Part 34

XX.

WHERE WAR HAS RAGED

In spite of the tremendous nature of the present war and its duration for more than two years at the time of our visit, comparatively little of France had been visited with the indescribable destruction marking the struggle. No war in history has been so intense, and few wars have been so long confined to such small areas as that on the western front.

It was about the first of October that we reached Belfort, and here we saw the first signs of havoc wrought by gunfire. At Paris we had been within twenty miles of the battlefield where the German hosts were first turned back, but there was not much ruin wrought to buildings at the Marne. Men, unprotected by trenches or any of the later found defensive methods, bore the brunt of the cannon there.

At Belfort we saw signs of bombardment, but they were not so shocking. The shell fire had been at long range and was apparently brief and inaccurate. This seemed to be the case at all of the towns between Belfort and St. Die. Apparently the Germans had not used so many heavy guns in this region, or perhaps they had not yet become so desperate and ruthless as later on. At any rate, it was at St. Die where we first saw a whole town ruined.

The ruined portion of France extends in a narrow strip around the frontier from the Alps to the North Sea. Very little of this section, about three hundred and twenty-five miles in length and varying from ten to fifty miles in breadth, escaped the fearful blast of war. Few towns located in it can ever be restored to their original condition.

After the great German army had crushed Liege and captured Antwerp, one section came up the valley of the Meuse and the other up the valley of the Schelde, uniting at a point between Namur and Mons. At the latter place Sir John French had gathered his hastily formed army of one hundred and twenty-five thousand men, and with this made a gallant defense. The British were soon forced back with tremendous losses, but they delayed the Germans until the French army, hastily mobilized on the German frontier east of Paris, could be reformed on the Marne. The great German machine drove rapidly down the valleys over the wide and splendid roads, forcing the English backward toward the sea and spreading out to meet the French front so hastily interposed between it and Paris. In this way the German line became extremely long before the Battle of the Marne began. The Kaiser's army had spread itself out like a fan. I was shown maps illustrating this mightiest of all military movements, and it was made plain how the English, hanging on the German flank, had placed the invaders in such a position that a skillful attack at the right time and in the right place forced them to fall back and strengthen their lines.

It was while they were attempting to do this that the French attacked them with all the fierceness of patriots defending their most beloved city. Then what the German commander, Von Kluck, had meant to be only a halt to reform his lines became a retreat that ended only when the Teutons had gained the hills beyond the Aisne. In their retreat they destroyed, or the French were forced to destroy, most of the towns in a section fifty miles wide and two hundred miles long--the fairest part of France--Artois and Champagne.

The surge of battle--such a battle as the world never saw before--swept over all these towns, but it was strange to see how much more some of them suffered than others. At Belfort, the town famous for withstanding sieges, comparatively little harm was done. Rambevillers, in the path of the stream of destruction, was almost unharmed. Gerbeviller, on the other hand, was entirely destroyed, probably out of revenge for the stubborn opposition of its defenders. St. Die was badly wrecked, as were Raon l'Etape and Baccarat.

It was the same all along the front. We saw some towns absolutely ruined, others very badly damaged, and still others in which the shells seem to have fallen in places where they did little harm, or where, perhaps, there was not time for the complete shelling that had made heaps of brick and stone of other thriving towns.

The smaller towns appeared to have suffered worse than the large cities. Nancy was badly battered, but not entirely destroyed. Reims, which was under the fire of German guns for many months, and where the wonderful cathedral was destroyed, apparently with malice, had lost about one-fourth of its buildings by fire and explosions resulting from the bombardment.

In the country, the territory once occupied by the Germans and now in possession of the French is seamed with trenches and pitted with shell craters in all directions. To all appearances about every foot of it has seen the tread of either French soldiers or their foes. Back from the lines a short distance in some cases, the fields had become green again, and the trees were trying to send forth new growth from then-burned and battered trunks; but it will be a long time before this part of France loses all of its scars. The filling of the trenches and leveling of the fields will be no mean task of itself. Few farm houses, which in France are built in groups of half a dozen or so, are to be seen. Stone heaps fill their places.

The roads over which we passed were in good condition, having been kept in repair. We were told, however, that many of the finest roads near the front had been badly torn up and that it would require much work to restore them. Hundreds of bridges have been destroyed, and most of the rivers and canals, of which there are many, are now crossed by temporary structures.

We were given a glimpse of the complicated system of railroads, built in large part since the war and to supply the armies with food and other necessaries. These roads were all laid hurriedly, but they seem to be in good condition and are invaluable to the French. Some of them have been laid with rails taken up in other places where they were not so badly needed. In this system of railroads and roads one gets a striking illustration of the huge task it is to feed an army.

The Commission was given figures showing the total number of buildings destroyed in France, with an estimate of their value. These figures had been compiled in July, 1916, and were reasonably accurate at the time we were there, since the Germans had yielded little ground in the interim and there had been less wanton destruction than in the first months of the war. According to this official report, more than half the houses had been destroyed, either by flames or gunfire, in one hundred and forty-eight towns. In the greater portion of these towns nearly all of the houses had been ruined. Besides this there were scores of towns suffering from gunfire which did not lose so large a part of their buildings. Among the buildings destroyed were two hundred and twenty-five city halls, three hundred and seventy-nine schools, three hundred and thirty-one churches, and more than three hundred other public buildings of various kinds and sizes. The mills and factories, like all of the larger buildings, suffered severely, more than three hundred having been totally destroyed.

Most of the towns suffering were of the smaller class, although four cities of more than one hundred thousand people were bombarded or burned by the Germans. These are Lille, Roubaix, Nancy and Reims. The section swept by the German advance and suffering even worse in the retreat is the most populous in France. It covered about ten thousand square miles. No one has yet undertaken to figure the loss in property sustained in this region. The Germans have still possession of about five million acres of French soil, including seventy per cent, of the iron ore mines and a large part of the coal supply.

The farmers are already back at work on a great part of the territory ravaged by the war. Farming under such conditions as we saw, where men and women worked in the fields within range of the guns and amid their constant roaring, or with the eternal white crosses for company, may be more exciting than the usual occupation of the agriculturist, but it must be a sad, discouraging and difficult task.

XXI.

GENERAL JOFFRE

Perhaps no other man in France is so talked of so much as General Joffre. Certainly he is the idol of the French people. They look on him as their hero and savior, and his name is mentioned among them with a sort of half-worship. No other people have ever depended on their leaders as have the French. They believe with the right sort of leadership they can do anything. This is the impression you get in talking to them. They say that since the Franco-Prussian War they have looked forward to the time when they might have a general with Napoleon's genius and some other name--for even the name Napoleon now prevents a man from fighting for France, at least if he is of the royal line.

You may be certain that we all looked forward to meeting this great man. We did not meet him after all at close range, having to content ourselves with a view of the busiest man in France as he rode by in an automobile at top speed.

General Joffre, as we learned, has been at the head of the French Army for two years before the war. He first came into notice when, at the last grand maneuvers, he jarred military circles and greatly pleased the people by unceremoniously dismissing from their command five gold-laced generals whose methods did not meet with his approval.

But Joffre first showed what sort of stuff was in him when he met the Germans at the Marne. It will be recalled that the French, never suspecting that Germany would invade Belgium and having all their military plans laid for mobilizing on the German frontier, were more or less demoralized when they found an entirely new line of defense necessary. They had no railroads built to help reform their line, and the moving of a vast army is a perplexing task. Without a leader in whom the whole army had supreme confidence, and with the German host sweeping across Belgium and hurling back the English, it would have been a hopeless situation.

But while what the Kaiser called "Sir John French's contemptible little army" was holding back for a few days the German onrush at terrific cost, Joffre was busy realigning his forces between the invaders and his beloved Paris, which seemed doomed to all but him. He had studied the situation carefully and detected the fact that the long flank of Von Kluck's army left an opening. This opening was found by the Army of Paris, augmented in every possible way and finally reinforced by every available soldier, rushed from Paris in every kind of automobile to be found. The Germans were stopped at the Marne--twenty miles from Paris. Not only was the capital of France saved, but the invaders were steadily driven back until they were sixty miles away before they could make a successful stand.

It was then that France found Joffre, so the people say. Up to that time they had heard little of him and nobody knew who he was or where he had come from. At once they began to inquire. Few of the soldiers had ever seen him, and there had been nothing much in the newspapers about the man who had managed all this.

After the Germans had been forced across the Aisne and there was time to breathe, the French decided to have a review of that part of the army that could be spared. It was here that everybody watched for Joffre. The French tell it in their own way and it is interesting to hear one of them explaining, with the usual gestures, just how the hero looked on the day of that review.

It was not much of a display of military style. The troops reviewed had been in the thick of the fight and there was an enormous amount of mud. There was no reviewing stand except a muddy elevation, on which the commander was to stand. Nobody seemed to know where he was or where he would come from, but it was passed around that he was to be there and the soldiers watched for him eagerly. Most of them thought that he was a little, fat man. They had unconsciously absorbed this idea from pictures of Napoleon, and, forgetting the terrible stress of the past weeks in the temporary flush of victory, they expected to see their general come to the stand with a blaze of glory. They looked for silken flags and gaudy uniforms and a regular French military parade. This was as little as they thought would do proper honor to the victorious commander of the Allied armies, and they were right, because General Joffre is at the head of the greatest force of men ever gathered together.

As you are told about this in France, the day came and at the spot selected for the review, an open field somewhat back of the lines, with plenty of freshly planted crosses in sight and evidence all around that the peace and quiet had not always been there, a few generals and officers gathered. Finally, a regimental band, playing the first martial music heard since before the battle of the Marne, swung out of the woods at the head of a body of troops.