Chapter 11

"The bandits who were at work here were assassins: I have seen the bodies of their victims, and taken the evidence on the spot. They shot down the inhabitants like rabbits, killing them haphazard in the streets, on their doorsteps, almost at arm's length. Of these victims it is still difficult to ascertain the exact number; it will be more than fifty. Most of the victims had been buried when I first entered the town; here and there, however, in a garden, at the entrance to a cellar the corpses of women still awaited burial. In a field just outside the town, I saw on the ground, their hands tied, some with their eyes bandaged--fifteen old men--murdered. They were in three groups of five. The men of each group had evidently clung to each other before death. The clenched hand of one of them still held an old pipe. They were all old men--with white hair. Some days had elapsed since their murder; but their aspect in death was still venerable; their quiet closed eyes seemed to appeal to heaven. A staff officer of the Second Army who was with me photographed the scene; with other _pièces de conviction_; the photograph is in the hands of the Governmental Commission charged with investigating the crimes of the Germans during this war."

The Bavarian soldiers in Gerbéviller were not only murderers--they were incendiaries, even more deliberate and thorough-going than the soldiers of Von Kluck's army at Senlis. With the exception of a few houses beyond the hospital, spared at the entreaty of Soeur Julie, and on her promise to nurse the German wounded, the whole town was deliberately burnt out, house by house, the bare walls left standing, the rest destroyed. And as, _after the fire_, the place was twice taken and retaken under bombardment, its present condition may be imagined. It was during the burning that some of the worst murders and outrages took place. For there is a maddening force in triumphant cruelty, which is deadlier than that of wine; under it men become demons, and all that is human perishes.

The excuse, of course, was here as at Senlis--"les civils ont tiré!" There is not the slightest evidence in support of the charge. As at Senlis, there was a French rear-guard of 57 Chasseurs--left behind to delay the German advance as long as possible. They were told to hold their ground for five hours; they held it for eleven, fighting with reckless bravery, and firing from a street below the hospital. The Germans, taken by surprise, lost a good many men before, at small loss to themselves, the Chasseurs retreated. In their rage at the unexpected check, and feeling, no doubt, already that the whole campaign was going against them, the Germans avenged themselves on the town and its helpless inhabitants.

Our half-hour in Soeur Julie's parlour was a wonderful experience! Imagine a portly woman of sixty, with a shrewd humorous face, talking with French vivacity, and with many homely turns of phrase drawn straight from that life of the soil and the peasants amid which she worked; a woman named in one of General Castelnau's Orders of the Day and entitled to wear the Legion of Honour; a woman, too, who has seen horror face to face as few women, even in war, have seen it, yet still simple, racy, full of irony, and full of heart, talking as a mother might talk of her "grands blessés"! but always with humorous asides, and an utter absence of pose or pretence; flashing now into scorn and now into tenderness, as she described the conduct of the German officers who searched her hospital for arms, or the helplessness of the wounded men whom she protected. I will try and put down some of her talk. It threw much light for me on the psychology of two nations.

"During the fighting, we had always about 300 of our wounded (_nos chers blessés_) in this hospital. As fast as we sent them off, others came in. All our stores were soon exhausted. I was thankful we had some good wine in the cellars--about 200 bottles. You understand, Madame, that when we go to nurse our people in their farms, they don't pay us, but they like to give us something--very often it is a bottle of old wine, and we put it in the cellar, when it comes in handy often for our invalids. Ah! I was glad of it for our _blessés_! I said to my Sisters--'Give it them! and not by thimblefuls--give them enough!' Ah, poor things!--it made some of them sleep. It was all we had. One day, I passed a soldier who was lying back in his bed with a sigh of satisfaction. '_Ah, ma Soeur, ça resusciterait un mort!_' (That would bring a dead man to life!) So I stopped to ask what they had just given him. And it was a large glass of Lachryma Christi!

"But then came the day when the Commandant, the French Commandant, you understand, came to me and said--'Sister, I have sad news for you. I am going. I am taking away the wounded--and all my stores. Those are my orders.'

"'But, mon Commandant, you'll leave me some of your stores for the grands blessés, whom you leave behind--whom you can't move? _What_!--you must take it all away? Ah, ça--_non_! I don't want any extras--I won't take your chloroform--I won't take your bistouris--I won't take your electric things--but--hand over the iodine! (_en avant l'iode_!) hand over the cotton-wool!--hand over the gauze! Come, my Sisters!' I can tell you I plundered him!--and my Sisters came with their aprons, and the linen-baskets--we carried away all we could."

Then she described the evacuation of the French wounded at night--300 of them--all but the 19 worst cases left behind. There were no ambulances, no proper preparation of any kind.

"Oh! it was a confusion!--an ugly business!" (_ce n'etait pas rose_!). The Sisters tore down and split up the shutters, the doors, to serve as stretchers; they tore sheets into long strips and tied "our poor children" on to the shutters, and hoisted them into country carts of every sort and description. "Quick!--Quick!" She gave us a wonderful sense of the despairing haste in which the night retreat had to be effected. All night their work went on. The wounded never made a sound--"they let us do what we would without a word. And as for us, my Sisters bound these big fellows (_ces gros et grands messieurs_) on to the improvised stretchers, like a mother who fastens her child in its cot. Ah! Jésus! the poverty and the misery of that time!"

By the early morning all the French wounded were gone except the nineteen helpless cases, and all the French soldiers had cleared out of the village except the 57 Chasseurs, whose orders were to hold the place as long as they could, to cover the retreat of the rest.

Then, when the Chasseurs finally withdrew, the Bavarian troops rushed up the town in a state of furious excitement, burning it systematically as they advanced, and treating the inhabitants as M. Mirman has described. Soon Soeur Julie knew that they were coming up the hill towards the hospital. I will quote the very language--homely, Biblical, direct--in which she described her feelings. "_Mes reins flottaient comme ça--ils allaient tomber à mes talons. Instantanément, pas une goutte de salive dans la bouche!_" Or--to translate it in the weaker English idiom--"My heart went down into my heels--all in a moment, my mouth was dry as a bone!"

The German officers drew up, and asked for the Superior of the hospital. She went out to meet them. Here she tried to imitate the extraordinary arrogance of the German manner.

"They told me they would have to burn the hospital, as they were informed men had been shooting from it at their troops.

"I replied that if anyone had been shooting, it was the French Chasseurs, who were posted in a street close by, and had every right to shoot!"

At last they agreed to let the hospital alone, and burn no more houses, if she would take in the German wounded. So presently the wards of the little hospital were full again to overflowing. But while the German wounded were coming in the German officers insisted on searching the nineteen French wounded for arms.

"I had to make way for them--I _had_ to say, '_Entrez, Messieurs!_'"

Then she dropped her voice, and said between her teeth--"Think how hard that was for a Lorrainer!"

So two German officers went to the ward where the nineteen Frenchmen lay, all helpless cases, and a scene followed very like that in the hospital at Senlis. One drew his revolver and covered the beds, the other walked round, poniard in hand, throwing back the bedclothes to look for arms. But they found nothing--"_only blood_! For we had had neither time enough nor dressings enough to treat the wounds properly that night."

A frightful moment!--the cowering patients--the officers in a state of almost frenzied excitement, searching bed after bed. At the last bed, occupied by a badly wounded and quite helpless youth, the officer carrying the dagger brought the blade of it so near to the boy's throat that Soeur Julie rushed forward, and placed her two hands in front of the poor bare neck. The officer dropped both arms to his side, she said, "as if he had been shot," and stood staring at her, quivering all over. But from that moment she had conquered them.

For the German wounded, Soeur Julie declared she had done her best, and the officer in charge of them afterwards wrote her a letter of thanks. Then her mouth twisted a little. "But I wasn't--well, I didn't _spoil_ them! (_Je n'étais pas trop tendre_); I didn't give them our best wine!" And one officer whose wounds she dressed, a Prussian colonel who never deigned to speak to a Bavarian captain near him, was obliged to accept a good many home truths from her. He was convinced that she would poison his leg unless he put on the dressings himself. But he allowed her to bandage him afterwards. During this operation--which she hinted she had performed in a rather Spartan fashion!--"he whimpered all the time," and she was able to give him a good deal of her mind on the war and the behaviour of his troops. He and the others, she said, were always talking about their Kaiser; "one might have thought they saw him sitting on the clouds."

In two or three days the French returned victorious, to find the burnt and outraged village. The Germans were forced, in their turn, to leave some badly wounded men behind, and the French _poilus_ in their mingled wrath and exultation could not resist, some of them, abusing the German wounded through the windows of the hospital. But then, with a keen dramatic instinct, Soeur Julie drew a striking picture of the contrast between the behaviour of the French officer going down to the basement to visit the wounded German officers there, and that of the German officers on a similar errand. She conveyed with perfect success the cold civility of the Frenchman, beginning with a few scathing words about the treatment of the town, and then proceeding to an investigation of the personal effects of the Boche officers.

"Your papers, gentlemen? Ah! those are private letters--you may retain them. Your purses?"--he looks at them--"I hand them back to you. Your note-books? _Ah! ça--c'est mon affaire!_ (that's my business). I wish you good morning."

Soeur Julie spoke emphatically of the drunkenness of the Germans. They discovered a store of "Mirabelle," a strong liqueur, in the town, and had soon exhausted it, with apparently the worst results.

Well!--the March afternoon ran on, and we could have sat there listening till dusk. But our French officers were growing a little impatient, and one of them gently drew "the dear sister," as every one calls her, towards the end of her tale. Then with regret one left the plain parlour, the little hospital which had played so big a part, and the brave elderly nun, in whom one seemed to see again some of those qualities which, springing from the very soil of Lorraine, and in the heart of a woman, had once, long years ago, saved France.

* * * * *

How much there would be still to say about the charm and the kindness of Lorraine, if only this letter were not already too long! But after the tragedy of Gerbéviller I must at any rate find room for the victory of Amance.

Alas!--the morning was dull and misty when we left Nancy for Amance and the Grand Couronné; so that when we stood at last on the famous ridge immediately north of the town which saw, on September 8th, 1914, the wrecking of the final German attempt on Nancy, there was not much visible except the dim lines of forest and river in the plain below. Our view ought to have ranged as far, almost, as Metz to the north and the Vosges to the south. But at any rate there, at our feet, lay the Forest of Champenoux, which was the scene of the three frantic attempts of the Germans debouching from it on September 8th to capture the hill of Amance, and the plateau on which we stood. Again and again the 75's on the hill mowed down the advancing hordes and the heavy guns behind completed their work. The Germans broke and fled, never to return. Nancy was saved, the right of the six French Armies advancing across France, at that very moment, on the heels of the retreating Germans, in the Battle of the Marne, was protected thereby from a flank attack which might have altered all the fortunes of the war, and the course of history; and General Castelnau had written his name on the memory of Europe.

_But_--the Kaiser was not there! Even Colonel Buchan in his admirable history of the war, and Major Whitton in his recent book on the campaign of the Marne, repeat the current legend. I can only bear witness that the two French staff officers who walked with us along the Grand Couronné--one of whom had been in the battle of September 8th--were positive that the Kaiser was not in the neighbourhood at the time, and that there was no truth at all in the famous story which describes him as watching the battle from the edge of the Forest of Champenoux, and riding off ahead of his defeated troops, instead of making, as he had reckoned, a triumphant entry into Nancy. Well, it is a pity the gods did not order it so!--"to be a tale for those that should come after."

One more incident before we leave Lorraine! On our way up to the high village of Amance, we had passed some three or four hundred French soldiers at work. They looked with wide eyes of astonishment at the two ladies in the military car. When we reached the village, Prince R----, the young staff officer from a neighbouring Headquarters who was to meet us there, had not arrived, and we spent some time in a cottage, chatting with the women who lived in it. Then--apparently--while we were on the ridge word reached the men working below, from the village, that we were English. And on the drive down we found them gathered, three or four hundred, beside the road, and as we passed them they cheered us heartily, seeing in us, for the moment, the British alliance!

So that we left the Grand Couronné with wet eyes, and hearts all passionate sympathy towards Lorraine and her people.

No. 10

_June 1st_, 1917.

DEAR MR. ROOSEVELT,--In looking back over my two preceding letters, I realise how inadequately they express the hundredth part of that vast and insoluble debt of a guilty Germany to an injured France, the realisation of which became--for me--in Lorraine, on the Ourcq, and in Artois, a burning and overmastering thing, from which I was rarely or never free. And since I returned to England on March 16th, the conduct of the German troops, under the express orders of the German Higher Command, in the French districts evacuated since February by Hindenburg's retreating forces, has only sharpened and deepened the judgment of civilised men, with regard to the fighting German and all his ways, which has been formed long since, beyond alteration or recall.

Think of it! It cries to heaven. Think of Reims and Arras, of Verdun and Ypres, think of the hundreds of towns and villages, the thousands of individual houses and farms, that lie ruined on the old soil of France; think of the sufferings of the helpless and the old, the hideous loss of life, of stored-up wealth, of natural and artistic beauty; and then let us ask ourselves again the old, old question--why has this happened? And let us go back again to the root facts, from which, whenever he or she considers them afresh--and they should be constantly considered afresh--every citizen of the Allied nations can only draw fresh courage to endure. The long and passionate preparation for war in Germany; the half-mad literature of a glorified "force" headed by the Bernhardis and Treitschkes, and repeated by a thousand smaller folk, before the war; the far more illuminating manifestoes of the intellectuals since the war; Germany's refusal of a conference, as proposed and pressed by Great Britain, in the week before August 4th, France's acceptance of it; Germany's refusal to respect the Belgian neutrality to which she had signed her name, France's immediate consent; the provisions of mercy and of humanity signed by Germany in the Hague Convention trampled, almost with a sneer, under foot; the jubilation over the _Lusitania_, and the arrogant defence of all that has been most cruel and most criminal in the war, as necessary to Germany's interests, and therefore moral, therefore justified; let none--none!--of these things rest forgotten in our minds until peace is here, and justice done!

The German armies are capable of "_no undisciplined cruelty_," said the 93 Professors, without seeing how damning was the phrase. No!--theirs was a cruelty by order, meditated, organised, and deliberate. The stories of Senlis, of Vareddes, of Gerbéviller which I have specially chosen, as free from that element of sexual horror which repels many sensitive people from even trying to realise what has happened in this war, are evidences--one must insist again--of a national mind and quality, with which civilised Europe and civilised America can make no truce. And what folly lies behind the wickedness! Let me recall to American readers some of the phrases in the report of your former Minister in Belgium--Mr. Brand Whitlock--on the Belgian deportations, the "slave hunts" that Germany has carried out in Belgium and "which have torn from nearly every humble home in the land, a husband, father, son, or brother."

These proceedings [says Mr. Whitlock] place in relief the German capacity for blundering almost as sharply as the German capacity for cruelty. They have destroyed for generations any hope whatever of friendly relations between themselves and the Belgian people. For these things were done not, as with the early atrocities, in the heat of passion and the first lust of war, but by one of those deeds that make one despair of the future of the human race--a deed coldly planned, studiously matured, and deliberately and systematically executed, a deed so cruel that German soldiers are said to have wept in its execution, and so monstrous that even German officers are now said to be ashamed.

But the average German neither weeps nor blames. He is generally amazed, when he is not amused, by the state of feeling which such proceedings excite. And if he is an "intellectual," a professor, he will exhaust himself in ingenious and utterly callous defences of all that Germany has done or may do. An astonishing race--the German professors! The year before the war there was an historical congress in London. There was a hospitality committee, and my husband and I were asked to entertain some of the learned men. I remember one in particular--an old man with white hair, who with his wife and daughter joined the party after dinner. His name was Professor Otto von Gierke of the University of Berlin. I gathered from his conversation that he and his family had been very kindly entertained in London. His manner was somewhat harsh and over-bearing, but his white hair and spectacles gave him a venerable aspect, and it was clear that he and his wife and daughter belonged to a cultivated and intelligent _milieu_. But who among his English hosts could possibly have imagined the thoughts and ideas in that grey head? I find a speech of his in a most illuminating book by a Danish professor on German Chauvinist literature. [_Hurrah and Hallelujah!_ By J. P. Bang, D.D., Professor of Theology at the University of Copenhagen, translated by Jessie Bröchner.] The speech was published in a collection called _German Speeches in Hard Times_, which contains names once so distinguished as those of Von Wilamovitz and Harnack.

Professor von Gierke's effusion begins with the usual German falsehoods as to the origin of the war, and then continues--"But now that we Germans are plunged in war, we will have it in _all its grandeur and violence_! Neither fear nor _pity_ shall stay our arm before it has completely brought our enemies to the ground." They shall be reduced to such a condition that they shall never again dare even to snarl at Germany. Then German Kultur will show its full loveliness and strength, enlightening "the understanding of the foreign races absorbed and incorporated into the Empire, and making them see that only from German kultur can they derive those treasures which they need for their own particular life."

At the moment when these lines were written--for the book was published early in the war--the orgy of murder and lust and hideous brutality which had swept through Belgium in the first three weeks of the war was beginning to be known in England; the traces of it were still fresh in town after town and village after village of that tortured land; while the testimony of its victims was just beginning to be sifted by the experts of the Bryce Commission.

The hostages of Vareddes, the helpless victims of Nomény, of Gerbéviller, of Sermaize, of Sommeilles, and a score of other places in France were scarcely cold in their graves. But the old white-haired professor stands there, unashamed, unctuously offering the kultur of his criminal nation to an expectant world! "And when the victory is won," he says complacently--"the whole world will stand open to us, our war expenses will be paid by the vanquished, the black-white-and-red flag will wave over all seas; our countrymen will hold highly respected posts in all parts of the world, and we shall maintain and extend our colonies."

_God, forbid!_ So says the whole English-speaking race, you on your side of the sea, and we on ours.