Paris resuming normality—Regular train service—Nancy under fire—By automobile to the front—Panorama of the contested lines—View of the German wedge—French veterans—Ancient Lorraine—A vision of battle—RÉsumÉ of the struggle—The first German advance—“The face of the earth sown with shells”—The Kaiser silenced—The German Lorraine campaign lost—Visit to a French heavy battery—Underground quarters—A policed army—Military simplicity.

Only a winding black streak, that four hundred and fifty miles of trenches on a flat map. It is difficult to visualise the whole as you see it in your morning paper, or to realise the labour it represents in its course through the mire and over mountain slopes, through villages and thick forests and across open fields.

Every mile of it was located by the struggle of guns and rifles and men coming to a stalemate of effort, when both dug into the earth and neither could budge the other. It is a line of countless battles and broken hopes; of as brave charges as men ever made; a symbol of skill and dogged patience and eternal vigilance of striving foe against striving foe.

From the first, the sector from Rheims to Flanders was most familiar to the public. The world still thinks of the battle of the Marne as an affair at the door of Paris, though the heaviest fighting was from Vitry le FranÇois eastward and the fate of Paris was no less decided on the fields of Lorraine than on the fields of Champagne. The storming of Rheims cathedral became the theme of thousands of words of print to one word for the defence of the Plateau d’Amance or the struggle around LunÉville. Our knowledge of the war is from glimpses through the curtain of military secrecy which was drawn tight over Lorraine and the Vosges, shrouded in mountain mists. This is about Lorraine in winter, when the war was six months old.

But first, on our way, a word about Paris, which I had not seen since September. At the outset of the war, Parisians who had not gone to the front were in a trance of suspense; they were magnetised by the tragic possibilities of the hour. The fear of disaster was in their hearts, though they might deny it to themselves. They could think of nothing but France. Now they realised that the best way to help France was by going on with their work at home. Paris was trying to be normal, but no Parisian was making the bluff that Paris was normal. The Gallic lucidity of mind prevented such self-deception.

Is it normal to have your sons, brothers, and husbands up to their knees in icy water in the trenches, in danger of death every minute? This attitude seems human; it seems logical. One liked the French for it. He liked them for boasting so little. In their effort at normality they had accomplished more than they realised. After all, only one-thirtieth of the area of France was in German hands. A line of steel made the rest safe for those not at the front to pursue the routine of peace.

When I had been in Paris in September there was no certainty about railroad connections anywhere. You went to the station and took your chances, governed by the movement of troops, not to mention other conditions. This time I took the regular noon express to Nancy, as I might have done to Marseilles, or Rome, or Madrid, had I chosen. The sprinkling of quiet army officers on the train were in the new uniform of peculiar steely grey, in place of the target blue and red. But for them and the number of women in mourning and one other circumstance, the train might have been bound for Berlin, with Nancy only a stop on the way.

The other circumstance was the presence of a soldier in the vestibule who said: “Votre laisser-passer, monsieur, s’il vous plaÎt!” If you had a laisser-passer, he was most polite; but if you lacked one, he would also have been most polite and so would the guard that took you in charge at the next station. In other words, monsieur, you must have something besides a railroad ticket if you are on a train that runs past the fortress of Toul and your destination is Nancy. You must have a military pass, which was never given to foreigners if they were travelling alone in the zone of military operations. The pulse of the Frenchman beats high, his imagination bounds, when he looks eastward. To the east are the lost provinces and the frontier drawn by the war of ’70 between French Lorraine and German Lorraine. This gave our journey interest.

Nancy, capital of French Lorraine, is so near Metz, the great German fortress town of German Lorraine, that excursion trains used to run to Nancy in the opera season. “They are not running this winter,” say the wits of Nancy. “For one reason, we have no opera—and there are other reasons.”

An aeroplane from the German lines has only to toss a bomb in the course of an average reconnaissance on Nancy if it chooses; Zeppelins are within easy commuting distance. But here was Nancy as brilliantly lighted at nine in the evening as any city of its size at home. Our train, too, had run with the windows unshaded. After the darkness of London, and after English trains with every window shade closely drawn, this was a surprise.

It was a threat, an anticipation, that has darkened London, while Nancy knew fulfilment. Bombardment and bomb dropping were nothing new to Nancy. The spice of danger gives a fillip to business in the town whose population heard the din of the most thunderously spectacular action of the war echoing among the surrounding hills. Nancy saw the enemy beaten back. Now she was so close to the front that she felt the throb of the army’s life.

“Don’t you ever worry about aerial raids?” I asked madame behind the counter at the hotel.

“Do the men in the trenches worry about them?” she answered. “We have a much easier time than they. Why shouldn’t we share some of their dangers? And when a Zeppelin appears and our guns begin firing, we all feel like soldiers under fire.”

“Are all the population here as usual?”

“Certainly, monsieur!” she said. “The Germans can never take Nancy. The French are going to take Metz!”

The meal which that hotel restaurant served was as good as in peace times. Who deserves a good meal if not the officer who comes in from the front? And madame sees that he gets it. She is as proud of her poulet en casserole as any commander of a soixante-quinze battery of its practice. There was steam heat, too, in the hotel, which gave an American a homelike feeling.

In a score of places in the Eastern States you see landscapes with high hills like the spurs of the Vosges around Nancy sprinkled with snow and under a blue mist. And the air was dry; it had the life of our air. Old Civil War men who had been in the Tennessee Mountains or the Shenandoah Valley would feel perfectly at home in such surroundings; only the foreground of farm land which merges into the crests covered with trees in the distance is more finished. The people were tilling it hundreds of years before we began tilling ours. They till well; they make Lorraine a rich province of France.

With guns pounding in the distance, boys in their capes were skipping and frolicking on their way to school; housewives were going to market, and the streets were spotlessly clean. All the men of Nancy not in the army pursued their regular routine while the army went about its business of throwing shells at the Germans. On the dead walls of the buildings were M. Deschanel’s speech in the Chamber of Deputies, breathing endurance till victory, and the call for the class of recruits of 1915, which you will find on the walls of the towns of all France beside that of the order of mobilisation in August, now weather-stained. Nancy seemed, if anything, more French than any interior French town. Though near the border, there is no touch of German influence. When you walked through the old Place Stanislaus, so expressive of the architectural taste bred for centuries in the French, you understand the glow in the hearts of this very French population which made them unconscious of danger while their flag was flying over this very French city.

No two Christian peoples we know are quite so different as the French and the Germans. To each every national thought and habit incarnates a patriotism which is in defiance of that on the other side of the frontier. Over in America you may see the good in both sides, but no Frenchman and no German can on the Lorraine frontier. If he should, he would no longer be a Frenchman or a German in time of war.

At our service in front of the hotel were waiting two mortals in goatskin coats, with scarfs around their ears and French military caps on top of the scarfs. They were official army chauffeurs. If you have ridden through the Alleghenies in winter in an open car why explain that seeing the Vosges front in an automobile may be a joy ride to an Eskimo, but not to your humble servant? But the roads were perfect; as good wherever we went in this mountain country as from New York to Poughkeepsie. I need not tell you this if you have been in France; but you will be interested to know that Lorraine keeps her roads in perfect repair even in war time.

Crossing the swollen Moselle on a military bridge, twisting in and out of valleys and speeding through villages, one saw who were guarding the army’s secrets, but little of the army itself and few signs of transportation on a bleak, snowy day. At the outskirts of every village, at every bridge, and at intervals along the road, Territorial sentries stopped the car. Having an officer along was not sufficient to let you whizz by important posts. He must show his pass. Every sentry was a reminder of the hopelessness of being a correspondent these days without official sanction. The sentries were men in the thirties. In Belgium, their German counterpart, the Landsturm, were the monitors of a journey that I made. No troops are more military than the first line Germans; but in the snap and spirit of his salute the French Territorial has an Élan, a martial fervour, which the phlegmatic German in the thirties lacks.

Occasionally we passed scattered soldiers in the village streets, or a door opened to show a soldier figure in the doorway. The reason that we were not seeing anything of the army was the same that keeps the men and boys who are on the steps of the country grocery in summer at home around the stove in winter. All these villages were full of reservists who were indoors. They could be formed in the street ready for the march to any part of the line where a concentrated attack was made almost as soon after the alarm as a fire engine starts to a fire.

Now, imagine your view of a ball game limited to the batter and the pitcher: and that is all you see in the low country of Flanders. You have no grasp of what all the noise and struggle means, for you cannot see over the shoulders of the crowd. But in Lorraine you have only to ascend a hill and the moves in the chess game of war are clear.

A panorama unfolds as our car takes a rising grade to the village of Ste. GeneviÈve. We alight and walk along a bridge, where the sentry or a lookout is on watch. He seems quite alone, but at our approach a dozen of his comrades come out of their “home” dug in the hillside. Wherever you go about the frozen country of Lorraine it is a case of flushing soldiers from their shelters. A small, semicircular table is set up before the lookout, like his compass before a mariner. Here run blue pencil lines of direction pointing to Pont-À-Mousson, to ChÂteau-Salins, and other towns. Before us to the east rose the tree-clad crests of the famous Grand CouronnÉ of Nancy, and faintly in the distance we could see Metz, that strong fortress town in German Lorraine.

“Those guns that I hear, are they firing across the frontier?” I asked. For some French batteries command one of the outer forts of Metz.

“No, they are near Pont-À-Mousson.”

To the north the little town of Pont-À-Mousson lay in the lap of the river bottom, and across the valley, to the west, the famous Bois le PrÊtre. More guns were speaking from the forest depths, which showed great scars where the trees had been cut to give fields of fire. This was well to the rear of our position—marking the boundaries of the wedge that the Germans drove into the French lines, with its point at St. Mihiel—in trying to isolate the forts of Verdun and Toul. Doubtless you have noticed that wedge on the snake maps and have wondered about it, as I have. It looks so narrow that the French ought to be able to shoot across it from both sides. If not, why don’t the Germans widen it?

Well, for one thing, a quarter of an inch on a map is a good many miles of ground. The Germans cannot spread their wedge because they would have to climb the walls of an alley. That was a fact as clear to the eye as the valley of the Hudson from West Point. The Germans occupy an alley within an alley, as it were. They have their own natural defences for the edges of their wedge; or, where they do not, they lie cheek by jowl with the French in such thick woods as the Bois le PrÊtre. At our feet, looking toward Metz, an apron of cultivated land swept down for a mile or more to a forest edge. This was cut by lines of trenches; whose barbed wire protection pricked a blanket of snow.

“Our front is in those woods,” explained the colonel who was in command of the point.

“A major when the war began and an officer of reserves,” mon capitaine, who had brought us out from Paris, explained about the colonel. We were soon used to hearing that a colonel had been a major or a major a captain before the Kaiser had tried to get Nancy. There was quick death and speedy promotion at the great battle of Lorraine, as there was at Gettysburg and Antietam.

“They charged out of the woods, and we had a battalion of reserves—here are some of them—mes poilus!”

He turned affectionately to the bearded fellows in scarfs who had come out of the shelter. They smiled back. Now, as we all chatted together, officer-and-man distinction disappeared. We were in a family party.

It was all very simple to mes poilus, that first fight. They had been told to hold. If Ste. GeneviÈve were lost, the Amance plateau was in danger, and the loss of the Amance plateau meant the fall of Nancy. Some military martinets say that the soldiers of France think too much. In this case thinking may have taught them responsibility. So they held; they lay tight, these reserves, and kept on firing as the Germans swarmed out of the woods.

“And the Germans stopped there, monsieur. They hadn’t very far to go, had they? But the last fifty yards, monsieur, are the hardest travelling when you are trying to take a trench.”

They knew, these poilus, these veterans. Every soldier who serves in Lorraine knows. They themselves have tried to rush out of the edge of a woods across an open space against intrenched Germans, and found the shoe on the other foot.

Now the fields in the foreground down to the wood’s edge were bare of any living thing. You had to take mon capitaine’s word for it that there were any soldiers in front of us.

“The Boches are a good distance away at this point,” he said. “They are in the next woods.”

A broad stretch of snow lay between the two clumps of woods. It was not worth while for either side to try to get possession of the intervening space. At the first movement by either French or Germans the woods opposite would hum with rifle fire and echo with cannonading. So, like rival parties of Arctic explorers waiting out the Arctic winter, they watched each other. But if one force or the other napped, and the other caught him at it, then winter would not stay a brigade commander’s ambition. Three days later in this region the French, by a quick movement, got a good bag of prisoners to make a welcome item for the daily French official bulletin.

“We wait and the Germans wait on spring for any big movement,” said the colonel. “Men can’t lie out all night in the advance in weather like this. In that direction—” He indicated a part of the line where the two armies were facing each other across the old frontier. Back and forth they had fought, only to arrive where they had begun.

There was something else which the colonel wished us to see before we left the hill of Ste. GeneviÈve. It appealed to his Gallic sentiment, this quadrilateral of stone on the highest point where legend tells that “Jovin, a Christian and very faithful, vanquished the German barbarians 366 A.D.”

“We have to do as well in our day as Jovin in his,” remarked the colonel.

The church of Ste. GeneviÈve was badly smashed by shell. So was the church in the village on the Plateau d’Amance. Most churches in this district of Lorraine are. Framed through a great gap in the wall of the church of Amance was an immense Christ on the cross without a single abrasion, and a pile of dÉbris at its feet. After seeing as many ruined churches as I have, one becomes almost superstitious at how often the figures of Christ escape. But I have also seen effigies of Christ blown to bits.

Any one who, from an eminence, has seen one battle fought visualises another readily when the positions lie at his feet. Looking out on the field of Gettysburg from Round Top, I can always get the same thrill that I had when, seated in a gallery above the Russian and the Japanese armies, I saw the battle of Liao-yang. In sight of that Plateau d’Amance, which rises like a great knuckle above the surrounding country, a battle covering twenty times the extent of Gettysburg raged, and one could have looked over a battle-line as far as the eye may see from a steamer’s mast.

An icy gale swept across the white crest of the plateau on this January day, but it was nothing to the gale of shells that descended on it in late August and early September. Forty thousand shells, it is estimated, fell there. One kicked up fragments of steel on the field like peanut shells after a circus has gone. Here were the emplacements of a battery of French soixante-quinze within a circle of holes torn by its adversaries’ replies to its fire; a little farther along, concealed by shrubbery, the position of another battery which the enemy had not located.

“So that was it!” The struggle on the immense landscape, where at least a quarter of a million men were killed and wounded, became as simple as some Brobdignagian football match. Before the war began the French would not move a man within five miles of the frontier lest it be provocative: but once the issue was joined they sprang for Alsace and Lorraine, their imagination magnetised by the thought of the recovery of the lost provinces. Their Alpine chasseurs, mountain men of the Alpine and the Pyrenees districts, were concentrated for the purpose.

I recalled a remark I had heard: “What a pitiful little offensive that was!” It was made by one of those armchair “military experts,” who look at a map and jump at a conclusion. They appear very wise in their wordiness when real military experts are silent for want of knowledge. Pitiful, was it? Ask the Germans who faced it what they think. Pitiful, that sweep over those mountain walls and through the passes? Pitiful, perhaps, because it failed, though not until it had taken ChÂteau-Salins in the north and Mulhouse in the south. Ask the Germans if they think that it was pitiful! The Confederates also failed at Antietam and at Gettysburg, but the Union army never thought of their efforts as pitiful.

The French fell back because all the weight of the German army was thrown against France, while the Austrians were left to look after the slowly mobilising Russians. Two million five hundred thousand men on their first line the Germans had, as we know now, against the French twelve hundred thousand. To make sure of saving Paris as the Germans swung their mighty flanking column through Belgium, Joffre had to draw in his lines. The Germans came over the hills as splendidly as the French had gone. They struck in all directions toward Paris. In Lorraine was their left flank, the Bavarians, meant to play the same part to the east that von Kluck played to the west. We heard only of von Kluck and the British retreat from Mons; nothing of this terrific struggle in Lorraine.

From the Plateau d’Amance you may see how far the Germans came and what was their object. Between the fortresses of Épinal and of Toul lies the TroueÉ de Mirecourt—the Gap of Mirecourt. It is said that the French had purposely left it open when they were thinking of fighting the Germans on their own frontier and not on that of Belgium. They wanted the Germans to make their trial here—and wisely, for with all the desperate and courageous efforts of the Bavarian and Saxon armies they never got near the gap.

If they had forced it, however, with von Kluck swinging on the other flank, they might have got around the French army. Such was the dream of German strategy, whose realisation was so boldly and skilfully undertaken. The Germans counted on their immense force of artillery, built for this war in the last two years and outranging the French, to demoralise the French infantry. But the French infantry called the big shells “marmites” (saucepans), and made a joke of them and the death they spread as they tore up the fields in clouds of earth. Ah, it took more than artillery to beat back the best troops of France in a country like this—a country of rolling hills and fenceless fields cut by many streams and set among thick woods, where infantry on a bank or at a forest’s edge with rifles and rapid-firers and guns kept their barrels cool until the charge developed in the open. Some of these forests are only a few acres in extent; others are hundreds of acres. In the dark depths of one a frozen lake was seen glistening from our position on the Plateau d’Amance.

“Indescribable that scene which we witnessed from here,” said an officer, who had been on the plateau throughout the fighting. “All the splendid majesty of war was set on a stage before you. It was intoxication. We could see the lines of troops in their retreat and advance, batteries and charges shrouded in shrapnel smoke. What hosts of guns the Germans had! They seemed to be sowing the whole face of the earth with shells. The roar of the thing was like that of chaos itself. It was the exhilaration of the spectacle that kept us from dropping from fatigue. Two weeks of this business! Two weeks with every unit of artillery and infantry always ready, if not actually engaged!”

The general in command was directing not one but many battles, each with a general of its own; manoeuvring troops across the streams and open places, seeking the cover of forests, with the aeroplanes unable to learn how many of the enemy were hidden in the forests on his front, while he tried to keep his men out of angles and make his movements correspond with those of the divisions on his right and left. Skill this requires; skill equivalent to German skill; the skill which you cannot organise in a month after calling for a million volunteers, but which grows through years of organisation.

Shall I call the general in chief command General X? This is according to the custom of anonymity. A great modern army like the French is a machine; any man, high or low, only a unit of the machine. In this case the real name of X is Castelnau. If it lacks the fame which may seem its due, that may be because he was not operating near a transatlantic cable end. Fame is not the business of French generals nowadays. It is war. What counted for France was that he never let the Germans get near the gap at Mirecourt.

Having failed to reach the gap, the Germans, with that stubbornness of the offensive which characterises them, tried to take Nancy. They got a battery of heavy guns within range of the city. From a high hill it is said that the Kaiser watched the bombardment. But here is a story. As the German infantry advanced toward their new objective they passed a French artillery officer in a tree. He was able to locate that heavy battery and able to signal its position back to his own side. The French concentrated sufficient fire to silence it after it had thrown forty shells into Nancy. The same report tells how the Kaiser folded his cloak around him and walked down in silence from his eminence, where the sun blazed on his helmet. It was not the Germans’ fault that they failed to take Nancy. It was due to the French.

Some time a tablet will be put up to denote the high-water mark of the German invasion of Lorraine. It will be between the edge of the forest of Champenoux and the heights. When the Germans charged from the cover of the forest to get possession of the road to Nancy, the French guns and mitrailleuses which had held their fire turned loose. The rest of the story is how the French infantry, impatient at being held back, swept down in a counter-attack, and the Germans had to give up their campaign in Lorraine as they gave up their campaign against Paris in the early part of September. Saddest of all lost opportunities to the correspondent in this war is this fighting in Lorraine. One had only to climb a hill in order to see it all!

In half an hour, as the officer outlined the positions, we had lived through the two weeks’ fighting; and, thanks to the fairness of his story—that of a professional soldier without illusions—we felt that we had been hearing history while it was very fresh.

“They are very brave and skilful, the Germans,” he said. “We still have a battery of heavy guns on the plateau. Let us go and see it.”

We went, picking our way among the snow-covered shell pits. At one point we crossed a communicating trench, where soldiers could go and come to the guns and the infantry positions without being exposed to shell fire. I noticed that it carried a telephone wire.

“Yes,” said the officer; “we had no ditch during the fight with the Germans, and we were short of telephone wire for a while; so we had to carry messages back and forth as in the old days. It was a pretty warm kind of messenger service when the German marmites were falling their thickest.”

At length he stopped before a small mound of earth not in any way distinctive at a short distance on the uneven surface of the plateau. I did not even notice that there were three other such mounds. He pointed to a hole in the ground. I had been used to going through a manhole in a battleship turret, but not through one into a field-gun position before aeroplanes played a part in war.

“Entrez, monsieur!”

And I stepped down to face the breech of a gun whose muzzle pointed out of another hole in the timbered roof covered with earth.

“It’s very cosy!” I remarked.

“Oh, this is the shop! The living-room is below—here!”

I descended a ladder into a cellar ten feet below the gun level, where some of the gunners were lying on a thick carpet of perfectly dry straw.

“You are not doing much firing these days?” I suggested.

“Oh, we gave the Boches a couple this morning so they wouldn’t get cocky thinking they were safe. It’s necessary to keep your hand in even in the winter.”

“Don’t you get lonesome?”

“No, we shift on and off. We’re not here all the while. It is quite warm in our salon, monsieur, and we have good comrades. It is war. It is for France. What would you?”

Four other gun positions and four other cellars like this! Thousands of gun positions and thousands of cellars! Man invents new powers of destruction and man finds a way of escaping them.

As we left the battery we started forward, and suddenly out of the dusk came a sharp call. A young corporal confronted us. Who were we and what business had we prowling about on that hill? If there had been no officer along and I had not had a laisser-passer on my person, the American Ambassador to France would probably have had to get another countryman out of trouble.

The incident shows how thoroughly the army is policed and how surely. Editors who wonder why their correspondents are not in the front line catching bullets, please take notice.

It was dark when we returned to the little village on the plateau where we had left our car. The place seemed uninhabited with all the blinds closed. But through one uncovered window I saw a room full of chatting soldiers. We went to pay our respects to the colonel in command, and found him and his staff around a table covered with oilcloth in the main living-room of a villager’s house. He spoke of his men, of their loyalty and cheerfulness, as the other commanders had, as if this were his only boast. These French officers have little “side”; none of that toe-the-mark, strutting militarism which some soldiers think necessary to efficiency. They live very simply on campaign, though if they do get to town for a few hours they enjoy a good meal. If they did not, madame at the restaurant would feel that she was not doing her duty to France.