CHAPTER X

GENERAL DUBAIL’S STAND

The days that followed—I may be more precise and say the three weeks that followed—were the most critical that France had ever known. Crowded together between August 20th and September 2nd came the capitulation of Namur, the defeats at Morhange, Charleroi, and Mons, the evacuation of Mulhouse, the retreats on Nancy and the Marne, the menace of von Kluck’s advance on Paris, and the migration of the President and Government of the Republic to Bordeaux. The war had begun in earnest. All along the line the soldiers of France were either making a desperate stand against superior numbers or, worse still, were retiring as fast as they could go. It was the hour of the supreme test. Except along the twenty miles between Thann and the Swiss frontier the whole line of the front had been drawn in a position chosen, not by the French, but by the Germans. Every day it was being pushed further on, and no one could say where the limit would be reached. Even the arrival of the English Expeditionary Force had made very little apparent difference. We know now how great was the part that they played in the work of saving Paris, in spite of their small numbers. But at the time all that they could do was to share in the general retreat, and make the pursuit as costly as possible for the triumphant Germans.

That was how the position in the north presented itself to the armies in the east, when they had time to look beyond their own share in the common defence, though as a matter of fact they were much too fully occupied to take the calm and dispassionate view of the situation which is now possible.

A soldier during a modern battle can see and understand nothing of what is going on except on his own immediate front. He is in a state of complete ignorance as to what may be happening to the other half of his own battalion in the next village. But these men were hundreds of miles from the events in Flanders. Even their chiefs can have known very little of what was going on. Only one thing was certain. All the news there was was bad news. Everywhere France and her armies were getting the worst of it, and all that the individual soldier could do was to obey his orders and do his own bit of fighting with all the courage and endurance he could command.

I suppose that if we could see into the minds of the rank and file of the first and second armies in those black days of disaster and doubt, we should find that the one thing that sustained them, next to their proud love of France, was the thought that they had Belfort and Epinal and Toul and Verdun behind them. They had been brought up in the belief that the four famous fortresses were to be the main defence against the invading Germans, they knew nothing of the crushing effects of mammoth siege guns, and believed that the forts of Liége were still holding out, and possibly, if they had been left to their own devices, they would have fallen back at once, as soon as they realized that the offensive was over, on the solid protection of these bulwarks of the frontier. Fortunately their generals knew better, and the series of battles that saved the entire line, and therefore France, was fought in the open country, well in advance of the fortresses. But the fine strategy and inspiring leadership of de Castelnau and Dubail and Pau and Foch, magnificent as they were, could have done nothing without the marvellous spirit of the officers and men under their command. And that spirit, after nearly a year and a half of the war, is more alive and vigorous than ever. The point is worth dwelling upon, because of its bearing on the future. The French in all probability have had their worst time and the Germans their best. But even if that is not the case, even if our Allies and we have to go through deeper waters still, we have this to depend upon, that those armies of the east, like their brother soldiers who fought at Charleroi and on the Marne, never once despaired, even when they might well have thought that their cause was hopelessly lost. Instead they first set their backs to the wall, and organized victory out of defeat, and then contentedly settled down to a method of fighting entirely foreign to the genius of their race. The fourth stage is yet to come, but as to the results of it we need have no fears.

Exactly, as it happens, a year ago, from the day on which this chapter is being written, I ended an article on a visit to the front trenches at Celles in the Vosges with these words: “The best of it all was just the one thing that it is most difficult to describe—the wonderful temper of the French troops that we passed, and sometimes talked to, on the road. In spite of cold and hardships and wounds and the constant nearness of death, these men at the front had a spirit of cheerful endurance and fearlessness that I believe nothing can conquer. If it comes to sitting in the trenches for a year looking at the German trenches fifty yards away they will sit the Germans out.” The year I spoke of has gone, and they have not sat the Germans out—yet. But they are still sitting, and before November 21st comes again—well, we shall see.

Three months before that visit to the Vosges, on August 21st, 1914, there were no trenches to sit in, except the pathetic kind of enlarged rabbit-scrapes that the men used to scoop out how and when they could. But they had not much time for digging. The enemy were hard on their heels. As soon as they knew that the French troops which had fought at Morhange were retreating, followed inevitably by those which lined the frontier of the Vosges, from the Donon down to the Ballon d’Alsace, they hurried additional regiments across the Rhine as quickly as they could, and very soon the force available for the attack amounted, it is believed, to seven army corps, or something over 300,000 men. General Dubail’s army, already reduced in size by the numerous levies made on it for the commands in the north, had also been obliged to extend its left wing in the direction of Nancy, and its centre, doubly weakened by these two causes, gave way to a certain extent, under the heavy pressure brought to bear upon it, and allowed the Germans to pour into France by Saales, Sainte Marie aux Mines, and the Bonhomme. Those who crossed the Col de Saales drove the French back as far as Ramberviller, twenty-five miles due west of the pass, and occupied Provenchères, Senones, Raon l’Etape, and St. Dié, while those who advanced by the two southern passes occupied St. Léonard, a few miles south of St. Dié, and threatened an attack on Epinal by the valley of Rouges-Eaux and the Col de la Chipotte.

That was the position—the very alarming position—a day or two after the battle of Morhange. The Col de Donon had been abandoned on the 21st, and other German troops had advanced by Badonviller and Baccarat as far as Gerbéviller and Lunéville, while a still larger army had crossed the Seille and the frontier by the Château-Salins road, and arrived nearly within striking distance of Nancy. The German front extended almost in a straight line north-west and south-east from Etain past Pont-à-Mousson, Champenoux, Lunéville, Gerbéviller, St. Benoit, (close to Ramberviller) and the valley of the Rouges-Eaux (just west of St. Dié) to the Col de Bonhomme.

The best way to arrive at a fairly clear idea of the operations that followed is, I think, to leave for the present everything that happened north of the Bayon-Lunéville road, culminating in the Battle of the Grand Couronné of Nancy, and to follow first the German advance south of the line between Lunéville and the Donon, in the department of the Vosges.

Nothing had happened so far to cause any alteration in the grand plan of campaign conceived by the general staff at Berlin before the war. Its execution had only been delayed (for about a fortnight) first by the unexpected resistance of Liége and the Belgian army, and secondly by the Alsace-Lorraine offensive. Now that these two obstacles had been disposed of the German armies were able to set themselves once again to the task of rounding up the French and English in the neighbourhood of Châlons-sur-Marne, to be operated by a simultaneous “hook” or encircling movement from the north and from the south, and so to leave open the way to Paris. From the beginning Metz was meant to be the pivot of the double advance through Belgium and through Lorraine. It was, so to speak, to represent the hinge of a pair of compasses. The left or lower leg of the compasses was composed of the armies of von Strantz, von Heeringen, and the Crown Prince of Bavaria, those which acted against Alsace and Lorraine. The right or upper leg consisted of the remaining armies, from the Crown Prince of Prussia’s to von Kluck’s. The two legs were to be gradually squeezed together till they crushed the French and English armies between them, and then—and not till then, in my opinion—Paris was to be invested. As the war went on the left leg of the compasses, which was at first meant to stretch as far as Belfort, was gradually shortened, bit by bit, under stress of circumstances. At the date at which we have arrived it only reached as far as Epinal, a little later still as far as Nancy, and when it was found that here too the resistance to the squeezing in process could not be overcome, the original left leg was discarded, or at least left where it was, and a fresh and still shorter one forged in Metz, and thrust out to St. Mihiel. But that was not till later. In the fourth week of August the original plan had not yet been modified. The part allotted to the armies commanded by the Crown Prince of Bavaria in the east was still to break through the line of frontier fortresses, and join hands with the other Crown Prince’s army somewhere near Bar le Duc, in order to carry out the encircling movement from the south.

In front of the left wing of his forces, which was now established to the west of the Vosges south of the Lunéville-Donon line, there was nothing but the open and unfortified Trouée de Charmes (the wide plain south of Nancy between Epinal and Toul), and the attenuated army of General Dubail. If they had succeeded in breaking through that human barrier, and if their companion Army Corps north of Lunéville had been equally successful in disposing of General de Castelnau’s army (two rather large suppositions) it is possible that they may have intended to bring up fresh forces and heavier siege guns for the investment of Epinal and Toul, and that the main army, without waiting for their reduction, would have been pressed forward to effect the contemplated junction with the armies operating from the north, just as von Kluck and von Hausen advanced to Namur and Charleroi while at least one of the forts of Liége was still holding out. But at any rate General Dubail’s army had to be dealt with first, and to this work they turned their immediate attention. As for Epinal, which was directly in front of their left flank, they found that it, like Belfort, was protected for some miles in front of its forts by a formidable network of trenches and wire entanglements, against which they decided not to run their heads, though the salient just north of Bruyères in the line of their furthest advance on this sector seems to show that they meant to make the attempt at first. That was the second stage in the process of shortening the lower leg of the compasses.

The position defended by Dubail’s army after the retreat from the Vosges extended from a point a few miles south of Lunéville to the Bonhomme, along the line forming the diagonal of an approximate square, (with a side twenty miles long) of which Lunéville, the Donon, the Col de Bonhomme and Epinal (nearly due south of Lunéville) were the four angles. This tract of land is watered by three smallish rivers, the Vesouze, the Meurthe, and the Mortagne, all rising in the Vosges, and flowing through shallow valleys towards Lunéville. Along the banks of each of them there is a good road and a railway. The Vesouze follows very nearly the north side of the square, and the chief towns on it are Cirey and Blamont. The Meurthe and the Mortagne flow close together, from south-east to north-west, one on each side of the diagonal. On the Meurthe the chief towns are St. Dié, Raon l’Etape, and Baccarat, and on the Mortagne, to the west of it, Rambervillers and Gerbéviller. The three rivers, after meeting in Lunéville or just below it, continue their joint course through Nancy to Frouard, five miles further north, where they join the Moselle, which rises near Belfort and flows to the west of the three other rivers through Epinal, Charmes, and Bayon, to Toul, from which it makes a steep bend to the east to Frouard, where it is joined by the Meurthe, and then flows nearly due north past Pont-à-Mousson to Metz.

It stands to reason that the position and direction of each of these rivers has had a most important bearing on the course of the campaign in this sector. Along the valleys of the Vesouze, the Meurthe, and the Mortagne, and over every yard of the Lunéville-Donon-Bonhomme triangle which they traverse, the fighting from August 21st onwards was of the most furious description, and in the top right hand corner of the triangle, towards the Donon, it still continues in the less murderous form of trench warfare. To follow it in detail through all its ups and downs and advances and retreats in that first period before the battle of the Marne is as yet practically impossible. But the general tendency of the engagements is, I think, fairly clear, though as yet very little has been written about them. The main point is that the enemy, though in some of the fights they outnumbered the French by ten to one, never succeeded in getting within twenty miles of Epinal, or (except near Gerbéviller) to the west of the line of the Mortagne, and were obliged to give up any hopes they may have had at the beginning of marching straight across the Trouée de Charmes and so getting round behind Toul. Instead of advancing due west in this way they were forced (or possibly they may have chosen) to incline north-west along the course of the Mortagne and the Meurthe towards Lunéville. Both before and after St. Dié was occupied on the 25th, after an attack that lasted for four days, there were fierce engagements at practically every town and village on and between the two rivers. Besides the bigger places which I have already mentioned there were many others, starting from the Col de Bonhomme and working up towards Lunéville, which one by one, and sometimes more than once, were the scene of furious and bloody encounters.

At la Croix aux Mines, Mandray, Entre-Deux-Eaux, Sauley-sur-Meurthe, Taintrux, Le Bois de Champ, Brouvelieures, Mortagne, la Vallée des Rouges-Eaux, le Haut Jacques, Autrey, La Bourgonce, La Salle, Nompatelize, St. Rémy, Etivalle, St. Michel, Col de la Chipotte, St. Benoit, Bru, Menille, Doncières, Xaffévillers, St. Piermont and Le Plateau de Moyen thousands of French and Germans fought and died in those few August and September days. The fighting was particularly violent at La Bourgonce, La Salle, Nompatelize, St. Rémy, Etivalle, the Col de la Chipotte and St. Dié. At the two last the number of the German dead alone was probably over 20,000. There was no question then of off-times in leafy cantonments between the spells of duty in the trenches. The men ate and slept where they could on the ground where they had fought. Day after day and hour after hour the fighting went on. Brilliant bayonet charges and desperate struggles hand-to-hand and body-to-body followed each other with hardly a moment’s break. The same positions were lost and taken over and over again, and the firing of the guns and the explosions of the shells kept up a ceaseless hurricane of noise, as the storm of shells ploughed up the green fields along those valley roads and mangled the bodies of the two armies that had been set to butcher each other to suit the purposes of the Prussian Junkers and the Kaiser’s militarist advisers. But the French soldiers never flinched, outnumbered and outweighed as they were. Above all the Chasseurs-à-pied and Chasseurs Alpins, whom the Germans feared and respected more than any other troops in General Dubail’s army, covered themselves with glory—glory that is none the less immortal, though very few individual acts of bravery will ever be recorded because most of the officers who saw them are silent in their graves. But that hardly matters. They were fighting not for glory and for recognition but for France and the freedom of the world. And they did their work. If they had failed, if the Teuton hordes had broken through between Epinal and Toul and the grand German plan had been carried out in all its completeness, then the whole defence of France would have broken down. But they did not fail. They gave their lives and France was saved.

Unhappily there was another side of all this fighting in the Vosges which was not so splendid. It is obvious that if the French soldiers quitted themselves like heroes in all this horrible strife the men they fought against were brave too. But not gallant, but not gentlemen, which the French are to a man. They had as a body imbibed too deeply the teaching of certain of their own philosophers. They had learnt or been drilled to substitute in time of war the religion of force for every other. Their _Credo_ was the antithesis of all the recognized beliefs which civilized men must inevitably hold or pretend to hold in time of peace. “I believe in the God of Battles, Maker of the rulers of the earth, who giveth the victory to those who shrink from nothing and no means in order to attain it. I believe in terrorism and pillage and destruction and death. I believe in stifling all my softer feelings, and in making the life of the people in whose country I fight a hell.”

Is that too severe a judgment? I am afraid not. No creed is consistently held or acted upon by all those who are supposedly its adherents. There are of course thousands and thousands of gallant gentlemen among the officers and the rank and file of the German armies. Innumerable letters found on their dead bodies show how the frightfulness of their fellow-soldiers shamed and angered them, and how they abominated German “Kultur” as deeply as Nietsche himself. But unhappily for Belgium and France, and more unhappily still for Germany, their opinions and example, even if they were in the majority, were powerless to control the acts of the thorough-going believers in the German war-creed. When the war is over, if not before, their voice will prevail. They will tear that creed, and perhaps the men who made it, to pieces as their Government did the treaty by which they bound themselves to respect the rights of Belgium. No nation can possibly consent to go on living under the shadow of such a disgrace as these men have brought on Germany. But for the present they must be judged by their present deeds, and it is impossible to write about the war in Alsace and Lorraine and the Vosges and the Woevre without saying something about the crimes which have been committed in the name of Germany by German soldiers. I will not weaken the case against them by repeating second-hand fairy-tales of “atrocities” which have not come under my own notice. There is enough material in the more carefully attested official reports, in what my colleague and I have been told by the victims and reputable eyewitnesses of these cruelties, and in what we have ourselves seen and heard, to prove beyond doubt that a very large number of soldiers in the German army have for some reason or other behaved during the war as brute-beasts. In this chapter I will quote only one case of “frightfulness” taken from a volume published officially by the French Foreign Office. The Foreign Office report, properly attested by the military authorities, is that at the end of August, 1914, thirty soldiers of the French 99th Regiment, having exhausted all their ammunition, were surrounded in a suburb of St. Dié by a company of Bavarian soldiers, and were shot down at close range at the moment when they were surrendering as prisoners. There is, I believe, no doubt that the butchery was deliberate, though possibly a special pleader might argue that the executioners did not know that their victims had no ammunition left and killed them either from motives of precaution or in self-defence. That line of defence cannot be adopted with regard to the numbers of instances of wilful incendiarism which cry for justice all over the invaded provinces. Many of the ruined villages which we saw in the Vosges were destroyed by shot and shell in fair fight. They are the eggs without which the omelette of war cannot be made. But that is not the case with Gerbéviller, Baccarat, Badonviller, a whole group of villages south of Raon l’Etape, and several other towns and villages in the same district, all of which have been wholly or partially destroyed by fire wantonly applied to them without a shadow of excuse on military grounds. I will reserve for another chapter the case of Gerbéviller, which, although it was perhaps the most cruel and wholesale of them all, may be fairly taken as typical of the rest. In every instance it is practically certain and generally proven that these acts of incendiarism (more common in the smaller villages where public opinion had not the same restrictive weight as in more important places) were accompanied by the murder of innocent and unoffending civilians. For the only excuse ever urged in their defence was that they were a painful necessity forced upon the Germans by the people themselves because they had fired upon them as franc-tireurs. And in practically every instance the more responsible of the inhabitants declare that that statement was a pretext and a lie.