One pathetic and dramatic story ran up and down the trenches upon a
line twenty miles in length. Told by different soldiers, that tragic
story never varies in the essential facts. When the Germans ruined a
village near Ham, they carried away some fifty-four girls and women
between the ages of fourteen and forty. These girls were held behind
the lines among the camp women, kept for the Huns. One chilly morning
last April a French boy, lying on a board on the bottom of his trench,
heard the wild shrieks of a girl. Standing on tiptoe he peeped over
the top to find the French soldiers in the one trench and the Boches
in the other had forgotten the peril of the sniper's bullet, and were
staring at a young girl out in No Man's Land. One week of cruelty had
driven the girl insane. The German soldiers had lifted her out of their
trench, and with their bayonets had pushed her in the direction of the
French lines, and were shouting to her to go over to her friends among
the French.
What the French soldiers saw was a young woman, clothed in a dark
blue skirt, her waist torn, her bosom exposed, her hair loose upon
her shoulders. She was standing bewildered in No Man's Land. Now she
poured forth the pealing laughter of a maniac, and now she seemed to
be talking to herself. Suddenly her eye caught sight of a human body,
wearing the garb of a French soldier. The girl did not know that it was
a French boy who in the darkness had been cutting the barbed wire, and
in the midst of the German flare had been caught by a bullet. Mistaking
the dead boy for that of her young husband, the girl ran forward, fell
upon her knees, and lifted the body that was already cold into her
arms. From time to time she would take an arm grown stiff and try to
put it around her neck and then gaze upon it, not understanding why
the cold hands did not clasp her around in the dear accustomed way.
Suddenly her eyes saw his coat, lying near by; but she did not know
that the boy in his death struggles had torn that coat from his body.
She thought that garment, already stiff with blood, was her own little
babe. Picking up the coat, she dropped upon her knees, lifted it to
her breast, and began to sway to and fro, and soon the French soldiers
heard a lullaby, familiar and dear to every Frenchman whose mother with
that song charmed the fear out of the eyes and the terror from the
heart. So terrible was the scene that for the moment the Frenchman and
German alike forgot all warfare! Finally, a German lifted his rifle to
the shoulder, and as the girl, rising to her feet, flung the bloody
coat away, and screamed, "The Boche! the Boche!" his rifle cracked, and
the young woman sank slowly down. A moment later, all helmets, German
and French alike, disappeared behind the trenches. Silence rested on No
Man's Land, and events went on as before. But for France the world will
never be the same again. German crimes have lighted a flame of sacred
anger that will never burn out until German cruelty has been utterly
consumed. That is why the fire sparkles in the eyes of the Allied
soldiers whenever you suggest peace by negotiation, or a peace without
victory.