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We heard that we were to march into Germany in the wake of the evacuating army and occupy one of the bridge-heads. All this came through in vague and unconfirmed form, but in a few days we were hauled back out of the line to a desolate mass of ruins which had once been the village of Bantheville.
Now the Austrians, who look down on their lost city from the heights to the eastward, refrain from destroying it, as they easily could do, because they cling to the hope that they may get it back again. So, though the bridge-heads are shelled constantly, and though considerable damage has been inflicted on the suburbs, no serious harm has been done to the city itself.
There is a brooding and threatening presence beyond the Rhine. And among the soldiers going and coming between the Rhine bridge-heads and Paris, there is a corresponding and anxious sense of the fierce vitality of Germany, and of the absence of any real change of heart among her people.
Out to the front the ping! ping! of the rifles has become rapid and incessant, and by broad daylight all the river bank and the walls of the buildings that command a view of it are packed with gray riflemen ready for work the instant those bridge-heads loom into view.
Their steep slopes were slashed with Austrian trenches and abristle with guns which commanded the roads leading to the river, the bridge-heads, and the town. To take Gorizia until these positions had been captured was obviously out of the question. Here, as elsewhere, Austria held the upper ground.
The raid had not entirely fulfilled its object, but much good work had been done, and it had materially assisted Sherif Faisal with his Hejaz troops in his operations further south against Maan. Our force returning from Eastern Palestine did not abandon the hardly-won eastern bank of the Jordan. Bridge-heads were retained.
France gave up her demand for a separate Rhineland, but secured occupation of the Left Bank, including the bridge-heads, for a period of fifteen years as a guarantee of the execution of the treaty.
Their promised assistance did not materialize, and the whole force was brought back to the crossings of the Jordan. Thenceforth, until the sweep of the following September the Jordan river and bridge-heads remained our front line. In the last chapter we saw how, after the capture of Jerusalem, the 20th Corps proceeded to improve the line on the right.
The first piece of information, far too belated, was the news that Namur had fallen, and that the enemy had been in possession of the bridge-heads over the Sambre and the Meuse since the preceding day, Saturday.
It was difficult to account for such a policy, which meant, not only the relinquishment of two bridge-heads of some importance and numerous farms and orchards which had been carried at expense and since garrisoned to good purpose, but the adoption instead of a position in rear, which was condemned with every tactical disadvantage and in which it would be impossible to remain once the enemy had secured possession of the ground we were now ordered to give up.
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