From the Trenches: Louvain to the Aisne, the First Record of an Eye-WitnessYoung, Geoffrey Winthrop
History
From the Trenches: Louvain to the Aisne, the First Record of an Eye-Witness
Young, Geoffrey Winthrop
World War, 1914-1918 -- Personal narratives
South of us, on the Meuse, the two northern armies, French and German,
are facing one another. They were in conflict all yesterday, and there
is no reason now to keep silence about the positions. The scouting
Uhlans, whom I touched at Eghezee and east of Wavre, have done their
work. The main body of the German Army Corps, supposed here to be the
4th, possibly with the 10th in support, appears to be moving definitely
against the French to the south of the fortress....
All day yesterday, in a sanguinary battle, they were trying to force
the passage of the Meuse north and south of Dinant. A squadron of
French Dragoons was surprised beyond the river and destroyed. There are
the wildest reports as to the losses of the Germans. An eye-witness of
the attempts upon the Anseremme Bridge described to me the Germans as
swept by the guns, as they advanced in their usual columns, and unable
to fall as they died, so close and massed were the ranks.
They were repulsed at the time, but they are returning in force. They
have began an attack upon the fort across the river at Davre. The
armies seem to be advancing north-west into the great angle of the
Meuse at Namur, coming into touch with the Belgians and French along
the semicircle from Huy to Givet.
In a lonely little village south of Namur to-day, where I shared the
deserted street with a few sad-faced women and half a dozen cripples
and old men, the landlord said, "This is the 15th: our feast day. I
usually have hundreds of tourists; to-day you are alone; we are waiting
for the great battle. To-night?--to-morrow? Who knows?" As he spoke,
and we waited, the thunderstorms kept rolling up the lime-stone gorges,
and we listened, each time thinking this was the beginning.
I slipped down from Namur this morning along the front of the French
lines on the Meuse. In all the villages deserted houses; walls pierced
for musketry; wire entanglements; and the picturesque windings of the
river scarred with trenches, and stirring with hardly-seen troops. It
was a curious change to leave our little friends, the dark Belgians,
and meet the moving patrols of French Dragoons, large, splendid-looking
fellows, bronzed and hardened since I saw them leave Paris but a
fortnight ago. But they cannot show more heart than our worn little
Belgian comrades, as they held back the overwhelming numbers in those
desperate engagements I watched yesterday, at Haelen and Diest.
Where the cliffs on the far side sink to the river the roadside hedges
on this bank were lined with smart, keen-looking infantrymen, by hedge
and tree and trench, leaning across walls or behind trees, with rifle
ready. Hardly an eye turned on us. For on the hills across and to the
south the Germans have been sighted. The attack may come anywhere, any
time.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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