After having to evacuate the city in 1914, the Germans made a very determined stand to the north at the Fort of Brimont, six miles away, as well as on the east at about the same distance, and even the desperate fighting of April, 1917, failed to move them. For the greater part of the war the French and Germans were facing each other on a north and south line a little to the east of the road from Rheims to Laon. But on their side the enemy succeeded in getting closer to the city, and the shelling must often have been at very close range, a condition of affairs more like that at Ypres than at Verdun. At one time in 1917 the Germans actually got for a day into the northern cemetery, just outside the city and only a couple of miles from the cathedral.
The remains of the French front line to the east of the Laon road were still not cleared away on my visit, the barbed-wire entanglements hardly visible above the thick growth of rank herbage. The road itself, running on a slight embankment, in places covers numerous dugouts, their entrances facing westward.
The end of September, 1918, saw the city freed at last, the Germans hastily evacuating the forts in their great retreat.
In the great retreat of the Germans in 1914 the Aisne was reached on the 12th of September, after Soissons had been in enemy occupation for ten days, during which heavy requisitions were made, although no pillage is said to have occurred. The first battle of the Aisne, the end of the German retreat in 1914, continued well into September, British artillery aiding the French north of Soissons, and Haig's troops, being farther east, attempting to reach the Chemin des Dames plateau above Troyon. But the Germans had had time to entrench themselves in the enormously strong positions afforded by the upper ground, and all the efforts of the Allies failed to dislodge them. They remained substantially unmoved until 1917, by which time they also held a sharp salient between Missy and Chavonne which had carried them across to the southern bank of the Aisne. By the beginning of 1915 the French held the valleys of Cuffies and Crouy, with the ridge between them and the western end of the high ground to the east. On the 12th-13th of January they were attacked by greatly superior numbers by Von Kluck, and, by the misfortune that floods on the Aisne had carried away their bridges higher up the stream, were cut off from their supplies, and had to retire south of the river, losing the bridge-head on the north bank. Soissons itself, however, was not captured, although the Germans remained within very easy shelling distance of it.