(PLATES 107 TO 124.)

On a bright and quiet Sunday morning, the 23rd of August, 1914, General Smith-Dorrien's men were aligned along the Mons-CondÉ Canal (Plate 107), west of the town, on the northern edge of a thickly populated industrial district, with the great spoil heaps of the mines (Plate 108) like a range of miniature extinct volcanoes lying behind them. They had only just arrived from home, and with the failure of "Intelligence," of which they knew nothing, they were entirely ignorant of the strength and movements of their opponents. The Sabbatic quietude was broken with startling suddenness soon after noon, and very shortly the unexpected action became general along the whole front. The Germans outnumbered us by two to one both in guns and men; they were fresh from their successful outrages in overrunning Belgium, and they were full of contempt for the British "mercenaries." Their advance was excellently well covered by the terrain until they were within fairly short range, and they advanced wave on wave in close formation. They were decimated again and again by our rifle-fire, but again and again advanced in spite of it. Our men were sick of the slaughter, and their fire was so deadly that the German writers have afterwards attributed it to the enormous number of machine-guns which we were using, although we were in fact all too short, at that time, of this particular arm. The defence held out for six hours in face of the overwhelming odds, but at night we were compelled to retire, Mons itself having been entered by the enemy. So commenced the Mons retreat, so far as our men were concerned. The French retreat, unfortunately, their men being equally outnumbered, had commenced twelve hours before. On the next two days the retreat continued, Smith-Dorrien's army on the west of the Mormal Forest towards Le Cateau, and Haig's on the east of the forest towards Landrecies. The great Mormal Forest itself (some ten miles long and from three to five miles wide) has been very much thinned during the war by the Germans for the sake of its timber (Plate 109). Even now, although traversed by many woodland roads, it would be an impossible undertaking to take through it a great army in retreat, and this made the separation of the two armies unavoidable. On the 25th of August Haig's men had reached the old fortified town of Landrecies, on the Sambre. Fifty years or so before this, R. L. Stevenson—boating down the river on his "Inland Voyage"—had passed through the old-world fortifications, and wrote of the town, singularly enough:

Hardly a "strong town" in these days, but certainly it made itself a name both at the beginning and the end of the war. At 10 o'clock on the night of the 25th of August an alarm was given; the Germans had made their way through wood roads, and tried to rush us in the camouflage of French uniforms and French words of command. Happily the 4th Guards Brigade was on the spot, although only just arrived, and received the enemy in unexpected fashion, so that by midnight the attack had collapsed, and a little more much-needed breathing-time was gained. A Landrecien told us, in 1919, how he had seen the Germans coming down "in their thousands," and how the Guards had stood up to them at the railway and road corner at which my photograph (Plate 110) was taken. In 1918 the tables were turned, and it was the German Guards who were trying to hold up our infantry, who captured the town on the 10th of October, after crossing the Sambre on rafts. It is of this attack that the story[43] is told of three tractor tanks, which made a bluff at a moment when the infantry were held up, and of which two got through and successfully made a way for the rifles.

South-west of the forest lies Le Cateau (Plate 111), at one end of the straight fifteen-mile road to Cambrai, south of which lie the villages of Caudry, Esnes, Ligny, and many others whose names we heard first in August, 1914, and again four years later. It was here that General Smith-Dorrien made the great stand of the 26th of August, which has been the subject of so much discussion, but which certainly gave the opportunity for most gallant fighting, both of infantry and artillery, while it held back—and, better still, greatly exhausted—the enemy. By the afternoon the position became untenable, and then followed the all-night march of the tired men towards St. Quentin. Le Cateau itself appears to be very little damaged.

On the "Roman road," running south from Le Cateau to the Cambrai-St. Quentin road, the villages are now much damaged, probably rather in 1918 than in 1914, and notices were still standing—"Do not halt on this road"—at places towards the south. Another souvenir of 1918 was a notice near Maurois, "Pip Squeaks 6.30 to-night!" A less agreeable reminiscence was a sugar factory, thoroughly gutted by the Germans in characteristic fashion, beside the road near EstrÉes, a village itself in ruins. Along this road, as in many places on the Somme, the route, now destitute of trees, is marked by short wooden posts on each side placed at short distances apart, their object being, of course, to keep lorries on the track in the dark, or at least to give them notice if they strayed from it. Here and there many of the posts on one side of the road seemed to be sloping in one direction, and those on the other side in the opposite direction. The obvious inference was that the slope of the posts was due to the frequency with which the lorries had run into them!

The Le Cateau battlefield was so quickly crossed both in 1914 and 1918 that many of its villages, some of which I had the opportunity of visiting while fighting was going on only a few miles farther north, are very little damaged, and the land surface generally is almost uninjured in comparison with its condition both farther north and farther south.

The 1st of September was the anniversary of Sedan, and the Germans had apparently hoped to celebrate the day in Paris. But on or about that day, perhaps the day before, Von Kluck had made the great turn to the south-east, which (whatever its original motive) eventually allowed the French to get on his flank across the Ourcq, and paved the way for the great victory on the Marne.

The Germans had progressed so far as to cross the Marne by the 4th of September, and had reached their farthest south position on the Petit Morin, which joins the Marne at La FertÉ-sous-Jouarre. On the next day Joffre gave his orders for the commencement of the advance on the 6th, which at one blow turned the much-vaunted advance into a retreat, and postponed for ever the triumphal march of the Emperor through the Arc de Triomphe which was found to have been so elaborately arranged for. The bridge over the Marne at La FertÉ-sous-Jouarre—close to which the photograph in Plate 112 was taken—was blown up, and we failed to cross the river until two days later, after which came the great and complex battle which ended with the Germans back to the Aisne. But they still succeeded in holding, and were still to hold for four more years, all the hilly country between Rheims and Verdun, as well as Laon, St. Quentin, PÉronne, and Cambrai, and also, for much of that time, the whole Somme region.

And so the war went on, until in May of 1918 Ludendorff played his last shot and swept down across the Aisne and the Vesle and the Tardenois country to the Marne once more,[44] and finally, in the Friedensturm (for the opening of which the Emperor came down specially on the 15th of July), crossed the river between ChÂteau Thierry (which is badly damaged), Dormans (Plate 113), and Montvoisin, and for a few days held a precarious and unhappy[45] footing on the south bank, his pontoon bridges being exposed to continual enfilade firing, and his communications only kept up very imperfectly in consequence. The ruin of the villages along the river here shows how hard the shelling had been at this time.

At length came the day when Foch could let his armies off the leash. No one can forget the thrill of that 18th of July, when the news came through in the early afternoon in the clubs and the newspapers that the advance for which we had hoped so long—and which we somehow knew with a singular certainty that Foch would make in his own time—had actually commenced. Some of us, whether more sanguine or more wise than others I cannot say, seemed to understand at once that the end had really begun, and the horrible black clouds of four years were broken up as suddenly and finally as when the sun bursts out after a thunderstorm, and the storm which was overhead a moment before is suddenly seen to be rolling away to the horizon. And when the late news at night and the early news the next morning allowed us to see something of Foch's intention, and how well things were progressing, we might well have ordered "joybells" if it had not been for our painful recollection of too early rejoicing over the Cambrai battle of 1917. But the joybells were within everyone, all the same. No doubt there is justification for the special celebration every year of Armistice Day. But to many of us the real day of relief, the day when the sun once more broke out on France and Britain and all the Allied lands, was the day on which Mangin astonished the Germans by suddenly walking through the western boundary of the salient which they had captured with so much effort and so much boastfulness.

The scheme of the Friedensturm was to encircle Rheims by simultaneous advances east and west of the impassable Montagne de Reims, the advances to meet at Epernay (Plate 114), and thereafter the valley of the Marne to provide the long-deferred route to Paris. On the east the advance was held up on the Vesle from the very start by General Gouraud's skilful "false front" tactics. Prunay was taken and retaken, and attempts made to secure a bridge-head at Sillery (Plate 115), six miles from the city, and due south of the Nogent de l'Abesse fort, while slight gains were made farther east; but practically no progress at all was effected.

South of Rheims and away to the south and east from Epernay towards Bar-le-Duc, the war-struck ground ceases. Pleasant avenues and undamaged villages are delightful to the eye after days of wandering in the desert of the north-west. In places we even passed through avenues of fruit-trees in full blossom.

Having failed in the east, Ludendorff redoubled his pressure on the west of the Montagne, but British troops and Italian Alpini joined the French in holding up the critical points; and although the salient round Rheims itself was narrowed, the Marne was not reached and Epernay could only be shelled from a distance of seven or eight miles. Near ChÂteau Thierry, at the western end of the great salient, American troops aided the French in preventing advance. Already on the 18th of July, the first day of the advance, the French reached positions commanding the road and railway at Soissons, on the 21st ChÂteau Thierry was recaptured, and the next day saw the Germans back, for the last time, north of the river which had been the turning-point in 1914. The 26th of July saw an engagement which earned very special appreciation from Haig,[46] the taking of the Buzancy ChÂteau (Plate 116) and the little plateau on which it stands, about 300 feet above the River Crise, some four miles south of Soissons. Buzancy had been the object of an attack by the French and another by the Americans within a week from the commencement of the advance, but had been pertinaciously held by the Germans. It is in effect a narrow promontory between two deep valleys, and an almost unassailable position. On the 28th of July the 15th Scottish Division were told off for the attack, and the Highlanders succeeded after a fight so notable that, although the position was not permanently held until a day or two later, the 17th French Division erected a memorial (Plate 117) in commemoration of it on the spot where the body of the foremost Highlander was found. The monument, simple and dignified, bears the inscription: "Ici fleurira toujours le glorieux Chardon d'Écosse parmi les Roses de France." Five days later the French entered Soissons once more, and on the 5th of August the Aisne was again crossed, and Fismes (Plate 95), on the Vesle, was taken by the Americans on the same day. But Foch's plan led him to leave this district for a time while equally important advances were made elsewhere.

On the 10th of October the troops were back again on the old Le Cateau battlefield, and Le Cateau was retaken, and on the next day the whole length of the Chemin des Dames plateau was again in the Allies' possession.

On the 4th of November we were again at Landrecies,[47] and right through the Mormal Forest, while on the next day the ancient fortifications of Le Quesnoy (Plate 118) were taken by assault and the garrison surrendered.

Meantime French and Americans were advancing farther to the east, outside the lines of the 1914 retreat, through extremely difficult country, and meeting with strenuous opposition. Near Varennes one saw still in 1920 the American notice, "Road under control; split your convoy" (see p. 75).

The Germans, retreating, naturally cut down all the trees on the roadsides in order to lay them across the roads to hinder our advance; there now remain only stumps a few feet above the ground. It must be long before the old avenues can reappear, but cultivation seemed to be going on normally everywhere. The destruction of fruit-trees in the German retreat of 1917 was a different matter, the justification of which on military grounds seems somewhat strained. Plate 119 is copied from a photograph in a captured German Report from the Hirson district. It was intended specially to show the blowing up of a railway-bridge at Mennessis, but serves also to show exactly the thorough and deliberate way in which the orchards were destroyed.

At cross-roads mine craters formed a serious delay to traffic, and the sappers (after careful investigation for, and destruction of, the numerous booby-traps) had to bridge or to circumvent them, or both. Bridges, of course, were all blown up. Hirson, entered on the 8th of November (Plate 120), is an example of many others, where there has not been time to erect a girder bridge. Plate 121 shows one of the pile bridges over the CondÉ Canal—bridges which were often erected in an incredibly short time. The Americans reached the Meuse at Sedan (Plate 122) on the 5th of November, and took the western half of the town on the 7th, and the British under Byng retook the ancient fortress of Maubeuge (Plate 123 shows the girder bridge over the Meuse here put across after the German retreat), which had been compelled to surrender, after a fortnight's siege, on the 9th of November in 1914. Finally British troops (Canadians) reached Mons (Plate 124), and entered the city at dawn on the 11th of November, a few hours before the Armistice came into effect. So ended the campaign where it had been commenced more than four years earlier. A story told by Mr. Buchan[48] is well worth repeating: The 8th Division in Horne's First Army had spent the winter of 1917-18 in the Ypres Salient; it had done gloriously in March in the retreat from St. Quentin; it had fought in May in the third battle of the Aisne, and from the beginning of August had been hotly engaged in the British advance:

With the recollection of this exploit and the story of Cambrai and Bourlon (and many others) before them, will anyone in future be daring enough to try to convince us of the physical and moral decadence of the Cockney—a doctrine which some offensively superior people tried to preach not so many years ago?

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