The affray in which the first lives were lost on each side took place at Joncherey, close to Delle on the Swiss frontier, five miles nearer to Belfort than Suarce. A glowing account of it was given in the Elsasser Kurier, a paper published at Colmar, which not only acknowledged the raid and the date (August 2, 1914), but deliberately gloried in the achievement of its leader, Lieutenant Mayer, of the 5th Chasseurs. He was, it says, when he received his orders from the general officer commanding the brigade to reconnoitre in the direction of Belfort, “full of joy and the lust of fighting, and proud to be the first to teach the enemy the might of the German trooper.” When he and his patrol of six or seven crossed the frontier into France they found, according to the same authority, that the numerous French cavalry and infantry detachments which had patrolled the district for some days before had disappeared—in obedience, of course, to the orders of their Government. On the way to Delle they saw, however, two sentinels posted on the road. “Like a flash of lightning,” wrote the Colmar enthusiast, “Lieutenant Mayer overtook them, and with the first stroke of his German sabre cleft to the breast the head of a French pioupiou, who was almost paralyzed by terror. At the same time, just as quickly, first-class trooper Heize thrust his lance with such fury into the breast of the other private that he could not withdraw his weapon from the body which he had pierced (“overtaken” is the word used), and was obliged to continue his ride with his sabre (and not his lance) in his hand.” The German story then goes on to tell how the little troop proceeded to gallop through a company of fifty French infantry without losing a man, how Lieutenant Mayer was shot down after they had passed them, and how first-class trooper Heize then took command and finally reached the German lines with a further loss of three men. As a matter of fact, the feats of arms of the gallant lieutenant and first-class trooper Heize were not quite so charmingly mediæval as the story makes out. What really happened was that when they came upon the French post, consisting of a corporal and four men, Lieutenant Mayer, by way of answer to Corporal Peugeot’s challenge, fired three shots at him with his revolver, one of which wounded him mortally, and was himself hit and killed by three bullets fired by the guard. (He was afterwards buried at Joncherey with full military honours, and a wreath was placed on his grave by the French.) The rest of the German account, except the appearance on the scene of the fifty worst shots in the French army, is fairly correct. In any case it is near enough to the truth to prove without need of further witness that the raid was not a mere youthful indiscretion on the part of the unfortunate Lieutenant Mayer.
French Advance in Village Street of Magnières, Meurthe et Moselle.
From “En Plein Feu.” By kind permission of M. Vermot, Rue Duguay-Trouin, Paris.
But the affair at Suarce is the most really damning piece of evidence supplied by any of these pre-war violations of French territory. It is not necessary to depend on the testimony of a Colmar newspaper, which might possibly be still further mistaken in its statements, to make the complicity of the German haut commandement historically certain. Early in the morning of the same fateful date (August 2, 1914), two cyclists and seven troopers of the German 22nd regiment of Dragoons rode into the village and informed the inhabitants that it was conquered territory. Later in the day an officer, a non-commissioned officer, and twelve troopers of the same regiment appeared, and after breaking up the telephone apparatus, forced a provision convoy, consisting of nine men, two waggons, and twenty-two horses, on its way to Belfort, to turn round and accompany them to Germany. The waggons and horses were taken as loot; the men were presumably the first specimens of the new kind of civil prisoner which, during the war, the Germans have been pleased to label as “hostages.” But in time of peace it is not the custom of civilized nations to take either loot or hostages from their neighbours, and, since there were no soldiers engaged in the affair on the French side, and therefore no fighting, the act could not be defended as an act of retaliation. Nor is there any question of the officer having done what he did merely on his own responsibility. You cannot take a troop of French horses and waggons and men into Germany and hide them under a bushel. The officer would not, in fact, have dared to commit the crime of international robbery and kidnapping, and then carried off his spoil with him to barracks, unless he had known that it would be condoned by his superior officers. In other words, like the Roman centurion, he was a man set under authority, and only did what he was told to do. The facts of the incident, as I have given them, are indisputable. If, at the time when the British cabinet was weighing the reasons for and against joining in the war, there were any of its members who doubted the extent of Germany’s guilt, the story of Suarce may well have played (as I have heard it did) an important part in helping them to make up their minds. For it was possibly the earliest positive evidence which proved beyond a shadow of doubt Germany’s deliberate intention of going to war. As far as I know, the story has not previously been published, at all events in any detail, and therefore it may be of a certain amount of historical interest to give the names of the nine Frenchmen who were made prisoners of war before war was declared. They were: Edouard Voelin (58 years of age), Eugène Mattin (52), François Verthe (66), Isidore Skup (57), Céléstin Fleury (55), Henri Féga (53), J. Pierre Marchal (51), Charles Martin (29), and Emile Mouhay (29). The last two had been passed as “bons pour l’armée” in the class of 1914. The rest were obviously far beyond the military age. Two of the nine have died during their indefensible imprisonment in Germany.
CHAPTER V
BELFORT TO NANCY
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