There is the very point of the war that makes a neutral take sides. If the Belgians had not received bread from the outside world, then Germany would either have had to spare enough to keep them from starving or faced the desperation of a people who fight for food with such weapons as they had. This must have meant a holocaust of reprisals that would have made the orgy of Louvain comparatively unimportant. However much the Germans hampered the Commission with red tape and worse than red tape through the activities of German residents in Belgium, Germany did not want the Commission to withdraw. It was helping her to economise her food supplies. And England answered a human appeal at the cost of hard and fast military policy. She was still true to the ideals which have set their stamp on half the world.
Paris resuming normality--Regular train service--Nancy under fire-- By automobile to the front--Panorama of the contested lines-- View of the German wedge--French veterans--Ancient Lorraine-- A vision of battle--Résumé of the struggle--The first German advance--“The face of the earth sown with shells”--The Kaiser silenced--The German Lorraine campaign lost--Visit to a French heavy battery--Underground quarters--A policed army--Military simplicity.
Only a winding black streak, that four hundred and fifty miles of trenches on a flat map. It is difficult to visualise the whole as you see it in your morning paper, or to realise the labour it represents in its course through the mire and over mountain slopes, through villages and thick forests and across open fields.
Every mile of it was located by the struggle of guns and rifles and men coming to a stalemate of effort, when both dug into the earth and neither could budge the other. It is a line of countless battles and broken hopes; of as brave charges as men ever made; a symbol of skill and dogged patience and eternal vigilance of striving foe against striving foe.
From the first, the sector from Rheims to Flanders was most familiar to the public. The world still thinks of the battle of the Marne as an affair at the door of Paris, though the heaviest fighting was from Vitry le François eastward and the fate of Paris was no less decided on the fields of Lorraine than on the fields of Champagne. The storming of Rheims cathedral became the theme of thousands of words of print to one word for the defence of the Plateau d’Amance or the struggle around Lunéville. Our knowledge of the war is from glimpses through the curtain of military secrecy which was drawn tight over Lorraine and the Vosges, shrouded in mountain mists. This is about Lorraine in winter, when the war was six months old.