Various - The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol 1, Issue 4, January 23, 1915

V >> Various >> The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol 1, Issue 4, January 23, 1915

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29

On the way we met two men in English uniform who later denounced us as
spies. We hailed them, and they replied that they had been cut off from
their regiment and were now fighting with the French. Just as luncheon
was announced eight soldiers filed into the hotel, arrested us, and
marched us before the Commandant, who saw that our papers were all
right, but suggested that on account of the dangerous position we leave
as soon as possible. We asked permission to finish our luncheon. It was
lucky that we were arrested then--before the accusation that we were
spies--for when that question arose there was no doubt in the mind of
the Commandant concerning us, so our accusers' charge merely reacted
upon themselves.

During the episode of arrest there was another lull in the bombardment,
which began again as we were seated at luncheon. All through the meal
the shells whistled and screamed overhead, and the dishes rattled
constantly on the table.

When the meal was over the proprietor called us to witness what had
happened to the far wing of the hotel. It was completely demolished.
"Alert" had just been sounded, and the soldiers were running through the
streets. We ran out in time to see a building falling half a block away,
completely filling the street by which we had entered the town an hour
earlier.

In a few minutes we heard the sharp crackle of infantry fire about half
a mile away, and we had a sudden desire to get away before the
automobile retreat was cut off. Just then we heard the sound of an aero
engine overhead. It was flying so low that through a glass we could
easily see the whirring propeller. The machine was mounted with a
rapid-fire gun which was trying to locate the German gunners, who
immediately abandoned the destruction of the town in an attempt to bring
it down. For ten minutes we saw shells bursting all about it. At times
it was lost in smoke, but when the smoke cleared there was the monoplane
still blazing away, always mounting to a higher level, and finally
disappearing toward the French lines.

There was another lull in the cannonade, and we were permitted to pass
down the street near the river, where, by peering around a building, we
could see where the German batteries were secreted in the hills. We were
warned not to get into the street which led to the bridge, as the
Germans raked that street with their fire if a single person appeared.
We then took advantage of a lull in the firing and departed to the south
at seventy miles an hour, in order to beat the shells, if any were aimed
our way as we crossed the rise of the hill.

*Unburied Dead Strew Lorraine*

*By Philip Gibbs of The London Daily Chronicle.*

DIJON, Sept. 26.--Although great interest is concentrated upon the
northwest side of the line of of battle in France, it must not be
forgotten that the east side is also of high importance. The operation
of the French and German forces along the jagged frontier from north to
south is of vital influence upon the whole field of war, and any great
movement of troops in this direction affects the strategy of the
Generals to command on the furthermost wings.

It was a desire to know something of what had been happening in the east
which led me to travel to the extreme right. Few correspondents have
been in this part of the field since the beginning of the war. It is far
from their own line of communications. For this reason there have been
no detailed narratives of the fighting in Lorraine, and a strange
silence has brooded over those battlefields. The spell of it has been
broken only by official bulletins telling in a line or two the uncertain
result of the ceaseless struggle for mastery.

Here are regiments of young men who have the right already to call
themselves veterans, for they have been fighting continually for six
weeks in innumerable engagements, for the most part unrecorded in
official dispatches. I had seen them answering the call to mobilization,
singing joyously as they marched through the streets. Then they were
smart fellows, clean shaven and spruce in their new blue coats and
scarlet trousers. Now war has put its dirt upon them and seems to have
aged them by fifteen years, leaving its ineffaceable imprint upon their
faces. Their blue coats have changed to a dusty gray, but they are hard
and tough for the most part, and Napoleon himself would not have wished
for better fighting men.

Now for the first time since the beginning of the war there will be a
little respite on the Lorraine frontier, and in the wooded country of
the two lost provinces there will be time to bury the dead which
incumber its fields. Words are utterly inadequate to describe the
horrors of the region to the east of the Meurthe, in and around the
little towns of Blamont, Badonviller, Cirey-les-Forges, Arracourt,
Chateau-Salins, Morhauge, and Baudrecourt, where for six weeks there has
been incessant fighting. After the heavy battle of Sept. 4, when the
Germans were repulsed with severe losses after an attack in force, both
sides retired for about twelve miles and dug themselves into lines of
trenches which they still hold; but every day since that date there has
been a kind of guerrilla warfare, with small bodies of men fighting from
village to village and from wood to wood, the forces on each side being
scattered over a wide area in advance of their main lines. This method
of warfare is even more terrible than a pitched battle.

"It is absurd to talk of Red Cross work," said one of the French
soldiers who had just come out of the trenches at Luneville. "It has not
existed as far as many of these fights are concerned How could it? A few
litter-carriers came with us on some of our expeditions, but they were
soon shot down, and after that the wounded just lay where they fell, or
crawled away into the shelter of the woods. Those of us who were unhurt
were not allowed to attend to our wounded comrades; it is against
orders. We have to go on regardless of losses. My own best comrade was
struck down by my side. I heard his cry and saw him lying there with
blood oozing through his coat. My heart wept to leave him. He wanted me
to take his money, but I just kissed his hand and went on, I suppose he
died, for I could not find him when we retreated."

[Illustration: Where the Armies are Contending in Alsace-Lorraine.]

[Illustration: GRAND DUKE NICHOLAS NICHOLAIEVITCH
The Russian Commander-in-Chief. _
(Photo (C) by Underwood & Underwood._)]

[Illustration: GEN. RENNENKAMPF
The Russian General Who Was Removed by the Grand Duke
[Transcriber: photo credit ineligible]]

Another French soldier lay wounded at the edge of a wood ten miles from
Luneville. When he recovered consciousness he saw there were only dead
and dying men around him. He remained for two days, unable to move his
shattered limbs, and cried out for death to relieve him of his agony. At
night he was numbed by cold; in the day thirst tortured him to the point
of madness. Faint cries and groans came to his ears across the field. It
was on the morning of the third day that French peasants came to rescue
those who still remained alive.

There have been several advances made by the French into Lorraine, and
several retirements. On each occasion men have seen new horrors which
have turned their stomachs. There are woods not far from Nancy from
which there comes a pestilential stench which steals down the wind in
gusts of obscene odor. For three weeks and more dead bodies of Germans
and Frenchmen have lain rotting there. There are few grave diggers. The
peasants have fled from their villages, and the soldiers have other work
to do; so that the frontier fields on each side are littered with
corruption, where plague and fever find holding ground.

I have said that this warfare on the frontier is pitiless. This is a
general statement of a truth to which there are exceptions. One of these
was a reconciliation on the battlefield between French and German
soldiers who lay wounded and abandoned near the little town of Blamont.
When dawn came they conversed with each other while waiting for death. A
French soldier gave his water bottle to a German officer who was crying
out with thirst. The German sipped a little and then kissed the hand of
the man who had been his enemy. "There will be no war on the other
side," he said.

Another Frenchman, who came from Montmartre, found a Luxembourger lying
within a yard of him whom he had known as a messenger in a big hotel in
Paris. The young German wept to see his old acquaintance. "It is
stupid," he said, "this war. You and I were happy when we were good
friends in Paris. Why should we have been made to fight with each
other?" He died with his arms around the neck of the soldier who told me
the story, unashamed of his own tears.

I could tell a score of tales like this, told to me by men whose eyes
were still haunted by the sight of these things; and perhaps one day
they will be worth telling, so that people of little imagination may
realize the meaning of this war and put away false heroics from their
lips. It is dirty business, with no romance in it for any of those fine
young Frenchmen I have learned to love, who still stay in the trenches
on the frontier lines or march a little way into Lorraine and back
again.

Some of those trenches on either side are still filled with men leaning
forward with their rifles pointing to the enemy--quite dead, in spite of
their lifelike posture.

*Along the German Lines Near Metz*

[Correspondence of The Associated Press.]

WITH THE GERMAN ARMY BEFORE METZ, Sept. 30, (by Courier to Holland and
Mail to New York.)--A five-day trip to the front has taken the
correspondent of The Associated Press through the German fortresses of
Mainz, Saarbruecken, and Metz, through the frontier regions between Metz
and the French fortress line from Verdun to Toul, into the actual
battery positions from which German and Austrian heavy artillery were
pounding their eight and twelve-inch shells into the French barrier
forts and into the ranks of the French field army which has replaced the
crumbling fortifications of steel and cement with ramparts of flesh and
blood.

Impressions at the end are those of some great industrial undertaking
with powerful machinery in full operation and endless supply trains
bringing up the raw materials for manufacture rather than of war as
pictured.

From a point of observation on a hillside above St. Mihiel the great
battlefield on which a German army endeavoring to break through the line
of barrier forts between Verdun and Toul and the opposing French forces
could be surveyed in its entirety. In the foreground lay the level
valley of the Meuse, with the towns of St. Mihiel and Banoncour nestling
upon the green landscape. Beyond and behind the valley rose a tier of
hills on which the French at this writing obstinately hold an intrenched
position, checking the point of the German wedge, while the French
forces from north and south beat upon the sides of the triangle, trying
to force it back across the Meuse and out from the vitals of the French
fortress line.

Bursting shells threw up their columns of white or black fog around the
edge of the panorama. Cloudlets of white smoke here and there showed
where a position was being brought under shrapnel fire. An occasional
aeroplane could be picked out hovering over the lines, but the infantry
and the field battery positions could not be discerned even with a
high-power field glass, so cleverly had the armies taken cover. The
uninitiated observer would have believed this a deserted landscape
rather than the scene of a great battle, which, if successful for the
Germans, would force the main French Army to retreat from its intrenched
positions along the Aisne River.

About three miles away, across the Meuse, a quadrangular mound of black,
plowed-up earth on the hillside marked the location of Fort Les
Paroches, which had been silenced by the German mortars the night
before. Fort Camp des Romains, so named because the Roman legions had
centuries ago selected this site for a strategic encampment, had been
stormed by Bavarian infantry two days earlier after its heavy guns had
been put out of action, and artillery officers said that Fort Lionville,
fifteen miles to the south and out of the range of vision, was then
practically silenced, only one of its armored turrets continuing to
answer the bombardment.

The correspondent had spent the previous night at the fortress town of
Metz, sleeping under the same roof with Prince Oscar of Prussia,
invalided from the field in a state of physical breakdown; Prince
William of Hohenzollern, father-in-law of ex-King Manuel, and other
officers, either watching or engaged in the operations in the field, and
had traveled by automobile to the battlefront thirty-five miles to the
west. For the first part of the distance the road led through the hills
on which are located the chain of forts comprising the fortress of Metz;
but, although the General Staff officer in the car pointed now and then
to a hill as the site of this or that fort, traces of the fortifications
could only occasionally be made out. Usually they were so skillfully
masked and concealed by woods or blended with the hillsides that nothing
out of the ordinary was apparent, in striking contrast to the exposed
position of the forts at the recently visited fortress of Liege, which
advertised their presence from the sky line of the encompassing hills
and fairly invited bombardment.

The country as far as the frontier town of Gorze seemed bathed in
absolute peace. No troops were seen, rarely were automobiles of the
General Staff encountered, and men and women were working in the field
and vineyards as if war were a thousand miles away instead of only next
door.

Beyond Gorze, however, the road leading southwest through Chambley and
St. Benoit Vigneuilles to St. Mihiel was crowded with long columns of
wagons and automobile trucks bearing reserve ammunition, provisions, and
supplies to the front, or returning empty for new loads to the unnamed
railroad base in the rear. Strikingly good march discipline was
observed, part of the road being always left free from the passage of
staff automobiles or marching troops. Life seemed most comfortable for
the drivers and escorts, as the army in advance had been so long in
position, and its railroad base was so near, that supplying it involved
none of the sleepless nights and days and almost superhuman exertions
falling to the lot of the train in the flying march of the German armies
toward Paris.

A few miles beyond Gorze the French frontier was passed, and from this
point on the countryside, with its deserted farms, rotting shocks of
wheat, and uncut fields of grain, trampled down by infantry and scarred
with trenches, excavations for batteries, and pits caused by exploding
shells, showed war's devastating heel prints.

Main army headquarters, the residence and working quarters of a
commanding General whose name may not yet be mentioned, were in Chateau
Chambley, a fine French country house. In the chateau the commanding
General made all as comfortable as in his own home. Telegraph wires led
to it from various directions, a small headquarters guard lounged on the
grass under the trees, a dozen automobiles and motor cycles were at
hand, and grooms were leading about the chargers of the General and his
staff. At St. Benoit, five miles further on, a subordinate headquarters
was encountered, again in a chateau belonging to a rich French resident.
The Continental soldier leaves tents to the American Army and quarters
himself, whenever it is possible, comfortably in houses, wasting no
energy in transporting and setting up tented cities for officers and
men. No matter how fast or how far a German army moves, a completely
equipped telegraph office is ready for the army commander five minutes
after headquarters have been established.

At St. Benoit a party of some 300 French prisoners was encountered,
waiting outside headquarters. They were all fine young fellows, in
striking contrast to the elderly reservist type which predominates in
the German prison camps. They were evidently picked troops of the line,
and were treated almost with deference by their guards, a detachment of
bearded Landwehr men from South Germany. They were the survivors of the
garrison of Fort Camp des Romains, who had put up such a desperate and
spirited defense as to win the whole-hearted admiration and respect of
the German officers and men. Their armored turrets and cemented
bastions, although constructed after the best rules of fortification of
a few years ago, had been battered about their ears in an unexpectedly
short time by German and Austrian siege artillery. Their guns were
silenced, and trenches were pushed up by an overwhelming force of
pioneers and infantry to within five yards of their works before they
retreated from the advanced intrenchments to the casemates of the fort.
Here they maintained a stout resistance, and refused every summons to
surrender. Hand grenades were brought up, bound to a backing of boards,
and exploded against the openings into the casemates, filling these with
showers of steel splinters. Pioneers, creeping up to the dead angle of
the casemates, where the fire of the defenders could not reach them,
directed smoke tubes and stinkpots against apertures in the citadel,
filling the rooms with suffocating smoke and gases.

"Have you had enough?" the defenders were asked, after the first smoke
treatment.

"No!" was the defiant answer.

The operation was repeated a second and third time, the response to the
demand for surrender each time growing weaker, until finally the
defenders were no longer able to raise their rifles, and the fort was
taken. When the survivors of the plucky garrison were able to march out,
revived by the fresh air, they found their late opponents presenting
arms before them in recognition of their gallant stand. They were
granted the most honorable terms of surrender, their officers were
allowed to retain their swords, and on their march toward an honorable
captivity they were everywhere greeted with expressions of respect and
admiration.

The headquarters guard here was composed of a company of infantry. The
company's field kitchen, the soup-boiler and oven on wheels, which the
German army copied from the Russians and which the soldiers facetiously
and affectionately name their "goulash cannon," had that day, the
Captain said, fed 970 men, soldiers of his own and passing companies,
headquarters attaches, wounded men and the detachment of French
prisoners.

Experienced German officers rank the field kitchens, with the sturdy
legs of the infantry, the German heavy artillery and the aviation corps,
as the most important factors in the showing made by the German armies.

Beyond St. Benoit the Cote Lorraine, a range of wooded hills running
north and south along the east bank of the Meuse, rises in steeply
terraced slopes several hundred feet from the frontier plain,
interposing a natural rampart between Germany and the French line of
fortresses beyond the Meuse. The French had fortified these slopes with
successive rows of trenches, permitting line above line of infantry to
fire against an advancing enemy. For days a desperate struggle was waged
for the possession of the heights, which was imperative for the German
campaign against the line of fortresses.

Germans do not mention the extent of their losses in any particular
action, but it was admitted and evident that it had cost a high price to
storm those steep slopes and win a position in the woods crowning the
range from which their batteries could be directed against the French
forts. Vigneuilles, a village at the foot of the hillside, shot into
ruins by artillery and with every standing bit of house wall scarred
with bullet marks from the hand-to-hand conflicts which had swayed to
and fro in its streets, was typical of all the little stone-built towns
serving as outposts to this natural fortress which had been the scene of
imbittered attacks and counter-attacks before the German troops could
fight their way up the hillsides.

The combat is still raging on this day from north and south against the
segment of this range captured by the Germans. The French, massing their
troops by forest paths from Verdun and Toul, throw them against the
Germans in desperate endeavors to break the lines which protect the
sites for the German siege artillery, heavy mortars of 8-1/4 and 16-1/2
inch calibre and an intermediate sized type, and for the Austrian
automobile batteries of 12-inch siege guns.

The correspondent had no opportunity to inspect at close range the
16-1/2-inch guns, the "growlers" of Liege, Namur, and other fortresses,
which Krupp and the German Army uncovered as the surprise of this war.
They could be heard even from Metz speaking at five-minute intervals. A
battery of them, dug into the ground so that only the gun muzzles
projected above the pits, was observed in action at a distance of about
a half mile, the flash of flames being visible even at this distance.

Their smaller sisters were less coy. A dismounted battery of the
intermediate calibre, details of which are not available for
publication, was encountered by the roadside, awaiting repairs to the
heavy traction engine in whose train it travels in sections along the
country roads, while the German 8-1/4-inch (21 centimeter) and the
Austrian 12-inch (30.5 centimeter) batteries were seen in action.

The heavy German battery lay snugly hidden in a wood on the rolling
heights of the Cote Lorraine. Better off than the French, whose aviators
had for days repeatedly scrutinized every acre of land in the vicinity
looking for these guns, we had fairly accurate directions how to find
the battery, but even then it required some search and doubling back and
forth before a languid artilleryman lounging by the roadside pointed
with thumb over shoulder toward the hidden guns.

These and the artillerymen were enjoying their midday rest, a pause
which sets in every day with the regularity of the luncheon hour in a
factory. The guns, two in this particular position, stood beneath a
screen of thickly branching trees, the muzzles pointing toward round
openings in this leafy roof. The gun carriages were screened with
branches. The shelter tents of the men and the house for the ammunition
had also been covered with green, and around the position a hedge of
boughs kept off the prying eyes of possible French spies wandering
through the woods.

It was the noon pause, but the Lieutenant in charge of the guns, anxious
to show them off to advantage, volunteered to telephone the battery
commander, in his observation post four miles nearer the enemy, for
permission to fire a shot or two against a village in which French
troops were gathering for the attack. This battery had just finished
with Les Paroches, a French barrier fort across the Meuse, and was now
devoting its attention to such minor tasks. Only forts really counted,
said the Lieutenant, recalling Fort Manonvillers, near Luneville, the
strongest French barrier fort, which was the battery's first "bag" of
the war. Its capture, thanks to his guns, had cost the German Army only
three lives, those of three pioneers accidentally killed by the fire of
their own men. Now Les Paroches was a heap of crumbled earth and stone.
In default of forts the guns were used against any "worthy target"--a
"worthy target" being defined as a minimum of fifty infantrymen.

At this moment the orderly reported that the battery commander
authorized two shots against the village in question. At command the gun
crew sprang to their posts about the mortar, which was already adjusted
for its target, a little less than six miles away, the gun muzzle
pointing skyward at an angle of about 60 degrees. As the gun was fired
the projectile could be seen and followed in its course for several
hundred feet. The report was not excessively loud.

Before the report died away the crew were busy as bees about the gun.
One man, with the hand elevating gear, rapidly cranked the barrel down
to a level position, ready for loading. A second threw open the breech
and extracted the brass cartridge case, carefully wiping [Transcriber:
original 'wipping'] it out before depositing it among the empties; four
more seized the heavy shell and lifted it to a cradle opposite the
breech; a seventh rammed it home; number eight gingerly inserted the
brass cartridge, half filled with a vaseline-like explosive; the breech
was closed, and the gun pointer rapidly cranked the gun again into
position. In less than thirty seconds the men sprang back from the gun,
again loaded and aimed. A short wait, and the observer from his post
near the village ordered "next shot fifty meters nearer."

The gun pointer made the slight correction necessary, the mortar again
sent its shell purring through the air against the village, which this
time, it was learned, broke into flames, and while the men went back to
their noonday rest, the Lieutenant explained the fine points of his
beloved guns. One man, as had been seen, could manipulate the elevation
gear with one hand easily and quickly; ten of his horses could take the
mortar, weighing eight tons, anywhere; it could fire up to 500 shots per
day. He was proud of the skillful concealment of his guns, which had
been firing for four days from the same position without being
discovered, although French aviators had located all the sister
batteries, all of which had suffered loss from shrapnel fire.

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29