The war again turned Champagne into a battlefield, and again many of its people suffered physical and financial hardship. The war threatened the continued existence of champagne by endangering not only its sources but also its markets. On 3 September , one month after the beginning of hostilities, the German army entered Rheims. On the 4 September it was in Epernay, moving towards Paris. The mayor of Epernay was Maurice Pol-Roger. During the night of the 4 September, from his headquarters in Bar-sur-Aube, General Joffre, the commander in chief of the French army, gave his famous order : The hour has come to advance whatever the cost and to die where we stand rather than retreat.
The victorious counter-offensive of the battle of the Marne saved Epernay on the 11 September and Rheims on the 13th. It was then that the war in the trenches began, of which the appalling monotony was interrupted, in Champagne, by two costly French offensives, the first in September , to the east of Rheims, and the second in the spring of , which seized from the enemy the dominant positions of the Chemin des Dames and the Monts de Champagne. On the 27 May it was the Germans who took the offensive.
The Rheims area was evacuated by the Germans at the end of September and Champagne was liberated at the beginning of October, liberated but ravaged. During the three and a half years of trench warfare the German lines had camped 1, metres north-east of Rheims, which was subjected to days of bombing. The cathedral was hit almost immediately on 19 September and then terribly damaged on several more occasions. What happened during this sad period to the vines and champagne production?
The vines in the region of Rheims were in the war zone. Criss-crossed with German and French trenches and riddled with craters from shells, cultivation had either stopped when the war began or been continued in the worst possible conditions.
Since all the men were in the army the population was made up of women, children, invalids, and the elderly; all displayed splendid courage in the face of adversity. There was not enough fertilizer or anti-parasite products, the horses had been requisitioned, the harvest houses were occupied by the troops, and artillery and aeroplane fire made the vines a dangerous place to work, but in spite of all, and very admirably, production was maintained.
