An icy gale swept across the white crest of the plateau on this January day, but it was nothing to the gale of shells that descended on it in late August and early September. Forty thousand shells, it is estimated, fell there. One kicked up fragments of steel on the field like peanut shells after a circus has gone. Here were the emplacements of a battery of French _soixante-quinze_ within a circle of holes torn by its adversaries’ replies to its fire; a little farther along, concealed by shrubbery, the position of another battery which the enemy had not located.
“So that was it!” The struggle on the immense landscape, where at least a quarter of a million men were killed and wounded, became as simple as some Brobdignagian football match. Before the war began the French would not move a man within five miles of the frontier lest it be provocative: but once the issue was joined they sprang for Alsace and Lorraine, their imagination magnetised by the thought of the recovery of the lost provinces. Their Alpine chasseurs, mountain men of the Alpine and the Pyrenees districts, were concentrated for the purpose.
I recalled a remark I had heard: “What a pitiful little offensive that was!” It was made by one of those armchair “military experts,” who look at a map and jump at a conclusion. They appear very wise in their wordiness when real military experts are silent for want of knowledge. Pitiful, was it? Ask the Germans who faced it what they think. Pitiful, that sweep over those mountain walls and through the passes? Pitiful, perhaps, because it failed, though not until it had taken Château-Salins in the north and Mulhouse in the south. Ask the Germans if they think that it was pitiful! The Confederates also failed at Antietam and at Gettysburg, but the Union army never thought of their efforts as pitiful.
The French fell back because all the weight of the German army was thrown against France, while the Austrians were left to look after the slowly mobilising Russians. Two million five hundred thousand men on their first line the Germans had, as we know now, against the French twelve hundred thousand. To make sure of saving Paris as the Germans swung their mighty flanking column through Belgium, Joffre had to draw in his lines. The Germans came over the hills as splendidly as the French had gone. They struck in all directions toward Paris. In Lorraine was their left flank, the Bavarians, meant to play the same part to the east that von Kluck played to the west. We heard only of von Kluck and the British retreat from Mons; nothing of this terrific struggle in Lorraine.