Chapter XX: Siege Warfare

The kind of modern siege in which the Allies are engaged, unlike the bombardment of a modern fortress, but like the sieges of old times, is bound to be a protracted affair. Still it is not likely that Germany will hold out as long as Troy did. From her geographical position, nearly surrounded by the host of enemies that her arrogance and self-seeking have arrayed against her, she was bound sooner or later to be the besieged party, unless she succeeded in crushing one or more of them by her first impetuous rush. It was not enough to drive them back. She had to annihilate them or at least to bring them to terms at the outset, and that she failed to do. Now, for the time being, she has created troublesome diversions in the Balkans and other parts of the world outside the main field of action, and has even opened a sally-port in the direction of Constantinople. But everywhere else her exits, and to a certain extent her entrances, are barred, north and south by the fleets of the Allies and the hitherto no-man’s land of two neutral states, on the east by the armies of Russia, and on the west by lines of trenches every bit as strong as her own.

It is on this side that the pressure of the siege bears most heavily upon her, and that in all probability the breach in her defences will be made. But, as has been ably pointed out in _The Times_ by Colonel Repington, whose military judgment carries more weight in France than that of any other English writer on the war, that breach will only be made by an even and continuous distribution of the pressure exerted along the whole of the western line, simultaneously with a sustained attack on the eastern front. It will not be effected by local offensives, however carefully prepared and however gallantly carried out. The day of brilliant cavalry charges on a grand scale is over. Even combined advances of infantry are a form of tactics that must be used as sparingly as possible, because of the enormous waste of life which under present conditions they necessarily entail. The slight advantage gained by the English last September at Loos and the French in Champagne was far too dearly earned. It was magnificent, but it was not siege tactics, and it is only by acting on the principle that the war, more particularly in the west, is not a series of battles but a siege, that it can be won. The time has come when it must be realized that partial offensives of this kind, carried on over a minute section of the front, are not worth the cost. The advance must be made by continuous sapping, that is to say by hammering away with artillery, and, so far as is possible, with nothing but artillery, along the whole line of the enemy’s trenches at the same time, without giving them any rest or any chance of shifting reinforcements from one part of the line or from one front to another.

During the months of comparative stagnation which are now, it may be hoped, drawing to a close, this policy has not been adopted, partly, no doubt, because it could not be. There were not enough guns and not enough high explosive shells. Once or twice they have been massed in huge quantities at some given point, as on those twenty-five miles between Auberives and Massiges in the Champagne country, and they have shown what can be done—provided that too much is not attempted. Our one object is to drive the enemy back. We have to oust them from the ground which they now occupy. That is what is going finally to break the _morale_ of Germany and the German army. We shall never do it, except at a prohibitive cost, as long as in our attacks we sacrifice length to depth. It is far more valuable to us, and far surer and less costly, to gain say one hundred square miles of ground by advancing a quarter of a mile along a front of four hundred miles than to win back the same acreage by pushing the enemy back five miles along a front of twenty.

But all this is in the future, and is the business of strategists and generals, and not of a newspaper correspondent, who may, after all, be completely wrong in his ideas. All that he can usefully do is to try to give his personal impressions of the way in which the present (or the old) plan has worked. Up till now it has in all probability been the only method that could be adopted, because of the lack of the guns and munitions necessary for a more comprehensive plan of action. It is commonly supposed that in this respect the French have been better off than the English. But in any case they, too, have been hampered in their general scheme of attack by a similar necessity for a sparing use of artillery ammunition, and it is this shortage which has principally dictated their conduct of the war of the trenches ever since it began.

At certain points all along the line, from the Channel to Verdun and from Verdun to the Vosges, there are what the German journalist quoted in the last chapter called “Craters of Death,” where, as the siege has progressed, both French and English have, so to speak, brought their battering-rams to bear on the defences. These points have not been chosen because they are the weakest, for there are no weakest points in continuous lines of trenches. One part of the system is as strong as another. But there are, though it sounds paradoxical to say so, strongest points, where the enemy, either because he is particularly well served by lines of communication behind, or because he is particularly anxious for strategical reasons to break through in front, has for months past concentrated greater numbers of guns and men. And since these strongest points have no “weakest” points on either side of them by which they might be turned, it is precisely there that the besiegers have been obliged to concentrate their attack. At the same time any attempt to rush the less thickly manned lines of trenches in between them has been rendered practically impossible by the fact that owing to aeroplanes and telephones and motor-traction any given part of the line can be very quickly strengthened, even to the extent of bringing fresh bodies of troops halfway across Europe for the purpose. Under these conditions the position of stalemate to which both besiegers and besieged have very nearly been reduced was practically unavoidable.

This second stage of the war, that is to say the whole wearisome period of the fighting in the trenches, I do not propose to follow at all closely. Even in the struggles round the “craters of death” there was, except on rare occasions, a sameness and a lack of dramatic incident which would be bound to depress the spirits of the general reader. As regards its bearing on the final issue, by far its most important feature is that it has not depressed the spirits of the French soldiers. Even more remarkable than the heroism which from time to time they have shown in making or repelling attacks on a more or less extended scale is the extraordinary cheerfulness with which they have accepted the dreary monotony as well as the wearing daily attrition imposed upon them by the stagnant immobility of the trenches. I have spoken already of this remarkable buoyancy of spirits, which so far as I have seen is characteristic of the whole of the French armies, and need not enlarge upon it again, except to remark that it is one of the most valuable assets upon which the Allies are able to count.

But there is one special aspect of it about which I should like to say a word or two, though it deserves a whole volume to itself. Because the Army of the Republic is a national army, there is no trade or calling or profession which is not represented in its ranks. France not only expects but requires that every able-bodied man of military age shall do his duty in the defence of his country, unless she has other work to put into his hands. Amongst the rest she calls upon the clergy, and with one consent these men of peace, instead of beginning to make excuse, have answered to the call with a fervour of patriotism which is excelled by no single class of their fellow-countrymen. Before the divorce between Church and State, garrison chaplains, bearing duly specified military grades, were part of the regular equipment of the army. When the State refused to recognize them any longer as functionaries, all priests became at once liable along with the laymen of their own year to ordinary military service. Consequently in the present war, either as men on the active list or as reservists or territorials, thousands of _abbés_ and _curés_, besides monks, novices, choristers, lay brothers, and other servants of the Church, are now serving with the colours.

As far as possible they are employed in the non-combatant ranks, but large numbers of them, both as officers and privates, serve shoulder to shoulder in the trenches and on the field of battle with the other fighting-men. As a body they seem to be inspired, even more than most soldiers, by the courage which springs from contempt of death. In nearly all the countless stories that are told of their heroism the dominant note is the same. Having once, in the pronouncement of their clerical vows, laid down their lives in the service of God, they are always ready to lay them down again in the service of their fellow-soldiers, whenever and wherever the need arises, without for one moment counting the cost. Time after time, like the many humble village _curés_, too old or too weak to serve their country in arms, who have nevertheless gone to meet the barbarians and death without flinching, they have shown to the enemy and to all the world that France has no more gallant sons and soldiers than her priests.

But they have done something more than that. Though they have become the soldiers of France they have remained the soldiers of Christ. Here is one of many instances that come crowding into my mind. A private soldier, badly wounded, was lying in one of the military hospitals, and, believing that he was on the point of death, asked anxiously for the services of a priest. At the moment none was to be found. The man in the next bed, with his thigh hideously shattered by a shell, was lying almost unconscious in a state of partial coma. Gradually, however, he realized what the doctor and the nurses of the ward were talking about. Weak and exhausted as he was, he managed to make one of them understand that he was himself a priest, and would pronounce the absolution of his fellow-soldier if she would hold up his hand; and then, as he whispered the words that brought to the other the comfort that he wanted, his own soul passed away.

That story is typical of the kind of lives which numbers of these men in their double capacity have led and are leading at the present moment. In out-of-the-way corners of the field, far from any church or chaplain, it is an everyday occurrence for some private soldier, with his clerical robes hastily thrown over his uniform, to celebrate mass for the men and officers of his regiment before the battle begins; or, when it is over, with the grime and the blood of it still thick upon him, to hear the confessions of the dying and give them the last consolations of their faith. Undoubtedly the influence of these soldier-priests and the influence of the religion for which they stand have had a large share in maintaining the wonderful _morale_ of the French troops. Even the _franc maçons_, consciously or unconsciously, are affected by it. The war has brought the whole nation as well as the armies face to face with the realities of life and death. They have this enormous advantage over the Germans, that for them the war they are engaged in is a holy war. They are not fighting for what they can get. They are fighting to defend and to free their homes, and therefore they feel and know that they are on the side of freedom and justice and right. In their trouble and peril they have turned instinctively to the consolations and the sustaining strength of what through long ages was their national as well as their personal religion. They have returned to the faith of their fathers. Not only individual soldiers and civilians but the authorities of the State themselves have awakened to the fact that in the great crises of life men and women have a natural craving for something spiritual, something outside of and higher than themselves.

Right at the beginning of the war the official rulers of the State and the Army did a wonderful thing. They took the step of reappointing regular _aumoniers_, or military chaplains, to the troops of the Republic; that is to say, they had the courage to undo their own work by deliberately revoking part of the anti-clerical legislation which, some years before, the Government had imposed on the country. In the autumn of 1914 I saw in a town near the eastern frontier a remarkable example of this same disposition on the part of the officials of the State to close, at all events to some extent, the breach between State and Church. In the cathedral of the town (a favourite target for the bombs of German aeroplanes), a solemn service was being celebrated in memory of the soldiers who had fallen during the war. And inside the rails of the chancel, on a chair placed opposite to the throne of the Archbishop and by the side of the General commanding the district, was seated the Prefect of the Department. It was the first time for fifteen years that a Prefect of France, acting in his official capacity and wearing his official uniform, had attended any form of public religious service. To the congregation, therefore, his presence at that solemn moment, while the thunder of Beethoven’s funeral march on the cathedral organ was almost drowned by the thunder of the guns on the heights outside the town, was a fact of the deepest significance. It was the outward and visible sign of the spirit of national unity and brotherly love which sprang into life all over France at the moment when war was declared. It was one of many proofs that for France and her highest interests the war has not been fought and the dead have not died in vain.

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Before I was carried away into this digression by the admiration which every one must feel for these brave soldier-priests of France, I was talking of the way in which, on the eastern half of the front, the chief energy of the war of the trenches has been concentrated at certain definite points or “craters of death.” West of the Vosges these points are all in the plain of the Woevre and the Hauts de Meuse, that is to say, along the sides of the St. Mihiel salient. The chief of them are at Les Eparges, on the north side of the angle, in the Forest of Apremont at the angle itself, and near Pont-à-Mousson at the eastern extremity of its southern side. At, and to a lesser extent between, these points the French and the Germans have now been at it, hammer and tongs, for more than a year. I use the expression “hammer and tongs” designedly, because I can think of no other that so well expresses the position. St. Mihiel and the Camp des Romains are situated at the hinge of the tongs, Les Eparges and Pont-à-Mousson towards the extremities of the two legs. With the object of squeezing the legs closer and closer together, so as to crush the German forces between them or at least to force them to retire on Metz, the French have been hammering away at these places for months past, in accordance with sound dynamic principles. At the same time from the Forest of Apremont they have pounded even more vigorously at the Camp des Romains. Dynamically the process of applying the force of the hammer at the St. Mihiel end of the tongs is not so advantageous, but it is, as I have tried to show, necessary. Force must be met by an equivalent force if it is desired to prevent motion in a particular direction, and they have at least so far succeeded in their object as to produce a state of equilibrium.

The position is one of great interest. What the Germans were trying to do at the end of September, 1914, they were still aiming at a year later, and, for all that one can foresee, the situation may be unchanged up to the time when this book is published, or even later. They wanted, and they still want, to cross the Meuse at St. Mihiel and in a sense complete the investment of Verdun. At any time since their first attempt at this manœuvre failed they might have repeated it, or would have repeated it if they could. If they had succeeded the consequences for the French and the whole of the Allies’ line would have been just as serious as at the beginning. Never was there a clearer case of “As you were,” and the fact that the point of danger for the French and the point of opportunity for the Germans was at the angle of the salient has made the situation there more pregnant with possibilities than at almost any other part of the front. The unsatisfactory side of it for our Allies is that because of their failure to turn the enemy out of the Camp des Romains they have not been able to put an end to the occupation of the Woevre, and that to a certain extent the menace of a forward movement still exists. On the other hand, the menace has always been held well in check, and the legs of the tongs are sensibly nearer to each other than they were fifteen months ago.

Through the closing months of 1914 and the whole of the following year a steady pressure was kept up on both sides of the salient by part of the Verdun garrison force and of the Third Army on the north side, that is to say, from the Meuse eastwards, and by part of the Toul garrison and of the Second Army operating from the south towards the Rupt de Mad. As the result of this general pressure, supplemented by occasional offensive movements in greater force, the enemy were driven back slightly on both their fronts.

The first of these offensive movements was made directly on St. Mihiel from the west. An attack was made on the German troops occupying the left bank of the river, and at first it had every appearance of being successful. The enemy were driven out of the suburb and barracks of Chauvoncourt and retired across the Meuse. Following in hot pursuit, the leading French troops took possession of the barracks—and fell into a trap. The ground had been mined by the Germans before their retreat, and the French paid the consequences of their impetuous advance. Practically the whole of the force that had entered the barracks was destroyed, and in the confusion the enemy successfully counter-attacked and remained masters of Chauvoncourt, which they still hold.

The next attack, a much bigger and brilliantly successful affair, was made at Les Eparges, twelve or thirteen miles north of St. Mihiel and the same distance south-east of Verdun. One of its objects was to defeat the enemy’s project of investing Verdun by driving him further back in the direction of Vigneulles, which lies about mid-way between the two fronts of the salient, and at the same time to threaten his position in the Forest of La Mortagne, to the west of the road from Vigneulles to Les Eparges. The operations, which began on February 17th and lasted till April 10th, were carried out with great determination by the French, and in the end they not only pushed their trenches forward a considerable distance, but were able to occupy a much safer and more commanding position. Before the advance was made the Germans had constructed a very strong redoubt, to the east of the village of Les Eparges, which was the main objective of the attack. After a careful preparation first by saps and mines, and then by sustained artillery fire, it was gallantly stormed and then evacuated and finally retaken, after a fierce hand-to-hand struggle, on February 19th. For the next six or seven weeks there was continual fighting on more or less the same ground till, at the beginning of April, the Crown Prince, who had returned from one of his prolonged and mysterious absences to the command of the Fifth Army, had the mortification of adding yet another to the list of his failures, and the French finally and conclusively gained the upper hand. They had fought with extraordinary dash and courage, and had suffered severely. But the result was well worth the cost. The position which they now hold commands a wide view northwards and eastwards over the plain of the Woevre. From the east side of the Forest of Amblonville, in which they have their main cantonments, the ground falls with a fairly steep descent till it rises again to the long bare spur of Les Eparges, over a thousand feet high, looking out over the plain. They are no longer exposed to the risk of an unexpected attack, as it is impossible for the enemy to concentrate troops in the ravines and behind the slopes which separate the forest from Les Eparges without being seen. The other main advantages which the French have gained on this side of the wedge are that they have made some advance on the two main roads, six or seven miles apart, which run between Verdun and Metz, one along the valley of the Orne past Etain, the other from Fresnes in the direction of Mars-la-Tour. They have also made a slight move forward on the centre of the German line at Lamorville, a few miles to the north of St. Mihiel.

On the southern side of the wedge the chief French efforts have been made at the two extremities of the line, at the Bois d’Ailly and the Bois Brulé, in the Forest of Apremont, and, fourteen and twenty-one miles further east, at the Bois de Mort-Mare, directly south of Thiaucourt, and the Bois le Prêtre, a little to the west of Pont-à-Mousson. The approach to the Forest of Apremont from the Meuse is one of the many places on this part of the front where the French side of the low hills behind the trenches are for miles honeycombed with cave-dwellings. They have been there so long now that they have become part of the landscape and look as if they had always belonged to it. I suppose when the war is over they will still be left for the edification of the cheap trippers and tourists of the world. What will not be left for them to see, for it is gone already, is the Bois Brulé. In the height of summer you can walk for hours along the trenches, through acres of what was once a green forest, and see never a leaf. Nothing is left of the trees but shattered stumps, cut clean off by the shells close to the ground. That gives one some idea of the severity of the endless duel of the guns. At the east end of the wood the hill on which it stands drops down sharply into the plain, and through the loopholes in the front trenches (where you do not linger for more than a few seconds at a time) you look down on the brown roofs of the village of Apremont, three or four hundred feet below you. It is full of Germans, though they never show themselves. But their advanced trenches are much closer than that, on the top of the reverse slope of the hill, in some places at the regulation nearest distance of about fifteen yards. Behind the hill, that is to say, on the south or French side of it, and as far as one can see to the east, the plain stretches out flat and unbroken (except by the lines of French and German trenches cut across it), backed on the south by a series of long, straight, level-topped hills, écheloned one behind the other, and ending far away to the right in the blue haze where the heights of the Moselle begin. That is where Pont-à-Mousson lies, and Bois le Prêtre, the greater part of it another dreary forest of stumps, through which the battle raged backwards and forwards again and again for months—or is it centuries?—till at last the whole of it was won and kept for France by her splendid soldiers.

And that is what they are doing all along the line. The progress is slow, but what changes there are in the position of the trenches are in favour of the French. Foot by foot they are winning back the land which was ravished from them at the beginning, and the longer the struggle for the possession of the Woevre goes on the surer it becomes that the occasional offensive movements of the French are assaults and those of the German attempts at sallies. The St. Mihiel salient is still a nuisance, but it has almost, if not quite, ceased to be a danger, and sooner or later it is practically certain that the prolonged attempt to cross the Meuse will have to be abandoned, and that not a single German will be left in France from Verdun to the Vosges.

In the Vosges themselves and in the Sundgau, ever since the retirement from Mulhouse, there has been continual fighting, sometimes of the most violent description, in which the Chasseurs Alpins and the Chasseurs-à-pied, splendidly supported by the French field artillery (supplemented during the latter part of last year with guns of heavier calibre), have done wonderfully fine work. They have not only successfully carried out their main task, which was to prevent the enemy from setting foot on the western slopes of the Vosges, but in the valleys of the Thur and the Doller and at other points along the line have gained a considerable amount of valuable ground. Further north, in the district of Senones, though they have not succeeded in penetrating again into the valley of the Bruche, they have kept the enemy well in check, and at the extreme right of the line, towards the Swiss frontier, have established themselves in a very strong position from which they are able to keep a watchful eye on Altkirch and Mulhouse, and at the same time to guard effectively against any attempt at either a straightforward or a roundabout attack on Belfort.

The main fighting has centred round Thann, Hartmannsweilerkopf, Cernay, Steinbach, the Ballon of Guebweiler, the valley of the Fecht, Reichackerkopf, and the valley of Münster, but from the Donon to Pfetterhausen on the Swiss frontier, especially on the southern section of this front, there is hardly any ground that has not been the scene of repeated combats, the net result of which is that the French have almost everywhere made slight advances. The summit of Hartmannsweilerkopf in particular, because it guards the entrance to the valley of St. Amarin, has been bathed in blood over and over again. Four or five times it has been taken and retaken, with dogged perseverance and extraordinary heroism, first by the French and then by the Germans, and the struggle for its possession still continues, though at present it is in the hands of the French. For both sides this famous mountain-top has been one of the most deadly of all those terrible “craters of death.”

Beyond this short general statement I shall not for the present attempt to follow the ins and outs of the campaign on this part of the line. Its strategical importance has been far greater than has appeared, and, once the weather conditions permit, there is always a chance of its developing into an attempt at a big offensive movement by one side or the other. But as regards the story of those heroic struggles we have had, I think, our fill of fighting. In the daily engagements on the plain of Alsace and among the fir-clad mountains of the Vosges the men of the armies of the east have shown the same enthusiastic devotion to their country, the same quiet disregard of danger and death, and the same cheerful endurance and unfailing confidence in the final triumph of right as their brother-soldiers who fought and died for the safety of Epinal and Nancy and Verdun and Toul. Higher praise than that they cannot have. The soldiers of France are the fearless sons of a great-hearted nation.

As I draw near to the end of this imperfect attempt to show the greatness of the debt which England owes to France, one other thought about them comes to me with increasing force. The French have played the game: they have fought the good fight like knights and gentlemen. That, more than almost anything else, is the reason why Englishmen have come to look upon them as something much more than Allies. Because of it they have forged a bond with us and our children’s children which Time itself will hardly be able to weaken. They are our brothers, not only in arms, but in all that civilization stands for. The Germans are—different. They are our enemies, not only because they are fighting against us, but much more because of the way in which they have fought. As a state, and, in cases that cannot be numbered, as individuals they have turned their backs upon principles and ideals by which all honourable nations and men must strive to rule their lives. Their scutcheon is blackened with arson and murder and pillage and rape. Their hands are red with the blood of the innocent. To the ends of the earth and of time they have made their name a byword and a reproach. But—worse than all this—they glory in their shame. They claim that their dishonour is honour and their wrong the right. Their eyes are holden that they cannot see. Some day they will be opened and they will see themselves and their crimes in all their revolting ugliness. For it is unbelievable that a whole nation of ordinary men and women can continue to allow themselves to be blinded by the false and cruel and iniquitous standards of a few devils in human form. But for the present all their sense of right and wrong is being eaten away by a foul and malignant cancer. Till that cancer has been cut out of their being by the sword they are a deadly danger to the whole world, for their success would infallibly spread its poison into every country on which, in their present condition, they were able to lay their hand. Till the sword has done its work, as firmly and as thoroughly as the surgeon’s scalpel, there is not one of the allied nations which can or will think of peace. Then and then only will come the end of the war.