Fields of Victory

ORY OF

neral Gouraud's maps and directions, an hour or two of most interesting convers

cognised by Alsatian and German alike as a champion of the French spirit and French traditions in the lost provinces. He belonged to that jeunesse of the nineties, which, in the absence of any reasonable grounds for expecting a reversal of the events of 1871, came to the conclusion that autonomous liberties would be at any rate preferable to the naked repression, at the hands of Bismarck and Manteuffel, of the eighties and early nineties. The young men of his date decided that the whole gov

. "Even if you could ever have annexed us with success"-said Dr. Bucher long before the war, to a German publicist with whom he was on friendly terms-"you came, as it was, a hundred years too late. We had taken our stand with France at the Revolution. Her spirit and her traditions were ours. We were not affected by her passing fits of reaction,

er he and Dr. Bucher had talked through a great part of the night, and the German

was prompt and app

said quietly-"no true Alsa

d then threw himself back

to be done." (Dann ist ja f

with a dreamer; so confident did the Germans

ong sympathies with France, or views antagonistic to the German administration, the infamous passport regulations, and a hundred other grievances, deepened year by year the regret for France, and the dislike for Germany. After the first period of "protestation," marked by the constant election of "protesting" deputies to the Reichstag, came the period of repression-the "graveyard peace" of the late eighties and early nineti

tarist. By this time some 400,000 native Alsatians had in the course of years left the country, and about the same number of immigrant Germans had taken their places. The indifference or apathy of the old population began again to yield to more active feelings. The rise of a party de

sides, there was an explosion

ssage the day before, through the decorated streets of the beautiful old town of Saverne, in the w

this country, Herr Doctor!"-and not very long before the war a German official to whom he was applying for leave to invite M. Andre Tardieu to lecture in Strasbourg, broke out with pettish exasperation: "For twenty years you have been turning my hair grey, M. le Docteur!"-and permission was refused. At the outbreak of war, he naturally escaped from S

repatriated-no doubt with much unavoidable hardship to individuals. Strasbourg contained then about 65,000 Germans out of 180,000. Among the remaining German officials there was often a curious lack of realisation of what had happened to Germany and to them. "The Germans are very gauche-their tone is still just the same!" And the Doctor described a scene he had witnessed in one of the bureaux of the prefecture only the day before. A German official was at his desk. Enter an Alsatian to make an inquiry about some point in a bankruptcy case. The German answered him with the curt rudeness which was the common off

class, had been rarely happy. The Alsatian strain was the stronger, and the wife's relations despised the German intruder. "Not long before the war I came upon two small boys fighting in a back street." The boy that was getting the worst of it was abu

gh personally attached to him, were anxious that there should be no complications with the French Government, and supported his wish to resign. But Rome had refused. Why? No doubt because the whole position of the Church and of Catholicism in these very Catholic provinces represents an important card in the hand of the Vatican, supposing the Papacy should desire at any time to reopen the Church and State question with Republican France. Wha

knows very well that there are difficulties ahead, and that the French love of symmetry and logic will have to make substantial concessions here and there to the local situation. There are a number of institutions, for instance, which have grown up and covered the country since

ough. And meanwhile the recovery of these rich and beautiful countries may well comfort her in some degree for her desolate fields and ruined towns of the North and Centre. The capital value of Alsace-Lorraine is put roughly at a thousand millions, and the Germans leave behind them considerable ad

in to mount into a region of chalk hills, barren and lonely enough before the war, and now transformed by the war into a scene which almost rivals the Ypres salient and Verdun itself in tragic suggestiveness. Standing in the lonely graveyard of Mont Muret, one looks over a tortured wilderness of trenches and shell-holes. Close by are all the places famous through years of fighting-Souain, Navarin Farm,

orse lay not far away; and in front, the white crosses of the graveyard. A grim scene, under the January sky! But in the very middle of the little cemetery some tender hand had just recently fastened a large bunch of white narcissus to one of the crosses. We ha

eading French Generals-Castelnau, Pétain, Nivelle, Gouraud, have passed through its furnace. But famous as it is, and for ever associated wi

Havre, at Boulogne, at St. Omer, how intent and absorbed a watch was kept along our front over the news from Verdun. It came in hourly, and the officers in the hotels, French and English, passed it to each other without much speech, with a shrug, or a look

call patriotism more terribly proved. "The poilu of Verdun," writes M. Joseph Reinach, "became an epic figure"-and the whole battle rose before Europe as a kind of apocalyptic vision of Death and Courage, staged on a great

the British front was attacked by 109 divisions, and the French by 25. In the most critical fighting at Verdun, from February 21st to March 21st, the French had to face 21 divisions, and including the second German attack in June and the triumphant French advance in December, the total enemy f

nastic interests of the Hohenzollerns, served by a magnificent army, and the finest military and patriotic traditions of France. From day to day the public in this country watched the fluctuations of the struggle with an in

d presently, as one passes along the streets, one sees that here is not a town, but only the ghost, the skeleton of a town. The roofless, windowless houses, of which the streets still keep, as in Rheims, their ancient lines, stare at you like so many eyeless skulls-the bare bones of a city. Only the famous citadel, with its miles of underground passages and rooms, is just as it was before the battle, and as it will be, one may hope

ll room, very famous in the history of the war. During the siege, scores of visitors from Allied and neutral countries-statesmen, generals, crowned heads-took luncheon under its canopy of flags

6-On les au

1918-On le

mprehensive and so close. From the few words I had with him I retain a shuddering impression as of a slaughter-house; yet nothing could be cheerfuller or humaner than the broad soldier-face. But our talk turned on the losses of Verdun, and although these losses-i.e., the proportion of death to the square yard-were probably exceeded in several later battles, in none, it seems to me, has the massacre of men on both sides left so terrible a mark on the survivors. There came a time when the French were sick of slaying, and the German dead were

which became so familiar to Europe in those marvellous four months from February to June, 1916. Every yard of these high slopes has been fought over again and again, witnessing on the part of the defenders a fury of endurance, a passion of resolve, such as those, perhaps, alone can know who hear through all their being the mystic call of the soil, of the very earth itself, the actual fatherland, on which they fight. "We are but a moment of the eternal France:"-such was once the saying of a French soldier, dying somewhere amid these broken trenches over which we are lookin

Western campaign. France, at Verdun, as in the Battle of the Marne, was defending not only her own freedom, but the freedom of Europe. A few months later, when the British Army of the Somme went over its parapets at daybreak on July 1st, Verdun was automatically relieved, and it was clear to all the world that Britain's apprenticeship was past, a

infantry creeping up the hill, through the communication trenches, in the dark, to the relief of their comrades in the fort; the runners-eager volunteers-assuring communications under the incessant hail of shell; the carrier-pigeons, when the fort is altogether cut off, bringing their messages back to Headquarters; the red and green signal ligh

t from the journal of Captain Delvert, defendi

st face is hollow, his eyes, with their blue rims, seem starting out of his head. 'Mon Capitaine, I'm used up. There are only three stretcher-bearers left. The others are

lock. We a

e Colonel. 'Owing to circumstanc

er

tenant X____ is lost in admiration of them. I da

n hours

he passage-way.... There they are-poor sentinels, whom we leave behind us, in a line on the parados, in their blood-stained unifor

orably, and within the fort

orders briefly, encouraged us, and placed us. Then he plunged his hand into the bag of bombs, and, leani

ly to attempt a falsehood." A grasp of the hand-a word from the Commandant: "Well done, mon ami!" But the Captain is thinking of his men. "Mon Commandant-if the Boches get through, it is not the fault of my company. They did all they could." Then a last message to his wife. And presently his name is carried through the dark by

he fort are choked with wounded and dying men, the water is giving out. On the 4th, a w

"We don't hear your artillery. Are attacked by gas, and flame throwers. Are at the last extremity." Then one message gets through from below-"Courage! we shall soon attack." The fort waits, and at night another fragmentary message com

al Joffre flashed his message to the heights-in the first place, a message of thanks to troops and Commander

nal-wounded, with a handful of survivors-surrendered, the Germans, in acknowledg

t this fight? What traditions did they

aux, I am indebted for the preceding details, to some extent answers the question by quoting a letter, a

won't they have a woman?-there, where she could really help! It is the business of mothers to pick up those poor lads, and give them a good word. Well, you must replace the mothers, you, mon chéri, you must do all you can-do the impossible-to help. I see

is present in the letter written by Roger Vamier's mother, as in the Ordres du Jour of Castelnau or Pétain. Facility of this kind is not our forte. Our lack of it suggests the laughter in that most delightful of recent French books, Les Silences du Colonel Bramble, which turns upon our national taciturnities and our minimising instinct in any matter of feeling, an instinct which is like the hiding instinct, the prote

y climbed the northern slopes of Fort Vaux. He was then from two to three hundred mètres from the counter-scarp. He took three months to cross these two to three hundred mètres-three months of superhuman effort, and of incredible losses in young men, the flower of the nation." The German strategic reserves were for the first time seriously shaken, and by the end of this wonderful year Pétain, Nivelle, and Mangin between them had recovered from the assailants all but a fraction of what had been lost at Verdun. Meanwhile, behind the "shield" of Verdun, which was thus attracting and wasting the force of the enemy, the Allied Armies had prepared the great offensive of the summer. Italy struck in the Trentino on the 25th of June, Russia attacked in June and July, the British attacked on the Somme on July 1st. The "wearing-down" battle had begun in earnest. "Soldiers of Verdun," said Marshal Joffre, in his order of the 12th of June, "the plans determined on by the Coalition are in full work. It is your heroic resistance that has ma

to the task. And presently we are passing the Moulin des Regrets, where Castelnau and Pétain met on the night of the 25th, and the resolution was taken to counter-attack instead of withdrawing. Verdun, indeed, is the classic illustration of the maxim that attack is the best defence, or, as the British Commander-in-Chief puts it in his latest dispatch, that "defensive success in battle can be gained only by a vigorous offensive." The long battle on the Meuse, "the greatest single action in history,

ill perhaps never see again, the war becomes a living pageant on the background of the dark. Then, with the lights of Chateau-Thierry, thought jumps in a moment from the oldest army in the war to the you

means, we must retrac