Part 42

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."

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*

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.