I have said that this warfare on the frontier is pitiless. This is a general statement of a truth to which there are exceptions. One of these was a reconciliation on the battlefield between French and German soldiers who lay wounded and abandoned near the little town of Blamont. When dawn came they conversed with each other while waiting for death. A French soldier gave his water bottle to a German officer who was crying out with thirst. The German sipped a little and then kissed the hand of the man who had been his enemy. "There will be no war on the other side," he said.
Another Frenchman, who came from Montmartre, found a Luxembourger lying within a yard of him whom he had known as a messenger in a big hotel in Paris. The young German wept to see his old acquaintance. "It is stupid," he said, "this war. You and I were happy when we were good friends in Paris. Why should we have been made to fight with each other?" He died with his arms around the neck of the soldier who told me the story, unashamed of his own tears.
I could tell a score of tales like this, told to me by men whose eyes were still haunted by the sight of these things; and perhaps one day they will be worth telling, so that people of little imagination may realize the meaning of this war and put away false heroics from their lips. It is dirty business, with no romance in it for any of those fine young Frenchmen I have learned to love, who still stay in the trenches on the frontier lines or march a little way into Lorraine and back again.
Some of those trenches on either side are still filled with men leaning forward with their rifles pointing to the enemy—quite dead, in spite of their lifelike posture.
Along the German Lines Near Metz
[Correspondence of The Associated Press.]
WITH THE GERMAN ARMY BEFORE METZ, Sept. 30, (by Courier to Holland and Mail to New York.)—A five-day trip to the front has taken the correspondent of The Associated Press through the German fortresses of Mainz, Saarbrücken, and Metz, through the frontier regions between Metz and the French fortress line from Verdun to Toul, into the actual battery positions from which German and Austrian heavy artillery were pounding their eight and twelve-inch shells into the French barrier forts and into the ranks of the French field army which has replaced the crumbling fortifications of steel and cement with ramparts of flesh and blood.
Impressions at the end are those of some great industrial undertaking with powerful machinery in full operation and endless supply trains bringing up the raw materials for manufacture rather than of war as pictured.
From a point of observation on a hillside above St. Mihiel the great battlefield on which a German army endeavoring to break through the line of barrier forts between Verdun and Toul and the opposing French forces could be surveyed in its entirety. In the foreground lay the level valley of the Meuse, with the towns of St. Mihiel and Banoncour nestling upon the green landscape. Beyond and behind the valley rose a tier of hills on which the French at this writing obstinately hold an intrenched position, checking the point of the German wedge, while the French forces from north and south beat upon the sides of the triangle, trying to force it back across the Meuse and out from the vitals of the French fortress line.
Bursting shells threw up their columns of white or black fog around the edge of the panorama. Cloudlets of white smoke here and there showed where a position was being brought under shrapnel fire. An occasional aeroplane could be picked out hovering over the lines, but the infantry and the field battery positions could not be discerned even with a high-power field glass, so cleverly had the armies taken cover. The uninitiated observer would have believed this a deserted landscape rather than the scene of a great battle, which, if successful for the Germans, would force the main French Army to retreat from its intrenched positions along the Aisne River.