Part 4 (1/2)
The note was sent and I waited, looking out the while on the gay and animated crowd that filled the Platz Gutenberg in front of the hotel, and listening to the bands of children, shouting the ”Ma.r.s.eillaise,”
and following every French officer as he appeared. Was there ever a more lovely winter evening? A rosy sunset seemed to have descended into the very streets and squares of the beautiful old town. Wisps of pink cloud were tangled in the narrow streets, against a background of intensely blue sky. The high-roofed burgher houses, with their decorated fronts, had an ”unsubstantial faery” look, under the strange rich light; and the front of the Cathedral, with its single delicate spire, soared, one suffusion of rose, to an incredible height above the narrow street below.
”_Allons, enfants de la patri-e!_” But a motor-car is scattering the children, and an _ordonnance_ descends. A note, written by the General's own left hand--he lost his right arm in consequence of a wound at the Dardanelles--invites us to dinner with him and his staff forthwith--the motor will return for us. So, joyously, we made what simple change we could, and in another hour or so we were waiting in the General's study for the great man to appear. He came at once, and I look back upon the evening that followed as one of the most interesting that Fate has yet sent my way.
As he entered I saw a man of slight, erect figure, lame, indeed, and with that sad, empty sleeve, but conveying an immediate and startling impression as of some fiery, embodied force, dominating the slender frame. He had a short beard, brown and silky, dark hair, and a pair of clear blue eyes, shrewd, indeed, and penetrating, but singularly winning. A soldier, a most modern soldier, yet with an infusion of something romantic, a touch of thoughtful or melancholy charm that recalled old France. He was dressed in a dark blue mess coat, red breeches, and top boots, with three or four orders sparkling on his breast. His manners were those of an old-fas.h.i.+oned and charming courtesy.
As is well known, like Marshal Foch and General Castelnau, General Gouraud is a Catholic. And like General Mangin, the great Joffre himself, Gallieni, Franchet d'Esperey, d'Humbert, and other distinguished leaders of the French Army, he made his reputation in the French Colonial service. In Morocco, and the neighbouring lands, where he spent some twenty-two years, from 1892 to 1914, he was the right-hand of General Lyautey, and conspicuous no less for his humanity, his peace-making, and administrative genius than for his brilliant services in the field. When the war broke out General Lyautey indeed tried for a time to keep him at his side. But the impulse of the younger soldier was too strong; and his chief at last let him go. Gouraud arrived in France just after the Marne victory, and was at once given the command of a division in the Argonne. He spent the first winter of the war in that minute study of the ground, and that friendly and inspiring intercourse with his soldiers, which have been two of the marked traits of his career, and when early in 1915 he was transferred to Champagne, as Commander of a Corps d'Armee, he had time, before he was called away, to make a survey of the battle-field east of Rheims, which was of great value to him later when he came to command the Fourth French Army in the same district.
But meanwhile came the summons to the Dardanelles, where, as we all remember, he served with the utmost loyalty and good will under General Sir Ian Hamilton. He replaced General d'Amade on the 10th of May, led a brilliant and successful attack on the 4th of June, and was, alas! terribly wounded before the end of the month. He was entering a dressing-station close to his headquarters to which some wounded French soldiers had just been brought when a sh.e.l.l exploded beside him. His aide-de-camp was knocked over, and when he picked himself up, stunned and bewildered, he saw his General lying a few yards away, with both legs and an arm broken. Gouraud, during these few weeks, had already made his mark, and universal sympathy from French and English followed him home. His right arm was amputated on the way to Toulon; the left leg, though broken below the knee, was not seriously injured, but the fracture of the right involved injury to the hip, and led to permanent lameness.
Who would have imagined that a man so badly hurt could yet have afterwards become one of the most brilliant and successful generals in the French Army? The story of his recovery must rank with the most amazing instances of the power of the human will, and there are various touches connected with it in current talk which show the temper of the man, and the love which has been always felt for him.
One of his old masters of the College Stanislas who went to meet him at the station on his arrival at Paris, and had been till then unaware of the extent of the General's wounds, could not conceal his emotion at seeing him. ”_Eh, c'est le sort des batailles_,” said Gouraud gaily, to his pale and stumbling friend. ”One would have said he was two men in one,” said another old comrade--”one was betrayed to me by his works; the other spoke to me in his words.” The legends of him in hospital are many. He was determined to walk again--and quickly. ”One has to teach these legs,” he said impatiently, ”to walk naturally, not like machines.” Hence the steeple-chases over all kinds of obstacles--stools, cus.h.i.+ons, chairs--that his nurses must needs arrange for him in the hospital pa.s.sages; and later on his determined climbing of any hill that presented itself--at first leaning on his mother (General Gouraud has never married), then independently.
He was wounded at the end of June, 1915. At the beginning of November he was sent at the head of a French Military Mission to Italy, and on his return in December was given the command of the Fourth French Army, the Army of Champagne. There on that famous sector of the French line, where Castelnau and Langle de Cary in the autumn of the same year had all but broken through, he remained through the whole of 1916. That was the year of Verdun and the Somme. Neither the Allies nor the enemy had men or energy to spare for important action in Champagne that year; but Gouraud's watch was never surprised, and again he was able to acquaint himself with every military feature, and every local peculiarity of the desolate chalk-hills where France has buried so many thousands of her sons. At the end of 1916, his old chief, General Lyautey, now French Minister for War, insisted on his going back to Morocco as Governor; but happily for the Army of Champagne, the interlude was short, and by the month of May, Lyautey was once more in Morocco and Gouraud in Champagne--to remain there in command of his beloved Fourth Army till the end of the war.
Such then, in brief outline, was the story of the great man whose guests we were proud to be on that January evening. Dinner was very animated and gay. The rooms of the huge building was singularly bare, having been stripped by the Germans before their departure of everything portable. But _en revanche_ the entering French, finding nothing left in the fine old house, even of the _mobilier_ which had been left there in 1871, discovered a _chateau_ belonging to the Kaiser close by, and requisitioned from it some of the necessaries of life.
Bordeaux drunk out of a gla.s.s marked with the Kaiser's monogram had a taste of its own. In the same way, when on the British front we drew up one afternoon, north of St. Omer, at a level crossing to let a goods train go by, I watched the interminable string of German trucks, labelled Magdeburg, Essen, Dusseldorf, and saw in them, with a bitter satisfaction, the first visible signs of the Reparation and Rest.i.tution to be.
The relations between the General and his Staff were very pleasant to watch; and after dinner there was some interesting talk of the war. I asked the General what had seemed to him the most critical moment of the struggle. He and his Chief of the Staff looked at each other gravely an instant and then the General said: ”I have no doubt about it at all. Not May 27th (the break through on the Aisne)--not March 21st (the break through at St. Quentin)--but May and June, 1917--'_les mutineries dans l'armee_,' _i.e._, that bitter time of '_depression morale_,' as another French military critic calls it, affecting the glorious French Army, which followed on General Nivelle's campaign on the Aisne--March and April, 1917--with its high hopes of victory, its initial success, its appalling losses, and its ultimate check. Many causes combined, however--among them the leave-system in the French Army, and many grievances as to food, billeting, and the like: and the discontent was alarming and widespread. But,” said General Gouraud, ”Petain stepped in and saved the situation.” ”How?” one asked. ”_Il s'occupa du soldat_--(he gave his mind to the soldier)--that was all.”
The whole leave-system was transformed, the food supply and the organisation of the Army canteens were immensely improved--pay was raised--and everything was done that could be done, while treating actual mutiny with a stern hand, to meet the soldiers' demands. ”In our army,” said General Gouraud, ”a system of discipline like that of the German Army is impossible. We are a democracy. We must have the consent of the governed. In the last resort the soldier must be able to say: '_J'obeis d'amitie._'”
That great result, according to General Gouraud, was finally achieved by General Petain's reforms. He gave as a proof of it that on the night of the Armistice, he and his Staff, at Chalons, unable to sit still indoors, went out and mingled with the crowd in the streets of that great military centre, apparently to the astonishment and pleasure of the mult.i.tude. ”Everywhere along the line,” said the General, ”the soldiers were cheering Petain! '_Vive Petain! Vive Petain!_'” Petain was miles away; but it was the spontaneous recognition of him as the soldiers' champion and friend.
Gouraud did not say, what was no doubt the truth, that the army at Chalons were cheering Gouraud no less than Petain. For one can rarely talk with French officers about General Gouraud without coming across the statement: ”He is beloved by his army. He has done so much for the soldiers.” But not a word of his own share appeared in his conversation with me.
The talk pa.s.sed on to the German attack on the French front in Champagne on July 15th, that perfectly-planned defence in which, to quote General Gouraud's own stirring words to his soldiers: ”You broke the strength and the hopes of the enemy. That day Victory changed her camp. She has been faithful to us ever since.” It makes one of the most picturesque stories of the war. The German offensive which broke out, as we know, along the whole of their new Marne front on July 15th, had been exactly antic.i.p.ated for days before it began by General Gouraud and his Staff. The Fourth French Army, which Gouraud commanded, was lying to the north-east of Rheims, and the German attack on the Monts de Champagne, already the scene in 1916 and 1917 of so much desperate fighting, was meant to carry the German line down to the Marne that same day. Gouraud was amply informed by his intelligence staff, and his air service, of the enemy preparations, and had made all his own. The only question was as to the exact day and hour of the attack. Then by a stroke of good fortune, at eight o'clock on the very evening preceding the attack, twenty-seven prisoners were brought in--of whom some are said to have been Alsatian--and closely questioned by the Staff. ”They told us,” said Gouraud, ”that the artillery attack would begin at ten minutes past midnight, and the infantry attack between three and four o'clock that very night. I thereupon gave the order for our bombardment to begin at 11.30 p.m. in order to catch the a.s.sembling German troops. I had 200 _batteries secretes_ ready--of which the enemy had no idea--which had given beforehand no sign of their existence. Then we sat with our watches in our hands. Was it true--or not true? 12.5--12.6--12.8--12.9.--Probably it was a mare's nest. 12.10--_Crac!_--the bombardment had begun. We sprang to our telephones!” And presently, as the captured German officers began to come in, their French captors were listening to their bewildered astonishment ”at the number of our batteries they had never discovered, which were on none of their maps, and only revealed themselves at the very moment of their own attack.”
Meanwhile, the first French position was not intended to be held. The advance posts were told to delay and break up the enemy as much as possible, but the famous Monts were to be abandoned and the real resistance was to be offered on a position intermediate between the first and second position, and so densely held that no infiltration of the enemy was to be possible. Everything happened, for once, really ”according to plan.” The advance posts, whose order was ”to sacrifice themselves,” and each member of which knew perfectly well the duty laid upon him, held out--some of them--all day, and eventually fought their way back to the French lines. But on the prepared line of resistance the German attack was hopelessly broken, and men and reserves coming on fast from behind, ignorant of what had happened to the attacking troops, were mown down by the French artillery. ”By midday,” says the typed _compte-rendu_ of operations, which, signed by General Gouraud's own left hand, lies before me--”the enemy appeared entirely blocked in all directions--and the battle-position fixed by the General Commanding the Army was intact.”
Gouraud's army had, in fact, according to the proclamation of its General, broken the attack of fifteen German divisions, supported by ten others. The success, moreover, was of the greatest strategical importance. Thus secured on his right, Foch at once transferred troops from the Fourth Army, in support of General Mangin's counter-attack of the 18th, to the other side of the Marne salient, and Gouraud remained firmly on the watch in the position he had so victoriously held, till the moment came for his own advance in September.
I seem still to see him insisting--in spite of his lameness--on bringing the Staff maps himself from his study, marking on them the points where the fighting in the September advance was most critical, and dictating to one of his Staff the itinerary it would be best for us to take if we wished to see part, at least, of the battle-field.
”And you won't forget,” he said, looking up suddenly, ”to go and see two things--the great cemetery at Chalons, and the little 'Cimetiere du Mont Muret.'” He described to me the latter, lying up in what was the main fighting line, and how they had gathered there many of the ”unidentifiables”--the nameless, shattered heroes of a terrible battle-field, so that they rest in the very ground where they gave their lives. He might have told me,--but there was never a word of it, and I only knew it later--that it was in that very scene of desolation, from May, 1917, to March, 1918, that he lived among his men, building up the spirit of troops that had suffered much, physically and morally, caring for everything that concerned them, restoring a shaken discipline and forging the army which a year later was to fight with an iron steadiness under its brilliant chief.
To fight both in defence and attack. From July 15th to September 26th Gouraud remained pa.s.sive in Champagne. Then on September 26th, the day before the British attack at Cambrai, he moved, with the First American Army on his right, against the strong German positions to the east of Rheims, which since the beginning of the war had barred the French way. In a battle of sixteen days, the French captured the whole of the fortified zone on this portion of the front, took 21,000 prisoners, 600 cannon and 3,500 machine guns. At the very same moment Sir Douglas Haig was driving through the Hindenburg line, and up to the west bank of the Selle, taking 48,000 prisoners and 600 guns; while the Americans were pus.h.i.+ng through the difficult forest country of the Argonne, and along both sides of the Meuse.
The German strength was indeed weakening fast. Between July 16th and the Armistice, the British took 188,700 prisoners, the French 137,000, and the Americans 43,000.
CHAPTER V
ALSACE-LORRAINE
THE GLORY OF VERDUN
Before we left Strasbourg on our way to the ”front de Champagne,”
armed with General Gouraud's maps and directions, an hour or two of most interesting conversation threw great light for me on that other ”field of victory”--Alsace-Lorraine.
We brought an introduction to Dr. Pierre Bucher, a gentleman in whom Alsatian patriotism, both before the war and since the Armistice, has found one of its most effective and eloquent representatives. A man of a singularly winning and magnetic presence,--with dark, melancholy eyes, and the look of one in whom the flame of life has burnt in the past with a bitter intensity, fanned by winds of revolt and suffering.