Chapter XVI: "with the Honors of War"

It was just dawn when I got off a train at Gerbéviller, the little "Martyr City" that hides its desolation as it hid its existence in the foothills of the Vosges.

There was a dense fog. At 6 A.M. fog usually covers the valleys of the Meurthe and Moselle. From the station I could see only a building across the road. A gendarme demanded my credentials. I handed him the _laisser-passer_ from the Quartier Général of the "First French Army," which controls all coming and going, all activity in that region. The gendarme demanded to know the hour when I proposed to leave. I told him. He said it would be necessary to have the permit "viséd for departure" at the headquarters of the gendarmerie. He pointed to the hazy outlines of another building just distinguishable through the fog.

This was proof that the town contained buildings--not just a building. The place was not entirely destroyed, as I had supposed. I went down the main street from the station, the fog enveloping me. I had letters to the town officials, but it was too early in the morning to present them. I would first get my own impressions of the wreck and ruin.

But I could see nothing on either hand as I stumbled along in the mud. So I commented to myself that this was not as bad as some places I had seen. I thought of the substantial station and the buildings across the road--untouched by war. I compared Gerbéviller with places where there is not even a station--where not even one house remains as the result of "the day when the Germans came."

The road was winding and steep, dipping down to the swift little stream that twists a turbulent passage through the town. The day was coming fast but the fog remained white and impenetrable. After a few minutes I began to see dark shapes on either side of the road. Tall, thin, irregular shapes, some high, some low, but with outlines all softened, toned down by the banks of white vapor.

I started across the road to investigate and fell across a pile of jagged masonry on the sidewalk. Through the fog I could see tumbled piles of bricks. The shapes still remained--specters that seemed to move in the light from the valley. An odor that was not of the freshness of the morning assailed me. I climbed across the walk. No wall of buildings barred my path, but I mounted higher on the piles of brick and stones. A heavy black shape was now at my left hand. I looked up and in the shadow there was no fog. I could see a crumbled swaying side of a house that was. The odor I noticed was that caused by fire. Sticking from the wall I could see the charred wood joists that once supported the floor of the second story. Higher, the lifting fog permitted me to see the waving boughs of a tree that hung over the house that was. At my feet, sticking out of a pile of bricks and stones, were the twisted iron fragments of a child's bed. I climbed out into the sunshine.

I was standing in the midst of a desolation and a silence that were profound. There was nothing there that lived, except a few fire-blacked trees that stuck up here and there in the shelter of broken walls. Now I understood the meaning of the spectral shapes. They were nothing but the broken walls of the other houses that were. They were all that remained of nine-tenths of Gerbéviller.

I wandered along to where the street turned sharply. There the ground pitched straight to the little river. Half of a house stood there, unscathed by fire; it was one of those unexplainable freaks that often occur in great catastrophes. Even the window glass was intact. Smoke was coming from the chimney. I went to the opposite side and there stood an old woman looking out toward the river, brooding over the ruin stretching below her.

"You are lucky," I said. "You still have your home."

She turned a toothless countenance toward me and threw out her hands. I judged her to be well over seventy. It wasn't her home, she explained. Her home was "là-bas"--pointing vaguely in the distance. She had lived there fifty years--now it was burned. Her son's house, he had saved thirty years to be able to call it his own, was also gone; but then her son was dead, so what did it matter? Yes, he was shot on the day the Germans came. He was ill, but they killed him. Oh, yes, she saw him killed. When the Germans went away she came to his house and built a fire in the stove. It was very cold.

And why were the houses burned? No; it was not the result of bombardment. Gerbéviller was not bombarded until after the houses were burned. They were burned by the Germans systematically. They went from house to house with their torches and oil and pitch. They did not explain why they burned the houses, but it was because they were angry.

The old woman paused a moment, and a faint flicker of a smile showed in the wrinkles about her eyes. I asked her to continue her story.

"You said because they were angry," I prompted. The smile broadened. Oh, yes, they were angry, she explained. They did not even make the excuse that the villagers fired upon them. They were just angry through and through. And it was all because of those seventy-five French chasseurs who held the bridge.

Some one called to her from the house. She hobbled to the door. "Any one can tell you about the seventy-five chasseurs," she said, disappearing within.

I went on down the road and stood upon the bridge over the swift little river. It was a narrow, tiny bridge only wide enough for one wagon to pass. Two roads from the town converged there, the one over which I had passed and another which formed a letter "V" at the junction with the bridge. Across the river only one road led away from the bridge and it ran straight up a hill, when it turned suddenly into the broad national highway to Lunéville, about five miles away.

One house remained standing at the end of the bridge, nearest the town. Its roof was gone, and its walls bore the marks of hundreds of bullets, but it was inhabited by a little old man of fifty, who came out to talk with me. He was the village carpenter. His house was burned, so he had taken refuge in the little house at the bridge. During the time the Germans were there he had been a prisoner, but they forgot him the morning the French army arrived. Everybody was in such a hurry, he explained.

I asked him about the seventy-five chasseurs at the bridge.

Ah, yes, we were then standing on the site of their barricade. He would tell me about it, for he had seen it all from his house half way up the hill.

The chasseurs were first posted across the river on the road to Lunéville, and when the Germans approached, early in the morning, they fell back to the bridge, which they had barricaded the night before. It was the only way into Gerbéviller, so the chasseurs determined to fight. They had torn up the street and thrown great earthworks across one end of the bridge. Additional barricades were thrown up on the two converging streets, part way up the hill, behind which they had mitrailleuses which could sweep the road at the other end of the bridge.

About a half mile to the south a narrow footbridge crossed the river, only wide enough for one man. It was a little rustic affair that ran through the grounds of the Château de Gerbéviller, which faced the river only a few hundred yards below the main bridge. It was a very ancient château, built in the twelfth century and restored in the seventeenth century. It was a royal château of the Bourbons. In it once lived the great François de Montmorency, Duc de Luxembourg and Marshal of France. Now it belonged to the Marquise de Lamberty, a cousin of the King of Spain.

I interrupted, for I wanted to hear about the chasseurs. I gave the little old man a cigarette. He seized it eagerly--so eagerly that I also handed him a cigar. He fondled that cigar for a moment and then placed it in an inside pocket. It was a very cheap and very bad French cigar, for I was in a part of the country that has never heard of Havanas, but to the little old man it was something precious. "I will keep it for Sunday," he said.

I then got him back to the seventy-five chasseurs. It was just eight o'clock in the morning--a beautiful sunshiny morning--when the German column appeared around the bend in the road which we could see across the bridge, and which joined the highway from Lunéville. There were twelve thousand in that first column. One hundred and fifty thousand more came later. A band was playing "Deutschland über Alles," and the men were singing. The closely-packed front ranks of infantry broke into the goose step as they came in sight of the town. It was a wonderful sight; the sun glistened on their helmets; they marched as though on parade right down almost to the opposite end of the bridge.

Then came the command to halt. For a moment there was a complete silence. The Germans, only a couple of hundred yards from the barricade, seemed slowly to consider the situation. The Captain of the chasseurs, from a shelter behind the very little house that was still standing--and where his men up the two roads could see him--softly waved his hand.

Crack-crack-crack-crack-crack-crack-crack-crack-crack! The bullets from the mitrailleuses whistled across the bridge into the front ranks of the "Deutschland über Alles" singers, while the men behind the bridge barricade began a deadly rifle fire.

Have you ever heard a mitrailleuse? It is just like a telegraph instrument, with its insistent clickety click-click-click, only it is a hundred times as loud. Indeed I have been told by French officers that it has sometimes been used as a telegraph instrument, so accurately can its operator reel out its hundred and sixty shots a minute.

On that morning at the Gerbéviller barricade, however, it went faster than the telegraph. These men on the converging roads just shifted their range slightly and poured bullets into the next ranks of infantry and so on back along the line, until Germans were dropping by the dozen at the sides of the straight little road. Then the column broke ranks wildly and fled back into the shelter of the road from Lunéville.

A half hour later a detachment of cavalry suddenly rounded the corner and charged straight for the barricade. The seventy-five were ready for them. Some of them got half way across the bridge and then tumbled into the river. Not one got back around the corner of the road to Lunéville.

There was another half hour of quiet, and then from the Lunéville road a battery of artillery got into action. Their range was bad, so far as any achievement against the seventy-five was concerned, so they turned their attention to the château, which they could easily see from their position across the river. The first shell struck the majestic tower of the building and shattered it. The next smashed the roof, the third hit the chapel--and so continued the bombardment until flames broke out to complete the destruction.

Of course the Germans could not know that the château was empty, that its owner was in Paris and both her sons fighting in the French army. But they had secured the military advantage of demolishing one of the finest country houses in France, with its priceless tapestries, ancient marbles and heirlooms of the Bourbons. A howl of German glee was heard by the seventy-five chasseurs crouching behind their barricades. So pleased were the invaders with their achievement that next they bravely swung out a battery into the road leading to the bridge, intending to shell the barricades. The Captain of chasseurs again waved his hand. Every man of the battery was killed before the guns were in position. It took an entire company of infantry--half of them being killed in the action--to haul those guns back into the Lunéville road, thus to clear the way for another advance.

From then on until 1 o'clock in the afternoon there were more infantry attacks, all failing as lamentably as the first. The seventy-five were holding off the 12,000. At the last attack they let the Germans advance to the entrance of the bridge. They invited them with taunts to advance. Then they poured in their deadly fire, and as the Germans broke and fled they permitted themselves a cheer. Up to this time not one chasseur was killed. Only four were wounded.

Shortly after 1 o'clock the German artillery wasted a few more shells on the ruined château and the chasseurs could see a detachment crawling along the river bank in the direction of the narrow footbridge that crossed through the château park a half mile below. The Captain of the chasseurs sent one man with a mitrailleuse to hold the bridge. He posted himself in the shelter of a large tree at one end. In a few minutes about fifty Germans appeared. They advanced cautiously on the bridge. The chasseur let them get half way over before he raked them with his fire. The water below ran red with blood.

The Germans retreated for help and made another attack an hour later with the same result. By 4 o'clock, when the lone chasseur's ammunition was exhausted, it is estimated that he had killed 175 Germans, who made five desperate rushes to take the position, which would have enabled them to make a flank attack on the seventy-four still holding the main bridge. When his ammunition was gone--which occurred at the same time as the ammunition at the main bridge was exhausted--this chasseur with the others succeeded in effecting a retreat to a main body of cavalry. If he still lives--this modern Horatius at the bridge--he remains an unnamed hero in the ranks of the French army, unhonored except in the hearts of those few of his countrymen who know.

During the late hours of the afternoon aeroplanes flew over the chasseurs' position, thus discovering to the Germans how really weak were the defenses of the town, how few its defenders. Besides the ammunition was gone. But for eight hours--from eight in the morning until four in the afternoon--the seventy-five had held the 12,000.

Had that body of 12,000 succeeded earlier the 150,000 Germans that advanced the next day might have been able to fall on the French right flank during a critical battle of the war. The total casualties of the chasseurs were three killed, three captured, and six wounded.

The little old man and I had walked to the entrance of the château park before he finished his story. It was still too early for breakfast. I thanked him and told him to return to his work in the little house by the bridge. I wanted to explore the château at leisure.

I entered the place--what was left of it. Most of the walls were standing. Walls built in the twelfth century do not break easily, even with modern artillery. But the modern roof and seventeenth century inner walls were all demolished. Not a single article of furniture or decoration remained. But the destruction showed some of the same freaks--similar to that little house left untouched by fire on the summit of the hill.

For instance, the Bourbon coat of arms above the grand staircase was untouched, while the staircase itself was just splintered bits of marble. On another fragment of the wall there still hung a magnificent stag's antlers. Strewed about in the corners I saw fragments of vases that had been priceless. Even the remnants were valuable. In the ruined music room I found a piece of fresh, clean music (an Alsatian waltz), lying on the mantelpiece. I went out to the front of the building, where the great park sweeps down to the edge of the river. An old gardener in one of the side paths saw me. We immediately established cordial relations with a cigarette.

He told me how, after the chasseurs retreated beyond the town, the Germans--reduced over a thousand of their original number by the activities of the day--swept over the barricades of the bridge and into the town. Yes, the old woman I had talked with was right about it. They were very angry. They were ferociously angry at being held eight hours at that bridge by a force so ridiculously small.

The first civilians they met they killed, and then they began to fire the houses. One young man, half-witted, came out of one of the houses near the bridge. They hanged him in the garden behind the house. Then they called his mother to see. A mob came piling into the château headed by four officers. All the furniture and valuables that were not destroyed they piled into a wagon and sent back to Lunéville. Of the gardener who was telling me the story they demanded the keys of the wine cellars. No; they did not injure him. They just held him by the arms while several dozen of the soldiers spat in his face.

While the drunken crew were reeling about the place, one of them accidentally stumbled upon the secret underground passage leading to the famous grottoes. These grottoes and the underground connection of the château were built in the fifteenth century. They are a half mile away, situated only half above ground, the entrance looking out on a smooth lawn that extends to the edge of the river. Several giant trees, the trunks of which are covered with vines, half shelter the entrance, which is also obscured by climbing ivy. The interior was one of the treasures of France. The vaulted ceilings were done in wonderful mosaic; the walls decorated with marbles and rare sea shells. In every nook were marble pedestals and antique statuary, while the fountain in the center, supplied from an underground stream, was of porphyry inlaid with mosaic.

The Germans looked upon it with appreciative eyes. But they were still very angry. Its destruction was a necessity of war. It could not be destroyed by artillery because it was half under ground and screened by the giant trees. But it could be destroyed by picks and axes. A squad of soldiers was detailed to the job. They did it thoroughly. The gardener took me there to see. Not a scrap of the mosaic remained. The fountain was smashed to bits. A headless Venus and a smashed and battered Adonis were lying prone upon the ground.

The visitors of the château and environs afterward joined their comrades in firing the town. Night had come. Also across the bridge waited the 150,000 reenforcements, come from Lunéville. The five hundred of the two thousand inhabitants who remained were herded to the upper end of the town near the station. That portion was not to be destroyed because the German General would make his headquarters there.

The inhabitants were to be given a treat. They were to witness the entrance of the hundred and fifty thousand--the power and might of Germany was to be exhibited to them. So while the flames leaped high from the burning city, reddening the sky for miles, while old men prayed, while women wept, while little children whimpered, the sound of martial music was heard down the street near the bridge. The infantry, packed in close formation, the red light from the fire shining on their helmets, were doing the goose step up the main street to the station--the great German army had entered the city of Gerbéviller with the honors of war.