CHAPTER XII

BATTLE OF THE GRAND COURONNÉ. I

By this brilliant series of hand-to-hand, town-to-town struggles, Dubail’s army, operating in the Bonhomme-Donon-Gerbéviller triangle, had prevented the enemy from penetrating westwards between Epinal and Toul. At the same time, on their left, de Castelnau’s men were fighting the desperate battle of the Grand Couronné of Nancy. Their line, continuing in the same direction as the valley of the Mortagne, ran from Gerbéviller across the Meurthe west of Lunéville to Crévic, and on to Amance, north of the Nancy-Château-Salins road, and some distance beyond it. It was a real pitched battle which lasted for nearly three weeks, and was one of the most important of the whole war. For on its result depended not only the fate of Nancy and of Toul but of all the other armies further north. In order to get an idea of one part of it we can hardly do better than to take our stand at the point which we have reached with the Second Army, to the west of Gerbéviller, on the Bayon-Lunéville road. From there, through the eyes of a French officer of dragoons who found time after he was wounded at Héraménil to publish an excellent little book on _La Victoire de Lorraine_ (Berger-Levrault: Nancy), we shall be able to follow in some detail the part of the battle which was fought to the west of Lunéville south of the Nancy-Lunéville road. That was where the battle was fiercest in its early stages. The section on the other side of the Nancy road we will leave till later. It was there that the XXth Army Corps held the line northwards up to Amance, and that the victory was finally won.

At one o’clock on the morning of August 19th our dragoon officer’s regiment started from near Altkirch, where they had formed part of General Pau’s army, for some uncertain destination further west. The Colonel, of course, knew where they were bound, but he kept his own counsel, and the junior officers could only speculate. Clearly, however, since they were being withdrawn from one successful offensive, they were wanted to smash the Germans somewhere else, either in Lorraine over the border, which was over-run (they believed) by French cavalry, or in Belgium, where report said that the enemy had been pulled up short in front of Liége.

After an interminable train journey by Belfort, Lure and Epinal, they reached Charmes in the middle of the night, rested for a few hours, and then started towards Lunéville. This time they felt there could be no doubt. They were making for the frontier, and next day would certainly see them in the annexed province. It was a long march, but the sun was shining brightly on the forest of Charmes, the valley of the Moselle on their left, and the hills of Lorraine in front of them, and everyone was in the best of spirits. Then suddenly there came an unexpected check. An orderly rode up to the Colonel with despatches, the regiment was halted at a little village on the road half way between Bayon and Lunéville, and there they spent the rest of the afternoon and the night of the 21st in ignorant inaction. Next morning everything was changed. The sunshine had gone out of the air, a steady drizzle was falling, and when the Colonel informed his officers that they were to be attached to an infantry division which was to organize a line of defence behind Lunéville they could hardly believe their ears and began to wonder anxiously why, instead of continuing the march to the frontier, they were ordered to fall back on Einvaux, on the south side of the Bayon-Lunéville road.

It was still raining when they reached the road, and they were obliged to halt to let a long convoy, which was passing along it across their front from east to west, go by. They waited five minutes, ten minutes, half an hour, and still the stream of men and horses poured on and on, an odd jumble of peasants’ carts, farm-carts, tradesmen’s carts, and every imaginable kind of country vehicle, plodding along drearily through the rain, the soldiers who were driving them huddled under the awnings, and all the ammunition and provision carts piled high with wounded. It must at least, they thought, be the convoy of a whole Army Corps. But why was all this mass of men and vehicles hurrying along in the mud, away from Lunéville, towards Bayon? Their hearts began to misgive them. They asked some of the drivers what it all meant, but no one seemed to understand and no one answered, until at last they stopped a non-commissioned officer and from him learnt part of the incredible truth—that the triumphant army which had invaded Lorraine was in full retreat.

After that they waited no longer. The melancholy string of carts which stretched along the road in both directions as far as they could see was halted to let them through, and they continued their march to their cantonments at Einvaux, five or six miles south of the road. There the young dragoon officer was at once given his marching orders. He was to take with him half a dozen troopers, cross the Meurthe and the forest of Vitrimont as far as the Lunéville-Nancy road, and try and get in touch with the enemy, who were pressing hard on the heels of the retreating troops.

When he reached the Bayon-Lunéville road again he had on each side of him two railways running nearly due north and south and cutting the road (which to the east crosses the Mortagne at Lamath, and then turns northward past Xermaménil, Rehanviller, and Hériménil to Lunéville) at a distance of about three miles apart. The one on the right curves away behind to Gerbéviller, the one on the left to Bayon, eventually to meet some distance to the south at Epinal. In front, to the north, both of them join the railway which runs from Lunéville to St. Nicolas-du-Port round the lower edge of the forest of Vitrimont, following closely the course of the Meurthe. On the further side of the forest the road from Lunéville to Dombasle, St. Nicolas-du-Port, and Nancy stretches across from right to left, and, as you see it on the map, the whole area composed of the forest and the ground beyond, as far as the Lunéville-Nancy road, is shaped like a feeding-cup, with Lunéville for the handle and Dombasle for the spout. North-west of Lunéville, along the Dombasle road, comes first the Faubourg de Nancy, and then two miles and four miles further on the villages of Vitrimont and Hudiviller, with the farm of Léomont midway between them, standing up on much higher ground just to the north of the road. In the parallelogram between the two railways south of the forest (which is about five miles long by two and a half deep) there are two villages, first Mont (with a bridge over the Mortagne), and then a little further west Blainville, both of them on a road which runs parallel to the Meurthe and quite close to it. At the point where this road crosses the Dombasle-Bayon railway there is another small village called Damelevières, and, also on this railway and a mile south of it, the village of Charmois. Taking a wider view of the whole terrain, the Lunéville-Dombasle road and the railway running round the forest with the two railways south of it and the stretch of the Bayon-Lunéville road between them form a rough figure of eight. To the west of the lower half of it trenches had been dug that morning on the plateau south of the Meurthe by the troops under the command of General Bigot, one of General Dubail’s brigadiers. The plateau of Saffais, midway between the Meurthe and the Moselle, was occupied by the 64th division, and on their right another division, the 74th, guarded the gap between Saffais and the Mortagne. Between them they formed a curtain of troops which was to play a very important part in the coming battle, which was fought chiefly over the ground covered by the figure of eight, but partly also further south, below the Bayon-Lunéville road, as far as the line between Bayon and Gerbéviller.

When the little party of dragoons once more reached the road, at the level crossing where it cuts the line from Epinal to Nancy, it was still covered with a dense mass of fugitives. This time it was not merely a procession of carts but of the army itself, the soldiers of the XVth and XVIth Army Corps. It was the final stage of the retreat which had begun after their defeat in front of Morhange and Saarburg by the armies of Metz, of the Crown Prince of Bavaria, and of General von Heeringen. For two days, by all the roads that cross the frontier between Vic and Réchicourt and meet on the south-east side of Lunéville, they had come crowding along to this harbour of refuge, the angle between the Mortagne and the Meurthe, where they were to find sanctuary behind the curtain of troops prepared by General Dubail and General Bigot. Infantry of the line, chasseurs, artillery, young men of the active army, territorials, troops of peasants, women and children and old men, some in carts and some on foot, all mixed up in inextricable confusion with the soldiers and regimental wagons, the drivers flogging their worn-out horses in the vain effort to make them move faster, the men on foot, almost as many of them wounded as not, too tired or too weak to get out of the way, marching anyhow without any formation or any attempt to keep to their own companies, splashing along in a slough of mud, wet to the bone by the ceaseless rain, without discipline, without courage, almost without thought, the tragic procession filed slowly by, away from the enemy, away from the frontier that they had been sent to defend.

But only for the time being, and only for two days. That was the marvel of it. By their failure—in face of the impossible task by which they were confronted—they had thrown the whole scheme of the eastern campaign out of gear. The XXth Army Corps under General Foch, which had the position on their left at Morhange, was forced to retire with them, and worse still would have befallen the corps from the Midi and the Pyrenees if it had not been for the steadying influence of the men of Lorraine and the magnificent rearguard action which they fought as they retreated steadily and in perfect order to their position in front of Nancy, marching by the roads to the north of Lunéville and the Meurthe. Much the same thing had happened on the right, as we have already seen. The advanced regiments of Dubail’s army, finding their left uncovered, were also obliged to give up their successful offensive and fall back on Baccarat, Raon l’Etape, and St. Dié, leaving to the enemy the strategical advantage of the positions on the crests of the Vosges, and at the same time prolonging their line westwards to the angle between the Mortagne and the Meurthe, so as to stand between the fugitives and the pursuing Germans and join in the one object that now mattered—the defence of Nancy.

That, then, was how the scene was staged for the first act of the Battle of the Grand Couronné on August 23rd. There was no question of the defence of Lunéville. It might possibly have been attempted, and successfully attempted, by the men whom we have just seen straggling along the road to Bayon. But they were not ready for so great a task yet. So the town was abandoned. The enemy marched into it without any resistance on the 23rd, and the line was drawn further back, behind Lunéville and behind the Mortagne instead of in front of them. On the left, from the Meurthe to Amance, were Foch and his men, the XXth Army Corps with its heart of gold—the famous 11th Division de Fer. Of them we need have no fear. What man can do they will do. But those others, who have retired in confusion behind Bigot’s covering troops, prolonging, between the Meurthe and the Mortagne, the line occupied by the XXth—what of them? This of them, not in my own words, but as they were seen by the young lieutenant of dragoons whom we left on his way to the Meurthe to look for the enemy—

“Ils se sont reformés avec une souplesse meridionale étonnante. Et ce fut un sujet d’admiration sans pareil, que de voir ces soldats hier encore battus, découragés, revenir ardents à la bataille deux jours après, leurs regiments reformés, les brigades dans la main du chef—lutter en héros—et vaincre!” And again: “Ce sont ces mêmes troupes qui, dans trois jours, reformées, vont contribuer à l’héroïque défense de la trouée, et ne laisseront pas un seul instant branler la muraille vivante dressée contre l’envahisseur: chaque soldat deviendra un rampart infranchissable. _Miles murus erit._”

On the right, too, then, as well as on the left, France had an army of heroes, all the more invincible because they were thirsting to blot out the memory of Morhange. They were to have the chance they wanted. From all directions through the forest of Vitrimont and along the roads south of Lunéville the enemy’s vanguard was converging on the angle between the two rivers. The rain of heavy shells which all day long had been speeding up the French retreat was continued now to cover the German advance. Far off across the forest, from the plateau where the farm of Léomont crowns the ridge that runs along the north side of the Nancy road, the 75’s of the XXth corps were firing at the big German batteries behind Lunéville. Suddenly, as the dragoons advanced towards the Meurthe, the farm burst into flames, which shot up like a huge bonfire into the crimson evening sky, streaked with the screaming shells and specked with the white puffs of the shrapnel which littered farm and road and plateau with wounded and dying men. At Mont, the little village where the two rivers meet, a battalion of Chasseurs Alpins, who had just come through the forest, were engaged in blowing up the bridge over the Meurthe. They told them that not a Frenchman was left on the other side, and warned them not to go on, as the forest was full of German scouts. The lieutenant’s orders, however, were to see, and not only to hear, where the enemy were, so, as his men were ready for anything, they crossed the river by a ford five hundred yards lower down, and advanced along one of the numerous rides through the forest till a brisk fusillade put the matter beyond a doubt. Then they rode back, without a scratch, to make their report, first to the Colonel, and then to the General at Bayon. The night and the next day passed without any vigorous action on the part of the enemy, though some of their patrols crossed the Meurthe. They were probably themselves not too fresh after their long forced march from beyond the frontier, and wanted to collect their strength and their forces for the grand attack.

On August 24th the storm burst at last. From Damelevières and Mont on the near side of the forest of Vitrimont, from Lunéville along the Bayon road, and out of the two smaller forests of Vacquenat and Clairlieu, which, from Lamath on the Mortagne, stretch along each side of it up to the most western of the two railways, the enemy came pouring on, battalion after battalion, regiment after regiment, till they had nearly got up to the concave sweep of the French defensive position, extending from the Sappais plateau eastwards across the road and railway in the direction of Gerbéviller. At the same time the German guns began to speak, and along the whole French front a hurricane of explosive shells and shrapnel ploughed and tore up a belt of ground over a mile deep. An hour after midday, in brilliant sunshine this time, no longer under the depressing rain, the French batteries opened fire and went on firing all through the afternoon and night, after a time without any sustained reply from the enemy except for one general cannonade before sundown.

If you are standing on the outskirts of a modern battle—say at a distance of a mile from the nearest battery, for a civilian is not likely to get much closer in these days—you hear what I may call the symphony of it far better than those who are actually taking part in the fighting, who are deafened to all other sounds but the guns that fire and the shells that burst near them, and the rifles of their own company. To the spectator, when heavy guns, field guns, rifles, and machine guns are all booming and banging and rattling at the same time, the noise is so tremendous that it seems that it must be beyond the limits of human endurance to face the storm of steel and fire. At the hottest moments it keeps changing curiously and horribly in character, volume, and tempo, rising and falling with alternating diminuendo and crescendo and hurrying and slackening pace. It is all extraordinarily relentless. Sometimes the deafening volleys of reports sound like the clattering of a clumsy, lumbering wagon, jolting heavily over the frozen ruts of a rough country lane; sometimes like the brisk hammering of thousands of carpenters and rivetters at work on thousands of wooden joists and steel plates; sometimes like the rumbling of hundreds of heavy goods-trains thundering and bumping over uneven points and meeting every now and then in hideous collision. Against the changing undercurrent and background of sound and confusion the different kinds of reports are always distinguishable—the heavy slow boom of the big guns, the sharp vicious bang of the field pieces, with their lightning-like velocity and shattering irresistible force, the shrieks of the shells, the whistle of the bullets, the crackling and spitting and spluttering snap of the lebels and mannlichers, the rapid pitiless tapping and rattling of the machine guns, and most awful of all, I think, the sudden unexpected silences, which make you hold your breath and wait—like a condemned murderer with the noose round his neck must wait on the scaffold—for the dreadful moment which you know will come when the storm will all begin over again _da capo_, and in the twinkling of an eye hundreds and hundreds of living vigorous men will be struck down dead. Mercifully few things are so false as the saying that every bullet has its billet. Otherwise not a man of the armies that fought in front of Nancy would be left.

Soon after the great battle, long before nature had begun to heal the gaping wounds that French and German had made in the bosom of the brown old earth, I or my French colleague or both of us visited most of the roads north and south of the Meurthe and north and west of the Mortagne which cross the ground on which it was fought. The whole country—the once happy villages, the wooded hills and wide rolling plains of grass and stubble fields with never a hedge and hardly a ditch—is one vast field of battle and one huge cemetery. From part of it the German flood of invasion was just beginning to recede. What was left of the towns and villages and farms, which had first withstood its advance like massive breakwaters and then been submerged as the tide of battle ebbed and flowed, looked much more like piles of rugged and weather-beaten rocks than human habitations. Everywhere the fields had been drenched with the blood of French and Germans. Everywhere they were scarred with deep shell-holes surrounded by great clods of brown earth scattered in all directions. It is a characteristic feature of the Lorraine country that in many places the roads, when they run between two belts of woodland, are bordered on each side by level stretches of grass, fifty or sixty yards wide. In these roadside glades—because roads lead to towns and villages, and because armies move more easily along them than over the soft fields—the shell-holes were so close together that often they were almost touching. In other places, where only a single line of trees marked the two sides of the road, trunk after trunk had been cut straight through by the shells, or whole rows of them ruthlessly felled to open up the line of fire. And everywhere there were blown-up bridges, broken telegraph poles, hanging wires, hop-gardens scorched and withered by sheets of fire, blackened corn-stooks rotting where they stood, ploughs and farm-carts twisted and smashed, festering bodies of dead horses in hideously ungainly attitudes, rifles, bayonets, caps, helmets, coats, saddles, haversacks, socks, shirts, boots, water-bottles, all kinds of things that men have made and used and worn, all manner of rubbish that once had form and beauty—a horrible unsightly jumble and litter of wreckage and decay, a tragedy of untellable noise and fury and suffering and death. And then there were the dead themselves—the pitiable little heaps of clothes, red or blue or grey, that once were men, that helped to make this tragedy and fell its victims. Most of them had been buried and hidden away in the shelter of the earth. But here and there they were still lying, sometimes prone on their faces as they fell, more often carefully laid on their backs, staring up at the sky with unseeing eyes. Some looked peaceful and at rest. Others had suffered horribly before they died, and their coal-black faces were twisted and drawn, and their outstretched arms and hands clutched at emptiness in an agony of intolerable pain.

The three weeks’ battle was now well under way. On the first day the opening rush of the German attack had spent itself in vain against the French right wing south of the Meurthe. The fire of Morhange had done its work. It had forged a tough line of Ironsides, which the Bavarian corps could neither bend nor break, and during the night they began to fall back toward the Mortagne leaving masses of dead behind them. A French cavalry patrol, sent out early on the morning of the 15th along the Bayon-Lunéville road to reconnoitre, got as far as Lamath, on the left bank of the river, before they found the enemy. During the day the village was gallantly carried by a battalion of Chasseurs-Alpins. Further south, in the triangle beyond the road and the forest of Vacquenat, the enemy held on more persistently to the ground which they had gained, and on the 25th and 26th at Einvaux, Clayeures, Réménoville, Rozelieures and other villages between the two rivers they were only driven back step by step as the result of most determined and gallant efforts on the part of the French. The loss of life on both sides was very great. A little stream which flows through Réménoville into the Mortagne was so choked with dead that the cavalry found it impossible to water their horses in it. All over the field of battle, especially in the woods, the air was tainted with the smell of putrefying bodies. But death and wounds had no effect on the morale of the two French Army Corps. Now that they had made their stand they were irresistible. They were constantly attacking instead of being attacked, and retreat was everywhere turned into advance. At the same time the chief weight of the German counter-attack—for though they were retiring they were always trying to make ground—was gradually shifted southwards away from the Bayon road towards Gerbéviller and Moyen, higher up the river, probably in the hope of breaking through between the XVth corps and the First Army on their right. But no breach was made. On the 27th a Colonial Regiment was fighting a little to the west of the martyred town. They had suffered severely and had lost two colonels since the 24th. A third came to join them, reported himself to the brigadier, rode forward towards his men and was knocked over and killed by a shell before he had been ten minutes in command. But still his men and all the other regiments fought on, the batteries continually shifted their positions from one place to another with wonderful mobility, some of the villages where the fighting was hottest were taken and retaken two or three times over, and step by step the long line of French bayonets forced the enemy back towards and at some points beyond the two rivers.

At last, on September 4th, though the battle was still far from won, the great attack had been so effectively checked that it was found possible to move the XVth corps across to the Argonne, to help General Sarrail and the Third Army in their struggle against the Crown Prince. From the moment when they had assumed the offensive on August 25th, they had fought with extraordinary courage. In two days one regiment alone, the 112th of the line, had forty-eight officers killed and wounded out of sixty-one. But losses had no effect on them now. The past was wiped out, and both during the defence of Nancy, and later on in the Heights of the Meuse and the Argonne, especially at Vassincourt, they took a prominent share in the victories by which General Sarrail relieved the pressure on Verdun. From every point of view the story of what they did and suffered and the way in which—like a ship on her maiden voyage—they found themselves after their first defeat, was and is one of the most significant features of the war. For it means that France cannot and will not be beaten. The steadying support and fellowship which they received in the hour of crisis from the sorely pressed corps on either side of them, their own heroic recovery, and the confident and confidence-inspiring leadership of the generals under whose command they redeemed themselves from the reproach of their momentary failure, all point to the same conclusion—the invincible solidarity of the whole of the French armies. On August 20th the chain of the eastern armies snapped at its weakest point. By the 25th the jagged ends of the broken link had been welded together and it was firmly joined up, stronger than it had ever been, with those on each side of it. Morhange might have been the beginning of another Sedan. Instead it was the prelude to the glorious triumph of the Battle of the Grand Couronné of Nancy.