LUNÉVILLE
One of the immediate and most satisfactory results of the victory in
front of Nancy was the hasty withdrawal of the Germans from Lunéville,
after an occupation which lasted for just three weeks. For four or five
days before the evacuation the Bavarian troops in front of the town had
been gradually falling back on the protection of the batteries in and
beyond it. Only one of these batteries, I believe, was in Lunéville
itself. It was placed, in obedience to the maxim that war and what the
Professors call sentimentality are poles asunder, close to one of the
hospitals, under the shadow and protection of the Red Cross. During the
bombardment one of the French nurses, a girl of eighteen, was
unfortunately killed by a chance shell. But the battery was perfectly
safe. For naturally, seeing where it was, the French gunners did not
choose to fire on it. They could not play the game except as gentlemen,
and the other side consequently scored, as has been known to happen in
our own country in the kindred game of football, also rather apt to
suffer from the disease of “Professoritis.” In any case, when the French
got near enough to bring an effective fire to bear upon the town, their
bombardment was bound to be half-hearted. They knew that there were
German soldiers quartered in the barracks and in many of the houses. But
they knew also that a large proportion of its inhabitants were still
there and they naturally shrank from the chance of spilling French blood
and the certainty of destroying French property, beyond what was
absolutely necessary. As a matter of fact, the amount of damage done by
shells was surprisingly small. The chief monument to the power of the
75’s was the melancholy wreck of the official residence of M. Minier,
the Sous-Préfet, which a couple of shells completely gutted. Not far
off, near the station, one or two other houses were about as badly
wrecked, but except for a certain kind of destruction which was due, not
to French shells, but to German fire-lighters a short-sighted man might
have walked through nearly all the streets a day or two after the
evacuation without once noticing that there had been a bombardment.
Inside some of the houses there was more to be seen. One of the
inhabitants, for instance, showed me with quaint pride the mess which a
75 shrapnel shell had made of his comfortable home. It had first drilled
a neat little round hole through the wall of his dressing-room, and then
burst and sent bullets and jagged fragments of the case flying through
the walls into his study and the kitchen and every room on the first
floor. Amongst other things, it had riddled his bath-tub like a sieve.
Fortunately, he was not in it at the time. He was out on one of the
heights west of Lunéville talking to the commander of the very battery
which broke up his happy home, and actually saw the shot fired. Like
every one else who suffered at all from the bombardment (including M.
Minier, who lost practically everything he had), he took it quite
cheerfully because the shell which did the mischief and the cause in
which it was fired were both French.
But the bombardment, which was mainly cautionary, was not yet. It came
at a later stage in the occupation, when there began to be a chance of
turning the enemy out. The first Germans entered the town on the evening
of August 22nd, after a stiff fight which had lasted all day and
resulted in the orderly retreat of the garrison, too few in numbers to
hold them back indefinitely, in the direction of Gerbéviller. They
marched in slowly, with marked caution, as if, the inhabitants said,
they were afraid of a surprise attack. However, there was no further
opposition, and on the 23rd, with drums beating and bands playing
triumphal music, a much larger body of troops made a parade entry into
the town and spread over it like a flock of locusts. Here, as elsewhere,
they seem to have had a particularly keen appetite for wine and women’s
underclothing and anything in the shape of a clock. They were not all
strangers to Lunéville. As commercial travellers, and in other
capacities connected with the peaceful pursuit of trade, several of them
had been well known to the inhabitants for years before their arrival in
the guise of warriors, and, for their own purposes, made good use of
their local knowledge. But on the whole, the behaviour of the Germans,
considering that they were Germans, was not particularly outrageous. A
military governor was appointed and some effort was made to preserve
order and even justice. The pillage was not wholesale, the incendiarism
only extended to one part of the town, the Faubourg d’Einville, and one
or two single buildings in other quarters, including the Jewish
synagogue, and the cases of cold-blooded murder of civilians were not
very numerous. Lunéville is not an obscure village, and it is not unfair
to say that, as a general rule, the larger the place which the fortune
of war had placed at the mercy of the German troops, the more careful
they were in the way in which they treated it. Still, even in Lunéville,
in spite of the restraining influence on their actions of such important
witnesses as M. Minier, the Sous-Préfet, M. Mequillet, the local Député,
and M. Keller, the Mayor, all of whom behaved in very trying
circumstances with great judgment and courage, the German record was
pretty bad. Most of the cases of shooting at sight seem to have been due
not so much to wanton lust for blood as to the nervous haste of
sentinels in the streets who imagined when they heard a window suddenly
opened that their own lives were in danger. But the burning of the
Faubourg d’Einville, a row of about forty houses which were set on fire
two or three at a time for days till the whole street was destroyed, was
an unwarrantable and unpardonable crime. For the Military Governor, from
the moment of his entry into the town, had taken every precaution to
prevent the acts of franctireurism which were usually made the excuse
for this kind of outrage. In the first place rules of extraordinary
severity were made and published and rigorously enforced as to what the
civilian inhabitants must or must not do while the Germans were in the
town. One of these _affiches_ is, I think, worth quoting as a historical
document:—
“AVIS À LA POPULATION
“Le 25 Aout 1914, des habitants de Lunéville ont fait une attaque par
embuscade contre des colonnes et trains allemands. Le même jour, des
habitants ont tiré sur des formations sanitaires marquées pas la Croix
Rouge. De plus on a tiré sur des blessés allemands et sur l’hôpital
militaire contenant une ambulance allemande.
“A cause de ces actes d’hostilité, une contribution de guerre de
650.000 francs est imposée à la commune de Lunéville. Ordre est donné
à M. le Maire de verser cette somme en or et en argent jusqu’ à 50.000
francs, le 6 septembre 1914, à 9 heures du matin, entre les mains du
représentant de l’autorité allemande. Toute réclamation sera
considerée comme nulle et non arrivée. On n’accordera pas de délai.
“Si la commune n’exécute pas ponctuellement l’ordre de payer la somme
de 650.000 francs, on saisira tous les biens exigibles.
“En cas de non paiement, des perquisitions domiciliaires auront lieu
et tous les habitants seront fouillés. Quiconque aura dissimulé
sciemment de l’argent ou essayé de soustraire des biens à la saisie de
l’autorité militaire, ou qui cherche a quitter la ville, sera fusillé.
“Le Maire et les otages, pris par l’autorité militaire, seront rendus
responsables d’exécuter exactement les ordres sus-indiqés.
“Ordre est donné à M. le Maire de publier tout de suite ces
dispositions à la commune.
“HERAMENIL le 3 septembre 1914.
“Le Général en chef,
“VON FASBENDER.”
In addition to the stringent regulations and threats contained in this
and other proclamations of the same kind (the statements in which were
unproved and false) the German authorities in command of Lunéville took
a further precaution to guard themselves against any kind of reprisal on
the part of the French population. Every day six prominent residents of
the town had to present themselves before the Governor and remain at his
disposal for twenty-four hours as hostages responsible for the orderly
behaviour of their fellow-citizens. Their position was not enviable.
Exposed, like every one else in Lunéville, to the danger of being killed
by the shells of their friends outside the town, they were guarded day
and night by sentries with loaded rifles, knowing (because they had been
warned) that at any moment they were liable to be shot if one of the
inhabitants in a fit of desperation lifted a finger against the sacred
body of a German soldier. The fact that they were not shot is proof
positive that no acts of the kind were attempted, and that therefore
there was no sort of excuse for the burning of the Faubourg d’Einville.
As the occupation continued, as the fortune of the battle between
Lunéville and Nancy turned more and more against the Germans, and the
French troops and the French shells came nearer and nearer, the Germans
in the town day by day became more nervous and irritable and their
attitude to the hostages and the rest of the townsfolk more and more
harsh and capricious, and it was with something more than a sigh of
relief that at last, on September 12th, M. Minier, M. Mequillet, and M.
Keller realized that for the town and themselves the time of trial was
at an end. M. Keller I only knew slightly; the other two I met often
while I was in Lorraine. All three make light of the difficult part
which they played when the Germans were in the town and while they were
waiting at their posts for their coming. But I know from others that the
courage and quiet dignity and practical wisdom with which they stood
between their fellow-citizens and the invader were beyond all praise.
They were all three fine types of the scores of Frenchmen in official
positions all over the occupied provinces who stuck to their posts in
the hour of danger. During those three weeks, when it was cut off from
the rest of the world, life in Lunéville, under its twofold tribulation
of occupation and siege, was not exactly gay for any one. The stern
application of martial law, the regulations about open doors and lights,
the growing shortness of food, the restrictions on personal liberty, the
noise and risks of the bombardment, the glare of the burning houses, the
fear for every one of possible death by a bullet fired by some drunken
soldier, and, for the women, of something worse than death, and the
constant presence of the hated and domineering invader, all combined to
keep the inhabitants in a continual state of anxiety and alarm and
general wretchedness. But it was on the shoulders of those three men
that the burden of it pressed most heavily, and the debt which Lunéville
owes them is real and great.
While they were doing their best inside the town to save it for France,
or, at all events, to save it from being sacked and burnt, they were in
a state of complete ignorance as to what was happening outside it.
Rumours, of course, there were, but nothing was certain. They were
surrounded on every side, left stranded on a lonely island in a German
ocean of invasion. They could only guess vaguely from the nearing or
receding sound of the guns and the temper of the German men and officers
round them how the battle was going. Yet all the time they kept up their
spirits and the spirits of all the French within the reach of their
influence. At the worst they never allowed themselves to doubt—think
what that meant—that the turn of the tide would come and Lunéville be
joined to the mainland of France again. And they were right. Their
splendid confidence in their own men and the destinies of France was
justified. All the time the rush of the tide was slackening and the hour
of their deliverance coming nearer.
The ebb began in earnest on September 8th. On that day the young dragoon
officer in whose company we began the great battle, crossed the Mortagne
at Mont by a temporary bridge erected by the engineers, and after a
brush with half a dozen Uhlans on the Lunéville side of it, rode with
his men along the Meurthe to Rehainviller, a village only two miles from
the south-west corner of the town, and found that not a German was left
in it. That news he sent back by one of his men to the general, and then
walked on alone, as the sun was rising, along the wall of the cemetery
on the right of the road just beyond the village. “I reached,” he says,
“the corner, where I stopped dead. I found myself face to face with a
German captain, like me alone and on foot. He was as thunderstruck to
see me as I was to meet him. Like me he had his map-case in his hand. He
had been examining the country.... We looked at each other, with our
eyes wide open. He felt for his revolver. Feverishly I tried to open my
case. Both of us knew that this contest of speed would decide our fate,
and we looked straight into each other’s eyes. Then I smiled, my
revolver came out of its case, the butt tight in my hand. My arm
stretched out. Then the officer no longer felt for his weapon: he knew
that he was beaten. My revolver flashed. He fell, with one bullet full
in his heart. The whole thing only lasted a second. It hurt me to see
him lying there; he had large blue eyes, open in death.”
To me that young French dragoon is only a name, or not even that, since
he has none, but a type of all the gallant soldiers of France who fought
in the gap between those blood-stained rivers. Still more, after that
contest of speed, that duel to the death at sunrise by the corner of the
cemetery wall, he becomes for me a symbol of France—France facing
Germany, both knowing that one or the other must fall, both clutching at
their weapons and staring into each others’ faces with wide open eyes. I
think we will not leave him now till he in his turn rides in triumph
into the streets of Lunéville.
The sound of the shot brought his men running up to him, and also drew
the fire of the company of the dead German officer, who were hidden in a
ravine a quarter of a mile further on. Luckily for the handful of
dragoons, whom presumably they took for the advance-guard of a larger
body of men, they did not, however, advance, but retired to the corner
of the buildings of a big manufactory, almost in Lunéville itself.
The German position was now on the road just in front of the town, the
first houses of which were within easy range of the rifles of the
French, who had by this time occupied Rehainviller and were gradually
closing in all round. But they still had three days of stiff fighting in
front of them before the end was reached, during which they were heavily
handicapped, as they had been all through the early part of the war, by
the fact that even their 155’s were outranged by a large number of the
German pieces, whose average effective range was at that time about six
miles, while the French could barely reach four. Supported by these
heavier guns from behind Lunéville the enemy advanced again in force to
within a mile of Rehainviller, up to a line between Hériménil and the
wood of Fréhaut, and it was not till the evening of the 11th that they
were finally driven back and that the French were able to look forward
with confidence to the prospect of being able to enter Lunéville on the
next day.
On one of the three days our lieutenant with some of his men was riding
through a village which had been occupied by the enemy a few hours
before. Not a single inhabitant was left in it. All the houses were
sacked. The flight of the Bavarians had been so hurried that they had
not had time to burn them. The rest of his story, which it seems to me
ought to be told to English readers, I give—because English readers have
English ways of looking at life and talking about it—in the original
French:—
“Par la fenêtre brisée, je voyais la salle à manger d’une demeure
confortable. Le buffet eventré, renversé, écrasant la table. La
vaisselle s’amoncelait sur le parquet, avec les bouteilles vides et
cassées, jusqu’à la hauteur des chaises. Une suspension, tombée du
plafond, s’était abîmée sur le buffet, et son globe vert, sans une
félure, par un prodige d’équilibre, se maintenait sur ce meuble
penché, comme allongé sur la table.
“Une voix m’appela par mon nom.
“C’était un officier du bataillon de chasseurs qui avait pris le
village. Il était à la fenêtre, au premier étage de la maison
dévastée.
“Monte un peu, me dit-il.
“Je repondis: ‘Je suis fatigué et pressé de rentrer cantonner.’
“Il reprit. ‘Cela en vaut la peine. C’est un de ces cochons qui est
crevé au sein de son fumier.’
“Je descends de cheval. Sur la porte de la maison une plaque de cuivre
brillante: ‘Etude de M. X. Notaire’. Je monte. Mon camarade rit aux
éclats, entouré d’un groupe d’officiers. Il y a de quoi.
“La chambre est saccagée, comme le reste de la maison; le linge sorti
des armoires, piétiné, les meubles démolis. Le lit est défait et sale.
Un lieutenant allemand a passé là la nuit précédente, et s’est couché
dans les draps sans retirer ses bottes. Une odeur écoeurante règne
dans la piece. Mais pourquoi S ... m’ a-t-il fait monter?
“Regarde, dit-il.
“Je n’avais pas vu! Un lieutenant bavarois est assis, mort, entouré
d’ordures, d’excréments humains, dans le tiroir ouvert d’une commode
ancienne. Ses culottes sont abaissées sur ses bottes. Sa tête et ses
épaules penchées tombent sur la poitrine vers les jambes. Il est dans
une posture ignoble, grotesque, malgré la mort.
“‘Nous sommes entrés brusquement dans le village,—me fit S..., sans
crier gare. De cette maison on nous tire un coup de feu. Je monte.
C’était un soldat qui nous visait de cette fenêtre. Je l’abats. Je me
retourne; et je vois ce cochon de gaillard en train de faire ses
insanités dans le tiroir de ce beau meuble, sur les dentelles de
famille! Il était si ahuri de me voir qu’il ne s’est même pas levé,
restant dans sa position ignoble et relevant sa chemise à deux mains.
Je lui ai tiré un coup de revolver. Il s’est abattu sur son
fumier....’
“Et je pense à la fiancée allemande, dans ce village de Bavière, qui
apprendra la mort de ce lieutenant et se représentera cette mort
héroique et chevaleresque ...”
It is not a very pleasant story, as we say in England, but then the
seamy side of the war is not pleasant, especially war as it is made in
France by some Germans. And the more people in England realize that fact
the better for the cause and hopes of us and our Allies.
On the night of the 11th, or rather at two o’clock in the morning of the
12th, the lieutenant assisted at a rather different scene, as dramatic
and glorious for all the sons of France as the other was vile and
ignoble for all Germans. He was roused from his sleep by an orderly with
the news that the General wished to see all the officers at once. With
all the others he hurried to the General’s quarters, and there—it was in
the police station—the brigadier handed them the famous telegram of
General Joffre, announcing that the Germans were retreating, the Battle
of the Marne won, Paris freed from the menace of the enemy, and France
saved.
There was no more sleep for those men that night. They embraced each
other, as Frenchmen do, they cried, as all men may sometimes in hours of
great joy after times of exhausting strain and anxiety, they
congratulated each other as though each man was the victorious
Commander-in-Chief himself, and at four o’clock the order was given “To
horse! To Lunéville!” On the Marne the enemy were beaten and in full
retreat. From the Grand Couronné they had been driven back to the
Seille. Only one thing remained to be done here, on de Castelnau’s
right—to hunt them out of Lunéville and chase them back to the frontier
without a moment’s delay.
[Illustration:
INFANTRY ATTACK ON FARM OF SAINT EPVRE, ON THE HEIGHTS ABOVE
LUNÉVILLE.
_From “En Plein Feu.” By kind permission of M. Vermot, Rue
Duguay-Trouin, Paris._
]
The way was across the Meurthe, through the forest of Vitrimont, out
past the ruined Faisanderie with its loop-holed crumbling walls, over
the shell-pitted slope below it and the shell-pitted dip beyond, and up
the slope again and down to the Nancy road to the right of the ruins of
the farm of Léomont, ragged and blackened against the sky, always past
rows of deserted German trenches, littered with rifles and ammunition
and haversacks and empty bottles—especially bottles—and then
right-handed along the broad road to the Faubourg of Nancy, the
north-west entrance to the town. Till they reached the road not a sign
of the enemy. Only near the ruined farm-buildings of St. Epvre on the
ridge of Frescati beyond it, covering the retreat, a company of Bavarian
Chasseurs, dislodged with some difficulty, for they fought bravely, and
then the road to Lunéville, clear at last. They entered it, these
dragoons of the advance-guard, at a gallop, galloping over the cobbles
and pavements of the streets in an ecstasy of triumph, dashing across
the river somehow (for the Germans had blown up the bridges), active
little Chasseurs-à-pied running beside them and easily keeping up with
their thundering chargers, women scattering flowers on them, waving
handkerchiefs from the doors and windows, and cheering and crying, and
every one shouting “La France! Vive la France! La France!” up to the
wide square in front of the grave old Palace of Stanislas, up to the
line of sweating horses of another squadron of dragoons which had
galloped into the town just as madly by the shorter road from the south.
It was Mulhouse over again, without the Mulhouse mistakes. It was
utterly different from the measured entry of the Germans three weeks
before, with their massed bands and formal triumph. If the men were a
trifle excited they had excuse enough. For that frenzied headlong entry
into Lunéville put the finishing touch to the victory of the Grand
Couronné, and set the seal on all the sacrifice and all the heroism of
those splendid three weeks. That night Lunéville was free and French
once more; not a German was left within some miles of it. That night,
for the first time for more than a month, our lieutenant of dragoons was
able to take a bath and sleep between sheets. And on that night,
September 12th, 1914, thousands and thousands of French men and women
all over France slept more soundly and more calmly than on any night
since the war began because from Paris and Nancy and little Lunéville
the abominable menace of German occupation was gone, never to return
again.