Miniatures of French history

It was a little after five in the afternoon of Wednesday, 9th September, when a general officer with the Ninth French Army rode with one companion up the road from Sezanne. He had clearly in his mind on a landscape map the memory of three disastrous days just past. He saw the line upon that map like a small, vivid picture; he saw it as it was also in reality—the crushing of his centre back and back, day after succeeding day, through the Sunday, the Monday, the Tuesday, and the early hours of this the Wednesday, in which the crisis had come: the crisis of the Marne.

To the north the ceaseless noise of the guns which had filled those four days still rolled, and as he heard it he considered the 42nd Division. It had just arrived behind the gap opening between the 11th and the 9th Corps. To his right, and also to the northward, but behind the line of the battle, a great storm-cloud was growing to cover the sky, and beneath it, where it darkened the last brilliance of that intensely hot day, the sharp edge of the Champagne hills, the steep down near the marshes of St. Gond, and the strangely isolated height of the Mont Aimé stood out unnaturally clear, the latter with the western light of the declining sun full on it against the ominous livid purple of the thunder-cloud. At its base the Prussian Guard had stretched out to the limit of their numbers; they were already too far extended; they were still advancing. Behind again to the right (he did not know in what confusion, but the confusion had come) bunched the Saxons.

That vast modern battle was not one in which, as in those of our fathers’ time, the decisive moment was grasped by the eye, and the decisive manœuvre conducted upon a field actually seen by the man deciding it. In that vast modern battle the critical moment was the end of calculation infinitely complex and stretching back for days; yet there was, in this moment of the late afternoon, on that Wednesday, essentially the same process maturing in a length of days which had with the great Napoleon matured in an hour; and what was about to be done was essentially the same as what Marlborough had done at Blenheim, when he drew that heavy phalanx of white-coated German cavalry from the right, under the heights, and launched it at the French left centre and decided Blenheim; for the enemy line, though still advancing, was stretched to its utmost, was breaking: the gap in the German line had been perceived, and proved fatal to the Germans.

The general officer returned from his ride a little after six o’clock. He sat in the room of a private house, which during the last twenty-four hours had been the conning tower of the fight. He had the great map before him, scored with rough chalk. He saw through the tall windows before him the lowering sky. He received minute by minute the telephone messages, and marked their news in sharp pencil jabs upon the sheet. The dull noise to the north was the same; the reports pouring in from the front showed little change, but that little change was as significant as the slight movement after slack water in a harbour, when the tide begins to turn.

It was still full daylight; the storm had broken on those northern hills; there were lightning flashes against the dead cloud, and the noise of distant thunder mingled with the ceaseless thudding of the guns. The general ceased his labour and could lean back in his chair, resting his eyes from the map, and make certain that the thing was accomplished. An order had been given upon the enemy’s side, and it was an order for retreat....

The evening fell, the rain drove through darkness, the thunder lessened, grumbled and withdrew. None slept. All followed the more distant, the withdrawing signal of the artillery. The reserve troops came marching through, hurrying to the north. The tide had indeed turned.

The general officer was mounted again with his few companions and riding north with the rest through the storm. Before midnight a great glare was seen on the horizon, blurred with rain. He informed himself what it was, and heard it was the station of La Fère Champenoise burning: the enemy had abandoned it three hours before. And still they went northwards, and still the far noise of the guns retired before them, miles away.

There is a house in Luxembourg built for a large school and standing upon the public square opposite the post office. Here was housed, in that same September of 1914, the Central Command of the German armies. Hence proceeded the central determining orders which moulded the battle reaching along one hundred and fifty miles of front, two hundred miles away.

The little hill-town on its splendid gorge was quiet enough. The German officers came and went through the streets, courteous, not ill-liked, among a people whom they had always regarded as one of their own; no cruelties had marked this violation of what they thought to be no more than a technical neutrality. The coinage, the customs, the railways had been German for a lifetime; German speech was all about them, and the traditions they knew. The afternoon was fair and warm in Luxembourg, high though the town stands. Here was all the odd, ironic air of peace, though here was the heart of the attack and of the enormous war.

Into that great empty building, now filled with its busy groups of writing and telephoning men, its big, bare deal tables with their masses of maps pinned down, its walls covered with further maps, lines in blue and red chalk drawn upon them and numbers hastily inscribed, came for the first time, after so many days of triumphant advance, the note of change. There was half an hour of too great calm, during which decision wrestled against decision and a proud refusal to accept inevitable things; but the moment came; it was the reflex of that same moment, a little after five o’clock, when the thunderstorm had broken far away beyond the reedy belts of the Marne River. An order had been given at the front: the man upon whose responsibility it went—a man already broken with illness—rose and went out uncertainly, as though he were far older than his age, leaning upon the plain iron rail of the school staircase as he painfully descended the steps; then slowly, with bent head, wandered into the neglected court and garden.

Between him and the public square there was but a low wall supporting high, open rails far apart. He came in his full uniform, this general officer, who had accepted and ordered the retirement. He was a nobleman, superior in military talent to his fellows, even amid that great organization, which was the best designed for war in Europe. He leaned against the railings a moment with his left hand, his whole body was bowed, and then he sat him down, careless of dignity, careless of prestige. He sat down publicly on the low stone wall that supported the railings, his head bending more and more forward, and staring on the ground. He bore a name with very different memories of cold triumph. It was Moltke.

A group of boys playing in the square ceased from play to gaze at the old boy, timidly approached the railings, and stared at that poor, broken figure. They could know nothing of the traditions of the Prussian army, nor of how strange a sight they saw, but they felt its enormity. He, for his part, had forgotten what was around him—the place, the children; he stared at the ground, remembering as in a vivid dream his urgent appeal to his emperor, his agony at defeat, his intelligence too great for his heart, and the knell still ringing there: “The campaign has failed.... The campaign has failed.”

THE END