In August of 1914, when the German army was broken and compelled to
retreat before the French, they passed through many French towns and
villages in which they found no soldiers and no weapons, and where no
battle, no skirmish and no shot took place. During last July and August
we went slowly from one of these ruined towns to another, talking
with the broken-hearted women and children, comparing the photographs
taken immediately after the German retreat and almost before the
mutilated bodies were cold. Slowly we sifted the evidence. On the
ground we compared the full official records made at the time, with the
statements of wretched survivors who live in cellars, where once stood
the beautiful homes, the orchards and vineyards, but where now all is
desolation and anguish.
Among the multitude of events described by witnesses who survived the
martyrdom of their village are the following: When the noise of the
approach of General Clauss' division of twenty thousand soldiers in
full retreat was heard, an aged Frenchman stood in his open door. He
had retired from business, to spend his last days midst the friends of
his childhood and youth. Hearing the noise of the approaching army,
the merchant stepped to his open door. As the first automobile swept
by, the German officers lifted their revolvers and emptied the lead
into the old man's body. He pitched forward down the stone steps, and
in his death struggle worked his way to the wrought iron gate, where
after the German retreat he was found dead. Before touching the body,
official photographers, under the direction of their noble Prefect,
took their photographs from different angles. In the garden behind
the smoking cellar was found the wife, lying dead upon the grass, her
left wrist tied by the clothes-line to the root of an apple tree, the
right wrist tied to a clump of gooseberry bushes. She was dead, but not
through dagger or pistol. Standing beside their graves we studied the
photographs and talked with the families of the fifteen aged men whom
General Clauss ordered shot because there were no young or middle-aged
men in the village whom he could kill.