ROBBERY UNDER ARMS
Between Montreux Vieux and Pfetterhausen there is a little French
village called Suarce, which, on the very eve of the war, was the scene
of an incident almost as dramatic from a historical point of view as the
violation of Belgium two days later. At the end of July, for some days
before the war began, the French had withdrawn their troops to a
distance of six miles from the frontier all along the line from
Luxembourg to the point, a mile from Pfetterhausen, which is the
meeting-place of the boundaries of France, Switzerland, and Alsace. They
were acting, I believe, partly at the suggestion of the English
Government, and certainly with their warm approval. A few frontier
posts, consisting chiefly of douaniers and gendarmes, had to be left,
but, short of their recall, everything possible was done to remove
temptation from the path of swashbuckling Uhlan patrols, and so to
diminish the risk of incidents likely to precipitate the declaration of
war.
Unfortunately, these precautions were thrown away, and were even turned
to France’s disadvantage. Before war had begun, Germany had sent a
number of small patrols across the frontier with roving commissions, to
promote the very incidents which France had tried to avoid. After it was
declared, in part of the border district between Metz and Luxembourg,
she gained valuable time by the ease with which her troops advanced in
the neutral zone which France had created. France, hoping against hope
for peace, had played the game: Germany, bent on war, had broken the
rules before it began.
There were nineteen of these deliberate acts of trespass by armed men on
the soil of a friendly power between Longwy and Belfort, twelve of them,
on Sunday, August 2nd, in the Belfort district, the rest, either on the
Sunday or the Monday, at Cirey and other places further north. The
number of them and the wide extent of ground which they covered, were in
themselves enough to prove that they were part of a premeditated scheme,
and not merely the casual acts of a few irresponsible and excitable
individuals. But there were facts about the affair at Suarce which made
it different from the others and established beyond question that the
German soldiers concerned in it (and therefore in the other eighteen
cases) were acting under the orders of their superior officers.
The affray in which the first lives were lost on each side took place at
Joncherey, close to Delle on the Swiss frontier, five miles nearer to
Belfort than Suarce. A glowing account of it was given in the _Elsasser
Kurier_, a paper published at Colmar, which not only acknowledged the
raid and the date (August 2, 1914), but deliberately gloried in the
achievement of its leader, Lieutenant Mayer, of the 5th Chasseurs. He
was, it says, when he received his orders from the general officer
commanding the brigade to reconnoitre in the direction of Belfort, “full
of joy and the lust of fighting, and proud to be the first to teach the
enemy the might of the German trooper.” When he and his patrol of six or
seven crossed the frontier into France they found, according to the same
authority, that the numerous French cavalry and infantry detachments
which had patrolled the district for some days before had disappeared—in
obedience, of course, to the orders of their Government. On the way to
Delle they saw, however, two sentinels posted on the road. “Like a flash
of lightning,” wrote the Colmar enthusiast, “Lieutenant Mayer overtook
them, and with the first stroke of his German sabre cleft to the breast
the head of a French _pioupiou_, who was almost paralyzed by terror. At
the same time, just as quickly, first-class trooper Heize thrust his
lance with such fury into the breast of the other private that he could
not withdraw his weapon from the body which he had pierced (“overtaken”
is the word used), and was obliged to continue his ride with his sabre
(and not his lance) in his hand.” The German story then goes on to tell
how the little troop proceeded to gallop through a company of fifty
French infantry without losing a man, how Lieutenant Mayer was shot down
after they had passed them, and how first-class trooper Heize then took
command and finally reached the German lines with a further loss of
three men. As a matter of fact, the feats of arms of the gallant
lieutenant and first-class trooper Heize were not quite so charmingly
mediæval as the story makes out. What really happened was that when they
came upon the French post, consisting of a corporal and four men,
Lieutenant Mayer, by way of answer to Corporal Peugeot’s challenge,
fired three shots at him with his revolver, one of which wounded him
mortally, and was himself hit and killed by three bullets fired by the
guard. (He was afterwards buried at Joncherey with full military
honours, and a wreath was placed on his grave by the French.) The rest
of the German account, except the appearance on the scene of the fifty
worst shots in the French army, is fairly correct. In any case it is
near enough to the truth to prove without need of further witness that
the raid was not a mere youthful indiscretion on the part of the
unfortunate Lieutenant Mayer.
[Illustration:
FRENCH ADVANCE IN VILLAGE STREET OF MAGNIÈRES, MEURTHE ET MOSELLE.
_From “En Plein Feu.” By kind permission of M. Vermot, Rue
Duguay-Trouin, Paris._
]
But the affair at Suarce is the most really damning piece of evidence
supplied by any of these pre-war violations of French territory. It is
not necessary to depend on the testimony of a Colmar newspaper, which
might possibly be still further mistaken in its statements, to make the
complicity of the German _haut commandement_ historically certain. Early
in the morning of the same fateful date (August 2, 1914), two cyclists
and seven troopers of the German 22nd regiment of Dragoons rode into the
village and informed the inhabitants that it was conquered territory.
Later in the day an officer, a non-commissioned officer, and twelve
troopers of the same regiment appeared, and after breaking up the
telephone apparatus, forced a provision convoy, consisting of nine men,
two waggons, and twenty-two horses, on its way to Belfort, to turn round
and accompany them to Germany. The waggons and horses were taken as
loot; the men were presumably the first specimens of the new kind of
civil prisoner which, during the war, the Germans have been pleased to
label as “hostages.” But in time of peace it is not the custom of
civilized nations to take either loot or hostages from their neighbours,
and, since there were no soldiers engaged in the affair on the French
side, and therefore no fighting, the act could not be defended as an act
of retaliation. Nor is there any question of the officer having done
what he did merely on his own responsibility. You cannot take a troop of
French horses and waggons and men into Germany and hide them under a
bushel. The officer would not, in fact, have dared to commit the crime
of international robbery and kidnapping, and then carried off his spoil
with him to barracks, unless he had known that it would be condoned by
his superior officers. In other words, like the Roman centurion, he was
a man set under authority, and only did what he was told to do. The
facts of the incident, as I have given them, are indisputable. If, at
the time when the British cabinet was weighing the reasons for and
against joining in the war, there were any of its members who doubted
the extent of Germany’s guilt, the story of Suarce may well have played
(as I have heard it did) an important part in helping them to make up
their minds. For it was possibly the earliest positive evidence which
proved beyond a shadow of doubt Germany’s deliberate intention of going
to war. As far as I know, the story has not previously been published,
at all events in any detail, and therefore it may be of a certain amount
of historical interest to give the names of the nine Frenchmen who were
made prisoners of war before war was declared. They were: Edouard Voelin
(58 years of age), Eugène Mattin (52), François Verthe (66), Isidore
Skup (57), Céléstin Fleury (55), Henri Féga (53), J. Pierre Marchal
(51), Charles Martin (29), and Emile Mouhay (29). The last two had been
passed as “bons pour l’armée” in the class of 1914. The rest were
obviously far beyond the military age. Two of the nine have died during
their indefensible imprisonment in Germany.