Up to the first months of 1916 there was only a small local railway that could be used between Revigny and Ste. Ménéhould by Triaucourt. Of the two big lines, one was cut by the Germans, and the other was exposed to the fire of their heavy artillery.
The violence of the German attacks in the Argonne prove that so long ago as September, 1914, they already dreamt of taking Verdun. Their aim was to force the French troops against Ste. Ménéhould and invest the fortress on three sides to bring about its fall.
These Argonne battles were invested with a particular interest and originality. They were in progress for a whole year, in a thick forest of almost impenetrable brushwood, split with numerous deep ravines and abrupt, slippery precipices. The humidity of the forest is excessive, the waters pouring down from high promontories. The soldiers who struggled here practically spent two winters in the water.
One can hardly imagine the courage and heroism necessary to bear the terrible hardships of fighting under such conditions. All the German soldiers made prisoners by the French describe life in the Argonne as a hideous nightmare.
From the end of September, 1914, the Germans delivered day and night attacks, generally lasting ten days. These attacks were made with forces of three or four battalions up to a division or a division and a half. In each attack the Germans aimed at a very limited objective--to capture the first or second line of trenches, to seize some particular fortified point. That object once attained, the Germans held on there, consolidated the occupied terrain, fortified their new positions and prepared for another push forward. It was thus by a process of nibbling the French trenches bit by bit that the Germans hoped to attain the Verdun-Ste. Ménéhould line.
The tactics employed in these combats were those suited to forest fighting; sapping operations methodically and minutely carried out to bring the German trenches as near as possible to the French; laying small mines to be exploded at a certain hour. Two or three hours before an attack the French positions were bombarded by trench mortars and especially heavy mine throwers.
At the short distances the effect would naturally be to cause considerable damage; trenches and their parapets were demolished, shelters, screening reserves, were torn open. At that moment when the attack is to be launched, the German artillery drops the "fire curtain" behind the enemy trenches to prevent reenforcements from arriving. Such are the tactics almost constantly employed by the Germans.