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Our 1st Corps advanced to Thiaucourt, while our 4th Corps curved back to the southwest through Nonsard. The 2d Colonial French Corps made the slight advance required of it on very difficult ground, and the 5th Corps took its three ridges and repulsed a counterattack.
When the Germans, therefore, retired to the trenches after the battles of September and October, 1914, they took to the ground on the heights of the Bois-le-Prêtre, a terrain far enough ahead of Thiaucourt and Metz to preserve these centers from the danger of being shelled.
"I am going to show him the Quart-en-Réserve first." We crept up on the edge of the ridge and looked over. An open, level field some three hundred yards wide swept from the Thiaucourt road to the edges of the Bois-le-Prêtre; across this field ran in the most confused manner a strange pattern of brown lines that disappeared among the stumps and poles of the haggard wood to the east.
Overcoming the enemy resistance, they romped through to the Rupt de Mad, a small river, crossed it on stone bridges, occupied Thiaucourt, the first day's objective, scaled the heights just beyond it, pushed on to a line running from the Zammes-Joulney Ridges to the Binvaux Forest, and there rested, with the second day's objectives occupied by 2.50 o'clock of the first day.
At the corner stood a government signpost of iron slightly bent back, bearing in gray-white letters on its clay-blue plaque the legend Thiaucourt, 12 kilomètres Metz, 25 kilomètres.
This brought the soldiers of the republic to within about four miles of Thiaucourt, which, with the control of Les Eparges, threatened St. Mihiel. The French heavy artillery shelled the southern front of the trenches at Metz on May 1, 1915. The great desire to take Alsace and Lorraine, however, was set aside early in the month.
They came, young and old, slum-dweller and country schoolmaster, rich young noble and Corsican peasant, to the storming of the wood, upheld by one vision, the unbroken, grassy slope that stretched from behind the German lines to the town of Thiaucourt.
This pleasant little moorland town, locally famous for its wine, is connected with Metz by two single-track railroad lines, one coming via Conflans, and the other by Arnaville on the Moselle. Thus the domination of Thiaucourt, or the valley of the Rupt de Mad, by French artillery would break the railroad communications between the troops keeping the salient and their base of supplies, Metz.
The Crown Prince of Bavaria commanded in the first section from Alsace to midway between Nancy and Verdun; the Crown Prince of Prussia directed the Verdun section reaching from west of Thiaucourt to Montfaucon; the Duke of Württemberg to Massiges; General von Hausen thence to Bery-au-Bac; General von Bülow to a point directly north of Soissons; General von Kluck in a northwesterly direction to a point west of Noyon and onward to the north and northeast to Douai, which is about fifteen miles northeast of Arras, from which point north the campaign has been described.
A rapid march brought reserve regiments of a division of the 5th Corps into Vigneulles in the early morning, where it linked up with patrols of our 4th Corps, closing the salient and forming a new line west of Thiaucourt to Vigneulles and beyond Fresnes-en-Woevre.
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