II
THE FORT APPEALS
“Roland says: ‘I will blow a blast on my horn, and Charles, who is passing through the gorges, will hear it. I avow to you that the Franks will turn back.’
“Roland has put the horn to his lips. He grasps it firmly and blows with might and main. The mountains are high, and the sound goes on in long-drawn-out echoes. Those echoes were heard at a distance of thirty leagues. It comes to the ears of Charles and all his men. The king says: ‘Our troops are fighting.’
“Count Roland, with great difficulty, great effort, and great sorrow, blows his horn. The bright blood gushes forth from his mouth. Near his forehead his temple is shattered. But the sound of his horn carries so far! Charles hears it as he passes through the gorges; Naimes hears it.... And the king says: ‘I hear Roland’s horn. He would not blow it if there were no fight going forward.’
“Count Roland’s mouth is bleeding. Near his forehead the temples are shattered. In pain and sorrow he blows the horn. Charles and his Frenchmen hear it. And Charles said: ‘That horn is long-winded.’ Duke Naimes answers: ‘It is Roland who is in pain.’”
Are the appeals of the horn that shook the Pyrenees more than ten centuries ago more moving than the silent appeals of Fort Vaux, which, above the enemy’s lines, communicates to the High Command the details of its death-agony and its resolve to hold out?
On the morning of June 3 a swift-flying pigeon reaches the dovecote.
“Messenger, what are your tidings? The fort, since it can send you, still lives. Tell us if it can endure a siege until the hour we had fixed for its deliverance.”
In vain does it look under its wing for the despatch that it should carry. Badly fastened, it has fallen off on the way. The bird has been let loose to no purpose. How many of its mates are there left in the fort?
On the 4th, about midday, the dovecote is visited by a poor wounded pigeon, which drags itself laboriously up to its resting-place. This one has not made a useless journey. Here is the message that it brings:
“We are still holding out, but are subjected to a very dangerous gas and smoke attack. It is urgent that we should be extricated; let us have immediate visual signalling communication by way of Souville, which does not answer our appeals. This is my last pigeon.”
The last pigeon! The telephone wires have long since been cut, and the signals are not working. The last pigeon: it is the final connecting link with the fort. The fort is now cut off from the outer world. No flapping of wings will ever again convey its messages. It will remain dumb if they do not contrive to restore the visual signalling connections. Nothing more will be known of its career. At the military dovecote a soldier has put the bird on his hand—the bird, which, like some scout, was wounded on active service.
The afternoon of June 4 passes, but the communications are not restored. It is impossible to obtain a signal from the fort. Probably there has been no means of registering the position of its sighting gear. On the 5th, however, at three o’clock in the morning, the headquarters of the division see two men arrive. They have issued from the fort—nothing more than that! They belong to the searchlight section. As there were no more pigeons and the signals were not working, they had to come to restore the communications. That is as plain as a pikestaff.
“So the fort is not encircled?”
“They are on top with a machine-gun, but there is no one at the southern exit.”
“That exit is stopped up.”
“You jump from a window into the ditch.”
Others have made the attempt, but have not succeeded in escaping. These two do not furnish many details. For the time being they are too much absorbed in other matters, for they are professionals. Will the fort hold out? Life is no laughing matter in the interior on account of liquid fire and thirst. Then, too, the place is overcrowded: more than 600 men. Yet the morale is good. Up there, they will try once more to interchange messages.
At half-past seven in the morning Fort Vaux is no longer isolated. It speaks and receives an answer....
“The mountains are lofty, massive, and dark, the valleys deep, the torrents swift. Behind and in front of the army the trumpets ring, and they all seem to reply to the horn....”
But when Charlemagne’s trumpets ring, Roland is already no more. Imagine him rising up in face of death to listen to those blasts!
Fort Vaux informs the High Command as to the position of the enemy. Its message rings with hope:
“The enemy is working at the western part of the fort to construct a mine-chamber and blow up the vault. Strike quickly with artillery.”
Ten minutes later it becomes insistent:
“Where are you?”
At eight o’clock, having had no reply, or having been unable to decipher it, it confesses the agony of its suspense:
“We do not hear your artillery. The enemy is plying us with gas and liquid fire attacks. Our situation is as bad as can be.”
At last, at nine o’clock, this signal is transmitted to it: “Don’t lose heart. We shall soon attack.”
Roland, as he was dying, heard Charlemagne’s trumpets. They are so distant, but their music is so sweet. He starts up, he listens, he motions to death to wait awhile. But the French must make haste! Already the shades are closing in around him and his speech grows thick.
All day the fort waits. When night falls, it shows signs of impatience. Will not this coming night be the last? will it not be wrapped in its lethal winding-sheet? The opening of the message that it sends is unintelligible, the rest already has the tone of a funeral oration—it speaks of its defenders in the past tense:
“... preceding day. It is essential that I should be delivered this evening and that a fresh supply of water should reach me at once; I am very near the end of my tether. In any case, the troops—officers, N.C.O.’s, and men alike—all did their duty up to the last.”
Is this not a final farewell? Is it not the death-rattle that precedes the end? And now, amid the formidable bombardment which from this side and that overwhelms the hill with iron and flame, one of our searchlight stations gets hold of these fragmentary signals:
“... 53 ... wounded ... aspires ... losses.... You will intervene before we are utterly exhausted. Long live France!”
Roland has raised himself up. He is calling. He stretches out his arms towards “sweet France.”
For the second time the echo of Charlemagne’s trumpets has been borne as far as the vale of Roncevaux.
For the second time the Souville headquarters reply to Fort Vaux: “Your message received. Don’t lose heart!”
Don’t lose heart! Will this wreck of a fort have any heart left after the three days it has just lived through? Not for a single moment has the storm ceased to shake the plateau. To the left, it wreaks its fury upon the entrenchment R¹, which has the audacity to resist; to the right, upon the Damloup battery, which holds the promontory and sweeps La Horgne bottom and the outlet from the village, and upon the immediate approaches, which are defended to the west by La Courtine and to the right by the Belfort and Montbéliard trenches. The enemy follows up the general attacks with local attacks, in order either to carry the whole position at a blow, or to make us waver at one point, against which he can then concentrate his onrush. He plunges into the abyss with three divisions, which he will even have to reinforce with a brigade of the Alpine corps. He lays siege to the fort from three sides—he is around it, above it, and inside it. Yet the fort doggedly refuses to give in. Cut off from the outer world for a whole day, it has no sense of being forsaken. Outside there, it feels certain, they are working on its behalf. Inside it sets up more and more barricades. Step by step it defends the stairways, and foot by foot the corridors. It faces heavy artillery, machine-guns, grenades, liquid fire, smoke-bombs, thirst, poisoning, intoxication, stench, putrefaction. It will go to the utmost limit of human endurance, the limit that is extended still further when one thinks that it has been reached, goes beyond all anticipation, and verges on the impossible. Among its cramped stones and under its echoing vaults the terrible sacrifice will be accomplished in full measure.
A second lieutenant of the 142nd, an officer in Chevassu’s battalion, fighting on the plateau outside the fort, described later to a comrade those days of horror: “Everywhere there was nothing but fire and dust, and in this pandemonium a few soldiers on the watch prevented the Boche hordes from passing. Their attacks were renewed every day, striking now at this point, now at that; never did we yield an inch of ground so long as there was a man to defend it. I will not speak to you of all that we went through. No water, no revictualling; those who went out to bring us supplies never got back. The only thing that we were not short of was munitions. We are terribly weakened, but happy to have done our duty, to have had our share in preventing the Boches from taking Verdun—Verdun, which their Emperor promised to them, and which they will never gain.... They would be compelled to pass over our bodies and over the corpses of all their comrades whom we have slain.... They attacked us from three sides at once, but they never got us in their claws....”
During the day of June 3 the enemy seeks to turn to account the capture of Damloup and make his way round the fort to the east. Details of the 142nd and 53rd Regiments hold him in check, and, assuming the offensive, even force him to draw back.
Whether for army, army corps, division, or brigade, the High Command supports the conflict that stretches from Fumin Wood to La Gayette bottom, pours fresh troops into the firing line, and prepares counter-attacks. There is a counter-attack on Damloup from the morning of June 2; at any rate this rescues the battery. There is a counter-attack on the fort from the evening of the 2nd, made by a battalion of the 53rd Regiment, which has to run the gauntlet of murderous curtain fires and can only reinforce the troops of the sector. There is a counter-attack on June 3 upon our left, to recapture the line of the entrenchments and come to the aid of R¹, which still holds out. And the balloon observers never cease from signalling the arrival of enemy columns, which are coming up the slopes to swell the number of the assailants.
Connection with the fort must be established, that is beyond all question. Comrades are there, waiting for the hour of their deliverance to strike: “In the fort we have French comrades,” the army telephones; “they must be released from their present plight. First and foremost, we must get into touch with them. This is the duty of all alike—a sacred duty.” General Tatin, who is in command of the sector, will personally direct the operation.
Yet the enemy does not leave off attacking, and he floods his objective with an endless deluge of projectiles. On the 4th, at two o’clock in the morning, an attack upon the fort is started from the north-east and the south-west. It begins by making progress, then it is checked by the machine-guns. At daybreak an aeroplane flies above the fort and comes down so low that it casts a shadow over all this chaos. Will the daring bird let itself be wounded, like the last pigeon? It darts through the midst of shells and bullets like a salamander in the fire, and behold, it is now rising again and going away! It has fulfilled its mission: on the superstructure of the fort it has registered the position of the machine-guns. A few minutes later our 75’s and our 155’s crush to pulp everything that the Germans had installed on the upper part of the earthwork. At ten o’clock in the morning, the weather being clear, our airmen report that the fort trenches have been entirely razed and that not a man is left upon the top of the fort.
On the following night the enemy once more begins to construct his works and his machine-gun shelters upon the superstructure. In this way he blocks up the southern exit. He tries to make it impossible to sally forth or to communicate with the outer world. Reconnoitring parties—as soon as they were suggested, the number of volunteers was so large that a selection had to be made—have tried to find a way of getting into the fort. None of them was successful. To compensate for this, some have managed to go out. Two signallers, we know already, crossed the lines on the early evening of June 4. Some hours later, during the night, Cadet Buffet, two N.C.O.’s, and three men of the 7th Company of the 142nd leave the fort in their turn. The problem is less baffling for those going out than for those coming in. The former merely have to elude the Boche machine-guns, whereas the latter have to elude ours as well. The fort, in order not to be invested, must keep the southern ditch and the approaches. Every shadow that draws near is suspect. The difficult thing is to convince the sentries that one is a friend.
“Don’t lose courage, we shall soon attack,” was the signal received, and the High Command speeds up the preparations for a fresh attack with more numerous effectives. It cannot be set going until June 6 at two o’clock in the morning.
We must now retrace our steps in order to know what has been going on in the interior of the fort.
From the morning of June 2 onwards the fort is swarming with Boches as the mane of a lion swarms with parasites. The Boche is in front, on the flanks, on top, and even inside, for he has rushed through the two gaps in the transverse gallery and is trying to bore his way through into the heart of the place. Major Raynal has introduced some order and system into the garrison, whose numbers have been unduly enlarged by the wounded and the overflow from neighbouring details. It ought not to consist of more than the 6th Company of the 142nd, the machine-gun company, and the fort engineers. The 7th and 8th Companies of the 142nd, which defended the right-hand transverse passages, have reinforced it with more than a hundred rifles; the 7th Company of the 101st, which defended the left-hand transverse passages, has brought some fifty. A machine-gun company of the 53rd has been left behind. With the wounded, this makes a total of over six hundred men. Six hundred soldiers who have to be supplied with water, when the cistern has run dry! Six hundred soldiers, among them wounded men, wasted with fever, who beg for a drop to drink! Nevertheless the garrison is divided up into reliefs, look-out men and rest units, and the distribution of boxes of tinned food, biscuits, chocolate, and even brandy is carried out with regularity. The water ration, which on May 31 was two pints, is reduced on June 2 to a pint and three-quarters. It will be cut down to a pint, then to barely half a pint—and under what conditions! From June 4 the commandant will be forced to take a decided step.
As we have seen, the enemy is at the transverse galleries on the morning of June 2. In spite of his losses, he manages to press the defenders hard, and they beat a retreat. The revolving gun of the double transverse gallery has been put out of action by a shell. The machine-gun that guards the entrance has been smashed by a bomb. The defence is driven back into the interior. A barricade is at once set up under the breach, but from the outside the Germans command it and overpower it with grenades. It has to be withdrawn to the foot of the stairway that leads up to the observing station. Another one is constructed at the top of the stairway. This latter one will hold out until the 4th. The same manœuvre takes place at the single transverse gallery at the north-eastern angle. The barricades keep the enemy back in front of the grating of the corridor, facing the lavatories, which can still be used.
“In the semi-darkness of the fort,” writes a survivor of the 142nd, “the struggle goes on. The enemy tried to exhaust us by depriving us of sleep and condemning us to thirst. The atmosphere was heavy and tainted. At every moment some part of the barricades blew up, and the grenade duel was resumed. We would not give in. But the air grew hot with all these explosives; the smoke and the stench made it almost impossible to breathe, yet the fighting went on all the time. We had installed machine-guns, which blocked up the gangways and did splendid work. It was then that the Germans, having contrived to blow up a barricade, attacked us with jets of flame and liquid fire. The heat, and the fact that we were taken unawares, caused us to waver for a moment. But Lieutenant Bazy, who was there with his machine-gun, darted forward, and so quick was he, that before we had recovered from our amazement he was standing upright in the middle of the gangways and fighting the Germans single-handed with bombs. The flames came up to his shoes, his left arm was bandaged, being already wounded, but little did he care. As he could not speak, on account of that black acrid smoke, he encouraged us by his example. Accordingly we shook off our stupor and went forward in rotation to stand by his side. At last the flame-throwers were quenched. He had succeeded in checking the attack and was beginning to go up again on to the barricade, when the Boches started sending us petards, which knocked us all down with the sandbags on top of us. I was quite convinced that my back was broken, and I only just had enough strength left to put my mask on, as I detected the whiff of poison gas. A private extricated me and carried me to the infirmary while the struggle recommenced. The Germans discharged gases whose heavy fumes hung about the gangways. Despite all their devilish contrivances, their flame-jets, their gases, and their petards, they made no advance. It was magnificent. They shouted to us in French: ‘Surrender, or you will all be killed,’ and we answered by slinging bombs full at their faces.”
“It was magnificent!” How comical is that outcry, in the thick of the fray!
It was on June 4, about midday, that this liquid fire attack took place. The Germans made it through the breach in the western passage. The fort was filled with a “black and acrid” smoke. In order to breathe, the garrison had to remove the armour-plating from the barrack windows. The flames came up to the corridor leading into the rooms. Some soldiers even jumped into the ditch in order to recover their breath. The machine-guns installed on the fort had been destroyed in the morning by our artillery. The curtain fire cut off the exits a little farther south. Without disorder, the troops retired into the interior, but the windows had to be closed again. The enemy swung up sacks of bombs with delay-action fuses, which he sent through the openings, and tried to blow up the armour-platings.
Nevertheless, he made progress in the north-eastern single transverse gallery. We had to retire some yards in the corridor, but not beyond the lavatories. The sick and the wounded had to be looked after on the spot. The stretcher-bearers took advantage of the destruction of the enemy machine-guns installed on the fort, and were thus able to carry corpses away in the western ditch and to cleanse the infirmary of all its filth. From the ensuing night onwards this task was beyond their powers. The dead had to remain with the living. An unspeakable horror stalked through these dim vaults, where, in a thick, pestilent atmosphere, a sleepless, nerve-racked, thirst-maddened garrison, crowded into a narrow space, refused to abandon the struggle.
It needed but one man to turn aside the flame attack: Lieutenant Bazy, straight and upright like a god, amid the smoke, in the middle of the corridor, his left arm in a sling, his right arm hurling bombs, barring the way to the foe. It needed but the commandant, a few officers and N.C.O.’s, a handful of picked men, to ensure, amid all these sufferings, the maintenance of a single idea, a single aim: to hold out.
The fort is cut off from the rest of the world, its last pigeon was sent off on the previous day, and its signals have not been transmitted. But when night has fallen, two signallers leap into the ditch: they are going to restore the communications.
Next day the fort’s appeal is heard.