Fields of Victory Part 5

A few days after our Strasbourg visit we drove, furnished with General Gouraud's notes and maps, up into the heart of the "front de Champagne." You cross the wide, sandy plains to the north of Chalons, with their scanty pine-woods, where Attila met his over-throw, and where the French Army has trained and manoeuvred for generations. And presently, beyond the great military camp of pre-war days, you begin to mount into a region of chalk hills, barren and lonely enough before the war, and now transformed by the war into a scene which almost rivals the Ypres salient and Verdun itself in tragic suggestiveness.

Standing in the lonely graveyard of Mont Muret, one looks over a tortured wilderness of trenches and sh.e.l.l-holes. Close by are all the places famous through years of fighting--Souain, Navarin Farm, Tahure, the b.u.t.te de Tahure, and, to the north-west, Somme-Py, Ste. Marie-Py, and so on to Moronvilliers and Craonne. In the south-western distance I could just descry the Monts de Champagne, while turning to the north one faced the slopes of Notre Dame des Champs, and recalled the statement of General Gouraud that on that comparatively open ground the fiercest fighting of last October had taken place.

And now, not a soul, not a movement! Everywhere lay piles of unused sh.e.l.l, German and French, small heaps of hand-grenades and bundles of barbed wire. The camouflaged battery positions, the deep dug-outs and strong posts of the enemy were all about us; a dead horse lay not far away; and in front, the white crosses of the graveyard. A grim scene, under the January sky! But in the very middle of the little cemetery some tender hand had just recently fastened a large bunch of white narcissus to one of the crosses. We had pa.s.sed no one that I could remember on the long ascent; yet the flowers were quite fresh and the thought of them--the only living and beautiful thing for miles in that scarred wilderness, over which a creeping fog was beginning to gather--stayed with me for days.

The Champagne-battle-field is indeed deeply interwoven with the whole history of the war. The flower of the French Army and almost all the leading French Generals--Castelnau, Petain, Nivelle, Gouraud, have pa.s.sed through its furnace. But famous as it is, and for ever a.s.sociated with the remarkable and fascinating personality of General Gouraud, which gives to it a _panache_ of its own, it has not the sacredness of Verdun.

We had spent the day before the expedition to Champagne at St. Mihiel and Verdun. To St. Mihiel I will return in my next chapter. Verdun I had never seen, and the impression that it makes, even in a few hours, is profound. In March, 1916, I well remember at Havre, at Boulogne, at St. Omer, how intent and absorbed a watch was kept along our front over the news from Verdun. It came in hourly, and the officers in the hotels, French and English, pa.s.sed it to each other without much speech, with a shrug, or a look of anxiety, or a smile, as the case might be. When we arrived on March 6th at the Visitors' Chateau at G.H.Q.--then, of course, at St. Omer--our first question was: "Verdun?" "All right," was the quick reply. "We have offered help, but they have refused it."

No--France, heroic France, trod that wine-press alone; she beat back her cruel foe alone; and, at Verdun, she triumphed alone. Never, indeed, was human sacrifice more absolute; and never was the spiritual force of what men call patriotism more terribly proved. "The _poilu_ of Verdun," writes M. Joseph Reinach, "became an epic figure"--and the whole battle rose before Europe as a kind of apocalyptic vision of Death and Courage, staged on a great river, in an amphitheatre of blood-stained hills. All the eyes in the world were fixed on this little corner of France. For a Frenchman--"Verdun was our first thought on waking, and was never absent from us through the day."

The impression made by the battle--or rather, the three battles--of Verdun does not depend on the numbers engaged. The British Battle of the Somme, and the battles of last year on the British front far surpa.s.sed it in the number of men and guns employed. From March 21st last year to April 17th, the British front was attacked by 109 divisions, and the French by 25. In the most critical fighting at Verdun, from February 21st to March 21st, the French had to face 21 divisions, and including the second German attack in June and the triumphant French advance in December, the total enemy forces may be put at 42 divisions. But the story is incomparable! Everything contributed--the fame of the ancient fortress, the dynastic and political interests involved, the pa.s.sion of patriotism which the struggle evoked in France, the spendthrift waste of life on the part of the German Command.

After the French rally, indeed, from the first terrific bombardment, which nearly gave the German Command its coveted prey, the thing became a duel, watched by all Europe, between Petain and the Crown Prince; between the dynastic interests of the Hohenzollerns, served by a magnificent army, and the finest military and patriotic traditions of France. From day to day the public in this country watched the fluctuations of the struggle with an interest so absorbing that the names of Douaumont, Vaux, Mort Homme, c.u.mieres, the Goose's Crest, came to ring in our ears almost as the names of Hougoumont, La Haye Sainte, La Belle Alliance, rang in those of an earlier time.

Verdun, from a distance, produces the same illusion as Rheims. The Cathedral and the town are apparently still in being. They have not lost their essential outlines, and the veils of grey and purple haze between the spectator and the reality disguises what both have suffered. Then one draws nearer. One enters the famous fortress, through the old Vauban fortifications, and over the Vauban bridge--little touched, to all appearance. And presently, as one pa.s.ses along the streets, one sees that here is not a town, but only the ghost, the skeleton of a town. The roofless, windowless houses, of which the streets still keep, as in Rheims, their ancient lines, stare at you like so many eyeless skulls--the bare bones of a city. Only the famous citadel, with its miles of underground pa.s.sages and rooms, is just as it was before the battle, and as it will be, one may hope, through the long years to come; preserved, not for any active purpose of war, but as the shrine of immortal memories. Itself, it played a great part in the struggle. For here, in these dormitories and mess-rooms and pa.s.sages so far underground that even the noise of the fierce struggle outside never reached them, it was possible for troops worn out by the superhuman ordeal of the battle, to find complete rest--_to sleep_--without fear.

We entered through a large mess-room full of soldiers, with, at its further end, a kitchen, with a busy array of cooks and orderlies. Then someone opened a door, and we found ourselves in a small room, very famous in the history of the war. During the siege, scores of visitors from Allied and neutral countries--statesmen, generals, crowned heads--took luncheon under its canopy of flags, buried deep underground, while the storm of sh.e.l.l raged outside. There, in the visitors' book, one might turn to the two signatures--one of them then only a fortnight old--that all France knows:

"March, 1916--_On les aura! Petain_"

"January, 1918--_On les a! Petain_"

A courteous Commandant, telephoned to from below, came from some upper region to greet us and to show us something of the endless labyrinth of rooms, pa.s.sages and dormitories, which during the siege often sheltered thousands of men. The veteran Colonel Duhay, who was in command of the citadel during the greater part of the year-long battle--a splendid, square-built tower of a man--I saw later in Paris.

It was ill-luck not to have been able to walk with him over the tragic battle-field itself, for few men can have memories of it at once so comprehensive and so close. From the few words I had with him I retain a shuddering impression as of a slaughter-house; yet nothing could be cheerfuller or humaner than the broad soldier-face. But our talk turned on the losses of Verdun, and although these losses--_i.e._, the proportion of death to the square yard--were probably exceeded in several later battles, in none, it seems to me, has the ma.s.sacre of men on both sides left so terrible a mark on the survivors. There came a time when the French were sick of slaying, and the German dead were piled metres high on the slopes of Mort Homme and c.u.mieres; in those weeks at the end of May, when the Germans, conscious that their prestige had suffered irreparably in the hundred days--which were to have been four!--of desperate and indecisive fighting, were at the opening of that fierce last effort which gave them Fort Vaux and its hero-commander, Commandant Raynal, on June 7th--put them in short-lived possession of Thiaumont and Fleury later--and was then interrupted at the end of the month by the thunder of the Allied attack on the Somme.

After leaving the citadel and the much-injured cathedral, beneath the crypt of which some of the labyrinthine pa.s.sages of the old fortress are hewn, we drove through the eastern section of the battle-field, past what was once Fort Souville, along an upper road, with Vaux on our right, and Douaumont on the northern edge of the hill in front of us; descending again by Froide Terre, with the Cote de Poivre beyond it to the north; while we looked across the Meuse at the dim lines of Mort Homme, of the Bois des Corbeaux and the Crete de l'Oie, of all that "chess-board" of hills which became so familiar to Europe in those marvellous four months from February to June, 1916. Every yard of these high slopes has been fought over again and again, witnessing on the part of the defenders a fury of endurance, a pa.s.sion of resolve, such as those, perhaps, alone can know who hear through all their being the mystic call of the soil, of the very earth itself, the actual fatherland, on which they fight. "_We are but a moment of the eternal France_:"--such was once the saying of a French soldier, dying somewhere amid these broken trenches over which we are looking. What was it, asks M. Reinach, that enabled the French to hold out as they did? _Daring_, he replies--the daring of the leaders, the daring of the troops led. The word hardly renders the French "_audace_" which is equally mis-translated by our English "audacity." "_Audace_" implies a daring which is not rashness, a daring which is justified, which is, in fact, the military aspect of a great nation's confidence in itself.

It was the spirit of the "Ma.r.s.eillaise," says M. Reinach again--it was the French soul--_l'ame francaise_--the soul of country and of freedom, which triumphed here.

And not for France alone. At the moment when the attack on Verdun began, although the British military power was strengthening month by month, and the Military Service Act of May, 1916, which put the finishing touch to Lord Kitchener's great work, was close at hand, the French Army was still not only the princ.i.p.al, but the essential element in the Western campaign. France, at Verdun, as in the Battle of the Marne, was defending not only her own freedom, but the freedom of Europe. A few months later, when the British Army of the Somme went over its parapets at daybreak on July 1st, Verdun was automatically relieved, and it was clear to all the world that Britain's apprenticeship was past, and that another great military power had been born into Europe, on whom, as we now know, the main responsibilities of final victory were to rest. But at Verdun France fought for _us_--for England and America no less than for herself; and that thought must always deepen the already deep emotion with which English eyes look out upon these tortured hills.

That dim line on the eastern ridge, which marks the ruins of Fort Vaux, stands indeed for a story which has been entrusted by history to the living memory of France's Allies, hardly less than to that of France herself. As we pause among the crumbling trenches and sh.e.l.l-holes to look back upon the height of Vaux, I seem to see the lines of French infantry creeping up the hill, through the communication trenches, in the dark, to the relief of their comrades in the fort; the runners--eager volunteers--a.s.suring communications under the incessant hail of sh.e.l.l; the carrier-pigeons, when the fort is altogether cut off, bringing their messages back to Headquarters; the red and green signal lights shooting up from the ridge into the night. One of these runners, when the siege was nearing its end, arrived at an advance post, having by a miracle got through a terrible barrage unhurt. "You might have waited a few instants," said the Colonel, kindly. But the runner, astonished, showed the envelope. "My Colonel, look--it is written--'_urgent!_'"

That was the spirit. Or listen to this fragment from the journal of Captain Delvert, defending one of the redoubts that protect Fort Vaux:

"Six o'clock--the bombardment has just begun again. The stretcher-bearer, L----, has just been leaning a few moments--worn out--against the wall of my dug-out. His good, honest face is hollow, his eyes, with their blue rims, seem starting out of his head. '_Mon Capitaine_, I'm used up. There are only three stretcher-bearers left. The others are dead or wounded. I haven't eaten for three days, or drunk a drop of water.' His frail body is only held together by a miracle of energy. Talk of heroes--here is a true one!

"Eight o'clock. We are relieved.

"Eleven o'clock. Message from the Colonel. 'Owing to circ.u.mstances the 101st cannot be relieved.'

"_Merci!_

"What a disappointment for my poor fellows! Lieutenant X---- is lost in admiration of them. I daresay--but I have only thirty-nine of them left."

Eighteen hours later.

"The order for relief has come. We shall leave our dead behind us in the trench. Then-comrades have carefully placed them out of the pa.s.sage-way.... There they are--poor sentinels, whom we leave behind us, in a line on the parados, in their blood-stained uniforms--solemn and terrible guardians of this fragment of French soil, which still in death they seem to be holding against the enemy."

But the enemy advances inexorably, and within the fort the dead and dying multiply.

"Captain Tabourot fought like a lion," says another witness. "He was taller than any of us. He gave his orders briefly, encouraged us, and placed us. Then he plunged his hand into the bag of bombs, and, leaning back, threw one with a full swing of the arm, aiming each time. That excited us, and we did our best."

But meanwhile the enemy is stealing up behind, between the trench and the fort. Captain Tabourot is mortally hit, and is carried into the dressing-station within the fort. Commandant Raynal, himself wounded, comes to see him. "No word of consolation, no false hope. The one knows that all is over; the other respects him too deeply to attempt a falsehood." A grasp of the hand--a word from the Commandant: "Well done, _mon ami_!" But the Captain is thinking of his men. "_Mon Commandant_--if the Boches get through, it is not the fault of my company. They did all they could." Then a last message to his wife.

And presently his name is carried through the dark by a carrier-pigeon down to the Headquarters below: "The enemy surrounds us. I report to you the bravery of Captain Tabourot, seriously wounded. We are holding out." And a few hours later: "Captain Tabourot of the 142nd has died gloriously. Wound received in defending the north-eastern breach.

Demand for him the Legion of Honour."

For five days the heroic defence goes on. All communications are cut, the pa.s.sages of the fort are choked with wounded and dying men, the water is giving out. On the 4th, a wounded pigeon arrives at Headquarters. It brings a message, imploring urgently for help.

"This is my last pigeon." The following day communication is partly re-established, and a few fragmentary messages are received. "The enemy"--signals the fort--"is working on a mine to the west of the fort. Turn on the guns--quick." ... "We don't hear your artillery. Are attacked by gas, and flame throwers. Are at the last extremity." Then one message gets through from below--"Courage! we shall soon attack."

The fort waits, and at night another fragmentary message comes from Raynal asking for water and relief. "I am nearly at the end of my powers. The troops--men and officers--have in all circ.u.mstances done their duty.... You will come, no doubt ... before we are completely exhausted. _Vive la France!_"

But death and thirst--thirst, above all--are victors. On the 6th, a few hours before the inevitable end, Marshal Joffre flashed his message to the heights--in the first place, a message of thanks to troops and Commander for their "magnificent defence," in the next, making Commandant Raynal a Commander of the Legion of Honour.

On the 7th a last heroic effort was made to relieve the fort. It failed, and Raynal--wounded, with a handful of survivors--surrendered, the Germans, in acknowledgment of the heroism of the defence, allowing the Commandant to retain his sword.

What manner of men were they that fought this fight? What traditions did they represent? What homes did they come from?

M. Henri Bordeaux, himself an eye-witness, to whose admirable and moving book on _The Last Days of Fort Vaux_, I am indebted for the preceding details, to some extent answers the question by quoting a letter, addressed by his mother to the stretcher-bearer, Roger Vamier, decorated in 1915 by General Joffre himself.

"_Et toi, mon tresor_--you must have a great deal to do.... Well, do all you can to save those poor wounded!--left there in the snow and blood. My blood boils to be staying on here, when there is so much to do over there, in picking up those poor fellows. Why won't they have a woman?--there, where she could really help! It is the business of mothers to pick up those poor lads, and give them a good word. Well, you must replace the mothers, you, _mon cheri_, you must do all you can--do the impossible--to help. I see you running--creeping along--looking for the wounded. If I could only be there too!--Yes, it is my place, _mon pet.i.t_, near you.

Courage, courage!--I know it is the beginning of the end--and the end will be grand for all those who have fought in the just cause."

A month later thousands of English, Scotch, Welsh and Irish lads, men from Canada, South Africa, New Zealand, and Australia, were pa.s.sing on the Somme through a similar furnace of death and suffering to that borne by the French at Verdun. But the English ways of expression are not the French; and both differ from the American. The instinct for ringing and dramatic speech rarely deserts the Frenchman--or Frenchwoman. It is present in the letter written by Roger Vamier's mother, as in the _Ordres du Jour_ of Castelnau or Petain. Facility of this kind is not our _forte_. Our lack of it suggests the laughter in that most delightful of recent French books, _Les Silences du Colonel Bramble_, which turns upon our national taciturnities and our minimising instinct in any matter of feeling, an instinct which is like the hiding instinct, the protective colouring of birds--only anxious to be mistaken for something else. The Englishman, when emotion compels him, speaks more readily in poetry than prose; it is the natural result of our great poetic tradition; and in the remarkable collections of war poetry written by English soldiers we have the English counterpart to the French prose utterance of the war--so much more eloquent and effective, generally, than our own.

One more look round the slopes over which the light is fading. The heroism of the defence!--that, here, is the first thought. But on the part of the attackers there was a courage no less amazing, though of another sort; the effect of an iron discipline hypnotising the individual will, and conferring on the soldier such superhuman power of dying at another man's will as history--on such a scale--has scarcely seen equalled. In the first battle of Verdun, which lasted forty-eight days (February 21st to April 9th), the German casualties were over 200,000, with a very high proportion of killed. And by the end of the year the casualties at Verdun, on both sides, had reached 700,000. Opinion in Germany, at first so confident, wavered and dropped. Why not break off? But the dynasty was concerned. Fortune, _toute entiere a sa proie attachee_, drove the German Army again and again through lanes of death, where the French 75's worked their terrible will--for no real military advantage. "On the 10th of March,"

says M. Henri Bordeaux, "the enemy climbed the northern slopes of Fort Vaux. He was then from two to three hundred metres from the counter-scarp. He took three months to cross these two to three hundred metres--three months of superhuman effort, and of incredible losses in young men, the flower of the nation." The German strategic reserves were for the first time seriously shaken, and by the end of this wonderful year Petain, Nivelle, and Mangin between them had recovered from the a.s.sailants all but a fraction of what had been lost at Verdun. Meanwhile, behind the "shield" of Verdun, which was thus attracting and wasting the force of the enemy, the Allied Armies had prepared the great offensive of the summer. Italy struck in the Trentino on the 25th of June, Russia attacked in June and July, the British attacked on the Somme on July 1st. The "wearing-down" battle had begun in earnest. "Soldiers of Verdun," said Marshal Joffre, in his order of the 12th of June, "the plans determined on by the Coalition are in full work. It is your heroic resistance that has made this possible. It was the indispensable condition, and it will be the foundation, of our coming victories." "Germany"--says M.

Reinach--"during ten months had used her best soldiers in furious a.s.saults on Verdun.... These troops, among the finest in the world, had in five of these months gained a few kilometres of ground on the road to the fortress. This ground, watered with blood as no field of carnage had ever been, which saw close upon 700,000 men fall, was lost in two actions (October 24th--November 3rd and December 15th--18th), and Germany was brought back to within a few furlongs of her starting point.... Douaumont and Louvemont were certainly neither Rocroy nor Austerlitz; but Verdun, from the first day to the last, from the rush stemmed by Castelnau to the battles won by Nivelle and Mangin; Verdun, with her mud-stained _poilu_, standing firm in the tempest, who said: "They shall not pa.s.s!" _(pa.s.seront pas!_), and they have not pa.s.sed; Verdun, for the Germans a charnel-house, for us a sanctuary, was something greater by far."

With these thoughts in mind we dropped down the long hill to Verdun again, and so across the bridge and on to that famous road, the _Voie Sacree_, up which Petain, "the road-mender" (_Le Cantonnier_), brought all his supplies--men, food, guns, ammunition--from Bar-le-Duc by motor-lorry, pa.s.sing and repa.s.sing each other in a perpetual succession--one every twenty seconds. The road was endlessly broken up, sometimes by the traffic, sometimes by sh.e.l.l, and as endlessly repaired by troops specially a.s.signed to the task. And presently we are pa.s.sing the Moulin des Regrets, where Castelnau and Petain met on the night of the 25th, and the resolution was taken to counter-attack instead of withdrawing. Verdun, indeed, is the cla.s.sic ill.u.s.tration of the maxim that attack is the best defence, or, as the British Commander-in-Chief puts it in his latest dispatch, that "defensive success in battle can be gained only by a vigorous offensive." The long battle on the Meuse, "the greatest single action in history," was in one aspect a vast school, in which a score of matters belonging to the art of war were tested, ill.u.s.trated, and explained, with the same general result as appears throughout the struggle, a result insisted on by each great commander, British or French, in turn; _i.e._, that in the principles of war there is nothing new to be learnt.

Discipline, training, co-operation, attack; these are the unchanging forces the great general has at command. It depends on his own genius what he makes of them.

Verdun fades behind us, and we are on our way to the Marne. In the strange isolation of the car, pa.s.sing so quickly, as the short winter twilight comes on, through country one has never seen before and will perhaps never see again, the war becomes a living pageant on the background of the dark. Then, with the lights of Chateau-Thierry, thought jumps in a moment from the oldest army in the war to the youngest. This old town, these dim banks of the Marne, have a long history. But in the history of last year, and the closing scenes of the Great War, they belong specially to America. This is American ground.

To realise what that means, we must retrace our steps a little.

CHAPTER VI

AMERICA IN FRANCE

On March 2nd, 1917, I found myself lunching at Montreuil, then the General Headquarters of the British Expeditionary Force, with the Staff of the Intelligence Department. After lunch I walked through the interesting old town, with the Chief of the Department, and our talk turned on the two subjects of supreme importance at that moment--America and Russia. When would America come in? For that she would come in was clear. It was now a full month since diplomatic relations between Germany and the United States had been broken off, and about a week since President Wilson had asked Congress to arm American vessels in self-defence against the new submarine campaign announced by Germany in January. "It can't be long," said my companion quietly; "Germany has gone too far to draw back. And the President will have the whole country with him. On the whole I think he has been right to wait. It is from Americans themselves of course that one hears the sharpest criticism of the President's 'patience.'"

My own correspondence of the winter indeed with American friends had shown me the pa.s.sion of that criticism. But on the 2nd of March there was small further need for it. Germany was rushing on her fate. During the course of the month, England and America watched the piling up of the German score as vessel after vessel was sunk. Then on the 1st of April came the loss of twenty-eight American lives in the _Aztec_, and the next day but one we opened our London newspapers to find that on April the 2nd President Wilson had asked Congress for a Declaration of War.