[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, Saarbrucken, 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.
Along the roadside through the Cote Lorraine were here and there graves with rude crosses and penciled inscriptions. At the western edge of the forest the battle panorama of the Meuse Valley suddenly opened out, the hills falling away again steeply to the level valley below. The towns below--St. Mihiel and Banoncour--seemed absolutely deserted, not a person being visible even around the large barracks in the latter town.
While the little party of officers and spectators, including the correspondent, were watching the artillery duel on the far horizon or endeavoring to pick out the infantry positions, a shrapnel suddenly burst directly before them, high in the air. There was a general stir, the assumption being that the French had taken the group on the hillside for a battery staff picking out positions for the guns; but as other shots were fired it was seen that the shrapnel was exploding regularly above the barracks, a mile and a half away, the French evidently suspecting the presence of German troops there.
A ten-mile ride southward led to the position of the Austrian 12-inch battery. The two guns this time were planted by the side of the road, screened only in front by a little wood, but exposed to view from both sides, the rear, and above. For this greater exposure the battery had paid correspondingly, several of its men having been killed or wounded by hostile fire. Here, as in the German batteries, the war work in progress went on with a machinelike regularity and absence of spectacular features more characteristic of a rolling mill than a battle. The men at the guns went through their work with the deftness and absence of confusion of high-class mechanics. The heavy shells were rolled to the guns, hoisted by a chain winch to the breech opening, and discharged in uninteresting succession, a short pause coming after each shot, until the telephonic report from the observation stand was received. The battery had been firing all day at Fort Lionville, at a range of 9,400 meters, (nearly six miles,) and the battery commander was then endeavoring to put out of action the only gun turret which still answered the fire. The task of finding this comparatively minute target, forty or fifty feet in diameter, was being followed with an accuracy which promised eventual success.
The shells from the guns started on their course with characteristic minute-long shrieks. Watches were pulled out to determine just how long the shrieks could be heard, and the uninitiated were preparing to hear the sound of the explosion itself. The battery chief explained, however, that this scream was due to the conditions immediately around the muzzle of the gun, and could not be heard from other points. He invited close watch of the atmosphere a hundred yards before the gun at the next shot.
Not only could the projectile be seen plainly in the beginning of its flight, but the waves of billowing air, rushing back to fill the void left by the discharge and bounding and rebounding in a tempestuous sea of gas, could be distinctly observed. This airy commotion caused the sound heard for more than a minute.
*The Slaughter in Alsace*
*By John H. Cox of The London Standard.*
BASLE, Switzerland, Aug. 19.--I have just returned from an inspection of the scenes of the recent fighting between the French and Germans in the southern districts of Alsace.
Dispatches from Paris and Berlin describe the engagements between the frontier and Mulhausen as insignificant encounters between advance guards. If this be true in a military sense, and the preliminaries of the war produce the terrible effects I have witnessed, the disastrous results of the war itself will exceed human comprehension.
As a Swiss subject I was equipped with identification papers and accompanied by four of my countrymen, all on bicycles.
At the very outset the sight of peasants, men and women, unconcernedly at work in the fields gathering the harvest, struck me as strange and unnatural. The men were either old or well advanced in middle age.
Everywhere women, girls, and mere lads were working.
The first sign of war was the demolished villa of a Catholic priest at a village near Ransbach. This priest had lived there for many years, engaged in religious work and literary pursuits. After the outbreak of the war the German authorities jumped at the conclusion that he was an agent of the French Secret Service and that he had been in the habit of sending to Belfort information concerning German military movements and German measures for defense--very often by means of carrier pigeons.
The Alsatians say that these accusations were utterly unjust; but last week a military party raided the priest's house, dragged him from his study, placed him against his own garden wall and shot him summarily as a traitor and spy. The house was searched from top to bottom, and numerous books and papers were removed, after which the building was destroyed by dynamite. The priest was buried without a coffin at the end of his little garden plot, and some of the villagers placed a rough cross on the mound which marked the place of interment.
In the next large village we were told that it had been successively occupied by French and German troops and had been the scene of stiff infantry fighting.
Here we found groups of old men and boys burying dead men and horses, whose bodies were already beginning to be a menace to health. The weather here has been exceptionally hot, and the countryside is bathed in blazing sunshine. Further on were a number of German soldiers beating about in the standing crops on both sides of the road, searching for dead and wounded. They said many of the wounded had crawled in among the wheat to escape being trodden upon by the troops marching along the road, and also to gain relief from the heat.
On the outskirts of another large village we saw a garden bounded by a thick hedge, behind which a company of French infantry had taken their stand against the advancing German troops. Among the crushed flowers there were still lying fragments of French soldiers' equipments, two French caps stained with blood and three torn French tunics, likewise [Transcriber: original 'liewise'] dyed red. The walls of the cottage bore marks of rifle bullets, and the roof was partially burned.
Passing through the villages we saw on all sides terrible signs of the devastation of war--houses burned, uncut grain trodden down and rendered useless, gardens trampled under foot; everywhere ruin and distress.