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22 chapters
PREFACE
PREFACE
At the beginning of September, 1914, I was commissioned by The Times to go to France as its representative on the eastern frontier, and it so happens that, during the war, no other English newspaper correspondent has been stationed for any length of time on the long section of the front between Verdun and Belfort. One or two paid flying visits to Lorraine after I was settled there, but they were birds of passage, and were off again almost as soon as they arrived. In collecting the material for m
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CHAPTER I LONDON TO DIJON
CHAPTER I LONDON TO DIJON
We left London on the evening of September the 8th with passports viséd for Dijon, and a faint hope that, if we were lucky, we might succeed some day in getting to Belfort, the immediate object of our journey. In ordinary times, and even now, after more than a year of the war, that is not a very difficult undertaking. In the second week of September, 1914, it was in its way quite a little adventure. Everything was obscure, everybody was in the dark. For all that most of us knew the retreat that
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CHAPTER II DIJON TO BELFORT
CHAPTER II DIJON TO BELFORT
In Paris, when we passed through it, it was still possible for inoffensive travellers to feel themselves free men. At Dijon we had our first real taste of the restrictions on personal liberty imposed by the war in the zone of the armies. Each time that we came to a new place we had to get at least three separate signed and stamped permits (from three or more officials) empowering us to leave the station, to stay, even for an hour, in the town, and to go into the station again, or anywhere outsid
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CHAPTER III IN ALSACE
CHAPTER III IN ALSACE
Next morning the General was as good as his word. A note was brought to our hotel by an orderly to say that if we would be round at his quarters after lunch we should be able to see des choses intéressantes , and by half-past one, in a motor-car driven by an Alsatian sergeant (who, like many others in the same position, had preferred service in the French army to his pre-war occupation as a German private), we were driving between the outlying forts on our way to the frontier, frontier, with Cap
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CHAPTER IV ROBBERY UNDER ARMS
CHAPTER IV ROBBERY UNDER ARMS
Between Montreux Vieux and Pfetterhausen there is a little French village called Suarce, which, on the very eve of the war, was the scene of an incident almost as dramatic from a historical point of view as the violation of Belgium two days later. At the end of July, for some days before the war began, the French had withdrawn their troops to a distance of six miles from the frontier all along the line from Luxembourg to the point, a mile from Pfetterhausen, which is the meeting-place of the bou
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CHAPTER V BELFORT TO NANCY
CHAPTER V BELFORT TO NANCY
Our first direct news of Nancy was given us by an army-surgeon whom we met in Dijon. He had just been invalided home suffering from septic poisoning as the result of an operation which he had performed in one of its many hospitals. In these days very little information was getting through from the Lorraine front. The general situation was so obscure that at one time some of the map-drawers of the English newspapers, probably owing to a too naïf confidence in the accuracy of the statements publis
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CHAPTER VI ÉTAT-DE-SIÈGE IN NANCY
CHAPTER VI ÉTAT-DE-SIÈGE IN NANCY
Our start in Nancy was not encouraging. We reported ourselves first at the Place, the military headquarters of the town, and were ushered by mistake into the room of an officer (we never knew his name), who was not the Military Governor, and was just packing up to go elsewhere. Therefore he said he could do nothing for us himself, though he had had friendly relations with Printing House Square, and he much doubted whether any one would give us leave to stay in the town for more than a night. The
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CHAPTER VII THE FRENCH OFFENSIVE
CHAPTER VII THE FRENCH OFFENSIVE
There is no denying the importance of the German territorial gains in Belgium and France, even with the smaller acquisitions of the French in Haut Alsace as a set-off. But the effect which they will have on the final results of the war has been much exaggerated, not only by the Germans, but by the States which call themselves neutral, the wavering small Powers in the Balkans, and our own faint-hearted pessimists at home. All of these people habitually forget or ignore that practically the whole
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CHAPTER VIII OCCUPATIONS OF MULHOUSE
CHAPTER VIII OCCUPATIONS OF MULHOUSE
Encouraged by their success at Altkirch, the French set out early next morning for Mulhouse, ten miles further down the valley of the Ill. The troops which had descended the previous day on Thann also advanced by way of Cernay, and along the twelve-mile front between Thann and Altkirch the whole way to Mulhouse no trace of the Germans was seen except their deserted entrenchments. At one o’clock a small patrol of dragoons trotted up to the Hotel de Ville, and after a momentary halt clattered away
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CHAPTER IX MORHANGE
CHAPTER IX MORHANGE
On the map the main ridge of the Hautes and Basses Vosges (and the boundary line of that part of the frontier) follows almost exactly the shape and position of a small manuscript “q.” At the head of the curl of the “q” is the Donon, and at its lower curve the Col de Saales, with the town of St. Dié a trifle to the west of it. Through the valley represented by the curl the river Bruche flows north-east past St. Blaise and Schirmeck, and then turns nearly due east past the fort of Mutzig, to Stras
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CHAPTER X GENERAL DUBAIL’S STAND
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 l
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CHAPTER XI THE MARTYRED TOWN
CHAPTER XI THE MARTYRED TOWN
It was certainly a lie with regard to Gerbéviller. That unhappy place was twice bombarded, first by the Germans and afterwards by the French, and at the first time of asking there was also a running fight through its streets. But it was not the shells of the 75’s and the 77’s that left roofless all but about six of its 463 houses. They were burnt by fire deliberately applied by the Bavarian soldiery by means chiefly of sulphur sticks and gunpowder pastilles, little black discs about the size of
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CHAPTER XII BATTLE OF THE GRAND COURONNÉ. I
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 o
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CHAPTER XIII BATTLE OF THE GRAND COURONNÉ. II
CHAPTER XIII BATTLE OF THE GRAND COURONNÉ. II
All towns are feminine by rights, but Nancy, I think, more than any that I have ever known. In its municipal arms the chief feature is a Scotch thistle. The emblem should belong rather to the gallant armies of the east, and especially to the famous XXth Army Corps, which was the backbone of General de Castelnau’s army. During all that long three weeks, while the XVth and XVIth with part of General Dubail’s army were checking the attack south of the Meurthe, along a front of about fifteen miles,
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CHAPTER XIV BATTLE OF THE GRAND COURONNÉ. III
CHAPTER XIV BATTLE OF THE GRAND COURONNÉ. III
The attempt to reach Nancy from the north was to be carried out by a detachment of the Metz army. In the earlier stages of the campaign, that army, or a part of it, had marched westwards towards Verdun, probably with the idea of joining up with the Crown Prince of Prussia’s command—that fatal illusory missing-link on which hinged so much of the German plan—or else of filling up the gap which at that time broke the continuity of the lines across what has since become the base of the St. Mihiel tr
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CHAPTER XV LUNÉVILLE
CHAPTER XV LUNÉVILLE
One of the immediate and most satisfactory results of the victory in front of Nancy was the hasty withdrawal of the Germans from Lunéville, after an occupation which lasted for just three weeks. For four or five days before the evacuation the Bavarian troops in front of the town had been gradually falling back on the protection of the batteries in and beyond it. Only one of these batteries, I believe, was in Lunéville itself. It was placed, in obedience to the maxim that war and what the Profess
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CHAPTER XVI NEWSPAPER CORRESPONDENTS
CHAPTER XVI NEWSPAPER CORRESPONDENTS
As soon as not only the menace but the cruel reality of the occupation was lifted from the smaller towns and villages, some of which had suffered so far more terribly than Lunéville, M. Mirman and M. Linarés, the Prefects of Meurthe et Moselle and Vosges, and M. Minier, the Sous-Préfet of Lunéville, were engaged almost every day in visiting different parts of their Departments in the track of the ruthless invader, partly to take stock of the crimes and destruction of which he had been guilty, bu
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CHAPTER XVII A DAY WITH A PREFECT
CHAPTER XVII A DAY WITH A PREFECT
Having said so much of what our friends of the various Préfectures did or tried to do for two humble newspaper correspondents, I should like, before going on to consider the next phase of the war, to try and give an idea of the work which they did for the people in their districts, and the risks which they often ran in doing it. I will begin with a description of a Conseil de Révision at St. Nicholas-du-Port, to which I went with M. Mirman and one of the Generals of the district. While we were i
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CHAPTER XVIII THE ATTACK ON THE RIVER FORTS
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 cen
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CHAPTER XIX THE “SOIXANTE-QUINZE”
CHAPTER XIX THE “SOIXANTE-QUINZE”
The capture of St. Mihiel and the Camp des Romains was the last real triumph—I had almost said the only real triumph—that the Germans won in the east of France. For the scene of their other great positive success was not in France but in the annexed part of Lorraine, even though as the result of it they still hold one corner of the Department of the Vosges. But there, as everywhere else, since the end of September, 1914, they have not only made no progress, but have been on the whole driven furt
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CHAPTER XX SIEGE WARFARE
CHAPTER XX SIEGE WARFARE
The kind of modern siege in which the Allies are engaged, unlike the bombardment of a modern fortress, but like the sieges of old times, is bound to be a protracted affair. Still it is not likely that Germany will hold out as long as Troy did. From her geographical position, nearly surrounded by the host of enemies that her arrogance and self-seeking have arrayed against her, she was bound sooner or later to be the besieged party, unless she succeeded in crushing one or more of them by her first
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EPILOGUE
EPILOGUE
[M. L. Mirman, who is a Fellow of the University of Paris and was a Mathematical Lecturer at the Lycée of Reims, was elected Deputy for Reims in 1893. He represented the city in Parliament till 1905, when he resigned his post as Deputy to become Directeur de l’Assistance et de l’Hygiène Publiques . Interesting as this office was in time of peace, it did not agree in time of war with his ideas of active work, and at the beginning of the month of August, 1914, he was appointed, at his own request,
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