mons front. The forces which passed through Brussels were Von Kluck's center, advancing south by east to fall in line beside the right wing, which had mainly passed between Brussels and Antwerp to the capture of Bruges and Ghent. The whole line when re-formed on the French frontier would stretch from Mons to the English Channel—the great right wing of the German armies.
Meanwhile, Von Bülow's second army had advanced up the valley of the Meuse, with its right sweeping the Hisbaye uplands. Some part of this army may have been transported by rail from Montmedy. Its general advance in columns was directed chiefly upon the Sambre crossings. As Von Kluck's wide swing through Belgium covered a greater distance, Von Bülow's army was expected to strike the Allies some twenty-four hours earlier. Its march, therefore, was in the nature of an onrush.
But Von Bülow was now in the full tide of fighting strength—an amazing spectacle to chance or enforced witnesses. Well may the terrified peasants have stood hat in hand in the midst of their ruined villages. Any door not left open was immediately broken down and the interior searched. Here and there a soldier could be seen carrying a souvenir from some wrecked château. But for the most part everyone fled from before its path, leaving it silent and abandoned. The field gray-green uniforms were almost invisible in cover, in a half light, or when advancing through mist. No conceivable detail seemed to have been overlooked. Each man carried a complete equipment down to handy trifles, the whole weighed to the fraction of an ounce, in carefully estimated proportions.