CHAPTER XVIII

THE ATTACK ON THE RIVER FORTS

In following the course of the war in the eastern provinces up to this point we have seen first of all how the tide of it ebbed and flowed for five weeks along the line of the frontier, that is to say, the river Seille and the range of the Vosges. Broadly speaking, the net result of this five weeks of fighting was that on the left or northern section of the line, from a point a little east of Nomeny nearly as far as the Donon, the French had pushed the enemy back to the frontier; that in the centre from near the Donon to about Ste. Marie aux Mines, half way along the Vosges, the Germans still held a footing in France in the Department of the Vosges; but that on the right of the line the French were a little way across the frontier in Southern Alsace.

We have seen, secondly, that behind this first line there was another, roughly parallel to it, running from Pont-à-Mousson past Dombasle and Gerbéviller and then on to St. Dié in the direction of the channels of the Moselle, the Meurthe, and the Mortagne, along which the Battle of the Grand Couronné was fought.

Beyond this second line there was, and is, a third, which stretches from Verdun along the valley of the Meuse to Toul, from which it is continued to Epinal and Belfort—the line or barrier of the great frontier fortresses. The whole of the war so far on the part of the invaders has been a sustained and desperate attempt to get near enough to this wall—against which the French had their backs—to batter it down. On their left, on the Belfort-Epinal section, they had failed, in a military sense, to get anywhere near it. In the centre, from Epinal to Toul, they had equally failed, thanks to the resistance of Dubail and de Castelnau, to come within striking distance. On the right, from Toul to Verdun, they had for the third time failed, in so far that neither Toul, which was protected by the armies in front of Nancy, nor Verdun, which was defended twelve miles in advance by the Third Army under General Sarrail, had ever fired more than an occasional shot at the enemy even from any of their outlying forts.

On the other hand, as the result of the advance of the main German right before the Battle of the Marne, the armies commanded by the Crown Prince of Prussia and the Duke of Wurtemburg had succeeded in turning Verdun, so that although the Germans had never got up to the wall of the fortresses, much less broken through it, they had, on the Verdun-Toul section, got to the farther side of it and the Meuse. There was a time, before the point which we have now reached, and before the Battle of the Marne, when, east and west of this stretch of the Meuse, two French armies, part of General Sarrail’s force and part of the left wing of the Second Army, with the Toul garrison force to help them, were actually fighting back to back, on opposite sides of the river. But the more important part of this double engagement—Sarrail against the Crown Prince of Prussia—was on the west side of the Meuse, and does not therefore belong, strictly speaking, to the scope of this book; the fighting on the right bank, except that extending a few miles south of Verdun on its east side, between part of its garrison army and part of the garrison army of Metz, was not at first very serious. There was, as I have said, at that time a gap of some miles, across the base of what afterwards became the St. Mihiel triangle, in the otherwise continuous line of the two opposing forces.

But in the period immediately following their defeat at the Grand Couronné the enemy began to attack this part of the barrier of fortresses with extraordinary vigour; on the rest of the line, the part with which we have already dealt, they confined themselves on the whole to the task of maintaining the positions to which, after their first advance, they had been driven back, and it was the fighting which resulted in the formation of the St. Mihiel wedge that became the really interesting part of the eastern campaign.

Before, however, going on to talk about the St. Mihiel business, and the attack on the northern half of the fortress line, something, I think, ought to be said about another fortified position, the only one between the great Verdun-Belfort fine and the frontier, the solitary fort of Manonviller, a few miles east of Lunéville, which stood alone between it and the enemy. The mystery of Manonviller also stands alone, or almost alone, in the history of the war. I know very little about it; no one, I fancy, knows much, except, perhaps, the high authorities and some members of the garrison, and these last are prisoners in Germany. It was supposed to be immensely strong and considerably feared by the Germans. There are many stories about its fall which may or may not be true. Some people say that the garrison only lost four or five killed and wounded, that right at the beginning of the attack it was found that the telephone communication with Toul had been cut off, and even that its guns were never fired at all. But in any case it is certain that the garrison of nine hundred men surrendered on August 28th after a two days’ bombardment, probably carried out by two Austrian 305’s stationed on the frontier at Avricourt, and that it was loudly whispered and widely believed that there was something queer about the matter. Since Longwy was able to hold out for three weeks there cannot, I am afraid, be much doubt that there was something curious about the surrender of its stronger sister-fort, which was swept out of the way of the German advance like a sand-castle by the waves of the sea.

After the Battle of the Grand Couronné the army of the Crown Prince of Bavaria occupied a front extending to the north-west from the frontier opposite Lunéville, past Pont-à-Mousson and Thiaucourt in the direction of Verdun, stopping some distance short of the point at which the left of the Crown Prince of Prussia’s army began. The left wing, as far as Thiaucourt, was kept busy in preventing the French from advancing on Saarburg and Metz; the right, reinforced by part of the Metz army, began at this time a determined forward movement across the plain of the Woevre to the wooded Hauts de Meuse. They had two objects in view: to break through the line of the fortresses between Verdun and Toul, and to cross the river and join hands with the right wing of the Crown Prince’s army so as to encircle Verdun.

The fortress of Toul is almost exactly half-way between Epinal and Verdun, about forty miles from each. In the lower stretch of country, the Trouée de Charmes, which had been so gallantly defended by the 75’s and Chasseurs-à-pied of the First Army, there are no forts. Between Toul and Verdun the French position was much stronger. East of the Meuse the Hauts de Meuse slope gradually down to the river, broken at intervals by a series of deep and precipitous ravines, guarded by numerous forts, ancient and modern. On the north the district is bounded by the Verdun-Metz railway, below which is the plain of the Woevre, and on the south by the quick-flowing Rupt de Mad, which runs from near Commercy on the Meuse north-east past Thiaucourt to Arnaville, where it falls into the Moselle close to Metz. The chain of forts extends all along the Meuse, on both sides of the stream. South of the Rupt de Mad, between Commercy and the Moselle (which here takes a sharp bend north-east from Toul, almost parallel to the Rupt de Mad, till it is joined at Frouard by the Meurthe) the forts of Liouville, Gironville, Jouy, Lucey, Bruley, and St. Michel, point their guns to the east and north, towards the German frontier. Lower down, on the right bank of the river, the guns of the Camp des Romains, a little south of St. Mihiel, like those of Forts Genicourt and Troyon to the north of the town, command much of the surrounding country and are ready to dispute (or rather were ready to dispute) the passage of the river, and still further north are the southern defences of Verdun, facing up the channel of the stream, on the further or left bank of which the Fort des Paroches, close to St. Mihiel, looks across the river to the east.

The real grand attack on this formidable position began about September 19th, I suppose when there were enough forces available. But before that there was a determined assault on Fort Troyon—once again on September 8th, the date which was to have been pregnant with such glorious possibilities for the Kaiser, the day of the most furious attack in front of Nancy, the last day before the Germans began their retreat from the Marne. It is worth going back to, for the defence of Troyon during both of the two bombardments which it suffered was one of the most gallant stands of the campaign. Earlier still the Crown Prince had tried to bombard it in a feeble sort of way, but apparently without much effect, for on September 8th, after the attack from the east had begun, an officer of the garrison wrote to his wife, “Nous avons été tranquilles pendant trente-sept jours,” that is to say, from the beginning of the war.

Even the day before, so peaceful was the tranquillity, this same officer had been out partridge-shooting. It looks as if it might be a fairly good partridge country, though to English eyes there is rather a lack of cover. The fort stands fairly high, and far off to the south, across the bare sweep of the down-like grass and stubbles, you can see higher still the jagged outline of the Camp des Romains, silhouetted against the sky like the sand dunes at Sandwich on a slightly larger scale. (At that time, of course, the Camp des Romains was still in the hands of the French.) Troyon itself is not very large. Outside it looks the most innocent thing in the world—a more or less quadrangular collection of rounded gravel banks, thickly covered with grass. Inside there are—or were—deep wide ramparts and ditches and vaults and walls of earth and solid masonry and iron—and the guns (155’s) and the steel cupolas.

On the evening of the 7th the garrison received news that a strong column coming from the direction of Metz (through the gap between the French Second and Third and the German Fifth and Sixth Armies) had reached Mouilly and St. Remy in the Hauts de Meuse, a little way south of Les Eparges, and five miles north-east of Troyon, and the next morning they were at Seuzey, nearly due east of the fort and only three miles away. At eight o’clock the bombardment began, and by eleven the German siege-mortars of 150 millimetres, concealed in deep ravines where the French gunners could not get at them, had dropped one hundred and eighty shells into the fort, which, though they only killed one man and wounded four, had knocked out seven of the French guns. The garrison were clearly in a bad position. All the French troops which had been on that side of the Meuse had crossed the river to join the final stages of the Battle of the Marne, so that they could count on no immediate support, though they knew that a division of cavalry and a regiment of artillery had left Toul early that morning. But there was no chance of their arriving till next day. The Governor of Verdun telephoned soon after the bombardment began to tell them that the success of the big battle on the other side of the river depended on their holding out for forty-eight hours; the commandant replied that they would—and prayed that the gun cupolas might not be smashed. Then Verdun telephoned again to say that they were sending an aeroplane to spot the enemy’s gun positions for them, but as they could not show themselves on the parapets that was cold comfort. At three, by which time four hundred shells had fallen, there was a short breathing space of comparative quiet, and they were able to take stock of the extensive damage done by the shells, of which, fortunately, about one in four failed to burst. Then came a third message to say that if the worst came to the worst the men were to take shelter in the ammunition cellars, but that the fall of the fort would be a grave disaster, and, in fact, that they positively must hold out for the success of the operations across the Meuse.

From half-past four in the afternoon to half-past seven there was another storm of shells, and then again a lull, and more stock-taking. Even though the vaulted shelters in the fort are immensely solid, the casualties were surprisingly light. Only eight more men had been wounded, so that the total number of deaths caused by four hundred shells was only one. There had been many hair-breadth escapes, but though the defences were crumbling to pieces before their eyes—when they could see for the blinding clouds of black smoke which hung about for two or three minutes after each explosion—so far they were not hopelessly broken in. In the bombardment of modern forts that is the principal factor—since on their standing depends the lives of the gunners—that and the resisting powers of the gun embrasures and cupolas, which cannot, however, last for ever. Their destruction is only a matter of time.

With that prospect in front of them, and also the practical certainty of a night attack, perhaps by infantry as well, the garrison were quite remarkably calm and resolute. Some of them even managed to snatch an hour or two of sleep, and all were thirsty enough to drink, though only one or two were able to eat anything.

During the night a brisk fusillade every twenty minutes or half-hour up to three o’clock was all that they had to put up with, except for several false alarms raised by the sentries of imaginary enemies trying to cross the barbed-wire protections, which kept everybody’s nerves on edge. The besiegers had evidently concluded that the fort was not yet sufficiently broken up to make an infantry attack feasible. So at about five, just after the fort of Les Paroches had rung up to say that they could do nothing to help them, as their guns could not reach the German positions, the 150’s began again, and one of the first shots hit an ammunition store and exploded about twenty 90-millimetre shrapnel shells. Then came another message (they must have found the telephone rather a comfort in their isolated position), this time from Commercy, to say that the 2nd Cavalry Division from Toul was well on the way to relieve them, and had reached Buxerulles on the Commercy-Fresne road, north-east of St. Mihiel, hardly more than twelve miles off. But it was not till well on in the night, nearly twenty-four hours later, that the Toul division at last arrived, and before that time the garrison had gone through a still more severe bombardment.

The day began with a white flag incident, or rather with the appearance of two German cavalrymen accompanied by a bugler, and carrying a large flag of truce. The commandant went forward to speak to them—they had stopped thirty yards the other side of the wire entanglements—and three times they summoned him to surrender the fort. To the first summons he answered simply, “Never”; to the second, “France has given me charge of the fort and I will blow it up sooner than surrender it”; and to the last, “F.... moi le camp, je vous ai assez vus ... A bientôt, à Metz!” So that was the end of them and their mission.

Up to now the guns bombarding them, as far as the garrison could make out, consisted of a battery of 150’s at the edge of the wood of Lamorville, about five miles to the east of the fort, and a field battery of 77’s, posted between one and two miles away on the reverse side of Hill 259, called La Gouffière. There were also some infantry engaged in digging trenches on the Signal of Troyon, close by, where the commandant had shot his partridges on the 7th. (On the 8th, in one of the lulls in the bombardment, he had two shots himself with 90 shrapnel at the men on his partridge ground, and rather spoilt their excavating work, but then the 150’s began again.) On the second day, after the white flag and its bearers had taken their departure, the bombardment began again, with greatly increased severity, as the enemy had now brought up some 280’s and 305’s, but in spite of the extraordinary havoc which they produced the plucky garrison still continued to serve their guns as best they could without any thought of surrender. When night fell there was another alarm of an infantry attack. This time there was no doubt about it. They could make out a black mass of men advancing towards the south cupola of the fort, and some of them were already busy cutting the barbed wire in front of it. The commandant, whose diary of the siege I have followed in this account, got his men together, ordered most of them under cover, and then opened fire on the swarm of assailants with machine-guns. That was too much for the Germans, and they broke and fled, leaving the ground strewn with their dead and wounded. Still later in the night he was knocked over and wounded in several places by fragments of a 305 shell which fell only a yard behind him. But as soon as his wounds were dressed he was up again, commanding and encouraging his men, and still the fort held out through the dark night, continually lit by the explosion of the bursting shells. And then, at last, the division from Toul arrived (I presume that the cavalry had had to wait at Buxerulles for the slower troops who were following them), the enemy were forced to abandon the bombardment not a moment too soon, and the commandant was carried off to hospital at Verdun (where he received the Croix de Guerre), but not before he had left fluttering on the crumbling parapet the flag of France. On the next day, and the next, and the next, further fierce onslaughts on the fort by large numbers of Germans were driven back with great slaughter by the garrison, strongly reinforced by the cavalry division and a Toul battery of 75’s, and the attack on Troyon was finally abandoned on the 13th. The German losses in front of the fort, as the result of the five days’ fighting and a second unsuccessful attack which they made on it a week later, were between seven and ten thousand men.

This splendid defence of Troyon was typical of what happened in several of the Meuse forts when the enemy, on September 20th, resumed their efforts, but with many more troops, to force their way across the Hauts de Meuse to the river. Having reoccupied Thiaucourt, on the Rupt de Mad, eight miles north-west of Pont-à-Mousson, they took up a position well to the west of it, with a long front extending north and south in front of St. Mihiel, through Heudicourt (eight miles north-east of the town) along the Hauts de Meuse. The gap in the line of the German front between the Fifth and Sixth Armies was now at last permanently filled up, for the first time during the war.

From this forward position they began a systematic bombardment of Troyon, les Paroches, the Camp des Romains, Liouville, and the other river forts. Their base position behind this line reached from Thiaucourt to Fresnes, on the edge of the Hauts de Meuse, seventeen miles across the plain in the direction of Verdun, and ten miles short of it. This position it is worth while to notice with some care, because it forms the base of the triangle of which St. Mihiel (of which we shall hear something) forms the apex. Its strength lay in the fact that it had Metz, with its big supplies of stores and men, less than twenty miles behind it, with direct railway communication; its weakness in its exposure to flank attacks, on its right to the north by the garrison army of Verdun, on its left by that of Toul and the left wing of de Castelnau’s army. The driving force of the Metz supplies of men and ammunition from the rear was strong enough to enable the centre of the German line to push forward like the point of a wedge to St. Mihiel in the west. But the lateral pressure of the two French forces on their right and left flanks was also strong and compelled them, as the point of the wedge advanced, to extend their forces on each side of it, facing outwards in two almost opposite directions. And that was how the original St. Mihiel triangle came to be formed, with a seventeen-mile base from Thiaucourt to Fresnes, and two equal sides, each fourteen miles long, from Fresnes to St. Mihiel on the north-west, and from St. Mihiel to Thiaucourt on the south-east. Nearly parallel to this lower side of the triangle, and five or six miles to the south of it, most of the road from Commercy to Pont-à-Mousson, a distance of twenty-five miles, was in the hands of the French. Their only railway ran along the valley of the Meuse, from Commercy past St. Mihiel to Troyon, and as a rule they were not able to use it except at night.

The Germans were better off. They commanded, to begin with, a line from Metz along the Moselle to Arnaville, from which it turned westwards along the Rupt de Mad to Thiaucourt. Half-way between these two places it was joined by another line running due south from Briey, and as their position was consolidated at least one other light railway was constructed in the direction of St. Mihiel. There was also another railway (a section of the Verdun-Commercy line) which runs south from Fresnes along the east edge of the Hauts de Meuse to Heudicourt, half-way between St. Mihiel and Thiaucourt, part of which was available for German traffic, besides a fairly large supply of level roads all through the district, and of these various facilities for transport they made excellent use.

In the plain of the Woevre behind the Fresnes-Heudicourt line everything worked with the precision of a huge machine. During and after the bombardment of the river forts the scene was more like the surroundings of an immense centre of industrial activity than the ordinary conception of a battlefield. From their emplacements between the infantry lines German and Austrian field-guns and siege artillery pounded away incessantly at the forts with 8¼-inch, 12-inch, and even 16½-inch shells. Observation balloons and occasional aeroplanes swayed and hovered over the lines, and ragged fan-shaped columns of brown or white smoke shot up into the air here and there as the charges of high explosives and shrapnel from French or German guns fell and burst. But apart from these inevitable and unconcealable signs of battle—noise and pillars of smoke by day, noise and flashes of flame by night—all the machinery of the fighting was hidden underground, and as far as eye could see the plain looked unpeopled and deserted. Only in the rear the supply trains constantly rolling up from the German base and the methodical work of the men loading and firing the guns and recording the effect of the shots, like shifts of artisans labouring round the furnaces of a gigantic mill, spoke of life and energy. But in appearance it was always the creative energy of a busy manufacturing district rather than the destructive energy of war.

Inside the forts, the direct object for the time being of all this system and activity, there were no illusions of this kind, nothing but grim reality and red ruin. Troyon was hotly bombarded for the second time till it had only four guns left capable of firing a shot, and still the plucky garrison refused either to retire or surrender. The storm of high explosives had only done part of its work. It had reduced Troyon and Les Paroches and Liouville and some of the other forts to a shapeless melancholy desolation of crumbling mounds and yawning pits, littered with tons of rusty steel and shattered blocks of scattered masonry and concrete, till they looked like discarded gravel-pits half buried under scrap-heaps of iron waste. But, though their existence as forts was at an end, the remains of them, with one exception, were still in the hands of the French, protected no longer by their bastions and the guns in their dismantled cupolas, but by the rifles of the men in the trenches, the real flesh and blood rampart of the Republic.

Unfortunately, the one fort in which the enemy did set foot—the Camp des Romains—was the most important of them all. It lies on a ridge nine hundred feet high, barely a mile to the south of St. Mihiel, and therefore at the apex of the triangular position occupied by the opposing lines of trenches, and commands the whole of the surrounding country except parts of the loops of the river immediately to the west and north of it. Its capture, after a heroic resistance on the part of the garrison, was finally brought about by the occupation of St. Mihiel by the army of Metz.

Why that occupation—a particularly disastrous blow for our Allies—was effected as easily as it was, it is not easy to understand. St. Mihiel, or at least the Camp des Romains, was the crucial point of the Meuse position. It was by this time quite obvious that the main object of the Germans was almost at any cost to break through the fortress barrier and cross the river so as to effect a junction with the Crown Prince’s army, which now occupied a position in the Argonne between the Aire and the Aisne, to the west of Verdun, extending eastwards to the north of that fortress. If this scheme had succeeded it would have had the double effect of completing the investment of Verdun with a ring instead of only a horse-shoe of hostile armies, and at the same time of relieving the pressure brought to bear on the Crown Prince’s army by the French troops in the Argonne between St. Ménéhould and Clermont. It might even have compelled these and the armies on their left to retire once more in the direction of the Marne. Consequently it was of vital importance for the French to concentrate every man they could spare at the point where the German thrust was likely to be most vigorous, and to hold on to St. Mihiel and the Camp des Romains like grim death.

Left to itself, the garrison could do next to nothing. It could account, and did account, for a large number of the enemy in front of its earthen ramparts. But sooner or later its doom was certain. Its fall was only a question of days, or even of hours. Like all fixed forts, ancient or modern, exposed to the fire of modern siege artillery, it was, in itself, about as impregnable as an umbrella. It lay on the extreme left of the French fine from the Meuse to Pont-à-Mousson. To the north it was protected to a certain extent by St. Mihiel, supposing that St. Mihiel contained any troops. But its real defences, on which the French had spent a considerable sum of money before the war, consisted of a large number of trenches, strengthened with concrete, some miles in advance of it on the farther side of the Hauts de Meuse, between Les Eparges and Thiaucourt. They occupied, that is to say, practically the whole of the space which I have spoken of as the gap in the lines of the armies, and which was partly accounted for by the fact that as the German Fifth Army inclined slightly westwards, to keep in touch with the others which had Paris as their principal objective, the French Third Army was to a certain extent obliged to follow it, besides which for the time being the French Second and the German Sixth Army were too much occupied with their own affairs round Nancy to be able to extend very far in the direction of Verdun. But the carefully prepared trenches were there all the time, and, as far as it is possible to judge without knowing all the circumstances, might and should have been held almost indefinitely, instead of which the chief purpose they seem to have served was to act as a shelter for the advancing Germans. By some further mischance or miscalculation, at this particularly critical moment, two or three days after the Germans had begun the general bombardment of the river forts, St. Mihiel was suddenly left almost wholly denuded of troops, with the result that on August 24th the enemy’s advance-guard walked into it practically unopposed.

There are two or three possible explanations of the way in which this regrettable mistake was brought about, in all of which there is probably a certain amount of truth. The French may have made up their minds that the enemy had for the moment given up the idea of making a determined effort to cross the river. Or they may have still clung to the mistaken belief that the fort on the height, chosen centuries ago by the Romans as the most commanding strategic position of the district, was strong enough to defend itself and look after the river as well. Or, thirdly, they may have concluded that they had no choice in the matter, and that the pressure nearer Metz, on the right flank of their line forming the south side of the St. Mihiel triangle, was for the moment more dangerous than that on their left, and that it was safe to move part of their force on the Meuse across to the Moselle.

That, at all events, is what they did, on or near September 22nd. The line in the south of the Woevre had already been considerably thinned by the despatch of a certain number of troops westwards across the Meuse to strengthen the right wing of the army in the Argonne during the Battle of the Marne and the operations which followed it. The effect of the removal of several additional battalions in the opposite direction, to the north of Nancy (where they found that their presence was urgently needed) was that St. Mihiel and the Camp des Romains were left almost isolated, with practically no soldiers at all to guard the town.

The news was quickly carried to the enemy (not by journalists, since there were none anywhere near, but by the spies who were particularly thickly planted in that district of France) and while the French troops which had moved eastwards were engaged to the north of Nancy, and the Toul force from the south was pushing back the main body of the XIVth German Army Corps in the direction of the Rupt de Mad, the extreme right of the Army of Metz, as the result of a bold flank-march along the left or north bank of the Mad, were able to advance nearly as far as St. Mihiel.

The presence of their advance-guard was first observed on the 23rd by a small patrol of French dragoons, who were attacked by a company of German infantry lying in ambush in a little wood by the side of the road about a mile from the town, and fell back on St. Mihiel after a slight skirmish. The news of the approach of the enemy created a panic in the town, and a large number of the inhabitants fled in the direction of Commercy. Next morning a squadron of Uhlans rode in and took possession of the place, cutting the telegraph and telephone wires, and carrying off as “hostages” some forty of the inhabitants, who must have bitterly regretted not having joined in the general exodus of the day before.

(Three months later M. Lamure received a letter on the subject of these hostages from a sergeant attached to the Bureau de Police of one of the eastern armies, who was anxious about some relations of his who were among them, as nothing was known up till then of their fate. He was a stranger to us, but he had heard of our existence, and had a pathetic though gratifying belief that the correspondents of _The Times_ might be able to give him the information which his own intelligence office could not.)

The Uhlans were followed, some hours later, by the main body of the German army, which turned off from the Vigneulles-St. Mihiel road somewhere near Chaillon and made its appearance on the Meuse to the north of St. Mihiel at a point where by the natural lie of the ground and the intervening hills it was protected from the fire of the guns both of Les Paroches and the Camp des Romains, which were in any case busy fighting their own battles.

The Germans, or at least a part of them, had now penetrated as far as the line which it had been the object of all their forces operating on the eastern frontier to reach. Their first appearance on the Meuse, which the other armies had crossed lower down to the north of Verdun weeks before, should have been one of the dramatic moments of the war. It had, however, been brought about so tamely and with so little opposition at the last moment that it rather lost that character, and it was not till an attempt to cross the river was made that the position became really exciting. It was still about as unfavourable as it could be for the French. Only a single battalion of Territorials, with no guns and even no mitrailleuses, guarded the river at that point, against a line of probably ten times their own number. The bridges had been hastily destroyed as the enemy advanced, and from the left bank the Territorials did their best to keep them from crossing the river, and during the night of the 25th, by the light of their one searchlight, successfully dealt with the persistent efforts of the German engineers to build a pontoon-bridge. But the next morning the enemy opened fire on them with some heavy batteries which they had brought up from Thiaucourt, and, as the heights of the river prevented the guns in the Camp des Romains from giving them any help, the Territorials were forced to retire under a hot fire, picking up and carrying with them their killed and wounded.

By midday the Germans were across the river, marching in the direction of the valley of the Aire, a tributary of the Aisne, between it and the Meuse, with the object of crossing it to attack General Sarrail in the Forest of the Argonne. The position was critical, and for the French airmen, who could see what was happening and gave due warning in different directions, must have been intensely interesting. There seemed a good chance that the Germans might really carry out the complete investment of Verdun, which their newspapers had already announced as an accomplished fact, and join hands at last with the army of the Crown Prince. Driven northwards by General Sarrail after the Battle of the Marne, past St. Menehould on the Aisne and Clermont on the Aire, left and right of the Forest of the Argonne, that army, which consisted of the XVIth, XVIIIth, and XXIst Army Corps, now occupied a position extending from Varennes (also on the Aire and the east side of the forest) eastwards in a flattened arc rather less than a semicircle which passed about ten miles north of Verdun and then curved down to the east of it in the direction of Fresnes. Opposite to the Crown Prince across the forest from the Aisne towards the Meuse was General Sarrail with the VIth and VIIIth Army Corps. Behind him, falling back from the Meuse on his protection, was the Territorial battalion, which during the night had prevented the Metz army from crossing the river below St. Mihiel, and behind them again, hot on their heels, the pursuing Germans, with a body of cavalry, detached by General Sarrail to head them off, advancing to meet them, and, though at a considerable distance, another French force, the XXth Army Corps, hurrying as fast as they could from the Moselle to overtake them from behind. Meanwhile, the Toul garrison army, which had advanced from the fortress, was keeping up the lateral pressure on the stationary German force along the Rupt de Mad.

In contrast with the state of comparative immobility to which the campaign was shortly afterwards reduced, the manœuvres of the two forces were for the moment particularly lively. Looked at as a war game played on a chess-board, the position was more or less as follows: The French (White) had moved most of their pieces of value up towards the top left-hand corner of the board, where they had the Germans (Black) pretty well penned in front of them along the two back rows. Black, however, was still able to threaten an attack on White’s King (Verdun) at about the centre of their fourth row, though it was defended by a few white pawns (its garrison army). Two rows lower down in the centre a black castle (the Metz army at St. Mihiel) was only prevented from checking White’s King by some white pawns (the southern forts of Verdun) and, at the same time, threatened a move across the board to the left in order to get behind the main mass of White’s pieces. To remove this danger, and to guard a pawn (the Territorial battalion) to the left of Black’s castle, White moved back one of his knights (Sarrail’s cavalry) from the left-hand top corner, moved up one of his castles (the Toul garrison force) from his back row, and brought across his Queen (the XXth Army Corps) from the lower right-hand corner of the board, where it had been trying to check Black’s King (Metz). As the result of these three moves he was able to force Black’s castle back to its original position near the centre of the board.

When the news of the occupation of St. Mihiel reached Lorraine the XXth Army Corps, which had barely finished its work there of checking a German advance from the direction of Metz, were at once ordered back to the Meuse, and the advanced guard of their cavalry by a forced night march managed to cross it at Lérouville just below Commercy, only five hours behind the German army, and got in touch with them shortly afterwards in the valley of the Aire. The dragoons at once engaged them with machine-guns, and held them till first the artillery and then the infantry of the corps came up and the battle became general. The Metz force made three separate attacks on the position which the French had taken up on the heights of the Aire, but were repulsed each time with heavy losses, and during the night they fell back on the Meuse, still, however, retaining a footing on the left bank of the river in the western suburb of St. Mihiel and the barracks of Chauvoncourt. After their battle of the day before in Lorraine the forced night march of the XXth Corps and their successful engagement on the Heights of the Aire were a magnificent performance, which had the satisfactory effect of putting an end to the bold effort of the right wing of the Metz army to effect the longed-for junction with the Crown Prince. What it unfortunately did not do was to relieve St. Mihiel. As soon as the Germans got back there they proceeded to entrench themselves strongly, and from a position near the town began to bombard the French forts in the Camp des Romains with their Austrian mammoths.

Concerning this artillery position M. Lamure was told an instructive little story on one of the rather adventurous expeditions which he made to the neighbourhood of St. Mihiel some weeks after the German occupation had begun. So many stories of the same kind (including one, I believe, about a tennis-court at Tooting) were published in the first part of the war that one became rather shy of believing them, but I have my reasons for thinking that this one is probably true. Anyhow, here it is.

Two years before the war a German company, formed for the manufacture of chemical produce, rented a large plot of ground close to St. Mihiel for a term of thirty years. It was a big company and it had need of big buildings with solid foundations. So a floor about two hundred and fifty feet long by thirty wide was laid down in reinforced concrete. Then the company, after announcing that its money had come to an end, and that it could not proceed to put up the proposed buildings, was dissolved. But the plot of ground and the concrete floor, which, before the workmen left, was tidily covered up with a loose coating of earth, still belonged to it. When the army of Metz arrived on the scene some one had the curiosity or the intelligence to inquire what might be hidden under this covering of earth, which was accordingly removed. And there, by the greatest good luck in the world, they discovered not only the concrete floor, but a number of holes in it which proved to be admirably adapted for emplacements for the Austrian guns.

On the whole, I am inclined to back the story of the St. Mihiel concrete floor against the Tooting tennis-court, though in any case it would only add one more to the long list of undoubted cases in which German settlers were planted in the Woevre district in order to render valuable services to the Fatherland either before or during the war. The main point is that from some position near St. Mihiel, whether prepared beforehand or not, the big Austrian howitzers in a very short time silenced the guns and smashed up the turrets and bastions of the Camp des Romains fort, until at last the plucky garrison had no guns left to shoot with, and were finally smoked out after trenches had been pushed up close to the fort. When the asphyxiated survivors had recovered enough to march out the Germans presented arms in recognition of the fine courage they had shown in the defence, and though they were naturally made prisoners the officers were allowed to keep their swords. The destruction of Troyon, les Paroches, and the Camp des Romains was followed, a day or two later, by that of Liouville, where the damage done was particularly extensive. The holes ploughed by the big shells were the largest I have seen, and for acres round the fort almost every square yard of ground is littered with scraps of shell casing and rusty iron.

As for the Camp des Romains, it was so badly hammered that the Germans could not use it, even when they had taken it, and were obliged to construct a new fort close to it. From that time all the subsequent efforts of the French to dislodge them have been unavailing. Although with St. Mihiel it is the only point which they have captured in the line of the river forts between Toul and Verdun, and although since the end of September, 1914, they have never advanced one foot beyond it, its possession has been extremely useful to them, and a nasty thorn in the side of the French. For though in position the Camp des Romains fort is only the apex of the St. Mihiel triangle, it is in effect its base and sides and area, since, without it, the triangle would not exist.