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Four days later, September 24, the real attack was made fifteen miles south of Troyon, on the village of St. Mihiel. The object of Von Strantz was to break through the Verdun-Toul line, to inclose Sarrail from the south and at Revigny link arms with the Crown Prince. They then would have had the army of Sarrail surrounded.
From the time we left Revigny until we had passed into the Champagne country, upon the return journey from Verdun, we no longer saw a green tree or a blade of green grass; we were now indeed upon the "White Road which leads into Verdun." Owing to an exceptionally trying and dry summer the roads are thick with white dust.
Somehow they affected him more than had the fresher results of combat which he had seen even in the quiet sector he had left. Silently he sped along the thirty-mile stretch from Revigny to Châlons, where a little group of French children pressed about him when he paused for gasoline. "Yankee!" they called, chattering at him and meddling with his machine.
The succeeding morning the Crown Prince of Prussia left Revigny and the great maneuver was initiated, that gigantic movement by the flank, surrounding and enmeshing us by a series of forced marches conducted in the most admirable order through Champagne and the Ardennes.
But Thatchy did not mind that kind of talk. West of Revigny, he crossed the old trench line, and came into the area which the Blond Beast had crossed and devastated in the first year of the war. Planks lay across the empty trenches and as he rode over first the French and then the enemy ditches, he looked down and could see in the moonlight some of the ghastly trophies of war.
A bombarding squadron of Zeppelins which the Germans sent out along the Verdun front to cut railway communications fared badly. The French antiaircraft guns brought down a number of Fokkers and a Zeppelin in flames at Revigny, but the raiders succeeded in cutting the Ste. Ménéhould line, leaving only a narrow-gauge road to supply Verdun.
Up to the first months of 1916 there was only a small local railway that could be used between Revigny and Ste. Ménéhould by Triaucourt. Of the two big lines, one was cut by the Germans, and the other was exposed to the fire of their heavy artillery. The violence of the German attacks in the Argonne prove that so long ago as September, 1914, they already dreamt of taking Verdun.
Later he again visited the village, and the women told him that beyond obliging them to clean the soldiers' clothes thoroughly, the German officer had inflicted no other punishment upon them. A certain number of inhabitants are still living in the village of Revigny.
The first destruction of Zeppelins that by Lieutenant Warneford, and the bringing down of LZ77 at Revigny, did not produce much disappointment. The war was going well in other directions.
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