The infantry of the Germans and of the French were now coming to hand grips. A battalion of Zouaves was creeping round to attack the advancing column in the rear. The German commander at Nogent l'Abbesse learned from his air scouts what was happening. He saw the peril of the advancing column, that it was almost surrounded, and, he threw further columns into the fray, to cover the retreat. The sortie on the railway had now become impossible. General Foch had moved too quickly. But, even so, the peril was great, for the German force was almost cut off. It meant the loss of 15,000 men and artillery, or it meant the sacrifice of some one corps to cover the retreat. The latter course was chosen.
Three thousand of the Guards Corps, the flower of the Prussian Army, were sent like a catapult at the gap in the French line, immediately in front of Rheims. Five times they charged, and with such heroic daring and such penetrative energy that General Foch did not dare break from his position. As they came up for the fifth assault, a wild cheer of admiration broke out along the French line. But the rifles spoke steadily, none the less for that. After the fifth assault, barely a hundred men were left, nearly all wounded. They reversed rifles, a sign of surrender, and in all honor they were received by General Foch, who conducted them to the hospital in the rear. They lived up to the full the most heroic traditions of the old Prussian corps and they saved that whole German force from destruction. Still, with the annihilation of the Death's Head Hussars and the remainder of the Prussian Guards Corps on the same day, the forces under General Foch felt that in part Rheims had been avenged.
The other section of this second phase of the Aisne consisted of the trench warfare, which solidified from September 19 to October 6, 1914, under conditions of extreme difficulty and more than extreme discomfort. It was practically the establishment of a trench campaign that lasted all winter, and revived the centuries-old fortress warfare, applying it under modern conditions to field fortifications. The French during that winter on the Aisne never quite succeeded in rivaling the mechanical precision of the German movements; the Germans, on the other hand, never showed themselves to possess the emotional fervor of the French with the bayonet.
In many places German and Allies' trenches almost touched each other. The first two weeks at the Aisne were one continual downpour, and the foundation of that ground is chalk. On the sides of the plateau of Craonne, after two weeks' rain, the chalky mud seemed bottomless. "It filled the ears and eyes and throats of our men," wrote John Buchan, "it plastered their clothing and mingled generously with their diet. Their grandfathers, who had been at Sebastopol, could have told them something about mud; but even after India and South Africa, the mire of the Aisne seemed a grievous affliction." The fighting was constant, the nervous strain exhausting, and the cold and wet were even harder to bear. There had as yet been no time to build trenches with all conveniences, such as the Germans possessed on the crest of the ridge, and the trenches of the Allies were a chilled inferno of woe.
A stretch of waste ground lay between the trenches, and often for days at a time the fire was too heavy to rescue the wounded or bring in the dead. The men in the trenches, on either side, were compelled to hear the groans of the wounded, lying in the open day after day, until exhaustion, cold and pain brought them a merciful release. In letters more than one soldier declared that the hardest thing to bear was to hear a fellow comrade shrieking or groaning in agony a few steps away for hours—even days at a time—and to be able to do nothing to help. The stench from the unburied bodies was so great that officially all the tobacco for the whole battle front was commandeered and sent to the trenches under the plateau of Craonne and on the hill to the westward, where the British First Army Corps was placed. Such, for the two weeks between September 22, 1914, and October 6, 1914, was the trench warfare during the second phase of the battle of the Aisne, a condition never after repeated in the war, for such a feat as the crossing of the Aisne could scarcely be duplicated. It was gallant, it was magnificent, and it was costly—the British casualty list for September 12 to October 6, 1914, being, killed, wounded and missing, 561 officers and 12,980 men—but it was useless, and only served to give the Allies a temporary base whereby General Foch was successful in checking the German attempt to capture the Rheims-Verdun railway. It was a victory of bravery, but not a victory of result.
During all these operations the Belgian army, now at Antwerp, had harassed the German troops by frequent sorties. The capture of the city was at once undertaken by the German Staff, following the stalemate created by the operations at the Aisne.
[CHAPTER XXV]
"THE RACE TO THE SEA"
The Germans, having failed in their first enveloping movement, attempted a second after the battle of the Marne. They tried to repeat their maneuver of August, endeavoring to overwhelm the French left; while the French, on their side, tried to overwhelm the German right. Each of these armies, by a converging movement, gradually drew its forces toward the west. No sooner did the Germans bring up a new corps on their right than the French brought up another on their left. Thus the front of the battle ascended more and more to the west and north until arriving at the sea it could go no farther. This is what has been called by French military critics "The Race to the Sea." In this race to the sea the Germans had a great advantage over the French. A glance at the map is enough to make it understood. The concave form of the German front made the lines of transportation shorter; they were within the interior of the angle, while the French were at the exterior. On the German side this movement drew into the line more than eighteen army corps, or twelve active corps, six reserve corps, and four cavalry corps.