Word: briey
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...this was not the explanation that emerged from headquarters; instead it was stated that if Briey were bombarded, the Germans, in reprisal, would turn their guns on Dombasle in Meurthe-etMoselle, where equally large-scale mining operations were supplying the French with much of their own raw material for ordnance and ammunition. So long as the French left Briey alone the Germans would let Dombasle alone; what hothead was there who would want to upset the apple cart under these circumstances? Of course, it the French and Germans had leveled the other's smelters, the war would have ended sooner...
...question at all. In corroboration there is spread upon the records the testimony of Deputy Pierre Etienne Flandin (scarcely a flaming Bolshevist, for he was later Finance Minister under Tardieu) to the effect that he, an artillery of the French Second Army had been expressly forbidden to bombard Briey when the chance existed, and when a ten-mile penetration of the sector would have come close to spelling German ruin. And the statement of his colleague, Deputy Barthe, in the Chamber on January 24, 1919, lost little of its significance in the long, loud, vicious debates and investigations which followed...
Before 1914 the great iron mines and smelters in the Briey basin provided 70 per cent of the ore used by France. The German advance wrested them from the political control of France--and quite naturally the German artillery chiefs saw to it that the mines were so protected from shell fire that they could be taken over intact. Thenceforth the mines of the Briey basin were operated for the benefit of Germany--in association with other mines in Lorraine which had been in German hands since 1871 they supplied Germany with some three quarters of the ore she consumed...
...some two years later, the Briey basin came once again within the potential grasp of the French. Throughout the second battle of Verdun. Briey was within range of the operations of the French Second Army. The Briey mines and smelters were turning out tons of raw materials per day which were being continuously turned into weapons of death against French troops, and the naive civilian would therefore suppose that the French Second Army would new into loose its bombing planes and blast out of existence a principal source of enemy supply...
...naive civilian would he quite wrong. Bombs did not burst at Briey: He where near Briey did more than a few shells from either side fall during the entire course of the war. There were even line officers who shared civilian naivete enough to question Fernch G. H. Q. on the immunity of Briey. A reasonable explanation could have been that the French were withholding, fire from Briey because they, in turn, hoped to recapture the basin and turn its products back to France...