THE MARTYRED TOWN
It was certainly a lie with regard to Gerbéviller. That unhappy place
was twice bombarded, first by the Germans and afterwards by the French,
and at the first time of asking there was also a running fight through
its streets. But it was not the shells of the 75’s and the 77’s that
left roofless all but about six of its 463 houses. They were burnt by
fire deliberately applied by the Bavarian soldiery by means chiefly of
sulphur sticks and gunpowder pastilles, little black discs about the
size of a florin, which apparently all the German soldiers carried with
them. I have specimens of both taken from their cow-skin haversacks. The
first time that we saw the town, about ten days after they had been
driven out, we drove there with M. Mirman, the Prefect of Meurthe et
Moselle, who had paid it his first official visit about a week earlier,
and had at once carefully examined all the available evidence as to what
had happened on the spot. That is a way M. Mirman has. He is not a
collector of second-hand rumours. He deals with facts, and the mass of
duly authenticated details about the doings of the Germans in his
Department which he is putting together will form a damning indictment
against them at the end of the war.
We drove to Gerbéviller by the road which, after crossing the Meurthe at
Dombasle, skirts the river and the lower edge of the forest of Vitrimont
for some miles and then cuts through the southern part of the
battlefield on which for three weeks the defenders of Nancy made their
memorable stand. We had therefore many chances of seeing the ruin caused
by the battle at Blainville, Mont, and other villages on the way. But in
none of them was there anything comparable to the wanton and wholesale
destruction at Gerbéviller. In Lorraine they speak of it as
Gerbéviller-la-Martyre. That is just what one feels about it. The town
is like the dead body of a woman whom some inhuman monster has violated
and kicked to death and then thrown into a bonfire.
When we got there some of the ruins were still smoking. We did not go
inside what was left of the walls of the church. They were not in a very
safe condition. In many places in the fields on the edge of the road
just outside the town, and behind some of the tottering fragments of
masonry that had once been the walls of houses, were lying the twisted
carcases of horses; every here and there there was a horrible smell of
burnt and putrefying flesh. There were also some pigs, routing about
among the ruins for what they might devour. At first they were the only
living things we saw. Everything else was dead, everything was burnt and
smashed except the stone figure of the dead Christ on the Cross that
stands at the corner where the principal street branches in two
directions, fully exposed to the shattering volleys that were poured
along it. By some miracle it had escaped destruction. Neither fire nor
shells had touched it. From the church the street winds down the slope
past the Christ on the Cross across the bridges that span the three
streams into which the Mortagne divides as it flows through the town,
then past what was once the private chapel of the family that owns the
old chateau on the opposite side of the road, up the hill on the other
side of the valley where there are half a dozen houses—at last—with
roofs and walls and even windows, from one of which a Red Cross flag is
floating, and then on to the wreck of the railway station. Some people
have likened the remains of the town to the ruins of Pompeii. There is
no need for that. They are the ruins of Gerbéviller. That will be
description enough as long as the stones that are left hang together.
The ruin is monstrous and unholy, especially in the part of the town on
the right bank of the river, where it is, like Jerusalem of old, a city
laid on an heap. We climbed at one place over the piles of stones and
rubbish that had formed the front walls of one of the houses, and in a
sort of ruined vault open to the air, which had been the cellar, saw
lying on its back the blackened skeleton of a woman. She was one of
several of the inhabitants who were burnt in the cellars in which they
took refuge from the German shells and the German brutality. They could
hardly be called hiding-places, because in some cases they were shot if
they tried to come out of them. Others were shot in the streets like
rabbits, as spies, or _franc-tireurs_ or what not. Any pretext or none
was good enough. I have seen a photograph which is in the possession of
the French Government, taken by a responsible official, of fifteen
white-haired old men whose dead bodies were found after the German
withdrawal lying in a field near the town. Their hands were bound
together, their trousers had been unbuttoned and were clinging round
their knees, either as a brutal insult, or else—the irony of it—to
prevent them from running away. They were shot in batches of five. The
signal for their “execution” was given by the senior officer of the
troops which had occupied the town. He sat at a table placed close to
the scene of their murder drinking with some other officers. Three times
he lifted his glass to his lips, and each time that he did so a volley
was fired and five old men fell dead on the ground.
[Illustration:
Photograph by Libert-Fernand, Nancy.
GERBEVILLER—MEURTHE ET MOSELLE.
]
By fire and by bullet probably a hundred and certainly not less than
forty people were assassinated and the whole population rendered
homeless, because, as the Germans said—the usual lying excuse—some of
them had fired on their troops. The truth of what happened is apparently
this. When they attacked the town it was defended only by a body of
Chasseurs, sixty or seventy strong. These men held out all day against
the Bavarian regiments engaged in the attack, that is to say about 4000
men. Till the enemy entered the town in the afternoon the defenders were
subjected to a bombardment as well as to the fire of rifle bullets.
After they entered it the fight was continued along the street till late
in the evening, when the men were driven back to their last stand behind
a barrier which they constructed on one of the bridges. From here during
the night they escaped—they had fought like heroes and nothing was to be
gained by staying any longer—all except two or three who had got
separated from the rest and had hidden in a cellar. Before morning these
others also got away safely, but in order to do so they had first to
kill a sentinel who was posted at the fork of the roads, near the stone
Cross. When his dead body was discovered by the Germans, who were
furious at the resistance they had met with, they decided that he had
been killed by one of the inhabitants, and by way of punishment the acts
of incendiarism were begun and were continued at intervals till the
final general bonfire was lit on the day when they were driven out by
the French soldiers.
Through the two bombardments, and the fight in the streets, and the
burnings and the executions, the horrible story of human blood-lust and
brutality was redeemed by the womanly courage and pity and devotion to
duty which was shown by a little band of Sisters of Mercy, who, with the
now famous Sœur Julie at their head, nursed the wounded all through
those dreadful three weeks, with no thought of their own danger. The
cross of the Legion of Honour was pinned on Sœur Julie’s serge robe
by the President of the Republic, in front of the house where the Red
Cross flag is still floating from the window, and where she and her
fellow-Sisters gave such a splendid proof of the faith that was in them.
Of the many deeds of heroism which they performed there is one little
story which belonged entirely to herself. When the German soldiery were
first let loose in the town, sacking and pillaging, they sacked and
pillaged amongst other places the church (or perhaps it was the chapel,
which is much nearer her house), and tried in vain to break open the
sanctuary above the altar, by firing bullets at the lock. After they had
gone Sœur Julie came to the place and with a bayonet which they had
left on the stones wrenched open the door of the sanctuary, for fear
that the sacred elements might fall into their sacrilegious hand if they
came again. Though no one but a priest had the right to touch the wafers
which were scattered on the floor of the sanctuary, she took them and
the chalice, pierced by the Bavarian bullets, to her own house, and
then, still with the same fear, herself consumed them, as David did the
Shewbread, though with a rather higher object. And then, I am told, she
felt rather uncomfortable in her mind—till she had made her confession
to an ambulancier priest and received absolution for her “sin.”
Gerbéviller differed only in degree from what happened in scores of
other towns and villages all over Lorraine and the Woevre and Alsace and
the Vosges. It was not an isolated case. At Baccarat, at St. Benoit, at
Badonviller, and many other places south of the Meurthe, as at Nomeny,
Réméréville and many other places north of it, there were the same
burnings, and the same shootings of innocent civilians. At Badonviller,
where, besides eleven other victims, the wife of the singularly brave
mayor, Monsieur Benoit, was shot in the street before his eyes, much
more damage was done by incendiarism than by the fights that went on for
the possession of the town. On the French side of the town there are few
signs that it has often, since the beginning of the war, been the centre
of furious fighting. A few French and German graves, distinguished by
_képis_, or spiked helmets, one or two houses damaged by shells—and that
is all. Then, as the road drops down into the town you see on the crest
of the opposite ridge the ruins of the church, which, with the cemetery
behind it was the part of the town that suffered most from the
bombardment. Dome and roof have both been entirely shot away; shattered
fragments of the pillars in front of the church and the shapeless
remains of the four walls are all that is left, except for one thing—a
statue of Joan of Arc, with one arm broken off short at the shoulder,
standing erect and serene on its pedestal, surrounded by the piles of
stone and mortar and timber and glass that litter the floor of the
roofless nave. Outside in the cemetery, at the time of our first visit,
coffins stripped of their covering of earth, broken tombstones, and
shattered crosses completed the dreary scene of desolation, another
proof that the church was the chief target of the German artillery. But
of that there is no doubt. In the rest of the town, away from the
church, comparatively little damage had been done by the shells, and
there is this further curious fact to note, that the bombardment which
did the mischief took place while the place was actually occupied by
German troops. They were simply ordered to keep out of the range of the
fire—which meant away from the actual neighbourhood of the church.
These troops—they were Bavarians—completed the work of destruction by
burning the quarter of the town nearest to the German frontier, some
thirty houses in all, besides pillaging many others. They also shot
twelve of the inhabitants, including a woman and the child she was
holding in her arms, and an old man of seventy-eight, who was sitting
peacefully by his window.
These were the chief events of the first occupation, which took place
early in August. The second—there have been three in all—began on August
23rd. At eight in the morning the French hurriedly evacuated Badonviller
and took up a position at Pexonnes, about two miles to the rear, and the
Germans, after a desultory bombardment, which went on all day, marched
in at six in the evening. For the next few hours there was furious
fighting in and around the town between the Chasseurs Alpins and the
Chasseurs d’Afrique on the one side and the Landwehr, the 162nd Regiment
of Strassburg, and the regiment of Lieutenant von Forstner (since
reported killed), the 99th of Saverne, on the other. During the night a
stronger German force approached the town, and as soon as they entered
it, began ordering the terrified inhabitants to come out of the cellars
in which they had taken refuge, when suddenly they were interrupted by a
furious counter-attack of the Chasseurs, and driven out of the town at
the point of the bayonet. Once more the natives shut themselves up in
the cellars and listened panic-stricken to the noise and confusion of
the struggle overhead. One comfort they had in their alarm. All the
time, above the din of the fighting, they heard the stirring notes of
the French bugles sounding the charge, and all the time the voices of
the French soldiers singing, as they charged, the famous Sidi-’Brahim
bugle-march:—
“Pan! Pan! L’Arbi!
Les chacals sont par ici!
Mais plus haut c’est les Turcos!”
Little by little the Germans retreated, and the sounds died away in the
distance, and then suddenly they began again, as the Chasseurs, still
chanting the Sidi-’Brahim, marched back through the town and retired to
their position at Pexonnes. Then once more the Germans, and at last the
silence of the night.
St. Benoit, near Raon l’Etape, is another of these murdered towns. It
has been destroyed, that is to say, burnt by the Germans, about as
effectually as Gerbéviller. The church has only its four walls left. The
Germans, during their occupation, placed mitrailleuses in the tower,
which stands high up and commands the main road. A body of French troops
passing along this road, which skirts the village to the north, came
under the fire of the mitrailleuses and suffered severely, without being
able to see where the attack came from. A second detachment was more
fortunate in finding out the position of the machine guns. A battery of
75’s was trained on the church. Shortly afterwards the French retired on
Rambervillers, and when the Germans reached St. Benoit they set fire to
the village to avenge the death of their comrades who belonged to the
same corps. They did not, however, the Mayor told us, kill any of the
inhabitants, of whom only 12 out of about 250 were missing.
In the little schoolhouse there are no doors, the blackboards are
riddled with bullets, and there is not a pane of glass in the windows.
But in this skeleton of a house we found the schoolmaster teaching a
class of twelve little boys who had their fathers’ coats and old sacks
hung on their shoulders to keep out the cold, and when we came in they
stood up like one man and sang a verse of the “Marseillaise.”
A little further on, in the Col de la Chipotte, which both sides called
the “Hole of Hell,” we came to the place where for several days was
fought the bloodiest battle of all this border warfare. Three or four
hundred feet below the road on the left, as it rises to the top of the
pass, there is a beautiful valley, with a quick little burn running at
the bottom of it with fir trees growing thickly on each side. On the
right the ground falls away in a more gradual slope. For some miles
along each side of this road there is not a space of ten yards in which
there are not the graves of French and German soldiers, marked by
crosses made of branches of trees, and here and there by a battered
_képi_. On the crosses are carved little flat slabs. If you read the
rough inscriptions on them—“Thirteen Germans,” or “Seventeen French
Soldiers”—you will see that those on the German graves are written
sometimes in German (in which case the number of the regiment is given),
and sometimes in French, but those of the French in French only. In
other words, the enemy buried only their own dead, and only some of
them, and it was left to the French to finish the work for both sides,
or to finish it partly. For up from the valley and the woods came the
sickening smell of still unburied bodies, the last remains of this
butchery of a battle.
There was fighting for about twelve or thirteen days round that stretch
of valley and mountain road, German attacks from both sides that drove
the French back by weight of superior numbers, and later a
counter-attack of the French in stronger force which pushed the enemy
back over the crest. It was a battle of rifle fire and hand-to-hand
fighting with bayonets and knives and rifle-butts and fists, a battle on
one side of the road of short breathless bursts and long painful
scrambles up and up to the deadly trenches cut on the bare slopes, on
the other of slow aimless groping through the low branches of the
dripping fir trees, so thickly planted that where they grew neither
aeroplanes nor artillery could do their work, a bewildering,
nerve-shaking game of blindman’s-buff under a hail of whistling bullets
that came from all sides at once, a hideous battue in an impenetrable
covert with men for ground-game.
But, after all, it was a fair stand-up fight between gallant soldiers,
with no quarter given or asked, in which each side could respect the
other, not a shameful massacre of unarmed innocents among the flaming
wrecks of their ruined homes, like those which in other parts of the
Vosges and Lorraine covered the Bavarian butchers with undying disgrace.
Gerbéviller and Nomeny were far more hellish “Holes of Hell” than the
Col de la Chipotte.