Читать книгу Verdun to the Vosges: Impressions of the War on the Fortress Frontier of France - Gerald Campbell - Страница 6

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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 Captain de Borieux of the Headquarters Staff as our guide and friend. Lie number one was soon disposed of. It was quite evident that the German claim that they were investing Belfort, and had even taken two of its forts, was false. Till we reached the frontier, after passing for eight miles over a wide, rolling plain, which even then was scarred in all directions with line upon line of French entrenchments and other formidable defences, there was not a sign of them, and even then it was only the negative sign that the boundary post erected by the Germans after 1870 was now rebaptized with the colours of France. A yard further, and I was in Alsace, the first of the very few Englishmen who since the beginning of the war have crossed into the part of the annexed provinces which had been won back from the enemy.

Photograph by Libert-Fernand, Nancy.

Les Halles, Raon l’Etape—Vosges.

We stopped first at Montreux Vieux, the German name for which was Alt Munster—a little town a mile or so beyond the frontier on the Rhine-Rhone Canal, just before it takes a turn to Dannemarie and Altkirch—in which a month before there had been some brisk fighting. In their attack on the town, which suffered pretty severely from their guns, the Germans pushed forward their infantry as far as the canal, about two hundred yards across the fields from the French sandbag defences in front of the station. That was the nearest point to Belfort which they reached. Before they got to the movable bridge over the canal a sergeant who was on guard in the bridge-house, ran out under heavy fire and turned the wheel by which it is raised and lowered till it stood erect on the French side. “Il était temps que j’y aille, mon Colonel,” he said afterwards to his commanding-officer, when the enemy had been finally driven back from the canal banks to the woods round Romagny, a scattered village a mile or two off which we visited later in the afternoon. The Germans visited it too, on the same day that they failed to get into Montreux Vieux, and vented their spite on its feeble inhabitants (their own fellow-subjects) in the now familiar way, bombarding church and houses from a distance of a few hundred yards, and then setting fire to a quarter of its cottages and homesteads, in none of which were there any French soldiers. I have often thought since of the two pictures—the quiet sergeant by the canal bridge and those smoking piles of rubbish that once were peasants’ homes—though the destruction in Romagny was nothing at all compared with the wholesale ruin and desolation which we saw afterwards in Meurthe et Moselle and other departments further north. They seem to me typical illustrations of the difference between the French and German conceptions of making war. For we know now that one of the normal features of the much-vaunted German organization (till the deadlock of the trenches made it impossible) was the organized burning by squads of disciplined men of defenceless villages, peopled, as a rule, only by old men and women and children. Even for the malign fits of bad temper which found vent in these wanton acts of incendiarism, the mailed fist of the drill sergeant gave the signal, and the men, acting under his orders and those of his superiors, carried them out, working shoulder to shoulder, as part of the regular system. There was nothing systematic about the act of the French sergeant at the bridge-house. He just did his duty, as he saw it himself, and on his own initiative, when he felt that it had to be done. The German soldier, for all his courage, is part of a mass, a cog or a nut in an unthinking machine. The Frenchman, for all his discipline, remains an individual, and the French army is made up not of men burning with the spirit of la revanche, but of patriots who have gone to the defence of their country because they thought it time.

That night, five weeks after the war had begun, we penetrated a good deal further into Alsace, to within about twenty miles of the Rhine. It was before the hard-and-fast line of the trenches had been drawn, and between the outposts on either side there was a wide stretch of No-Man’s land in the Sundgau (the corner of the Rhine plain in the angle between the ranges of the Vosges and the Bernese Jura) which was constantly traversed by both French and Germans. Colonel Quais, the officer commanding the brigade stationed at Montreux Vieux, had arranged for the following day a reconnaissance in force as far as Ferette, which lies close to the Swiss frontier a little way west of Basle. Part of his object was to round up the German troops by which it was tenanted, as they had been making themselves a nuisance to his cavalry patrols. His force consisted of two regiments of infantry and two batteries of 75’s, with detachments of dragoons and bicyclists. From Montreux Vieux to Pfetterhausen, to which they had marched that evening, was only eleven miles, and from Pfetterhausen to Ferette another seven or eight. But night marches are leisurely affairs, and to be on the ground in good time in the morning, we had to start before midnight. So after a very early dinner with the Colonel and his staff we turned in at eight o’clock on the shake-downs which he provided for us, and, after three hours’ sleep and a hasty snack, five of us packed into a smallish car and set off for what he called his little fête, with high hopes of what the morrow might bring forth. Unfortunately, for all of us—our kind host as well as ourselves—the promised fight did not come off, but for all that the trip was well worth making. It is not every night in the war that English journalists get a chance of a forty-mile march into German territory with an escort of between two and three thousand French troops.

On the way to Pfetterhausen we were challenged several times by sentries posted at different barriers on the road. At each stop the car slowed down and was pulled up, the officer sitting next the driver got down and opened the slide of his lantern—the night was pitch dark, with only a thin crescent moon high up in the cloudy sky—gave the word, advanced to the barrier, showed our papers, and finally turned the lantern in our direction to show that we might come on. Once or twice he must have found the pauses before the sentries would let him walk up to the muzzles of their loaded and levelled rifles uncomfortably long. We were cutting across the narrow strip of French territory which lies between Montreux Vieux and Pfetterhausen, and their lonely posts were quite close enough to the frontier to make the question of dealing with an unknown motor, arriving suddenly in the dead of night, rather a nervous problem. They could not know for certain, till they had examined the permits—even the Acting-Brigadier had to have one—whether we were friends or foes, and to fire first and inquire afterwards might have seemed to them the better part of discretion if not of valour. That did happen more than once to harmless travellers like ourselves while we were driving about Belgium, where the sturdy patriots of the troisième ban, who guarded the barriers with ancient weapons that looked as if they had been dug up on the field of Waterloo, were a real terror by night. But these sentries were disciplined French soldiers, not ignorant Wallachian peasants, and gave one quite a pleasant feeling of security—once we had passed them. No German scouts were likely to be prowling about within, at any rate, a mile or two of their posts.

When we had left the last of them behind and had turned into Alsace again we seemed to be alone in the quiet night, when, all of a sudden, startlingly close beside us, there was the clink of a chain and the stamp of a horse’s hoof, and we could just see that we were abreast of a long line of horses and guns and men drawn up along the side of a narrow lane, barely leaving room for us to pass on to the cross-roads of the village. Here there was a long wait while the officers of the different units got their orders from the Brigadier. The men, who were drawn up along the roads leading to the village, were curiously quiet. They spoke very little and only in whispers, and even the tramp of their feet when the column began to get on the move soon after two o’clock had struck, with the Colonel marching with the infantry at its head and the dragoons darkly silhouetted against the grey walls of the houses, made hardly a sound. We gave them a long start and then followed on in the car, continually overtaking and passing different bodies of the long column, horse and foot. At one time, at a moment when we happened to be out of touch with any part of it and were rather afraid that we might have lost our way, we roused a scared German villager out of his bed and took him on board to show us the road. We were not anxious to come upon the enemy unawares, and when we sighted and caught up another body of troops, it was distinctly comforting to see in the dawning light that the colour of their trousers was red and not grey. Just after that, in the middle of a thick wood, the car stuck for a time in some boggy ground as we were trying to get past a couple of trees which the Germans had felled the day before and dragged across the road—a likely enough place for an ambush. Nothing, however, happened, and a mile or two further on, as the sun rose in front of us beyond the Rhine, a quickly-fading picture of gorgeous rose and crimson and deep blue, we overtook the head of the column, picked up the Colonel, as fresh and eager as a boy for all his sixty-two years, and five minutes later were eating bread and cheese and other good things in the orchard which was to be his headquarters in the battle of Ferette. And after all, there was no battle. The batteries took up their position in our rear, the infantry deployed in open order over the fields, the cyclists and dragoons exchanged snap-shots with the enemy’s vanishing scouts and skirmishers far away on the left flank, and gradually the town, which nestles among the wooded hills of the Bernese Jura, was surrounded. But not a German soldier was left in it, and the only result of the reconnaissance was to prove that in that part of Alsace there was no body of enemy troops strong enough to risk an attack on our half-brigade.

If the Colonel had been a German officer he would probably have treated Ferette as the enemy had Romagny, by way of revenge and as an object-lesson in terrorism to the Alsatian villagers. There was nothing and no one to prevent him. He had the men and the guns and at a pinch could have improvised the fire-lighters which the Frenchman does not carry ready-made in his haversack, like the Boche. But that is not the French way. They fight like soldiers, not with women and children, and they do not wantonly destroy property. At the same time I am bound to say that just to show what the 75’s, though served by territorials, could do, they were allowed to fire one shot at the ruined castle which stands on one of the wooded heights above the town. The range was about three miles, the target was invisible to the gunners, the observation officer was perched in a tree three or four hundred yards from the battery, and yet the shell struck the wall exactly in the middle of the panel above the central window, making a neat little extra window, absolutely round, which was even an improvement on the original architect’s design.

It was a trifling little incident, but it was very characteristic of the light-hearted boyish way in which the French set about the business of war. The nearer you get to the front the more that fact strikes you. Behind the armies, far away from the trenches, war is a dreary affair. The office-clerks, the road-menders, the men who guard canals and bridges and lines of communication, or are scattered about in little postes of twenty or thirty, in ugly suburbs and out-of-the-way villages, and all the other hosts of soldiers (including most of the embusqués), who have never come face to face with an enemy, except, perhaps, a disarmed prisoner—these are the real unfortunates of the war. They only see its unpicturesque side, where if there is little danger there is also no glory and no excitement, and are apt to lose heart and take a gloomy view of its prospects. The optimists and the real light-hearted children of the nation are the fighting men who suffer its horrors and its hardships day and night, summer and winter, at the front. Their life, as was said shortly before his death by an Eton boy and gallant English soldier, is a glorified picnic—a picnic with an object. They live the open-air existence, which is the proper environment of the natural man. It is better fun to ride and march through the night to Ferette, with a chance of a scrap with the Boches at the end of it, than to put on a stiff collar and hard hat to crawl to a stuffy office day after day in a crowded suburban train. It is better fun, as well as a more dignified calling, to be a soldier fighting your country’s battles than a waiter or a flunkey or a billiard-marker or a rich idler with no real work to do. That is how the French soldier at the front takes the war, in spite of its hardships and sufferings and its deadly home-sickness, the aching separation from those he loves, which is the worst thing that the soldier has to bear. For a long year now in the east of France his home for the most part has been in the big woods that, in the Vosges and Lorraine and La Woevre, lie almost everywhere behind the lines, and it is because he is a boy at heart that when he has built his leafy wigwam or his wooden or stone hut, or hollowed out and roofed his cave in the ground—just the things that boys love to do—he is able to keep lively and cheerful. He surrounds his new home with little paths and garden-beds—generally with coloured stones arranged in patterns instead of borders and flowers—he decorates it with war trophies, and, if he is an artist, with war pictures and even frescoes, he collects round it young boars and owls and other live mascots (which boys would call pets), he builds his own fires and has picnic meals in the open, he is constantly doing things with his hands, he goes to bed early and sleeps like a top (when he is not in the trenches), his relaxations, which he has to invent for himself, are simple and clean, and, officer or man, although he is living constantly face to face with death, he manages somehow, but chiefly because he is a Frenchman, to be nearly always gay and young-hearted.

I remember once coming to a nearly roofless village near Thiaucourt, which was held as part of the front line of trenches by an infantry battalion of territorials. An enemy aeroplane was whirring overhead, and occasional shells were dropping not very far off. It was an off-time, and the men were mostly in the street, playing with their baby sanglier and posing for a snap-shotting photographer. When the Taube came “over” they all bolted for cover like a lot of cheerful rabbits, and in half a minute came running out again, laughing and joking like schoolchildren, and crowding together in front of the camera to be taken in a regimental group. The spirit of the officers was just the same. Four young lieutenants were just starting to play tennis on a vilely bad mud court, and, Taube or no Taube, they went on with their game. But the Colonel, portly and middle-aged, was the real joy. He had just invented and rigged up an ingenious system of taps and pulleys and cisterns and boilers, thanks to which his men could enjoy the luxury of hot as well as cold shower-baths. As he was showing it off he stopped for a moment to listen to the scream of an approaching shell, then said, “Ce n’est pas pour nous,” and went on enthusing over the merits of his new toy. Apparently he had not a thought of war in his head.

That is one side of the character of French soldiers as I have seen it in this war. But there is another, which almost seems to have been born during the war, some little time after it had begun. I only speak from a very slight experience, but some of the French as well as the Belgian officers whom we met right at the beginning gave me the idea of being nervous and rattled of knowing nothing about their own plans or the enemy’s whereabouts, and of being generally in a state of mental confusion and irritable uncertainty, which looked extremely likely to lead to disaster. When I came to France later on I saw an extraordinary change, or perhaps my original diagnosis was entirely wrong. Bad mistakes were certainly made at the beginning, and probably the greatest service rendered by General Joffre to France was the way in which, quietly and without unnecessary publicity, but with perfect firmness, he weeded out the men, whatever their rank, whom he held to be at fault. But these, perhaps, were exceptions. The spirit and training of the great bulk of the army may have been as admirable from the first as it is now, and that spirit may have been in existence before the war, and not produced by it and by the example and warning of the preliminary failures. At all events, there is no doubt about it now. The confusion and uncertainty and nervous apprehension, if they ever existed to an extent greater than what was naturally caused by the suddenness of Germany’s unprovoked attack, are gone—were already gone when we arrived in Belfort. Even in those anxious times, when we had only just begun to throw back the impetuous rush of the enemy, there was everywhere order, and method, and quiet confidence, and a fixed determination to go on, neither unduly elated by success nor troubled by failure, to the absolutely certain end. No one was in a hurry, but every one was quick and alert. The army, officers and men, seemed to be an army of real soldiers, masters of their profession, and not a collection of bunglers. If mistakes had been made, or should be made, they would have to be rectified. But no mistakes and no defeats, and no possible combination of circumstances, would alter the final issue, because France and her Allies were fighting for the cause of the liberty of the world, the triumph of which was absolutely certain. That was the spirit of the French a year ago, and it is so now more than ever. For all their light-heartedness they are taking the war as seriously as a religion, and out of the travail of it a new France has been born.