Читать книгу Verdun to the Vosges: Impressions of the War on the Fortress Frontier of France - Gerald Campbell - Страница 8

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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 published by the Wolff bureau, actually placed the line showing the position of the German front on the west side of Nancy, as though it had been occupied by the enemy. Fortunately they were mistaken. Though the capital of Lorraine had been lightly bombarded on the night of September 9, two days before the médecin-major left it, it was then, as it has since remained, in spite of the enemy’s persistent efforts to reach it, Nancy l’Inviolée. But though the Germans, after three weeks of incessant fighting, during which they suffered very heavy losses, had been driven back, they were still only a few miles away, and when we got back to Belfort from Alsace, we had already decided that, if it could be managed, Lorraine was the place for us to go to.

Even if we could have got leave to stay in Belfort the outlook there, from our point of view, was not promising. The field defences between it and the frontier, without taking into account the troops stationed at Montreux Vieux and in other parts of Alsace, were enough to convince us that there was little chance of the enemy getting anywhere near it. The lessons of Liége and Namur had not been thrown away. It was pathetic now to remember how when we were in Belgium everyone had gone about repeating the parrot cry, “Namur est imprenable” (just as they had said “Les forts de Liége tiennent, et ils tiendront toujours”), when, except inside the girdle of the forts, it was not protected by a single earthwork of any value. The confidence of the French in Belfort was better founded. The commanders of the garrison had learnt very early in the war that forts, to be of any use in modern warfare, must themselves be flanked, as golf-architects guard their greens, with an interminable network of bunkers. Acting on that principle they had constructed a position of such formidable strength that not even the German generals, who had shown such a complete disregard of losses in their advance after Charleroi, would be likely to face the huge waste of life which a frontal attack on the Vosges fortress would have entailed.

A year has passed since then, and instead of getting nearer to it they are miles further back than the place where Lieutenant Mayer met his death. Pfetterhausen and Montreux Vieux and Dannemarie and a good slice of Alsace are still in the hands of the French, and the siege of Belfort (unless the enemy try the desperate expedient of a flanking movement through Switzerland) is more unlikely than ever. So confident are the authorities of their security that most of the civil inhabitants who had been evacuated at the time of our first visit have now been allowed to return, and the life of the town is becoming almost normal again. That is a healthy sign. It is one of the numerous proofs that the apparent deadlock at the front is really a signal victory for the Allies. For it means that for all their carefully prepared organization and their calm disregard of the conventions of war by which the other nations consider themselves bound, the original plans of the enemy have broken down. The cupolas of the forts of Belfort, which were to have been so easily crushed, are still intact; their guns have not yet fired a shot, except at aeroplanes. As in 1870, no German soldier has set foot within its walls. Its famous lion is still a lion couchant.

Just before starting on our way back to Dijon we paid a visit to M. Goublet, the Civil Governor and Préfet of the Territoire de Belfort (who has rejoined his old service, the Navy, and is now in command of a small cruiser), another warm friend and admirer of England and The Times. During the war M. Goublet and all his fellow-préfets of the border provinces have been most valuable servants of the State. No men in France, except perhaps the ministers and the great chiefs of the army, have had heavier responsibilities on their shoulders or more anxious duties to perform, and no account of the way in which France has faced the invader can be anything like complete which does not give some idea of their share in the common work.

We have nothing in England that corresponds to the office of the French prefect, who, as the direct representative of the Government in his Department, plays a very important part in the civil administration of the country. The eighty-six Departments, each governed by its Prefect, are divided into sub-districts under the sous-préfets, and the sub-districts into Communes or Mayoralties. The Mayor, as with us, is a municipal officer, and looks after only what concerns his own commune, which is called, in the case of the big towns, an Arrondissement. In his Department the Prefect is supreme. Every civilian official in it—the Sous-Préfets, the Mayors and their subordinates, and all the minor officers of the State, such as the gendarmerie and the special police commissaires whom he controls himself—is under his orders. He is saluted not only by all these civilian officials and employés, but by the officers and soldiers of the army. He ranks with the Generals commanding army-corps, and in time of peace even takes precedence of them. When a new General comes into a Department he calls on the Prefect, and by him is introduced to the civil authorities, and in the same way all the official calls on New Year’s Day are paid first to the Préfecture. Even in time of war, because the State is greater than its army, it is only in strictly military matters that the Generals in his Department are his superiors. Thus a proclamation by a General to the people can only be issued through the Prefect and over his signature, and he has the power, subject of course to the General’s right of appeal to the Généralissime and the Minister of War, to refuse to sanction any decree affecting the civil population which the military authority might wish to enforce. There has been one striking instance of the exercise of this power during the present war. By an agreement between the Prefect and the Military Governor the population of an important town near the frontier were evacuated in the early days when it appeared very probable that it would be besieged by the Germans. After a time, as nothing happened and all fear of an investment seemed to be at an end, the inhabitants began gradually to come back, and no notice was taken of their return till suddenly the Military Governor issued a second proclamation, without consulting the Prefect, ordering them once more to leave the town. To this the Prefect objected, on the ground that his sanction had not been asked. He announced that they might stay, and the action which he had taken was upheld by the Minister of the Interior.

The Prefect, therefore, acts either as the channel, or (if he thinks it necessary), as the barrier between the military authorities and the people of his Department, and is therefore a standing safeguard against the militarism, which, according to some English critics, is bound to arise in a country which has a “conscript” army. The mere fact of the existence of the office, with its extraordinary powers, is a sufficient guarantee that in France the militarism of which these people make a bugbear can never make any real headway.

Amongst his other duties the Prefect is responsible for the care of the main roads and State monuments (such as cathedrals) in his Department; for the holding of Conseils de Révision (the periodical assemblies of the young men of the nation, at which they are finally examined, in classes dependent on the year of their birth, to see if they are physically and mentally fit for service in the army); for the provisioning and lighting of the towns and villages in his district; and for the control of the Press, or what is commonly termed the censorship, which, in time of war, he exercises jointly with the military authorities. In the invaded districts the importance of each of these several duties is obvious, and no praise can be too high for the way in which they have been carried out, all along the battle-line from Belfort to Briey, by M. Goublet (Territoire de Belfort), M. Linarès (Vosges), M. Léon Mirman (Meurthe et Moselle), M. Aubert (Bar le Duc) and the sous-préfets of Lunéville, Toul, and Briey, M. Minier, M. Mage, and M. Magre. To the sorely tried people under their charge these men have set a fine example of unity, hard work, self-sacrifice, confidence, and courage, with a leaven of the less ornamental virtue of common-sense. They have unflinchingly carried out the often risky work of visiting, as soon as the enemy was driven back from one position after another, the burnt and ruined villages which he left behind him. They have been the stand-by of the brave mayors who have stuck to their posts in the hour of danger, they have cheered the wounded in the hospitals, they have cared for the homeless and destitute refugees, and they have stimulated and encouraged the whole population by giving them a true and lofty ideal of what the war means for France and the world, and of the way in which Frenchmen and French women and children should face its perils and its inevitable sufferings and distress. And—si parva licet componere magnis—those of them whom we have been fortunate enough to know have been exceedingly kind and helpful to two grateful journalists from London.

Woelflin, Nancy, phot.

M. Leon Mirman, Prefect of Meurthe et Moselle.

At this particular moment, however, it was the military, rather than the civil authorities, who were able to help us on our way. By the service de renseignements, or military intelligence department, at Belfort, we were given a special pass to go to Nancy by way of Dijon and Chalindrey (the direct route by Epinal being impossible), and when we got back to Dijon General Brissaud himself viséd our passports for the same destination.

Armed with these double credentials we started from Dijon on what in ordinary times is a journey of six hours, instead of which it took us from three o’clock in the afternoon till half-past eight next morning. The first big check was at Chalindrey, close to Langres, where we had a three hours’ wait during which we saw two interesting little sidelights on the war. In those days all station-restaurants had been taken over for the use of the army, and as we were not allowed to stay on the platform or to sit in the train, we thought at first that we should have to kick our heels till midnight in the station yard. It was a dark and chilly prospect. However, by the help of a friendly private and persistent knocking at a back door, we did at last force our way into the refreshment room, and on the strength of being English were allowed to order some supper. While we were eating it a taciturn sergeant demanded our papers and carried them off into the outer darkness. Then there was a long pause. We waited and waited, each moment getting more and more afraid that they were not going to get us through after all, when the door opened and out of the ewigkeit, nearly two hundred miles from the nearest English troops, two Red Cross Tommies, an Australian and a Lanarkshire miner, walked into the room. They were under the escort, not to say the arrest, of the Station Commandant, who wanted to confront them with us to see if the story they told was true. It was, as a matter of fact, rather lame. They said that after the Battle of the Marne they had lost the rest of their detachment somewhere near Compiègne, and being tired of hospital work were trying to reach the front, in the hope of being allowed to do some fighting. Whether they were deserters or not they certainly had their full share of Scotch and Australian mother-wit, or they could never have got so far without being arrested. Three months later, by some miracle, for they spoke no French and had only their ordinary soldiers’ passes, they turned up in Nancy, still on their own, and were taken to Toul, this time, I believe, under close arrest. As they were the unconscious means of doing us a good turn, I rather hope that they were not impostors, and that they were not too hardly dealt with. Hearing me talking to them, a French officer, Commandant Chesnot of the 360th Regiment of the Reserve, introduced himself as an ardent admirer of England, and invited us to make the rest of the journey in the reserved carriage which he shared with another officer. They were old schoolfellows belonging to the same regiment, who had been knocked over by the same shell three weeks before at Réméréville, and were now returning to duty, still limping from the effect of their wounds. Like every wounded French officer and soldier whom we met, their one idea was to get out of the surgeon’s hands and back again to the front as soon as possible. It was lucky for us that they were so keen.

At Toul, where we had to wait for another three hours, we sat with them in the waiting-room reserved for soldiers, instead of being herded with the civilian crowd next door, and from Champigneul, beyond which no passenger trains had been running for some time, we travelled as their friends in one of the familiar trucks built to accommodate forty men or eight horses, sitting on bundles of sacking filled with the disinfected uniforms of dead soldiers. Since the service had been suspended at the beginning of the war, we were, I believe, the first civilians who made their entry into Nancy by train.