Chapter V: Part 5

At last the poor Curé could walk no farther. He gave his watch to a companion. "Give it to my family when you can. I am sure they mean to shoot me." Then he dropped exhausted. The Germans hailed a passing vehicle, and made him and another old man, who had fallen out, follow in it. Presently they arrive at Lizy-sur-Ourcq, through which thousands of German troops are now passing, bound not for Paris, but for Soissons and the Aisne, and in the blackest of tempers. Here, after twenty-four more hours of suffering and starvation, the Curé is brought before a court-martial of German officers sitting in a barn. He is once more charged with signalling from the church to the French Army. He again denies the charge, and reminds his judges of what he had done for the German wounded, to whose gratitude he appeals. Then four German soldiers give some sort of evidence, founded either on malice or mistake. There are no witnesses for the defence, no further inquiry. The president of the court-martial says, in bad French, to the other hostages who stand by: "The Curé has lied--he is a spy--_il sera jugé_."

What did he mean--and what happened afterwards? The French witnesses of the scene who survived understood the officer's words to mean that the Curé would be shot. With tears, they bade him farewell, as he sat crouched in a corner of the barn guarded by two German soldiers. He was never seen again by French eyes; and the probability is that he was shot immediately after the scene in the barn.

Then the miserable march of the other old men began again. They are dragged along in the wake of the retreating Germans. The day is very hot, the roads are crowded with troops and lorries. They are hustled and hurried, and their feeble strength is rapidly exhausted. The older ones beg that they may be left to die; the younger help them as much as they can. When anyone falls out, he is kicked and beaten till he gets up again. And all the time the passing troops mock and insult them. At last, near Coulombs, after a march of two hours and a half, a man of seventy-three, called Jourdaine, falls. His guards rush upon him, with blows and kicks. In vain. He has no strength to rise, and his murderers finish him with a ball in the head and one in the side, and bury him hastily in a field a few metres off.

The weary march goes on all day. When it ends, another old man--seventy-nine years old--"le père Milliardet"--can do no more. The next morning he staggered to his feet at the order to move, but fell almost immediately. Then a soldier with the utmost coolness sent his bayonet through the heart of the helpless creature. Another falls on the road a little farther north--then another--and another. All are killed, as they lie.

The poor Maire, Liévin, struggles on as long as he can. Two other prisoners support him on either side. But he has a weak heart--his face is purple--he can hardly breathe. Again and again he falls, only to be brutally pulled up, the Germans shouting with laughter at the old man's misery. (This comes from the testimony of the survivors.) Then he, too, falls for the last time. Two soldiers take him into the cemetery of Chouy. Liévin understands, and patiently takes out his handkerchief and bandages his own eyes. It takes three balls to kill him.

Another hostage, a little farther on, who had also fallen was beaten to death before the eyes of the others.

The following day, after having suffered every kind of insult and privation, the wretched remnant of the civilian prisoners reached Soissons, and were dispatched to Germany, bound for the concentration camp at Erfurt.

Eight of them, poor souls! reached Germany, where two of them died. At last, in January 1915, four of them were returned to France through Switzerland. They reached Schaffhausen with a number of other _rapatriés,_ in early February, to find there the boundless pity with which the Swiss know so well how to surround the frail and tortured sufferers of this war. In a few weeks more, they were again at home, among the old farms and woods of the Ile-de-France. "They are now in peace," says the Meaux Librarian--"among those who love them, and whose affection tries, day by day, to soften for them the cruel memory of their Calvary and their exile."

A monument to the memory of the murdered hostages is to be erected in the village market-place, and a _plaque_ has been let into the wall of the farm where the old men and the women passed their first night of agony.

* * * * *

What is the moral of this story? I have chosen it to illustrate again the historic words which should be, I think--and we know that what is in our hearts is in your hearts also!--the special watchword of the Allies and of America, in these present days, when the German strength _may_ collapse at any moment, and the problems of peace negotiations _may_ be upon us before we know.

_Reparation_--_Restitution_--_Guarantees_!

The story of Vareddes, like that of Senlis, is not among the vilest--by a long, long way--of those which have steeped the name of Germany in eternal infamy during this war. The tale of Gerbéviller--which I shall take for my third instance--as I heard it from the lips of eye-witnesses, plunges us in deeper depths of horror; and the pages of the Bryce report are full of incidents beside which that of Vareddes looks almost colourless.

All the same, let us insist again that no Army of the Allies, or of America, or of any British Dominion, would have been capable of the treatment given by the soldiers of Germany to the hostages of Vareddes. It brings out into sharp relief that quality, or "mentality," to use the fashionable word, which Germany shares with Austria--witness the Austrian doings in Serbia--and with Turkey--witness Turkey's doings in Armenia--but not with any other civilised nation. It is the quality of, or the tendency to, deliberate and pitiless cruelty; a quality which makes of the man or nation who shows it a particularly terrible kind of animal force; and the more terrible, the more educated. Unless we can put it down and stamp it out, as it has become embodied in a European nation, European freedom and peace, American freedom and peace, have no future.

But now, let me carry you to Lorraine!--to the scenes of that short but glorious campaign of September 1914, by which, while the Battle of the Marne was being fought, General Castelnau was protecting the right of the French armies; and to the devastated villages where American kindness is already at work, rebuilding the destroyed, and comforting the broken-hearted.

No. 9

_May 24th_, 1917.

DEAR MR. ROOSEVELT,--To any citizen of a country allied with France in the present struggle, above all to any English man or woman who is provided with at least some general knowledge of the Battle of the Marne, the journey across France from Paris to Nancy can never fail to be one of poignant interest. Up to a point beyond Châlons, the "Ligne de l'Est" follows in general the course of the great river, and therefore the line of the battle. You pass La Fertée-sous-Jouarre, where the Third Corps of General French's army crossed the river; Charly-sur-Marne, where a portion of the First Corps found an unexpectedly easy crossing, owing, it is said, to the hopeless drunkenness of the enemy rear-guard charged with defending the bridge; and Château Thierry, famous in the older history of France, where the right of the First Corps crossed after sharp fighting, and, in the course of "a gigantic man-hunt" in and around the town, took a large number of German prisoners, before, by nightfall, coming into touch with the left of the French Fifth Army under Franchet d'Espercy. At Dornans you are only a few miles north of the Marshes of St. Gond, where General Foch, after some perilous moments, won his brilliant victory over General Billow and the German Second Army, including a corps of the Prussian Guards; while at Châlons I look up from a record I am reading of the experiences of the Diocese during the war, written by the Bishop, to watch for the distant cathedral, and recall the scene of the night of September 9th, when the German Headquarters Staff in that town, "flown with insolence and wine," after what is described as "an excellent dinner and much riotous drinking," were roused about midnight by a sudden noise in the Hôtel, and shouts of "The French are here!" "In fifteen minutes," writes an officer of the Staff of General Langle de Gary, "the Hôtel was empty."

At Épernay and Châlons those French officers who were bound for the fighting line in Champagne, east and west of Reims, left the train; and somewhere beyond Épernay I followed in thought the flight of an aeroplane which seemed to be heading northwards across the ridges which bound the river valley--northwards for Reims, and that tragic ghost which the crime of Germany has set moving through history for ever, never to be laid or silenced--Joan of Arc's Cathedral. Then, at last, we are done with the Marne. We pass Bar-le-Duc, on one of her tributaries, the Ornain; after which the splendid Meuse flashes into sight, running north on its victorious way to Verdun; then the Moselle, with Toul and its beautiful church on the right; and finally the Meurthe, on which stands Nancy. A glorious sisterhood of rivers! The more one realises what they have meant to the history of France, the more one understands that strong instinct of the early Greeks, which gave every river its god, and made of the Simois and the Xanthus personages almost as real as Achilles himself.

But alas! the whole great spectacle, here as on the Ourcq, was sorely muffled and blurred by the snow, which lay thick over the whole length and breadth of France, effacing the landscape in one monotonous whiteness. If I remember rightly, however, it had ceased to fall, and twenty-four hours after we reached Nancy, it had disappeared. It lasted just long enough to let us see the fairy-like Place Stanislas raise its beautiful gilded gates and white palaces between the snow and the moon-light--a sight not soon forgotten.

We were welcomed at Nancy by the Préfet of the Department, Monsieur Léon Mirman, to whom an old friend had written from Paris, and by the courteous French officer, Capitaine de B., who was to take us in charge, for the French Army, during our stay. M. Mirman and his active and public-spirited wife have done a great work at Nancy, and in the desolated country round it. From the ruined villages of the border, the poor _réfugiés_ have been gathered into the old capital of Lorraine, and what seemed to me a remarkably efficient and intelligent philanthropy has been dealing with their needs and those of their children. Nor is this all. M. Mirman is an old Radical and of course a Government official, sent down some years ago from Paris. Lorraine is ardently Catholic, as we all know, and her old Catholic families are not the natural friends of the Republican _régime_. But President Poincaré's happy phrase, _l'union sacrée_--describing the fusion of all parties, classes, and creeds in the war service of France, has nowhere found a stronger echo than in Lorraine. The Préfet is on the friendliest of terms with the Catholic population, rich and poor; and they, on their side, think and speak warmly of a man who is clearly doing his patriotic best for all alike.

Our first day's journeyings were to show us something of the qualities of this Catholic world of Lorraine. A charming and distinguished Frenchwoman who accompanied us counted, no doubt, for much in the warmth of the kindness shown us. And yet I like to believe--indeed I am sure--that there was more than this in it. There was the thrilling sense of a friendship between our two nations, a friendship new and far-reaching, cemented by the war, but looking beyond it, which seemed to me to make the background of it all. Long as I have loved and admired the French, I have often--like many others of their English friends and admirers--felt and fretted against the kind of barrier that seemed to exist between their intimate life and ours. It was as though, at bottom, and in the end, something cold and critical in the French temperament, combined with ignorance and prejudice on our own part, prevented a real contact between the two nationalities. In Lorraine, at any rate, and for the first time, I felt this "something" gone. Let us only carry forward _intelligently_, after the war, the process of friendship born from the stress and anguish of this time--for there is an art and skill in friendship, just as there is an art and skill in love--and new horizons will open for both nations. The mutual respect, the daily intercourse, and the common glory of our two armies fighting amid the fields and woods of France--soon to welcome a third army, your own, to their great fellowship!--are the foundations to-day of all the rest; and next come the efforts that have been made by British and Americans to help the French in remaking and rebuilding their desolated land, efforts that bless him that gives and him that takes, but especially him that gives; of which I shall have more to say in the course of this letter. But a common victory, and a common ardour in rebuilding the waste places, and binding up the broken-hearted: even they will not be enough, unless, beyond the war, all three nations, nay, all the Allies, do not set themselves to a systematic interpenetration of life and thought, morally, socially, commercially. As far as France and England are concerned, English people must go more to France; French people must come more to England. Relations of hospitality, of correspondence, of wide mutual acquaintance, must not be left to mere chance; they must be furthered by the mind of both nations. Our English children must go for part of their education to France; and French children must be systematically wooed over here. Above all the difficulty of language must be tackled as it has never been yet, so that it may be a real disadvantage and disgrace for the boy or girl of either country who has had a secondary education not to be able to speak, in some fashion, the language of the other. As for the working classes, and the country populations of both countries, what they have seen of each other, as brothers in arms during the war, may well prove of more lasting importance than anything else.

* * * * *

But I am wandering a little from Nancy, and the story of our long Sunday. The snow had disappeared, and there were voices of spring in the wind. A French Army motor arrived early, with another French officer, the Capitaine de G----, who proved to be a most interesting and stimulating guide. With him I drove slowly through the beautiful town, looking at the ruined houses, which are fairly frequent in its streets. For Nancy has had its bombardments, and there is one gun of long range in particular, surnamed by the town--"la grosse Bertha," which has done, and still does, at intervals, damage of the kind the German loves. Bombs, too, have been dropped by aeroplanes both here and at Lunéville, in streets crowded with non-combatants, with the natural result. It has been in reprisal for this and similar deeds elsewhere, and in the hope of stopping them, that the French have raided German towns across the frontier. But the spirit of Nancy remains quite undaunted. The children of its schools, drilled to run down to the cellars at the first alarm as our children are drilled to empty a school on a warning of a Zeppelin raid, are the gayest and most spirited creatures, as I saw them at their games and action songs; unless indeed it be the children of the _réfugiés_, in whose faces sometimes one seems to see the reflection of scenes that no child ought to have witnessed and not even a child can forget. For these children come from the frontier villages, ravaged by the German advance, and still, some of them, in German occupation. And the orgy of murder, cruelty, and arson which broke out at Nomény, Badonviller, and Gerbéviller, during the campaign of 1914, has scarcely been surpassed elsewhere--even in Belgium. Here again, as at Vareddes, the hideous deeds done were largely owing to the rage of defeat. The Germans, mainly Bavarians, on the frontier, had set their hearts on Nancy, as the troops of Von Kluck had set their hearts on Paris; and General Castelnau, commanding the Second Army, denied them Nancy, as Maunoury's Sixth Army denied Paris to Von Kluck.

But more of this presently. We started first of all for a famous point in the fighting of 1914, the farm and hill of Léomont. By this time the day had brightened into a cold sunlight, and as we sped south from Nancy on the Lunéville road, through the old town of St. Nicholas du Port, with its remarkable church, and past the great salt works at Dombasle, all the country-side was clear to view.

Good fortune indeed!--as I soon discovered when, after climbing a steep hill to the east of the road, we found ourselves in full view of the fighting lines and a wide section of the frontier, with the Forest of Parroy, which is still partly German, stretching its dark length southward on the right, while to the north ran the famous heights of the Grand Couronné;--name of good omen!--which suggests so happily the historical importance of the ridge which protects Nancy and covers the French right. Then, turning westward, one looked over the valley of the Meurthe, with its various tributaries, the Mortagne in particular, on which stands Gerbéviller; and away to the Moselle and the Meuse. But the panoramic view was really made to live and speak for me by the able man at my side. With French precision and French logic, he began with the geography of the country, its rivers and hills and plateaux, and its natural capacities for defence against the German enemy; handling the view as though it had been a great map, and pointing out, as he went, the disposition of the French frontier armies, and the use made of this feature and that by the French generals in command.

This Lorraine Campaign, at the opening of the war, is very little realised outside France. It lasted some three weeks. It was preceded by the calamitous French reverse at Morhange, where, on August 20th, portions of the 15th and 16th Corps of the Second Army, young troops drawn from south-western France--who in subsequent actions fought with great bravery--broke in rout before a tremendous German attack. The defeat almost gave the Germans Nancy. But General Castelnau and General Foch, between them, retrieved the disaster. They fell back on Nancy and the line of the Mortagne, while the Germans, advancing farther south, occupied Luneville (August 22nd) and burnt Gerbéviller. On the 23rd, 24th, and 25th there was fierce fighting on and near this hill on which we stood. Capitaine de G---- with the 2nd Battalion of Chausseurs, under General Dubail, had been in the thick of the struggle, and he described to me the action on the slopes beneath us, and how, through his glasses, he had watched the enemy on the neighbouring hill forcing parties of French civilians to bury the German dead and dig German trenches, under the fire of their own people.

The hill of Léomont, and the many graves upon it, were quiet enough as we stood talking there. The old farm was in ruins; and in the fields stretching up the hill there were the remains of trenches. All around and below us spread the beautiful Lorraine country, with its rivers and forests; and to the south-east one could just see the blue mass of Mont Donon, and the first spurs of the Vosges.

"Can you show me exactly where the French line runs?" I asked my companion. He pointed to a patch of wood some six miles away. "There is a French battalion there. And you see that other patch of wood a little farther east? There is a German battalion there. Ah!" Suddenly he broke off, and the younger officer with us, Capitaine de B----, came running up, pointing overhead. I craned my neck to look into the spring blue above us, and there--7,000 to 8,000 feet high, according to the officers--were three Boche aeroplanes pursued by two French machines. In and out a light band of white cloud, the fighters in the air chased each other, shrapnel bursting all round them like tufts of white wool. They were so high that they looked mere white specks. Yet we could follow their action perfectly--how the Germans climbed, before running for home, and how the French pursued! It was breathless while it lasted! But we did not see the end. The three Taubes were clearly driven back; and in a few seconds they and the Frenchmen had disappeared in distance and cloud towards the fighting-line. The following day, at a point farther to the north, a well-known French airman was brought down and killed, in just such a fight.

Beyond Léomont we diverged westward from the main road, and found ourselves suddenly in one of those utterly ruined villages which now bestrew the soil of Northern, Central, and Eastern France; of that France which has been pre-eminently for centuries, in spite of revolutions, the pious and watchful guardian of what the labour of dead generations has bequeathed to their sons. Vitrimont, however, was destroyed in fair fight during the campaign of 1914. Bombardment had made wreck of the solid houses, built of the warm red stone of the country. It had destroyed the church, and torn up the graveyard; and when its exiled inhabitants returned to it by degrees, even French courage and French thrift quailed before the task of reconstruction. But presently there arrived a quiet American lady, who began to make friends with the people of Vitrimont, to find out what they wanted, and to consult with all those on the spot who could help to bring the visions in her mind to pass,--with the Préfet, with the officials, local and governmental, of the neighbouring towns, with the Catholic women of the richer Lorraine families, gentle, charitable, devout, who quickly perceived her quality, and set themselves to co-operate with her. It was the American lady's intention--simply--to rebuild Vitrimont. And she is steadily accomplishing it, with the help of generous money subsidies coming, month by month, from one rich American woman--a woman of San Francisco--across the Atlantic. How one envies that American woman!

The sight of Miss Polk at work lives indeed, a warm memory, in one's heart. She has established herself in two tiny rooms in a peasant's cottage, which have been made just habitable for her. A few touches of bright colour, a picture or two, a book or two, some flowers, with furniture of the simplest--amid these surroundings on the outskirts of the ruined village, with one of its capable, kindly faced women to run the _ménage_, Miss Polk lives and works, realising bit by bit the plans of the new Vitrimont, which have been drawn for her by the architect of the department, and following loyally old Lorraine traditions. The church has been already restored and reopened. The first mass within its thronged walls was--so the spectators say--a moving sight. "_That sad word--Joy_"--Landor's pregnant phrase comes back to one, as expressing the bitter-sweet of all glad things in this countryside, which has seen--so short a time ago--death and murder and outrage at their worst. The gratitude of the villagers to their friend and helper has taken various forms. The most public mark of it, so far, has been Miss Folk's formal admission to the burgess rights of Vitrimont, which is one of the old communes of France. And the village insists that she shall claim her rights! When the time came for dividing the communal wood in the neighbouring forest, her fellow citizens arrived to take her with them and show her how to obtain her share. As to the affection and confidence with which she is regarded, it was enough to walk with her through the village, to judge of its reality.

But it makes one happy to think that it is not only Americans who have done this sort of work in France. Look, for instance, at the work of the Society of Friends in the department of the Marne,--on that fragment of the battlefield which extends from Bar-le-Duc to Vitry St. François. "Go and ask," wrote a French writer in 1915, "for the village of Huiron, or that of Glannes, or that other, with its name to shudder at, splashed with blood and powder--Sermaize. Inquire for the English Quakers. Books, perhaps, have taught you to think of them as people with long black coats and long faces. Where are they? Here are only a band of workmen, smooth-faced--not like our country folk. They laugh and sing while they make the shavings fly under the plane and the saw. They are building wooden houses, and roofing them with tiles. Around them are poor people whose features are stiff and grey like those of the dead. These are the women, the old men, the children, the weaklings of our sweet France, who have lived for months in damp caves and dens, till they look like Lazarus rising from the tomb. But life is beginning to come back to their eyes and their lips. The hands they stretch out to you tremble with joy. To-night they will sleep in a house, in _their_ house. And inside there will be beds and tables and chairs, and things to cook with.... As they go in and look, they embrace each other, sobbing."

By June 1915, 150 "Friends" had rebuilt more than 400 houses, and rehoused more than seven hundred persons. They had provided ploughs and other agricultural gear, seeds for the harvest fields and for the gardens, poultry for the farmyards. And from that day to this, the adorable work has gone on. "_By this shall all men know that ye are My disciples, if ye love one another_."

* * * * *

It is difficult to tear oneself away from themes like this, when the story one has still to tell is the story of Gerbéviller. At Vitrimont the great dream of Christianity--the City of God on earth--seems still reasonable.

At Hérémenil, and Gerbéviller, we are within sight and hearing of deeds that befoul the human name, and make one despair of a world in which they can happen.

At luncheon in a charming house of old Lorraine, with an intellectual and spiritual atmosphere that reminded me of a book that was one of the abiding joys of my younger days--the _Récit d'une Soeur_--we heard from the lips of some of those present an account of the arrival at Lunéville of the fugitives from Gerbéviller, after the entry of the Bavarians into the town. Women and children and old men, literally mad with terror, had escaped from the burning town, and found their way over the thirteen kilomètres that separate Gerbéviller from Lunéville. No intelligible account could be got from them; they had seen things that shatter the nerves and brain of the weak and old; they were scarcely human in their extremity of fear. And when, an hour later, we ourselves reached Gerbéviller, the terror which had inspired that frenzied flight became, as we listened to Soeur Julie, a tangible presence haunting the ruined town.

Gerbéviller and Soeur Julie are great names in France to-day. Gerbéviller, with Nomény, Badonviller, and Sermaize, stand in France for what is most famous in German infamy; Soeur Julie, the "chère soeur" of so many narratives, for that form of courage and whole-hearted devotion which is specially dear to the French, because it has in it a touch of _panache_, of audacity! It is not too meek; it gets its own back when it can, and likes to punish the sinner as well as to forgive him. Sister Julie of the Order of St. Charles of Nancy, Madame Rigard, in civil parlance, had been for years when the war broke out the head of a modest cottage hospital in the small country town of Gerbéviller. The town was prosperous and pretty; its gardens ran down to the Mortagne flowing at its feet, and it owned a country house in a park, full of treasures new and old--tapestries, pictures, books--as Lorraine likes to have such things about her.

But unfortunately, it occupied one of the central points of the fighting in the campaign of Lorraine, after the defeat of General Castelnau's Army at Morhange on August 20th, 1914. The exultant and victorious Germans pushed on rapidly after that action. Lunéville was occupied, and the fighting spread to the districts south and west of that town. The campaign, however, lasted only three weeks, and was determined by the decisive French victory of September 8th on the Grand Couronné. By September 12th Nancy was safe; Lunéville and Gerbéviller had been retaken; and the German line had been driven back to where we saw it from the hill of Léomont. But in that three weeks a hell of cruelty, in addition to all the normal sufferings of war, had been let loose on the villages of Lorraine; on Nomény to the north of Nancy, on Badonviller, Baccarat, and Gerbéviller to the south. The Bavarian troops, whose record is among the worst in the war, got terribly out of hand, especially when the tide turned against them; and if there is one criminal who, if he is still living, will deserve and, I hope, get an impartial trial some day before an international tribunal, it will be the Bavarian General, General Clauss.

Here is the first-hand testimony of M. Mirman, the Prefét of the Department. At Gerbeviller, he writes, the ruin and slaughter of the town and its inhabitants had nothing to do with legitimate war:

"We are here in presence of an inexpiable crime. The crime was signed. Such signatures are soon rubbed out. I saw that of the murderer--and I bear my testimony.

"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.