CHAPTER XVII

A DAY WITH A PREFECT

Having said so much of what our friends of the various Préfectures did or tried to do for two humble newspaper correspondents, I should like, before going on to consider the next phase of the war, to try and give an idea of the work which they did for the people in their districts, and the risks which they often ran in doing it. I will begin with a description of a _Conseil de Révision_ at St. Nicholas-du-Port, to which I went with M. Mirman and one of the Generals of the district. While we were in Lorraine there were a large number of special sittings of these courts, at which the young men of the nation go through their final medical inspection before entering upon their statutory term of military service. Sometimes they were presided over by the Préfet himself, sometimes by M. Slingsby, the President of the Prefectorial Council, a direct descendant of the old Yorkshire family but a Frenchman to the bone. In ordinary times the regular annual inspections take place in March, and the normal age of enlistment is twenty. Soon after the war began boys of nineteen were called up to undergo training for service with the colours, and it was to judge of their fitness to bear arms and also to revise cases that had previously been turned down or put back that these extraordinary _Conseils de Révision_ were held.

There was, of course, an obvious difference between the case of these boys and the armies of volunteers which Lord Kitchener was at that time recruiting in England. This was compulsory service in being, the so-called conscription which then and for many a long day after so seriously agitated the tender bosoms of English agitators and champions of personal liberty. These young Frenchmen had got to be soldiers whether they liked it or not. But compulsory service, whatever its uninformed opponents may say, is service and not slavery. That is precisely why in France, in peace as well as in war-time, the inspections are presided over by the civil and not the military authorities. The Prefect, or his deputy, in conducting them, is fulfilling one of his chief functions, which is to represent the people as their official champion, and check any tendency to the possible evils of militarism. It is his bounden duty to see that no man is taken for service in the army who on account of physical incapacity or for any other reason ought and has the right to remain a civilian.

There was, however, little need for this kind of paternal _surveillance_ in the extra _Conseils de Révision_ which were held during the war, except possibly in the way of restraining some whose capacity to bear arms was not so certain as their enthusiasm. There was not a suspicion of reluctance. One and all they were itching to be up and at them. When we arrived at the Hotel de Ville a crowd of between three and four hundred of them were waiting outside in the street, talking to their friends and relations, who looked just as proud as the boys themselves that they had been called up, and just as eager that they should be passed as fit—if not _bons pour service_ in the Army, at all events for some kind of auxiliary service. It was impossible to look at them and not to think of the hundreds of thousands of boys in England who, in spite of all that could be done to coax and wheedle and bribe them into the army, in spite of every kind of ignoble coercion short of compulsion, were at that time still hanging back from the honour and glory of serving their country in arms. Not even the thought of those other still more numerous hundreds of thousands who had gladly volunteered and given up everything else at the one supreme call could quite take the taste of the contrast out of my mouth.

In ordinary times I dare say some of those French boys would have been frankly annoyed at the prospect of giving up their civil employment and their personal freedom for a period of enforced military service. But now as they came pouring up the stairs after us into the big bare room—decorated only by a tricolor flag and a white bust of the République Française, crowned with a wreath of oak leaves—there was no mistaking their extraordinary enthusiasm or the reason for it. The soldiers of the Kaiser when they went to the war, believed firmly that they were going to fight because the Fatherland was in danger, because otherwise it would inevitably be crushed by the ring of jealous nations by which it was surrounded. That was the idea which had been carefully drilled into them. That was what they had been told by the ignoble and servile army of professors and sergeants. But these boys of Lorraine needed no telling. They knew. If they did not all actually come from the blackened and ruined villages and towns which marked the track of the retreating incendiaries, they lived without exception within a few miles of them. Saint Nicholas-du-Port had only just escaped occupation by the enemy. Dombasle was only two miles off. For weeks the Germans’ guns had been thundering in their ears, for weeks they had heard—and known—of the murder of innocent women and children and old men; for weeks they had been familiar with the effects of pillage and incendiarism and rape. No wonder they were willing to die for _la patrie_. If the things that were done in Lorraine and the Vosges had been done in Kent and Norfolk the shirkers of England would long ago have repented in khaki and ashes. There would have been no need of lurid posters and cinematograph films and compulsion to bring them in. They would have fought because they would have known—as these French boys knew—that otherwise their country and all that they loved must die. And if they had been rejected because, though the spirit was willing, the flesh was too weak to make a fighting soldier, they would have been as bitterly disappointed as these boys of Lorraine were whenever they failed to pass the doctor’s tests.

Among the boys, in one of the batches that came in a dozen at a time to be examined, there was, I remember, a man of well over fifty, long past the military age but still perfectly fit and strong, who had been called up owing to some mistake made by a clerk. It was curious and it was exhilarating to see this greybeard standing up stripped to the skin, quietly and with proud dignity explaining to the uniformed full-dressed committee in front of him that he had already served his terms as active soldier, reservist, and territorial, but that he was still able to fight and asked nothing better than to be reckoned _bon pour service_ if the country had need of him.

There were other grey beards in the room besides this willing veteran’s. Ranged at the upper end of it by the daïs on which M. Mirman sat with the committee, were the mayors of the various towns and cantons from which the boys came, about twenty in all, ready to answer questions on doubtful cases. Before the actual inspection began, the whole thing reminded me oddly of a Public School function at home, except that the headmaster wore the uniform of a Prefect of France, the boys were all of the same age and practically of the same height, and the assistant masters, many of them humble peasants, looked like hard-bitten farmers from the Yorkshire moors or the lowlands of Scotland. There was a great contrast between them and the boys. Mayors, as a rule, are men of peace, associated in the mind with gold chains and heavy dinners. But the mayors of Lorraine are different. They live very close to the frontier, and, as M. Mirman said in an earnest and spirited speech to the young recruits, they had lately had need not only of much patience and good humour, but of unusual physical and moral courage. All of them whose cantons lay between St. Nicholas-du-Port and the frontier had a few weeks before at least run the risk of being carried off as “hostages,” to say nothing of graver perils. Still, after all, the men by the daïs, bravely as they had stuck to their posts, had escaped with their lives. But the boys—I was looking at them, and thinking of the pity and wickedness of it all, when M. Mirman began to talk to them. The war that they were going away from their homes to fight in was, he told them, a war to kill war. When he put to them the question, “Do you want not to serve?” they thundered out the kind of “No” with which in England political audiences are in the habit of declaring to the world and to each other that they are not down-hearted. Sometimes these political negatives are not as confident as they seem, and are rather efforts at self-encouragement than statements of fact. But the “No” of the boys of St. Nicholas-du-Port was absolutely genuine. There was no question of that. Their only wish was to join the ranks and fight, and fight, and fight—till the wrongs of France were avenged and the victory won.

Another day that we spent with M. Mirman almost directly after our arrival in Nancy was rather more _mouvementé_. It was a week after the Germans had finally been driven back from Amance and Champenoux, and the news had been brought in that Nomeny, a town between St. Généviève and the frontier, had just been evacuated by the enemy. So M. Mirman was going to visit it, and he offered to take us with him. Before we started we lunched at the Préfecture with a fairly large party which included, besides M. Mirman and his eldest daughter, M. Abeille, his sécrétaire général (who has since been killed fighting for France), M. Mage, the Sous-Préfet of Toul, M. Guiran Scevola and M. Royer, two well-known French artists, painters in ordinary to the Ministry of War, temporarily attached as artillery privates to the Toul garrison, M. Dominique Bonnaud, the Parisian chansonnier, attached to the staff of the Préfecture, M. Jean Rogier, of the _Petit Parisien_, the only special correspondent of a London or Paris newspaper besides ourselves who stayed more than a few days in Nancy, and M. Puech, a big ironmaster of Frouard, five miles down the Moselle, who for the first part of the war acted as M. Mirman’s chauffeur, and went with him through some rather exciting scenes during his prefectorial visits. After lunch—it is a pleasant way the French have—there were a few speeches, one of which fell to the lot of the English correspondent of _The Times_, and was delivered haltingly and slowly in Public School French. As events proved afterwards, it was fortunate for us that there were speeches and that one of them took some time, for if we had started ten minutes sooner we should probably not have come back—at all events for some months.

We set off at half-past one, M. Rogier and I in the Préfet’s car, an open one, with him and M. Puech, the rest in a larger and slower Limousine behind. At that time there were a large number of troops in and round Nancy—most of them the men who had fought in the Battle of the Grand Couronné—and for the first five or six miles we were constantly passing them, in the town and the villages and along the roads, marching, driving long processions of hooded country-carts, hauling down a captive balloon, lighting fires against the walls of the houses, cooking their meals, grooming their horses, furbishing up their arms and accoutrements, foraging, laughing, singing, shaving, washing, tailoring, eating, drinking, smoking, and chatting as busily and light-heartedly as if the enemy were a hundred miles away instead of only a little way beyond the horizon on the frontier.

After we had gone some way along the Château-Salins road we turned northwards, leaving Amance on the right, and began to get away from the many soldiers who were off duty to the smaller number who were fighting. The road we were now on ran parallel to the frontier at about three miles from it. On our left was the range of hills which stretches northwards to Ste. Généviève and Pont-à-Mousson, on our right an almost flat plain sloping down to the frontier and the Seille. By the side of the road a battery of 75’s was banging away into the distance, and in one or two places clouds of white smoke were rising up from burning villages. We stopped to speak to the gunner commandant, who looked rather suspiciously at a car-ful of _civils_. But there is no mistaking the silver lace on the _képi_ of a Préfet, and eventually he said that as far as he knew there was no reason why we should not go on to Nomeny, though he advised us not to dawdle for the next few miles, as we were rather close to the frontier and the enemy. M. Puech, who can drive as well and as fast as any one I know, consequently let her rip, and we covered the next seven or eight miles in almost as few minutes. Batteries on the hills on our left were firing over our heads at the enemy positions across the Seille, and once or twice we passed trenches manned by companies of _fantassins_, but the return fire did not come our way, and some minutes later we passed into a quieter region, by contrast curiously still and peaceful. As we drove up to a small village about a mile from Nomeny, the day, which had been beautifully sunny, suddenly clouded over, the sky in front of us became inky black, and the German horizon looked darker and more threatening than I ever saw it. In the village, not very badly damaged considering its position, we saw not a soul except one old woman who was standing at her door looking out with dazed eyes, but quickly turned in and disappeared as we dashed past. That might have warned us. We ought to have been struck by the death-like emptiness of the village street. But we were thinking of other things, of the pace we were going at, the gathering storm, of what Nomeny would be like, and especially of the slower car behind, and why we had not seen it for so long. I was just looking round for it again when suddenly the car slowed and stopped dead. Then “Cachez-vous,” said M. Puech quietly, and though it did not feel very glorious, we did, without losing very much time. As I crouched down on the seat (the Préfet was in front with M. Puech) I looked ahead and on the brow of the slight slope up which we had been running, not more than a full iron shot from where we were, saw four grey figures in spiked helmets, with levelled rifles pointing straight at us, kneeling by the side of the road. It was a tight place, and it was lucky for us all that we had M. Puech to drive. Instead of trying to turn the car, as he might have done, on a convenient bit of level ground by the side of the road, he made up his mind what to do, and did it, in the same second, jamming his lever into the reverse speed directly we stopped, and the car began moving steadily backwards, though not quite as fast as we should have liked. He was sitting bolt upright in front of me, with one hand on the steering-wheel and the other on the back of his seat, looking away from the Germans along the road behind us. As soon as they saw that we were not coming on they began to fire. Still perfectly cool and French, he backed down the slope of the hill, which was as straight as a two-foot rule, counting the shots out loud as we went: “One, two, three, four....” They made a flick just like the crack of a small hunting-crop. “Another thousand yards and we’re all right ... five, six—that touched us” (it had grazed the right front lamp and glanced on to the trumpet) “seven ...” and so on up to “nine, ten ... eleven,” and with that we reached a side lane into which, with the same quick decision, he backed the car to turn her. And then, just when it seemed as if we had got off safely, things began to go wrong. The engine stopped dead, and the off-wheels stuck in the ditch. So out we jumped. M. Puech to the front to start the engine if he could, M. Mirman and M. Rogier and I to push behind—our very hardest, but without the slightest effect, M. Puech grinding away just as hard and just as vainly at the engine crank—and then suddenly the engine started, and we flung ourselves into the car, this time with our backs to the foe but our heads erect, and in a moment were flying back to the village as fast as our excellent M. Puech could push her along.

In the village street we found M. Lamure and the others and the second car, standing in the middle of a group of excited villagers. When they had come along, a minute or two behind us, the whole population, instead of only our old woman, rushed out and barred the road in front of them, and when they had pulled up told them they could not possibly go on as sixty Uhlans had just left the village, only ten minutes before our car went through. While they were talking to them, wondering what to do, the shots fired at us, or rather at M. Puech, began to sing into the village, but over their heads, chipping the plaister off the upper walls. And that, no doubt, was the explanation of our escape. The Germans had been firing from the village, most probably at a long range, before we came into it, and when they retired towards Nomeny the four men whom they had left on the road as a rearguard had forgotten to lower their sights, till one of them saw what he was doing, corrected his mistake, and fired the shot which hit the lamp of the car.

I expect when our four friends got back to the other fifty-six, or at all events when they learnt that they had missed bagging a Prefect of France, they had a poorish time of it. But that was not our affair. Thanks to the courage and nerve of M. Puech we had got safely out of a rather awkward fix, for at the best, if they had crippled our chauffeur or the car, we should have paid a prolonged visit to Germany. And thanks to the speeches at lunch, including, I am proud to think, the one in Public School French, we had escaped by ten minutes running our head into a much larger nest of hornets in the village.

So we decided to put off our visit to Nomeny till another day. We had had enough of Germans for the present. Also we thought it more prudent to go home by a different road, at the back of the hills where the French batteries were stationed, round by Ste. Généviève and up the valley of the Moselle, especially as, before M. Lamure and the other party reached the village, when their car was panting after ours, one particular shell had fallen rather too near them to be pleasant, and there was no urgent need to repeat the experience.

When we got back to Nancy, after getting stuck in the middle of a large field flooded by the Moselle, from which the car had to be dragged out by a passing team of artillery horses, M. Mirman wrote for me a _petit mot_ on one of his cards. It was dated Nancy, Dimanche 20 Septembre, 1914, and ran as follows:—

“Léon Mirman, Préfet de Meurthe et Moselle, s’excuse très humblement de n’avoir pu montrer à M. Richard Campbell”—he always would call me Richard—“la pauvre ville de Nomeny, assassinée par les Allemands, et qui garde les traces des meutres commis sur des civils et de l’incendie systématiquement et scientifiquement organisée comme il en verra un exemple demain à Gerbéviller—et il lui remet cette carte en souvenir très amicale d’une promenade ... un peu mouvementée où le ‘feu’ et l’eau n’ont pu altérer leur commune bonne humeur.

“Et vive l’Entente Cordiale d’hier qui a préparé l’action commun de deux grands nations pour assurer le triomphe de la civilization contre la Barbarie Teutonne!”

So “now you know,” as M. Rogier wrote in the vivid account of our trip which he sent to the _Petit Parisien_, “why I didn’t go to Nomeny.” But at least I am glad that we tried to go. For it showed me first of all the sort of chances that a Prefect in the occupied provinces had to take in carrying out his duty, and secondly what our Allies mean by _sang-froid_. It seems to me that is rather a fine quality, in a motor or outside it, and that it will yet help us to win the war.