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In sight of that Plateau d'Amance, which rises like a great knuckle above the surrounding country, a battle covering twenty times the extent of Gettysburg raged, and one could have looked over a battle-line as far as the eye may see from a steamer's mast.
South of the Champenoux Forest the French were compelled to retire; they were thrown back on the ridge west of the forest. On the 9th a new bombardment of Mont d'Amance, a struggle of extreme violence, took place on the ridge west of the forest of Champenoux, the French gaining ground. General Castelnau decided to take the direct offensive, the Germans giving signs of great fatigue.
The struggle attained to especial violence in the Champenoux Forest. On September 5, 1914, the enemy won Maixe and Remereville, which they lost again in the evening, but they were unable to dislodge the French from the ridge east of the forest of Champenoux. The Mont d'Amance was violently bombarded; a German brigade marched on Pont-
Some of these forests are only a few acres in extent; others are hundreds of acres. In the dark depths of one a frozen lake was seen glistening from our viewpoint on the Plateau d'Amance. "Indescribable that scene which we witnessed from here," said an officer who had been on the plateau throughout the fighting. "All the splendid majesty of war was set on a stage before you. It was intoxication.
Heavy German artillery of every caliber made an enormous expenditure of ammunition; on the Grand Mont d'Amance alone, one of the most important positions of the Grand Couronne of Nancy, more than 30,000 howitzer shells were fired in two days.
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.
On the 7th the Germans directed on Ste. Geneviève, north of the Grand Couronne, a very violent attack, which miscarried. Ste. Geneviève was lost for a time, but it was retaken on the 8th; more than 2,000 Germans lay dead on the ground. The same day the enemy threw themselves furiously on the east front, the Mont d'Amance, and La Neuvelotte.
Nature is certainly the greatest of all pacifists; she will not permit the signs of war to endure nor the mind to believe that war itself has existed and exists. From St. Geneviève we went to the Grand Mont d'Amance, the most famous point in all the Lorraine front, the southeast corner of the Grand Couronné, as St. Geneviève is the northern.
We heard only of von Kluck; nothing of this terrific struggle in Lorraine. From the Plateau d'Amance you may see how far the Germans came and what was their object. Between the fortresses of Epinal and of Toul lies the Trouée de Mirecourt the Gap of Mirecourt.
Geneviève was badly smashed by shell. So was the church in the village on the Plateau d'Amance, as are most churches in this district of Lorraine. Framed through a great gap in the wall of the church of Amance was an immense Christ on the cross without a single abrasion, and a pile of debris at its feet.
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