Part 1
VIVE LA FRANCE!
[Illustration:
_From a photograph copyright by M. Rol._
“High-explosive!”
“A geyser of earth and smoke shot high into the air. Then an explosion which was brother to an earthquake.” ]
VIVE LA FRANCE!
BY
E. ALEXANDER POWELL
WAR CORRESPONDENT OF _THE NEW YORK WORLD_, _THE LONDON DAILY MAIL_, AND _SCRIBNER’S MAGAZINE_, WITH THE ALLIED ARMIES
NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
1915
COPYRIGHT, 1915, BY
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
Published December, 1915
[Illustration: [Logo]]
TO FRANCE
WHOSE COURAGE, SERENITY, AND SACRIFICES, IN A CONFLICT WHICH SHE DID NOTHING TO PROVOKE, HAVE WON HER THE SYMPATHY, RESPECT AND ADMIRATION OF THE WORLD
AN ACKNOWLEDGMENT
For the assistance they have given me, and for the innumerable kindnesses they have shown me, I welcome this opportunity of expressing my thanks and appreciation to his Excellency Jean Adrien Antoine Jules Jusserand, French ambassador to the United States; to Lord Northcliffe, owner of _The Times_ and _The Daily Mail_; to Ralph Pulitzer, Esq., president, and C. M. Lincoln, Esq., managing editor, of _The New York World_; to Major-General Ryerson, of the Canadian Overseas Contingent; to Captain Count Gérard de Ganay, who was my companion from end to end of the western battle-line; to Messrs. Ponsot, Alexis Leger, and Henri Hoppenot, of the Bureau de la Presse; to Lieutenant-Colonel Spencer Cosby, military attaché of the American embassy in Paris; to Captain John W. Barker, of the American Military Mission in France; to Honorable Walter V. R. Berry; to Charles Prince, Esq., Herbert Corey, Esq., Lincoln Eyre, Esq., and William Philip Simms, Esq., who on a score of occasions have proved themselves my friends; and finally to James Hazen Hyde, Esq., whose kindness I can never fully repay. To each of these gentlemen I owe a debt of gratitude which I shall not forget.
E. ALEXANDER POWELL.
HÔTEL DE CRILLON, PARIS, November, 1915.
CONTENTS
PAGE ACKNOWLEDGMENT vii CHAPTER I. IN THE FIELD WITH THE FRENCH 1 II. ON THE BRITISH BATTLE-LINE 56 III. CAMPAIGNING IN THE VOSGES 97 IV. THE RETAKING OF ALSACE 120 V. THE FIGHTING IN CHAMPAGNE 154 VI. THE CONFLICT IN THE CLOUDS 190 VII. THE RED BADGE OF MERCY 215
ILLUSTRATIONS
“High-explosive!” │ _Frontispiece_
│ FACING PAGE
French trenches in the sand-dunes of the Belgian littoral 4
The watch on the Aisne 5
The taking of Neuville St. Vaast 12
French infantry going into action 13
Dragoons going into action 14
The effect of shrapnel from a French “seventy-five” on a German battery 15
French 155-millimetre gun shelling the German trenches on the Aisne 18
French artillery officers, in an observatory on the Aisne, watching the effect of shell-fire on the German trenches 19
In an underground first-aid station 30
Zouaves carrying a German position in the Belgian sand-dunes by storm 31
In the Argonne 38
An observing officer directing the fire of a French battery three miles behind him 39
The mass before the battle 54
What a 38-centimetre shell, fired from a gun twenty-three miles away, did in Dunkirk 55
London buses at the front 64
British field-kitchens on the march in Flanders 65
Machine-gun squad wearing masks as a protection against the asphyxiating gas with which the Germans precede their attacks 84
A British battery in action 85
───────────────────────────────────────────────────────┬─────────────── “Bodies, long months dead, rotting amid the wire │_Group_ entanglements” │ 86 “Imagine what it must be like to sleep in a hole in the│ earth, into which you have to crawl on all fours, │ „ like an animal into its lair” │ „ ───────────────────────────────────────────────────────┴─────────────── French high-explosive shells bursting on the German trenches 87 In a bomb-proof gun-pit 98 French trenches on the Somme 99 In the French trenches on the Yser 100 Campaigning in the Vosges 101 What the Germans did to the church at Ribécourt 106 On the summit of the Vosges 107 On the Lac Noir 114 The penalty for treason 115 Troglodyte dwellings in Alsace 124 The straggling columns of unkempt, unshaven men were in striking contrast to the helmeted giants on gigantic horses who guarded them 125 In the trenches in Alsace 136 Convoy of German prisoners guarded by Moroccan Spahis 137 A French smoke bomb 140 With hand-grenades in the trenches 141 Chevaux-de-frise and movable entanglements 150 Taking precautions against a gas attack 151 The battle-field of Champagne 154 Bringing in the wounded during the battle of Champagne 155 The battle of Champagne 166 The battle-field of Champagne, showing the French high-explosive shells bursting on the German trenches 167 Fighting in a quarrel that is not his own 172 The first-line German trenches captured by the French in Champagne 173 This crater, seventy feet deep and twice that in diameter, was caused by the explosion of a mine. In the terrific blast five hundred Germans perished 174 German officers captured during the battle of Champagne 175 The price of victory 176 Instruction against gas attacks 177 “Men were at work rolling up the barbed wire in the captured German entanglements” 180 The thousands upon thousands of empty brass shell-cases with which the battle-fields are strewn are collected and sent back to the factory for reloading 181 Mounted on the German trench walls were revolving steel turrets containing quick-firing guns 182 “Brown-skinned men from North Africa in turbans and burnooses” 183 Motor-buses with wire-netting tops filled with carrier pigeons 184 German prisoners came by, carrying on their shoulders stretchers on which lay the stiff, stark forms of dead men 185 Lunéville from an aeroplane 200 French antiaircraft gun in action against a German aeroplane 201 When the chickens come home to roost 206 Antiaircraft guns, posted outside the towns, are ready to give a warm reception to an aerial intruder 207 “Two soldiers lifted him onto a stretcher and carried him between interminable walls of brown earth to the dressing-station” 236 Unloading wounded at a hospital in northern France 237 Red Cross men getting wounded out of a bombarded town in Flanders 244 Bringing in the harvest of the guns 245 “Every house and farmyard for miles around was filled with wounded and still they came streaming in” 250 “The paths of glory lead——” 251
_All illustrations but those specifically acknowledged were taken by the Photographic Service of the French Armies and are here reproduced by special permission._
VIVE LA FRANCE!
I IN THE FIELD WITH THE FRENCH
Before going to France I was told that the French were very stingy with their war. I was told that the only fighting I would be permitted to see would be on moving-picture screens. I was assured that war correspondents were about as welcome as the small-pox. But I found that I had been misinformed. So far as I am concerned they have been as generous with their war as a Kentucky colonel is with mint-juleps. They have, in fact, been so willing to let me get close up to where things were happening that, on one or two occasions, it looked as though I would never see the Statue of Liberty again. I do not wish to give the impression, however, that these facilities for flirting with sudden death are handed out promiscuously to all who apply for them. To obtain me permission to see the French fighting machine in action required the united influence of three Cabinet Ministers, a British peer, two ambassadors, a score of newspapers—and the patience of Job.
Unless you have attempted to pierce it, it is impossible to comprehend the marvellous veil of secrecy which the Allied Governments have cast over their military operations. I wonder if you, who will read this, realize that, though the German trenches can be reached by motor-car in ninety minutes from the Rue de la Paix, it is as impossible for an unauthorized person to get within sound, much less within sight, of them as it would be for a tourist to stroll into Buckingham Palace and have a friendly chat with King George. The good old days in Belgium, when the correspondents went flitting light-heartedly about the zone of operations on bicycles and in taxicabs and motor-cars, have passed, never to return. Imagine a battle in which more men were engaged and the results of which were more momentous than Waterloo, Gettysburg, and Sedan combined—a battle in which Europe lost more men than the North lost in the whole of the Civil War—being fought at, let us say, New Haven, Conn., in December, and the people of New York and Boston not knowing the details of that battle, the names of the regiments engaged, the losses, or, indeed, the actual result, until the following March. It is, in fact, not the slightest exaggeration to say that the people of Europe knew more about the wars that were fought on the South African veldt and on the Manchurian steppes than they do about this, the greatest of all wars, which is being fought literally at their front doors. So that when a correspondent does succeed in penetrating the veil of mystery, when he obtains permission to see with his own eyes something of what is happening on that five-hundred-mile-long slaughter-house and cesspool combined which is called “the front,” he has every excuse for self-congratulation.
When the Ministry of War had reluctantly issued me the little yellow card, with my photograph pasted on it, which, so far as this war is concerned, is the equivalent of Aladdin’s lamp and the magic carpet put together, and I had become for the time being the guest of the nation, my path was everywhere made smooth before me. I was ciceroned by a staff-officer in a beautiful sky-blue uniform, and other officers were waiting to explain things to me in the various divisions through which we passed. We travelled by motor-car, with a pilot-car ahead and a baggage-car behind, and we went so fast that it took two people to tell about it, one to shout, “Here they come!” and another, “There they go!”
[Illustration:
French trenches in the sand-dunes of the Belgian littoral.
Here begins that four-hundred-mile-long line of trenches which stretches across Europe like a monstrous and deadly snake. ]
Leaving Paris, white and beautiful in the spring sunshine, behind us, we tore down the historic highway which still bears the title of the Route de Flandre, down which countless thousands of other men had hastened, in bygone centuries, to the fighting in the north. The houses of the city thinned and disappeared, and we came to open fields across which writhed, like monstrous yellow serpents, the zigzag lines of trenches. The whole countryside from the Aisne straightaway to the walls of Paris is one vast network of trenches and barbed-wire entanglements, and, even in the improbable event of the enemy breaking through the present line, he would be little better off than he was before. The fields between the trenches were being ploughed by women, driving sleek white oxen, but the furrows were scarcely ever straight, for every few yards they would turn aside to avoid a turf-covered mound surmounted by a rude cross and a scarlet kepi. For half a hundred miles this portion of France is one vast cemetery, for it was here that von Kluck made his desperate attempt to break through to Paris, and it was here that Joffre, in the greatest battle of all time, drove the German legions back across the Marne and ended their dream of entering the French capital. We whirled through villages whose main streets are lined with the broken, blackened shells of what had once been shops and dwellings. At once I felt at home, for with this sort of thing I had grown only too familiar in Belgium during the earlier days of the war. But here the Germans were either careless or in a hurry, for they had left many buildings standing. In Belgium they made a more finished job of it. Nothing better illustrates the implicit confidence which the French people have in their army, and in its ultimate success, than the fact that in all these towns through which we passed the people were hard at work rebuilding their shattered homes, though the strokes of their hammers were echoed by the sullen boom of German cannon. To me there was something approaching the sublime in these impoverished peasants turning with stout hearts and smiling faces to the rebuilding of their homes and the retilling of their fields. To these patient, toil-worn men and women I lift my hat in respect and admiration. They, no less than their sons and husbands and brothers in the trenches, are fighting the battles of France.
[Illustration:
_From a photograph copyright by M. Rol._
The watch on the Aisne.
“On that four-hundred-mile-long slaughter-house which is called ‘the front.’” ]
As we approached the front the traditional brick-red trousers and kepis still worn by the second-line men gave way to the new uniform of silvery-blue—the color of early morning. There were soldiers everywhere. Every town and hamlet through which we passed was alive with them. The highways were choked with troops of all arms; cuirassiers, with their mediæval steel helmets and breastplates linen-covered; dragoons, riding under thickets of gleaming lances; zouaves in short blue jackets and baggy red breeches; spahis in turbans and Senegalese in tarbooshes and Moroccans in burnooses; _chasseurs d’Afrique_ in sky-blue and scarlet; infantry of the line in all the shades of blue that can be produced by dyes and by the weather; mile-long strings of motor transports; field-batteries; pontoon trains; balloon corps; ambulances with staring scarlet crosses painted on their canvas covers—all the nuts and bolts and springs and screws which go to compose what has become, after months of testing and improvements, as efficient a killing machine as the world has ever seen. And it is, I am convinced, eventually going to do the business. It struck me as having all, or nearly all, of the merits of the German organization _with the human element added_.
When only a short distance in the rear of the firing-line we left the car and proceeded on foot down a winding country road which debouched quite suddenly into a great, saucer-shaped valley. Its gentle slopes were checkered with the brown squares of fresh-ploughed fields and the green ones of sprouting grain. From beyond a near-by ridge came the mutter of artillery, and every now and then there appeared against the turquoise sky what looked like a patch of cotton-wool but was in reality bursting shrapnel. The far end of the valley was filled with what appeared at first glance to be a low-hanging cloud of gray-blue mist, but which, as we drew nearer, resolved itself into dense masses of troops drawn up in review formation—infantry at the right, cavalry at the left, and guns in the centre. I had heard much of the invisible qualities of the new field uniform of the French Army, but I had heretofore believed it to be greatly inferior to the German greenish gray. But I have changed my mind. At three hundred yards twenty thousand men could scarcely be distinguished from the landscape. The only colorful note was struck by the dragoons, who still retain their suicidal uniform of scarlet breeches, blue tunic, and the helmet with its horse-tail plume, though a concession has been made to practicality by covering the latter with tan linen. The majority of the French woollen mills being in the region held by the Germans, it has been possible to provide only a portion of the army with the new uniform. As a result of this shortage of cloth, thousands of soldiers have had recourse to the loose corduroy trousers common among the peasantry, while for the territorials almost any sort of a jacket will pass muster provided it is of a neutral color and has the regimental numerals on the collar. Those soldiers who can afford to provide their own uniforms almost invariably have them made of khaki, cut after the more practical British pattern, with cap-covers of the same material. Owing to this latitude in the matter of clothing, the French army during the first year of the war presented an extraordinarily variegated and nondescript appearance, though this lack of uniformity is gradually being remedied.
At three o’clock a rolling cloud of dust suddenly appeared on the road from Compiègne, and out of it tore a long line of military cars, travelling at express-train speed. All save one were in war coats of elephant gray. The exception was a low-slung racer painted a canary-yellow. Tearing at top speed up the valley, it came to a sudden stop before the centre of the mile-long line of soldiery. A mile of fighting men stiffened to attention; a mile of rifle barrels formed a hedge of burnished steel; the drums gave the long roll and the thirteen ruffles; the colors swept the ground; the massed bands burst into the splendid strains of the _Marseillaise_, and a little man, gray-mustached, gray-bearded, inclined to stoutness, but with the unmistakable carriage of a soldier, descended from the yellow car and, followed by a staff in uniforms of light blue, of dark blue, of tan, of green, of scarlet, walked briskly down the motionless lines. I was having the unique privilege of seeing a President of France reviewing a French army almost within sight of the invader and actually within sound of his guns. It was under almost parallel circumstances that, upward of half a century ago, on the banks of the Rappahannock, another President of another mighty republic reviewed another army, which was likewise fighting the battles of civilization.
Raymond Poincaré is by no means an easy man to describe. He is the only French President within my memory who looks the part of ruler. In his person are centred, as it were, the aspirations of France, for he is a native of Lorraine. He was a captain of Alpine Chasseurs in his younger days and shows the result of his military training in his erect and vigorous bearing. Were you to see him apart from his official surroundings you might well take him, with his air of energy and authority, for a great employer or a captain of industry. Take twenty years from the age of Andrew Carnegie, trim his beard to a point, throw his shoulders back and his chest out, and you will have as good an idea as I can give you of the war-time President of France.
At the President’s right walked a thickset, black mustached man whose rather shabby blue serge suit and broad-brimmed black slouch hat were in strange contrast to the brilliant uniforms about him. Yet this man in the wrinkled clothes, with the unmilitary bearing, exercised more power than the President and all the officers who followed him; a word from him could make or break generals, could move armies; he was Millerand, War Minister of France.
After passing down the lines and making a minute inspection of the soldiers and their equipment, the President took his stand in front of the grouped standards, and the officers and men who were to be decorated for gallantry ranged themselves before him, some with bandaged heads, some with their arms in slings, one hobbling painfully along on crutches. Stepping forward, as the Minister of War read off their names from a list, the President pinned to the tunic of each man the coveted bit of ribbon and enamel and kissed him on either cheek, while the troops presented arms and the massed bands played the anthem. On general principles I should think that the President would rebel at having to kiss so many men, even though they are heroes and have been freshly shaved for the occasion.
[Illustration:
_From a photograph by Meurasse._
The taking of Neuville St. Vaast.
French infantry engaged in house-to-house fighting. ]
I might mention in passing that the decoration most highly prized by the French soldier is not, as is popularly supposed, the Legion of Honor, which, like the Iron Cross, has greatly depreciated because of its wholesale distribution (it is the policy of the German military authorities, I believe, to give the Iron Cross to one in every twenty men), but the Médaille Militaire, which, like the Victoria Cross and the Prussian decoration, Pour le Mérite, is awarded only for deeds of the most conspicuous bravery. The Médaille Militaire, moreover, can be won only by privates and non-commissioned officers or by generals, though the Croix de Guerre, the little bronze cross which signifies that the wearer has been mentioned in despatches, is awarded to all ranks and occasionally to women, among the _décorées_ being Madame Alexis Carrel, the wife of the famous surgeon.
[Illustration:
_From a photograph copyright by M. Rol._
French infantry going into action.
“These were the famous _poilus_, the bearded ones, ... a moving cloud of grayish blue under shifting, shimmering, slanting lines of steel.” ]
The picturesque business of recognizing the brave being concluded, the review of the troops began. Topping a rise, they swept down upon us in line of column—a moving cloud of grayish blue under shifting, shimmering, slanting lines of steel. Company after company, regiment after regiment, brigade after brigade, swept past, businesslike as a locomotive, implacable as a trip-hammer, irresistible as a steam-roller, moving with mechanical precision to the exultant strains of the march of the _Sambre et Meuse_. These were the famous _poilus_, the bearded ones, the men with hair on their chests. Their uniforms were not immaculate. They were faded by wind and rain and sometimes stained with blood. On their boots was the mud of the battle-fields along the Aisne. Fresh from the trenches though they were, they were as pink-cheeked as athletes, and they marched with the buoyancy of men in high spirits and in perfect health. Here before me was a section of that wall of steel which stands unbroken between Western Europe and the Teutonic hordes. Hard on the heels of the infantry came the guns—the famous “75’s”—a score of batteries, well horsed and well equipped, at a spanking trot. A little space to let the foot and guns get out of the way, and then we heard the wild, shrill clangor of the cavalry trumpets pealing the charge. Over the rise they came, helmeted giants on gigantic horses. The earth shook beneath their gallop. The scarlet breeches of the riders gleamed fiery in the sunlight; the horsehair plumes of the helmets floated out behind; the upraised sword-blades formed a forest of glistening steel. As they went thundering past us in a whirlwind of dust and color they rose in their stirrups, and high above the clank of steel and the trample of hoofs came the deep-mouthed Gallic battle-cry: “_Vive la France! Vive la France!_”.
[Illustration:
_From a photograph by Captain John W. Barker, U. S. A._
Dragoons going into action.
“We heard the wild, shrill clangor of the cavalry trumpets pealing the charge.... Over the rise they came, helmeted giants on gigantic horses.” ]