Verdun to the Vosges: Impressions of the War on the Fortress Frontier of France. Gerald Campbell

guns, served not by ordinary artillerymen but by specially and secretly trained artificers from Krupp’s works, which were to batter down the vaunted French fortresses as they had smashed the forts of Liége. They looked, he said, less like cannons than huge unwieldy antediluvian animals compounded of wheels and levers. They had been assigned an important part in the final act of the drama to be played in front of Paris, which was timed to finish by the end of the year. More in sorrow than in anger he explained how Paris would be reached. The armies of the German right wing which had poured through Belgium (von Kluck’s and the rest) would be rushed forward in irresistible masses and by incredibly rapid stages so as to envelop the French and English left wing from the north. At the same time a corresponding hook (he was continually talking of this “hook” as the be all and end all of German strategy) would take place from the south. Under the command of von Haeseler, the idol of the German troops (a man of iron will with ribs of silver which he wore in the place of those he lost in the Franco-Prussian War), the left wing were to advance through the Vosges, Lorraine, and La Woevre, crushing the cupolas of Belfort and Epinal and Toul and Verdun on their way like so many egg-shells, and, with the Crown Prince’s army as the connecting link between them and the northern hook, to round up the whole of the French and British armies, on or near the plain of Châlons. Meanwhile a specially detached army was to march on Paris and inform the Government and its inhabitants that unless the terms of peace proposed by Germany were immediately signed the city would be bombarded, and the French, he assured me, sooner than see their beloved Paris reduced to ruins by the 42-centimetre mammoths, would certainly comply, and leave Germany free to turn her attentions and the super-mammoths which she was preparing for their especial benefit to London and England.

      To-day all this sounds very fantastic and foolish—the idle vapourings of an irresponsible young man of no importance. But that it was in outline the German plan there is no doubt, and, but for the heroic resistance of de Castlenau and Foch and Dubail on the eastern frontier and the taxi-cab march of Gallieni’s Paris army and the other circumstances which caused that curious flank march of von Kluck’s on the north at the moment when his part in the programme was on the eve of completion, it might have gone near to succeeding. We know that if it had it would not have ended the war, for the French would undoubtedly have sacrificed Paris and fought to the bitter end, rather than agree to the proffered peace. But up to the end of the Battle of the Marne no one could say with any approach to certainty that they would not be put to the test.

      That was the position when we started for Paris. The whole ordered course of modern civilized life had been upset, and anxiety and uncertainty had taken its place. Telephones and telegraphs were only used by the official world, who were nearly as much in the dark as the rest of us. Channel boats were few and far between. Long-distance trains were either not running at all or were restricted to not more than two journeys in the twenty-four hours, and they felt their way like skirmishers advancing over open country, stopping and making a prolonged halt at every single station. The journey from Havre in a carriage dimly lit by a single candle seemed as if it would never end, and I had plenty of time to reflect with mixed feelings on certain articles which had recently been published in The Times pointing out the crying necessity of reducing the time of the whole journey between the two capitals to something under seven hours. This time it took rather over thirty. I was beginning to learn the first lesson of the war, the sovereign virtue of patience.

      In Paris we had to put up with another day’s delay. There was, of course, no question of taking the ceinture or driving straight across to the Gare de Lyon. Instead we had to dawdle about from five in the morning till ten at night, getting passports viséd and buying tickets (a two hours’ job), and then sitting in the train for another two hours before it started so as to keep the places which by good luck and the help of a friendly police official, after a series of humiliating rebuffs from about half a dozen other commissaires and commandants, all of them harassed and suspicious, we had had the luck to secure. That was the second lesson, afterwards many times repeated—never to expect to get a laisser passer or a permis de voyage or séjour or any other necessity of a journalist’s existence, until you had approached at least three of the powers that be.

      When at last we started, at midnight, the atmosphere of the crowded carriage was so suffocating that I migrated to the corridor and tried to sleep, with a suit case for a pillow, on the floor, while other restless passengers walked about on various parts of my body. Once more we stopped at every station with a violent bumping and jolting, repeated at each fresh start, and due to the combined facts that the train was about a quarter of a mile long, that it was made up of a job lot of carriages, and that the understudies of the regular drivers and stokers mobilized for active service were not very well up in their parts. Still, all things considered, we were uncommonly lucky to reach Dijon in thirteen hours instead of in five; and, all things considered, we knew quite well that we had nothing to complain of. As the Battle of the Marne was being fought at an average distance of about seventy miles from the line on which we were travelling, the wonder was that passenger trains were running at all. When the real history of the war is written a good deal will have to be said of the splendid way in which the railwaymen of France have done their important but trying and dreary share of the country’s work in the country’s hour of need.

      We were not, as I wrote at the time, a cheerful crowd. Many of us had come long distances, some even from America. The compelling hand of the war was on everyone in the train. Except in the deserted streets of Paris during the few hours that I spent there the day before, I had never seen such uniform sadness on so many faces at once. The women especially, bravely as they tried to face their grief and their anxieties, kind and helpful as they were to one another and the tiny babies that some of them had with them, were indescribably pathetic.

      These people were not refugees, like the trainloads one had seen lately in Belgium and Holland. They were going to the scene of the war instead of away from it. Most of them were reservists or the wives and children of reservists, bound for their old homes near the various headquarters to which the men had been called up. Some of them were nurses of the Croix Rouge, middle-aged women and quite young girls; some were on their way to visit wounded relations. Each and all carried the same heavy burden. Not one but many of those near and dear to them were at the front. They knew in some cases that they were already among the dead or wounded or missing. But generally they knew nothing at all except that, if they were still alive, they were there somewhere on one of the many battlefields on the long line of the Allies’ front, face to face with the enemy and death.

      We made many friends of different conditions in life during the slow hours between dawn and midday, and all had the same story to tell. But there was no need to ask. It was written in their faces. The natural vivacity of these sorrowing women of France was gone. They talked, when they did talk, quietly and sadly, and of only one subject. More often they sat with unseeing eyes, looking far off into the darkness of the unknown future, fearful of the fate that waited for the men by their side, and appalled by the thought of the ruin and suffering that threatened their homes and their children. The tragedy that has brought sorrow to the women of half the world had come upon them with the suddenness of a bomb from a Taube, and some of them were wounded and all were stunned by its effect. That was when we were still in the dark about the result of the great battle that had begun to rage on the left wing near Paris, before the German retreat began. On the second day of our stay in Dijon there was a sudden change in the emotional atmosphere. Directly I left the hotel in the evening I felt that good news had come. Relief and happiness were in the air. In the railway station, in the streets, in the cafés, on the pavements outside the newspaper offices where the daily news of the war was posted up, the look of the people was absolutely different. For the moment personal griefs and losses were hidden and forgotten. General Joffre’s general order of September 11th had been published to the troops, and from them the news had spread so quickly that in half an hour everyone seemed to know what had happened.

      It was the first real success of the war, the first time since its very early days that the French had begun to lose the feeling of apprehension produced in their minds by the steady retreat of the allied troops from the Belgian frontier, after the battles of Charleroi and Mons. Even the officers at Dijon were affected by it. Up till then, though they spoke confidently enough of eventual success, the subject uppermost in their minds and their conversation was always the wonderful perfection