September 26th
Gouraud remained passive in Champagne. Then on September 26th, the day
before the British attack at Cambrai, he moved, with the First
American Army on his right, against the strong German positions to the
east of Rheims, which since the beginning of the war had barred the
French way. In a battle of sixteen days, the French captured the whole
of the fortified zone on this portion of the front, took 21,000
prisoners, 600 cannon and 3,500 machine guns. At the very same moment
Sir Douglas Haig was driving through the Hindenburg line, and up to
the west bank of the Selle, taking 48,000 prisoners and 600 guns;
while the Americans were pushing through the difficult forest country
of the Argonne, and along both sides of the Meuse.

The German strength was indeed weakening fast. Between July 16th and
the Armistice, the British took 188,700 prisoners, the French 137,000,
and the Americans 43,000.

CHAPTER V

ALSACE-LORRAINE

THE GLORY OF VERDUN

Before we left Strasbourg on our way to the "front de Champagne,"
armed with General Gouraud's maps and directions, an hour or two of
most interesting conversation threw great light for me on that other
"field of victory"--Alsace-Lorraine.

We brought an introduction to Dr. Pierre Bucher, a gentleman in whom
Alsatian patriotism, both before the war and since the Armistice, has
found one of its most effective and eloquent representatives. A man of
a singularly winning and magnetic presence,--with dark, melancholy
eyes, and the look of one in whom the flame of life has burnt in the
past with a bitter intensity, fanned by winds of revolt and suffering.
Before the war Dr. Bucher was a well-known and popular doctor in
Strasbourg, recognised by Alsatian and German alike as a champion of
the French spirit and French traditions in the lost provinces. He
belonged to that _jeunesse_ of the nineties, which, in the absence of
any reasonable grounds for expecting a reversal of the events of 1871,
came to the conclusion that autonomous liberties would be at any rate
preferable to the naked repression, at the hands of Bismarck and
Manteuffel, of the eighties and early nineties. The young men of his
date decided that the whole government of the province could not any
longer be left to the German bureaucrat, and a certain small number of
them entered the German administration, which was imposed on the
province after 1871 and had been boycotted thence-forward up to nearly
th