Chapter XIII: The Marne to Mons (3)

_A little salient of rising ground on the north of the Somme, filling up a bend in the river, taken by the Londoners after very hard fighting in August, 1918, with the friendly aid of a few Americans who are said to have lost their bearings, but were ready for a fight wherever they found themselves._]

CAPPY.

_One of the many destroyed villages along the Somme. The water here is only the canalised branch of the river, the rest of the stream spreads itself out to the north on the flat valley bottom._]

VILLERS CARBONNEL.

_An official photograph of the village just after we had passed it and before the débris was tidied up. The aspect of solidity about the cottages is much more apparent than real. In 1919 scarcely anything was visible which could be called a building._]

CLÉRY.

_Cléry lies a little north of Péronne and below the great bend of the Somme. The photograph gives some idea of the difficulties which we had to encounter in getting an army across the river at Brie, and which the Australians had to meet, close to Cléry, in the memorable crossing on the 31st of August, 1918, after which they were able the next day to take Mont St. Quentin and enter Péronne._]

THE CHÂTEAU OF BRIE.

_At Brie the road from Amiens crosses the Somme, continuing on to the east for St. Quentin, and turning north to Péronne._

_It was here that the trials were made--on the Somme--in September, 1918, of the various appliances used two days later in the audacious crossing of the deep water forming a part of the Hindenburg Line at the St. Quentin Canal, which proved so splendidly successful._]

ON THE AMIENS-ALBERT ROAD.

_At a little village (Lahoussoye), beyond Pont Noyelles on the road to Albert, stands, or stood, this dilapidated barn, carrying the scrawl written by some cheerful "Tommy"--"Pessimists shot on sight."_]

ALBERT ON EVACUATION.

_An official photograph of one of the main entries to the town just after we had regained it in August, 1918. This photograph, and also Plate LXIX, may well be compared with Plates LXXIX and LXXXVIII, as showing the original naked devastation by contrast with the state of places after the sappers had been at work, and the inhabitants had begun to return._]

VIII.--ALBERT AND THE ANCRE

(PLATES 67 TO 73.)

Half a dozen miles from Amiens on the road to Albert one crosses the valley of a little stream at Pont Noyelles--an untouched valley, beautiful with tall trees and green meadows like a bit of Middlesex. The road climbs the combe on the eastern bank, and a little farther on crosses the narrow space "that just divides the desert from the sown." Onwards on the high ground from this point all greenness and beauty have disappeared, every tree has gone, and at one bound is reached the "desert" which covers thousands of square miles to east and north and south. Close to the point of change it was cheering to come across the inscription (Plate 67), doubtless scrawled by some plucky "Tommy" in the bad spring days of 1918, "Pessimists shot on sight." One hopes that the cheerful artist got through safely; it was just his spirit that gave the army that final victory which they believed in as strongly in our worst hours as at any other time.

The French had compelled the Germans to leave Albert in December, 1914, and it remained in the hands of the Allies until the German advance in 1918, when it was captured on the 27th of March. It was finally retaken by us on the 22nd of August. The little industrial town, originally containing some 7,000 inhabitants, was severely shelled during years by the Germans, and then for four months by ourselves, and reduced absolutely to ruins. Plate 68 is one of those officially taken, and gives a vivid idea of the condition of one of the principal streets of approach just after we had retaken it.

In April of 1919 (Plate 69)[30] it remained a ruin, and even a year later it could hardly be otherwise described. (I believe that Plates 68 and 69 correspond to nearly the same places.) But motoring through it some nine months after the Armistice, while it was still to all appearance very much in the condition indicated by the photographs, we were practically held up about 10 o'clock in the forenoon by a stream of some hundreds of people, carrying bags and all sorts of receptacles, making their way towards the railway-station. They must no doubt have found, somewhere, shelter enough to live and sleep in in cellars or otherwise, in spite of the destruction, and were on their way to Amiens to lay in supplies.

[30] From a negative taken by Mr. Basil Mott.

It was on the tower of the pilgrimage Church of Notre Dame de Brebières that there stood for so long a statue of the Madonna in a position which appeared to defy gravity, and which provoked the prophecy that its fall would indicate the end of the war. The prophecy was not exactly fulfilled, but the great heap of rubbish in front of the church (Plate 70) is all that was left of the tower after our shelling of the town in 1918.

The road northwards from Albert to Miraumont (Plate 71) runs in the broad marshy valley of the River Ancre. The valley was originally thickly wooded, but was in 1918 covered with fallen tree-trunks, and Plate 72, which was taken close to Aveluy, gives some idea of its appearance. The ground on each side of the valley rises somewhat steeply for some 300 feet. The high ground on the east of the valley is that on which Thiepval and the German redoubts lay. On the west, farther north, lie Beaucourt, Beaumont-Hamel, and Miraumont, all of which were repeatedly the scenes of very heavy fighting. Beaucourt and Beaumont-Hamel were taken only at the very end of the 1916 campaign, in a short spell of possible weather.[31] Haig describes the defences here as of special and enormous strength.

[31] Haig's Despatches, p. 50.

At Beaumont-Hamel there was literally hand-to-hand fighting of the most severe kind. Mr. O'Neill describes the action graphically:

"On many occasions sandwiches of Scots and Germans wrestled and strove in the constricted space.... Bodies of men were prisoners and captors many times over before the struggle approached a decision.... In the midst of the fighting vast stores were tapped, and the men began to smoke as they went about their business. Some of them found time to change their underclothing when a large supply of spare shirts was found."[32]

[32] O'Neill, "History of the War," p. 664.

And these men were not even the "Contemptibles," but only "mercenaries" who had been civilians till a year or so before! Truly the German preconceived notions as to the British must have suffered rude shocks.

Plate 73 (again from an official photograph) was taken after the 1918 fighting, which covered episodes as noteworthy as those of four years earlier. The photograph is taken from a point near the "cross-roads" at Beaumont-Hamel, looking across the Ancre valley to the northern (lower) end of the Thiepval Ridge, and beyond it to the higher ground on which Bapaume stands.

The final attack across the Ancre began under Thiepval, when troops of the 14th Welsh crossed the river, wading breast deep through the flooded stream under heavy fire, holding their rifles and pouches above their heads, and formed up in the actual process of a German counter-attack, along the line held by the two companies who had crossed the previous morning.[33] A day later a part of the 64th Brigade (New Zealanders) started at 11.30 p.m. on a pitch-dark night, crossed the valley, and gained and held positions, half surrounded, until the covering troops arrived. This was on the slope near Miraumont seen across the valley in Plate 73.

[33] Haig's Despatches, p. 268.

ALBERT IN WINTER.

_The ruins of Albert under snow in the early spring of 1919._]

ALBERT CATHEDRAL.

_The great heap of stone and brick rubbish was once the tower on which stood for a long time a statue of the Madonna at an angle which appeared to defy gravity. I am afraid that it was our shelling in 1918 which eventually brought it down._]

IN THE ANCRE VALLEY.

_The road along the Ancre Valley, entering Albert from the north._]

AVELUY.

_The swampy, but once well wooded, valley of the Ancre, with the Thiepval Ridge as its farther bank._]

IX.--THE OISE AND THE AVRE

(PLATES 74 TO 78.)

In the northern outskirts of the Forest of St. Gobain, a couple of miles from the village of Crépy, and about seven miles east of La Fère and the Oise, are to be found the remains of the emplacement (Plate 74) of the "Grosse Bertha," the gun which bombarded Paris from a distance of about seventy-four miles. On the spot we were told that there had been three guns, or at any rate three emplacements, but that the other emplacements were still more completely destroyed than the one which I have photographed. The guns and gun-carriages were, of course, removed by the Germans before we could reach them. We know, however, that the shell was about 8 inches in diameter and was fired from a large naval gun, probably similar to the gun captured at Chuignes (p. 45), lined up for the small shell. The stories that some mysterious new ballistics were involved in the matter were, of course, entirely "buncombe." But naturally the trajectory of a shell travelling more than seventy miles was a matter of interest to all artillerymen. It must have reached a height of something like five-and-twenty miles, and our knowledge of atmospheric conditions at that height is somewhat limited. The alignment of the gun, with the allowances for wind and drift, must have been very accurately calculated and carried out, for even the whole of Paris is not a large target under such exceptional circumstances.

It will not be forgotten, as a characteristic piece of German mentality--or brutality--that this gun was used on Good Friday (the 29th of March, 1918), and a shell burst in a Paris church during service and killed many of the congregation. But the Parisians, after the first shock, were to be as little scared by Bertha as the Londoners by the Zepps.

Crossing the Forest of St. Gobain--which had been continuously within the German lines--by the very worst stretches of road which I found anywhere, even in Flanders--I came across a German O.P. (Plate 75) in a tall tree. The forest itself is very fine, quite untouched by shell-fire, but the group of large, pleasant-looking country houses at St. Gobain itself have been much injured. Farther south reconstruction was in rapid progress. At the little manufacturing town of Chauny (half-way to Noyon) we found the odd condition of affairs that half the town had been entirely destroyed and the other half--the division was quite a sharp one--almost untouched.

In the early part of the war--September, 1914--when the French occupied Péronne, there was hard fighting about Noyon; at that time the Germans were too strong and the French had to fall back, but they both recovered and relost it later on. In 1917 they took Noyon once more during the great German retirement, but again it passed into German hands during the March advance in 1918, to be abandoned finally by the enemy on the 29th of August. After changing hands so often it is not to be wondered at that the town is a good deal damaged. It is not, however, totally destroyed. The cathedral (Plate 76) is a building dating from the eleventh and twelfth centuries, with very interesting architectural features. It has been greatly injured by shell-fire, roof and vaulting having mostly gone and the towers being much damaged.

Toward the end of their great advance in 1918 the Germans succeeded (on the 28th of March) in crossing the little River Doms (a southern tributary of the Avre), on which Montdidier (Plate 77) stands, and this little town, which was entirely ruined (but by this time is largely rebuilt), formed the south-western apex of their advance. Farther north, on the Avre itself, they took Moreuil and Morisel on the 29th of March, and within the next few days crossed the river and reached--from there southwards to Montdidier--the higher ground on the west of the valley, which forms the background in Plate 78. They were here, for the time, about ten miles south-east of Amiens, just as beyond Villers Bretonneux they were the same distance west. The photograph shows how exceedingly thin the coating of soil over the chalk in this district is, all the shell-holes (they are quite small) showing up like patches of snow. The little Avre River runs under the line of trees in the distance at the foot of the higher ground which the Germans had reached.

The main road southwards in the Avre valley lies here for a long distance between banks which are still riddled with German dugouts and French defences dating from the fighting of 1918.

Five days after Foch had started the great counter-offensive in July the German lines here were attacked by French troops, with some British tanks in aid, and were driven back to the Avre. The attack was in many ways a notable one, perhaps especially for the tanks, but was only a preliminary before the great advance of the 8th of August (p. 44), when at one bound the Avre was passed and the Germans pushed six miles westward.

Montdidier was surrounded by the French three days later, its garrison surrendered, and the great advance continued its inexorable progress.

BEAUMONT-HAMEL.

_An official photograph taken from near the cross-roads at Beaumont-Hamel looking across the Ancre Valley to the northern part of the Thiepval Ridge, towards Miraumont._]

THE "BIG BERTHA" EMPLACEMENT.

_All that is left of an emplacement of the "Grosse Bertha," one of the guns in the St. Gobain Forest between La Fère and Laon, which shelled Paris from a distance of about seventy-four miles._]

THE ST. GOBAIN FOREST.

_The St. Gobain Forest was in German hands throughout the war; the photograph shows a German O.P. in a tall tree on high ground which would command the Oise valley in the direction of Chauny._]

NOYON.

_The fine twelfth-century Cathedral of Noyon is even more entirely ruined, throughout much of its length, than the Cathedral of Soissons, and very much more than Rheims._]

MONTDIDIER.

_This little town was the farthest south point reached by the Germans in their Somme advance of 1918. It lies on the Doms, which is practically a continuation of the Avre._]

THE AVRE VALLEY.

_The chalk here, just below Moreuil, is so near the surface that the shell-holes still looked like snow patches more than a year after they had been formed. The ground shown is that of the French counter-attack (with English tanks) a few days before the advance on the Somme in August, 1918._]

CAMBRAI PLACE D'ARMES.

_A portion of the Place d'Armes in Cambrai, burnt deliberately by the Germans in their final evacuation, after there had been time to clear away the débris with which it had been covered._]

CAMBRAI CATHEDRAL.

_The tower of the modern Cathedral of Notre Dame at Cambrai appears to stand, in its upper part, in defiance of all theories of stable construction in masonry._]

X.--CAMBRAI TO ST. QUENTIN

(PLATES 79 TO 87.)

West of Cambrai and south to St. Quentin lay over thirty miles of the strongest part of the Hindenburg Line, that "granite wall of 24,000 square kilometres." The southern end of the much-talked-of "Switch Line" at Quéant, ten miles west of Cambrai, had been forced by the First and Third Armies on the 2nd of September, 1918, but the defence was still strong, and it was only on the 10th of October that I was greeted, on arriving at Colonel Gill's quarters, with the welcome news that Cambrai had just fallen. Two days later I was able to visit the city. The central part (Plate 79) was still burning, having been fired by the Germans on their evacuation, but it was possible to get round by the suburbs; only an occasional shell still reached the town. (It is hardly necessary to say that the photograph, taken many months later, shows the Place d'Armes only after it had been cleared up, and not in the state in which it was when the city was entered.) The railway-station was destroyed, the windows of most houses had disappeared, and walls were cracked everywhere. But on the whole the destruction (obviously largely due to bombing as well as shell-fire) was not nearly so complete or so irreparable as at Rheims or Ypres or Lens. The tower of the cathedral (Plate 80), a church rebuilt about sixty years ago, looks as if it could hardly stand permanently. There were many houses in the suburbs which, although much damaged, could be made habitable without very serious difficulty. But it is to be remembered that the wanton destruction of household property, down to the very toys of the children, must have caused the returning inhabitants here and in many other places even more intense feeling about the invaders than the mere destruction of the houses themselves, which had come to be recognised as an inevitable consequence of the state of war, and might, in fact, have been caused by combatants on either side.

I have before me an airplane plan of Cambrai, which I obtained from the First Army in 1918 and which is an excellent example of the great skill and success we had obtained in aerial surveys. As it is printed it is very nearly a map on a scale of 6 inches to the mile, although it is a mosaic of prints from eight or nine different negatives, taken, as the direction of the shadows shows, at at least four different times. But the joins between the different prints are in many cases invisible, and the map as a whole only wants the names of the streets to make it complete.

West of Cambrai, about four miles on the road to Bapaume, and on a little rising ground, stands the Bourlon Wood, which has for us a history perhaps even more tragic than that of the woods north of the Somme. The full story of our attempt to take Cambrai in November, 1917, the first accounts of which induced foolish authorities to have "joybells" rung (a proceeding which they must have bitterly regretted afterwards), is given in Haig's Despatches (pp. 153-171). The large-scale map by which it is accompanied shows how we gained the wood, and were, in fact, close to Cambrai for a week, but a week later had lost nearly the whole of our gains. The photograph (Plate 81) is taken from the village at the north-west corner of the wood, the farthest point which we reached on the 23rd-24th November. It was in this fighting that a small party of East Surreys were rescued after having held out, surrounded, for forty-eight hours, while later on a company of the 13th Essex, entirely surrounded and without hope of relief, fought to the last man rather than surrender. Bourlon Wood was only recovered, in our final great advance, on the 27th of September, 1918.

The road from Cambrai to Le Cateau, the scene of so much fighting both in August, 1914, and in October, 1918 (see p. 78), runs eastwards from Cambrai. I was able to visit a number of the villages south of the road in October, 1918 (finding in some houses the hastily left meals of their late German occupants), while fighting still continued a few miles farther north, and was surprised to find that they were very little injured in spite of the indications of heavy barrage over the face of the ground. The fighting here had gone over the ground too rapidly to leave behind it the fearful trail of destruction which is everywhere visible on the land where fighting was continuous for many weeks, or even months, together.

The south-eastern suburbs of Cambrai and the villages on that side of the town show no very extensive signs of destruction, but on the south-west and farther to the south, where the fighting across the Hindenburg Line was so severe, everything is destroyed. West of Cambrai, and for many miles to the south, lay the part of the Hindenburg defences known as the Siegfried Line, the strongest section of which, and that part deemed by the Germans to be practically impregnable, included the deep cutting of the canal between Bellicourt (Riqueval) and Bellenglise. For 6,000 yards before reaching Bellicourt the canal runs in a tunnel, the southern end of which, and the high ground above it, as well as the village of Bellicourt, is seen in Plate 82. The Americans had been told off to deal with the country over the tunnel, and did so quite successfully, but they unfortunately neglected to clear up behind them, so that the Germans, getting up from the tunnel by shafts which they had provided for the purpose, attacked them from the rear with serious consequences, and the Australians, following on, had a somewhat hard time. We had some talk with a good lady and her family who lived in a house just above the mouth of the tunnel, in which a number of German officers had been quartered. It was curious to notice how, after beginning to speak quite quietly, she and her daughter became more and more excited as their recital continued, under the recollection of the nightmare of the German occupation, although in this case there had happily been no special brutality to bring to mind.

Southwards for a couple of miles from Bellicourt towards Bellenglise the canal runs in the deep cutting seen in Plate 83, which was taken from above the tunnel mouth. The banks of the cutting are 60 or 70 feet high, very steep, and covered with thick vegetation--covered also, in 1918, with barbed wire. On the east side the bank carried, in addition, many concrete machine-gun emplacements. The water in the canal was very deep near the tunnel, and did not shallow until it nearly reached Bellenglise. The attack was carried out by Midland Territorials (Stafford and Lancashire), and had immediate success. It is specially mentioned by General Haig, and well described by General Maurice, and with natural enthusiasm and much detail by Major Priestley.[34] It was preceded by a barrage, lasting forty-eight hours, from about 1,600 guns of various calibres, and then--for once--the weather favoured us, for at zero hour, 5.50, on the morning of the attack (the 29th of September)[35] the whole country was covered with a thick fog, under which our men advanced, invisible to their enemies, although with some difficulty to themselves. The 46th Division scrambled down the cutting (where it will be seen that there was no jumping-off place on that side), and got across by swimming (with life-belts), by improvised rafts and collapsible boats, and all the devices which had been tested on the Somme at Brie (see Plate 66) a few days earlier. It seems uncertain whether any of the German foot-bridges had been left undestroyed, but the Riqueval Bridge (Plate 84) had not been knocked down by our shelling, and still stood as it was when I last saw it, carrying a notice that it was safe "for infantry in file only." Major Priestley tells the story of how Captain Charlton, with a small party of nine men, found his way by compass to the bridge, charged down on the sentries (one N.C.O. getting four of them just in time), cut the wires, and threw the blasting charges into the canal. The bridge was saved and held by 8.30, and naturally proved most useful.

[34] Haig's Despatches, p. 282, "The Last Four Months," p. 161, and "Crossing the Hindenburg Line," p. 48.

[35] We now know that it was on the 28th of September that Ludendorff met the Kaiser and insisted on the necessity for an armistice.

Among Major Priestley's stories of this adventure he tells how two R.A.M.C. privates (Moseley and George) collected prisoners, dressed the wounded and made the prisoners carry them, and finally arrived at quarters as the sole escort of twenty stretcher cases and seventy-five unwounded prisoners.[36]

[36] Priestley, _op. cit._, p. 63.

At Bellenglise (at the bend of the canal two miles south of Bellicourt) the Germans had made for themselves an extraordinary underground tunnel shelter, of which Plate 85 shows one of the entrances. We were told by the villagers that it was a kilometre and a half in length, but did not verify this. In any case it was certainly fitted up as barracks and quarters of the most extensive nature, for a thousand prisoners were taken in it with no resistance. It was also provided with electric light, and we are told that the captured electricians who were instructed to start the dynamo for us had to confess the existence of a booby-trap to blow up the whole affair when the switch was closed, and, of course, to remove it.

St. Quentin is five miles south of Bellenglise, but the crossing of the Hindenburg Line at the canal tunnel at St. Tronquoy, a necessary preliminary to taking the city, proved a task almost as difficult, but quite as successfully carried out, as the Bellicourt crossing. It was effected on the 30th of September. St. Quentin itself, which had been within the German lines ever since 1914, was entered by the French First Army on the next day. When it became clear to the Germans that they would have to give up the town, which was but little damaged, they prepared a characteristic piece of devilment, one which could not by any exercise of imagination be supposed to have the slightest military consequence. They cut out large recesses (each of about a couple of cubic feet) in the walls and columns of the cathedral, with the intention of using the cavities so made for blasting charges to wreck the whole building (Plate 86). I did not count the number of these holes, but it was officially stated to be ninety! Happily the French got into the town twenty-four hours before their entry had been expected, so that the church still stands (not, of course, without some other damage), with the holes and the blocks cut out from them visible as damning evidence of what otherwise would be no doubt denied. But very much the same seems to have been done by the same savages at other places, as far apart even as Péronne and Beersheba.

The region between the Arras-Péronne and the Cambrai-St. Quentin roads has been fought over both by French and British. Going eastwards from the crossing of the Somme at Brie the country already showed signs of renewed cultivation, but some villages, like Mons and Bernes, were totally destroyed, and others, like Estrées, Vraignes, and Hancourt, and the little town of Vermand, had been very badly strafed. Near Cambrai, villages such as Bony and Vendhuille, Gouzeaucourt and Ribécourt (Plate 87), and of course Bourlon, were quite in ruins. At Gouzeaucourt very active reconstruction was, however, going on, and rows of neat brick cottages had already appeared. To mention all the ruined villages would be to give almost a complete list of them, but over the whole region active and obviously successful attempts were being made to carry on cultivation, the surface having been by no means so badly damaged as farther north.

Southwards from St. Quentin, also, much cultivation is being actively carried on, although many of the villages, such as Liez and Essigny, are badly injured; but after La Fère is reached, and beyond the Oise, cultivation is complete, and the conditions are more or less normal as far as the Ailette and the Aisne. North of Cambrai also, on the east of the Cambrai-Douai road, where the country was always in German occupation, and behind the Hindenburg defence lines, its condition is also normal.

BOURLON WOOD.

_The remains of Bourlon village, in the north-west corner of the wood, which was fought for, and taken, and lost again in the Cambrai battle of November, 1917._]

BELLICOURT.

_The south end of the 6,000-yard tunnel on the St. Quentin Canal, seen from the western bank of the canal cutting. The village of Bellicourt lies over the tunnel mouth, and the higher ground beyond is that covered by the Americans in the advance of the 29th of September, 1918._]

THE ST. QUENTIN CANAL.

_The canal cutting looking down from above the tunnel mouth--an "absolutely impregnable" portion of the Hindenburg Line defences._]

THE RIQUEVAL BRIDGE.

_The only bridge over the St. Quentin Canal which was not destroyed by the Germans before our attack on their "impregnable" position in September, 1918. A small party of the Midland Territorials, under Captain Charlton, reached it in the fog just in time to deal with the sentries, throw the charges into the water, and so save the bridge._]

BELLENGLISE.

_One of the entrances to the immense underground workings constructed by the Germans as a part of the Hindenburg defences at the St. Quentin Canal. The elaborate workings were finally only a trap for the thousand Germans who were secured there as prisoners._]

ST. QUENTIN CATHEDRAL.

_The Germans cut ninety recesses in the columns and walls of the Cathedral (two are seen in the photograph) for the purpose of placing mine charges in them and destroying the whole building when they evacuated the town. The unexpected arrival of the French frustrated this diabolical plan, but the holes and the blocks cut from them remain as witnesses._]

RIBÉCOURT.

_This was one of the villages which were taken in the Cambrai battle, and retained in the possession of the Allies. They are all equally destroyed, but some are already half rebuilt._]

RHEIMS.

_This bit of Rheims--tidied up--is a fair example of the condition to which perhaps 10,000 out of its 14,000 houses have been reduced._]

XI.--RHEIMS, THE AISNE, SOISSONS

(PLATES 88 TO 97.)

Rheims shares with Ypres and Verdun the glory of having successfully withstood a continuous four years' siege, and with Ypres the additional distinction of having been for a long time the central point in an extraordinarily narrow salient, surrounded by the enemy practically on three sides. It is truly an ancient storm centre, unsuccessfully besieged by the English in the fourteenth century, taken by them in the fifteenth (perhaps more by intrigue than by fighting), and held until Joan of Arc turned us out after nine years' occupation. It was entered by the Germans on the 4th of September, 1870, and again on the forty-fourth anniversary of that day in 1914. But while after 1870 they held the city for two years, in 1914 they had to evacuate it after nine days only. They commenced immediately to shell it, and, according to the universal opinion in France, to shell particularly the cathedral, in spite of official assurances that it was not used for observation purposes, which anyone but a Prussian would have believed. The north tower, unfortunately, was under repair in 1914, and covered with timber scaffolding. An incendiary shell set fire to this a week after the Germans had left the city, and the whole of the roof of the cathedral was burnt. Later on the vaulting over the transept and the choir was badly but not irreparably damaged (the statement is made that a number of Germans--the church being used as a hospital--were killed by a shell which penetrated the vaulting), and the chevet at the east end is very badly knocked about. The west end, happily, has not suffered so much, the direction of firing being generally from Brimont and Nogent l'Abesse, respectively north and east of the city. One is glad to know that it was found possible to save a certain amount of the fine stained glass.

In thinking of the fate of Rheims from the point of view of the French, it is to be remembered that to them the cathedral stands in much the same relation as does Westminster Abbey to us. It is not perhaps the finest, nor the most beautiful, nor the largest of the glorious churches of France, but it is the one which, more than any other, represents in itself and its associations the faith and the history and the life of the country over many centuries and through endless changes and vicissitudes. Considering the mentality of the Germans--as judged by the sentiments of their newspapers at the time--it may probably have been the very consciousness of the special affection of the French for the cathedral that induced them to make it their special target.

The figures which are given as to the number of shells fired, and specially the number fired at the cathedral in 1914, and on certain days in 1917, are almost unbelievable.[37]

[37] Buchan's "History of the War," vol. iii., p. 71, and the "Michelin Guide to Rheims," p. 20, etc.

The city has, or had before the war, about 115,000 inhabitants and some 14,000 houses. Of the latter an English visitor in 1918 informed me that about 2,000 had escaped with little damage and were more or less habitable, 2,000 more might be said to be still standing, while the remaining 10,000 were entirely destroyed. (As a comparison it may be remembered that in the Great Fire of London about 13,000 houses are said to have been burnt, or destroyed to limit the flames.)

Plate 88 is simply an example of the state of the greater part of the city, after, of course, the wreckage had been cleared off the roadways and things in general "tidied up." Plates 89 and 90 show respectively the west end of the cathedral, with its towers, and the chevet at the east end seen across a mass of ruined houses. I am afraid that the glass of the great rose windows was destroyed very early, before it could be removed, and at the east end much of the tracery of the windows has been smashed. It is in no way to the credit of the Germans, either in their intentions or in their shooting, that the damage has not been immensely greater. One may be permitted to hope that in the reconstruction of the city, which is proceeding apace, advantage will be taken of the clearance which has become unavoidable to leave such space round the building as will allow its magnificence to be more fully seen than has hitherto been possible.

After having to evacuate the city in 1914, the Germans made a very determined stand to the north at the Fort of Brimont, six miles away, as well as on the east at about the same distance, and even the desperate fighting of April, 1917, failed to move them. For the greater part of the war the French and Germans were facing each other on a north and south line a little to the east of the road from Rheims to Laon. But on their side the enemy succeeded in getting closer to the city, and the shelling must often have been at very close range, a condition of affairs more like that at Ypres than at Verdun. At one time in 1917 the Germans actually got for a day into the northern cemetery, just outside the city and only a couple of miles from the cathedral.

The remains of the French front line to the east of the Laon road were still not cleared away on my visit, the barbed-wire entanglements hardly visible above the thick growth of rank herbage. The road itself, running on a slight embankment, in places covers numerous dugouts, their entrances facing westward.

The end of September, 1918, saw the city freed at last, the Germans hastily evacuating the forts in their great retreat.

* * * * *

In the great retreat of the Germans in 1914 the Aisne was reached on the 12th of September, after Soissons had been in enemy occupation for ten days, during which heavy requisitions were made, although no pillage is said to have occurred. The first battle of the Aisne, the end of the German retreat in 1914, continued well into September, British artillery aiding the French north of Soissons, and Haig's troops, being farther east, attempting to reach the Chemin des Dames plateau above Troyon. But the Germans had had time to entrench themselves in the enormously strong positions afforded by the upper ground, and all the efforts of the Allies failed to dislodge them. They remained substantially unmoved until 1917, by which time they also held a sharp salient between Missy and Chavonne which had carried them across to the southern bank of the Aisne. By the beginning of 1915 the French held the valleys of Cuffies and Crouy, with the ridge between them and the western end of the high ground to the east. On the 12th-13th of January they were attacked by greatly superior numbers by Von Kluck, and, by the misfortune that floods on the Aisne had carried away their bridges higher up the stream, were cut off from their supplies, and had to retire south of the river, losing the bridge-head on the north bank. Soissons itself, however, was not captured, although the Germans remained within very easy shelling distance of it.

The Aisne winds along a flat valley bottom in great bends, always bounded on the north by high ground, which rises some 400 to 450 feet above the river, and is traversed by steep and narrow wooded ravines very much like Surrey combes, which were occupied and fully utilised by the enemy. Along the top of the plateau runs from west to east the road which became so familiar to us as the "Chemin des Dames," although this picturesque name did not appear on the maps. The main road from Soissons to Laon crosses the western end of the plateau close to the Malmaison Fort; its eastern end passes through Craonne, and the ground falls quickly down to the level of the Rheims-Laon road at Corbeny. Every foot of the "Ladies' Road" has been fought over; the whole plateau is shell-pocked almost as badly as ground beside the Amiens-Péronne road on the Somme, and the road itself is in many places no longer distinguishable, the whole area being thickly overgrown with rank herbage. Plate 91 gives some idea of what the once well-marked road now looks like where it crosses the Troyon road, the route by which Haig's troops tried in vain to reach and hold the high ground. The village of Cerny, close to the crossing, is wiped out, some hint only of its former position being indicated by the remains of what has probably been a sugar factory (Plate 92).

In many places on the slopes above the Aisne there are quarries and natural caves, greatly enlarged and very fully utilised in the German defence. Plate 93 shows one of these caves at Crouy, a now ruined village a couple of miles above Soissons on the side of the valley in which runs the little stream that descends from Laffaux on the north to the Aisne at Soissons. Beside and across this stream our artillery had hard fighting in 1914, in the vain attempt to dislodge the enemy from the high ground above and to the west, at a time when the Germans could fire twenty shells to one of ours.

The Aisne valley remained in general fairly quiescent from 1914 until April, 1917, when General Nivelle, after his great success at Verdun, planned the gigantic blow at the German front from Soissons to the Argonne, which, in spite of its ultimate success in carrying nearly the whole of the Chemin des Dames, failed to relieve Rheims,[38] and by falling so far short of the hoped-for and too optimistically predicted success helped to cause considerable, although happily only temporary, discontent in parts of the French Army, which was only cleared away by the magnificent way in which Pétain showed his men a few months later, both on the Aisne and at Verdun, that they still remained more than a match for their opponents.

[38] Captain Tuohy in "The Secret Corps" says that the trial of a spy known as "Suzette" showed that her machinations played no small part in preventing Nivelle's success. She is alleged especially to have given the enemy full details as to the new French tanks, and also full information where and how it was intended to use them.

The last battle of the Aisne formed the third of the series of great advances which Ludendorff had made in March and April, 1918. In each of the first two the Allies had been driven back so far and so definitely as to enable the Germans to claim overwhelming victory. But each of them, all the same, had finally found the victorious troops face to face with undefeated and immovable armies, and found them also too exhausted to press forward to gain those objectives which had constituted the real intention of each advance. The third Aisne battle was destined to have a similar conclusion. The German intentions had been well concealed, and their enormous concentration of troops had not been discovered, so that the attack which started suddenly on the 27th of May swept everybody off the ridge and down to the Aisne at once. The British 9th Corps (four divisions) were on the French right, brought there to rest after their hard fighting farther north! They held on at Craonne for a while, but were hopelessly outnumbered, and had to fall back with the rest of the troops. The Aisne and the Vesle were lost, and in three days the Germans had reached the Marne, and held ten miles of the river between Château Thierry and Dormans. Soissons fell on the 28th and Château Thierry a few days later, but the right, on which was still our 9th Corps, beside the French Fifth Army and some fine Italian troops, held back the invaders and succeeded in keeping them at a distance from Rheims and Epernay. Then followed counter-attacks, which were sometimes successful, and a month's quiescence, until on the 15th of July Ludendorff started the _Friedensturm_ which was to have brought him peace--a German peace--but which ended in his utter ruin.

The Oise and Aisne Canal reaches (and crosses) the Aisne close to the foot of the road up to Troyon. The canal was no doubt dry during the war, as it was when I saw it afterwards (Plate 94), the bridge on the main road, destroyed during the German retreat, having been replaced by another.

North of the Aisne, from Soissons to Berry-au-Bac, all the villages except one appeared to be in ruins.

The whole of the country south of the Aisne to the Vesle, and again south to the Marne, was fought over in 1914, and again in the German advance in May, 1918, as well as in their final retreat in July and August. The villages, so far as I saw them, were in ruins--such, for example, as Fismes (Plate 95)--but were still recognisable as villages without the necessity, as on the Somme, of a notice-board on the roadside saying "This was ..."

Soissons itself was never far enough from the German lines to be free from shell-fire until October, 1917; it has not been, however, nearly so completely destroyed as Rheims, a reasonable number of houses remaining habitable in the end of 1918. The Germans entered it again in May, 1918, and remained in possession for two months, and during this occupation they had apparently repented of their moderation four years before, for they pillaged and stole systematically, and destroyed wantonly what they did not wish to steal.

The beautiful towers and spires of the west front of St. Jean des Vignes (Plate 96), which were all that remained of the once noble church, are a good deal damaged. It is stated that this church was pulled down in 1805 on the demand of the Bishop of Soissons in order to provide material for the repair of the cathedral, but that the two towers and spires were spared on the entreaty of the inhabitants.[39] Certainly only the skeleton of the west end with the towers has been in existence for a very long time. Apparently there have been other Huns than the Germans! The cathedral itself (Plate 97) has actually been cut in half and its one tower (the northern tower had never been built) knocked to pieces. The cathedral, although a small one, was a very beautiful structure, and was more or less unique in being arranged as two churches, one lying east and west, and the other across the transepts at right angles. The view in Plate 97 was taken in 1920 across what is now a fine open space, but which was, on my pre-war visits to the city, covered closely with houses and shops, and in 1919 was still a mass of broken walls and stone rubbish. It can be said, at any rate, that the view of the cathedral--or what is left of it--is certainly much more complete and effective than it ever had been before.

[39] "Michelin Guide to Soissons," p. 44.

West of Soissons the destruction of villages continues for seven or eight miles along the valley, as far as Pontarchet, but still farther west, and to the south in the Compiègne forest, there are very few signs of fighting.

RHEIMS CATHEDRAL--WEST END.

_The west front of the Westminster Abbey of France is happily not irreparably damaged, but the glass of the rose window has gone, and some of the statues and the carvings are injured. The roof of the building has gone entirely, and the vaulting is broken through in places._]

RHEIMS CATHEDRAL--EAST END.

_The east end of the Cathedral is very much more injured than the west, having been more exposed to the fire from the forts which were shelling the city._]

THE CHEMIN DES DAMES.

_The road crossing the photograph from right to left is the Troyon road up from the Aisne valley. It is still practicable for motors. What is left of the Chemin des Dames itself, at this place (near Cerny), starts from the right-hand corner of the view, crosses the Troyon road, and practically disappears in the wilderness._]

THE CHEMIN DES DAMES--CERNY.

_All that seemed to be left of the village of Cerny--the remains, apparently, of a sugar factory--with some water-logged shell-holes._]

XII.--VERDUN, THE MEUSE, AND THE ARGONNE

(PLATES 98 TO 106.)

After the first battle of the Marne, in 1914, the Germans were driven back to positions encircling Verdun on three sides (north-west, north-east, and south-east) at a distance of ten to twelve miles. They succeeded, however, in holding a little salient at St. Mihiel, on the eastern bank of the Meuse, about twenty miles south of Verdun, and with it the village of Chauvoncourt, on the west side of the river. This village was entered by the French in November, 1914, but immediately blown up (it had been already mined) by the Germans, and regained by them in a counter-attack. It remained in their hands until 1918, but they were so tightly held all round by the French that they could make no use of it as a bridge-head.

The possession of the St. Mihiel Salient, however, gave the Germans command of a stretch of the main road in the Meuse valley, and enabled them to cut the only full-gauge railway which still connected Verdun with the rest of France. This road and railway were therefore, until the successful American attack of September, 1918, entirely useless to the city, and its only railway was the narrow-gauge line leading southwards to the main line at Bar-le-Duc, and the one main road to the same place _via_ Souilly. The latter came to be known as the "Sacred Way" (_La Voie Sacrée_), and became the principal line of communication for men, munitions, and stores. It is stated that thirteen battalions of infantry were occupied in keeping it in such repair as was possible, and that 1,700 lorries passed over it daily. In 1919 the northern part of the Voie Sacrée was still as bumpy for motoring as many of the worst roads in Flanders.

CAVES ABOVE SOISSONS.

_Beside the Laon road, going northwards from Soissons, are a number of old limestone caves, partly natural and largely artificial, which were made useful by the Germans in their long occupation of this region._]

THE OISE AND AISNE CANAL.

_The dry bed of the Oise and Aisne Canal, with the original bridge blown up in the German retreat, and the French girder bridge replacing it._]

FISMES.

_The townlet of Fismes, on the Vesle, like many other places between the Aisne and the Marne, has been shelled in turn by French and Germans. It is practically destroyed, but without being levelled to the ground and swallowed up by weeds like villages farther north._]

SOISSONS--ST. JEAN DES VIGNES.

_Only these two towers, with their beautiful spires, have remained of this church for more than a century. One of the towers has been so damaged as to present strange problems to an engineer in the strength of materials._]

The great attack on Verdun was intended to capture the city in four days and to clear the way to Paris at one swoop, and the Emperor (whose presence never seemed to bring good fortune to his troops) was waiting at Ornes, some eight or ten miles north, to make his triumphal entry. The attack began with enormous impetuosity on the 21st of February, 1916, but in four days--with enormous losses on both sides, but chiefly to the attackers--the Germans were still held some four or five miles away from their objective on the east side of the river, and double as far on the west. But nearer the Argonne their positions had allowed them already to cut the full-gauge railway to St. Menehould by shell-fire.

A book written by General von Zwehl[40] gives the number of guns used in this attack as being about 230 in each of three corps. He also speaks of the "dejection and pessimism" induced in his troops by the failure of the artillery to make the clear way to the city which had been predicted and promised.

[40] Reviewed in _The Times_ Literary Supplement of the 7th of April, 1921.

The Douaumont Fort was entered on the 25th, and the Emperor had sent to Berlin the news that the "key of the last defences of Verdun" was in German hands. But on the next day Pétain began counter-attacks, and although during several months the Germans made progress from time to time, eventually gaining the Vaux Fort and most of the Mort Homme Ridge, the great attack had, in reality, miscarried from the start.

The city itself, from which all civilians had been evacuated by the 25th of February, was heavily shelled, especially at the commencement of the attack, but as a city it has not suffered to anything like the same extent as Rheims, to say nothing of Albert, Lens, or Ypres. The fighting and the tremendous shelling were always in a zone lying roughly between four and eight miles from the city; within this zone the ground is as completely shell-marked, the villages and woods as completely destroyed, as even on the Somme.

The greatest German advance was reached in June, 1916, Thiaumont Fort being taken on the 30th of June, when at one point the Germans were only three miles from the city. Thiaumont was retaken when the French offensive started in the following October, and on the 2nd of November Vaux Fort was recovered and the Germans had been driven back nearly to the lines they had succeeded in occupying on the 24th of February. But the Mort Homme Ridge was entirely regained only in August, 1917, and it was still another year before it could be said that Verdun was entirely "cleared." The final success of the French in driving back the enemy is attributed by General von Zwehl to the overwhelming superiority of their artillery, the German heavy guns having been sent elsewhere.

Plate 98, taken from the left bank of the Meuse, shows the broken bridge at St. Mihiel and the ridge above; the little town lies chiefly beyond the picture in a hollow on the right. It has been very little damaged; even the great clock in the church tower is uninjured. It is easily seen how entirely the ridge, some 300 feet above the river and filling up an acute bend, enabled the Germans to dominate the road and railway on the left bank for a long distance. In April, 1915, a French attack on the north side of the salient took Les Éparges after severe fighting, but made no further progress. The neighbouring country to the west of the Meuse is quite unharmed until one comes within a few miles of the river. The St. Mihiel Salient was attacked from the south by the Americans and by the French from the north on the 11th of September, 1918, just as the Germans had determined to evacuate it, and it was finally cleared within a week.