Evening Republican, Volume 21, Number 4, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 6 January 1917 — FIGHTING POWER OF THE FRENCH GROWS STEADILY [ARTICLE]

FIGHTING POWER OF THE FRENCH GROWS STEADILY

Stronger in Artillery; in r.'n and in Morale Than Ever Before. PREPARED TO FIGHT IT OUT Were Able in Four Hours at Verdun to Regain Nearly AH That It Cost the Germans Five Months and Appalling Loss of Life to Win.

By ARNO DOSCH-FLEUROT.

Correspondent of Jhe New York World.) Paris.—ln four hours a portion of the French mobile army under General Nivgllev has regained nearly all the ground won by the crown prince before Verdun during five months of continuous attack. It Is a great French victory—such a victory as the Germans at this stage of the war would make the occasion of a celebration, but here in France it has been received almost without demonstration. More remarkable even than the victory is the way it has been accepted by the people of France. It has given a feeling of satisfaction and reassur- • ance, to be sure, and it is very timely, as France has been having an hour of nervousness over the fate of her new ally, Roumania; but, far from being any shouting about it, there has been simply the ordinary interest in how It was accomplished. - Nothing could express more plainly how the French feel about themselves and about the war. It reveals an unconscious attitude Of success that characterizes all -French thought at this stage of the war. It is a new phase in the absorbing question of French morale. There has certainly been no other time during the war when so signal a victory would hav.e been accepted so calmly. To me, living herein France and watching the stateof feeling more closely than anything else, it is entirely unexpected. Went Off Like Clock Work. The whole story of tills attack is, In fact, extraordinary. The time of it was known to a day two weeks in advanced The preparations were made with hardly any attempt at secrecy. Visiting correspondents were told by the commanding generals just what Was going .tcuhappen. Here in Paris it has been the talk of the boulevards. The Germans were so well Informed of details that they were able to bring up re-enforcements against the point whenever attacks took place, and it is to be presumed they did their best to check It. But ,the advance went off like Clockwork as scheduled. — — It will be recalled that the Germans a few months ago were able to do that kind of thing pretty much where they pleased. Now they are able to do it only against green troops such as Roumania brought into the war. To go

no further back in the history of the war, the Verdun advances were themselves heralded from time to time, and except for the half-dozen announcements made from Berlin that Verdun Itself was about to fall, they usually made good off their prophecies.’ They were able to do so because they knew wriat their preparations were and that the French had nothing to withstand them.

“T’other Way Round” Now. Now it is cutting the otrier way. The French had such preparations thaf they knew 1 the Germans could not stand against them. And no one wants to be deceived by the Berlin claim that the French have retaken the ground at frightful cost. It mity have cost orie-tenth what it cost the Germans to take it, not more. At this stage of the war human cost can be ? figured accurately on the basis of shellfire and the number of hours the at-

tacking urmy ‘fought tn the open. Ground taken tn a fext hours is bound to cost much less than ground captured after months of ceaseless attack. The copt in lives has not entered into the discussion here at all. though the question of is the catchword of the day. and there is a reason for it. Everyone fn France knows now that French troops are not ordered out of the trenches until the opposing German trenches have bepn wiped out by shell tire. When the Germays cry “This is not war, it is slaughter,” trie French pgypie simply rub their palms in ' self-congratulation. They know they have trie job of driving the Germans out of France a jump at a time, and if the Germans will jump back ahead of their shell tire tliey are content. They have reached the’cheerful state of mind where they are willing to go on making shells in larger and larger numbers for an Indefinite period.

Verdun Front Secure. Things may go ahead for a while on other fronts, but there is hardly a Frenchman living who thinks anything disastrous can happen again on this front. lam with them in that belief, and so is everybody who knows anything about the present strength of the French army in men and shells.' My confidence in the situaflon, gathered from contact, with the French people, is such that J am willing to write this and confide it to the slowgoing mails when the French advance at Verdun is hardly more than under way, and I have no fear anything will happen meanwhile to contradict it

There is a common-sense reason for this, too. For the first time there is an adequate supply of big new modern artillery before Verdun. The Germans nearly took Verdun because France did not have a sufficient number of heavy fieidpieces to protect it. It was saved by the small .75-millimeter guns, the same guns that turned, the Germans on the Marne, and the Germans were stopped only when the French succeeded in bringing up fortress guns from the forts on the Italian frontier; the French army was that badly off in artillery. There was new artillery enough for the Somme, but not for both the Somme and Verdun, so they advanced with the new on the Somme and held the Germans at Verdun with the old. Now the French have enough new heavy artillery for both- the Somme and Verdun, so they are advancing at both spots. Artillery the Big Factor. It takes time to make artillery, nut it takes longer yet to remove fixed ideas, and even the brilliant men who have turned France's military fortunes could not foresee what the war would be like at this stage and did not provide against the present necessity for heavy fieldpieces. It was Verdun that stirred things up. Verdun stands for many things, but in close-in- military and political circles in France it means the point where France began to go in for heavy artillery on a big scale. There are several different factions in France just now claiming the credit for France’s growing artillery superiority, and without casting any discredit on the high command of the army it is generally conceded that the French parliament had an important hand in it. It is balm, too, to the feelings of French parliamentarians, for they were certainly snubbed at the beginning of the war, and they can pjnt out now with perfect propriety, especially the senators, that they ordered and voted the funds for heavy artillery when many military men in high position were inclined to think the thing was being overdone. The credit for the hew Verdun at least that part not due to the soldiers and the brilliant French artillerymen —will have to go to a senatorial committee that got busy months ago, when it was not very much encouraged, and made the new supply of big guns possible. This whole matter is not talked about much here; it is simply accepted. One no longer hears scornful re,marks frpm military men about “meddling politicians.” And the members of parliament arid all the civil side of the government they represent are wearing their regained prestige, rather modestly. But anyone who ever feared a military dictatorship in France can now definitely put that fearjislde. .? “Rained Crape on France.”

At this time last year the more nervous Parisians were just beginning to believe that the Germans would never get to Paris. That had, in fact, been obvious since the battle of the Marne. Nevertheless, they had more and the army itself had more confidence than the facts justified. The Germans could not break through, perhaps, but they showed at, Verdun that they could make it very expensive for France to 'Verduh.asawvhole.tfielossandregalnlug of its outer circle of forts, has cost the French nowhere hear so much as it has cost the Germans; but there is .not a French village, hardly a French family, where mourning is not worn for someone lost at Verdun. Those families that escaped owe it to unusual luck. On the whole, Verdun has been a very bloody business —much worse than the Somme. The best proof of this is the comparatively few deaths on the Somme among one’s personal acquaintances and connections. Verdun rained crape on France. The Somme has - been no such slaughter house—for the French. But it was., there the Germans first began harping on the phrase. “This is slaughter.” Jt was slaughter, because the French for the first time opposed them with as much artillery as they had, and French artillerymen are superior to any others. At the battle of the Marne itself, before the artillerymen had had all the experience the last two years