_May 24th_, 1917.
DEAR MR. ROOSEVELT,--To any citizen of a country allied with France in
the present struggle, above all to any English man or woman who is
provided with at least some general knowledge of the Battle of the
Marne, the journey across France from Paris to Nancy can never fail to
be one of poignant interest. Up to a point beyond Châlons, the "Ligne de
l'Est" follows in general the course of the great river, and therefore
the line of the battle. You pass La Fertée-sous-Jouarre, where the Third
Corps of General French's army crossed the river; Charly-sur-Marne,
where a portion of the First Corps found an unexpectedly easy crossing,
owing, it is said, to the hopeless drunkenness of the enemy rear-guard
charged with defending the bridge; and Château Thierry, famous in the
older history of France, where the right of the First Corps crossed
after sharp fighting, and, in the course of "a gigantic man-hunt" in and
around the town, took a large number of German prisoners, before, by
nightfall, coming into touch with the left of the French Fifth Army
under Franchet d'Espercy. At Dornans you are only a few miles north of
the Marshes of St. Gond, where General Foch, after some perilous
moments, won his brilliant victory over General Billow and the German
Second Army, including a corps of the Prussian Guards; while at Châlons
I look up from a record I am reading of the experiences of the Diocese
during the war, written by the Bishop, to watch for the distant
cathedral, and recall the scene of the night of September 9th, when the
German Headquarters Staff in that town, "flown with insolence and wine,"
after what is described as "an excellent dinner and much riotous
drinking," were roused about midnight by a sudden noise in the Hôtel,
and shouts of "The French are here!" "In fifteen minutes," writes an
officer of the Staff of General Langle de Gary, "the Hôtel was empty."
At Épernay and Châlons those French officers who were bound for the
fighting line in Champagne, east and west of Reims, left the train; and
somewhere beyond Épernay I followed in thought the flight of an
aeroplane which seemed to be heading northwards across the ridges which
bound the river valley--northwards for Reims, and that tragic ghost
which the crime of Germany has set moving through history for ever,
never to be laid or silenced--Joan of Arc's Cathedral. Then, at last, we
are done with the Marne. We pass Bar-le-Duc, on one of her tributaries,
the Ornain; after which the splendid Meuse flashes into sight, running
north on its victorious way to Verdun; then the Moselle, with Toul and
its beautiful church on the right; and finally the Meurthe, on which
stands Nancy. A glorious sisterhood of rivers! The more one realises
what they have meant to the history of France, the more one understands
that strong instinct of the early Greeks, which gave every river its
god, and made of the Simois and the Xanthus personages almost as real as
Achilles himself.
But alas! the whole great spectacle, here as on the Ourcq, was sorely
muffled and blurred by the snow, which lay thick over the whole length
and breadth of France, effacing the landscape in one monotonous
whiteness. If I remember rightly, however, it had ceased to fall, and
twenty-four hours after we reached Nancy, it had disappeared. It lasted
just long enough to let us see the fairy-like Place Stanislas raise its
beautiful gilded gates and white palaces between the snow and the
moon-light--a sight not soon forgotten.
We were welcomed at Nancy by the Préfet of the Department, Monsieur Léon
Mirman, to whom an old friend had written from Paris, and by the
courteous French officer, Capitaine de B., who was to take us in charge,
for the French Army, during our stay. M. Mirman and his active and
public-spirited wife have done a great work at Nancy, and in the
desolated country round it. From the ruined villages of the border, the
poor _réfugiés_ have been gathered into the old capital of Lorraine, and
what seemed to me a remarkably efficient and intelligent philanthropy
has been dealing with their needs and those of their children. Nor is
this all. M. Mirman is an old Radical and of course a Government
official, sent down some years ago from Paris. Lorraine is ardently
Catholic, as we all know, and her old Catholic families are not the
natural friends of the Republican _régime_. But President Poincaré's
happy phrase, _l'union sacrée_--describing the fusion of all parties,
classes, and creeds in the war service of France, has nowhere found a
stronger echo than in Lorraine. The Préfet is on the friendliest of
terms with the Catholic population, rich and poor; and they, on their
side, think and speak warmly of a man who is clearly doing his patriotic
best for all alike.
Our first day's journeyings were to show us something of the qualities
of this Catholic world of Lorraine. A charming and distinguished
Frenchwoman who accompanied us counted, no doubt, for much in the warmth
of the kindness shown us. And yet I like to believe--indeed I am
sure--that there was more than this in it. There was the thrilling sense
of a friendship between our two nations, a friendship new and
far-reaching, cemented by the war, but looking beyond it, which seemed
to me to make the background of it all. Long as I have loved and admired
the French, I have often--like many others of their English friends and
admirers--felt and fretted against the kind of barrier that seemed to
exist between their intimate life and ours. It was as though, at bottom,
and in the end, something cold and critical in the French temperament,
combined with ignorance and prejudice on our own part, prevented a real
contact between the two nationalities. In Lorraine, at any rate, and for
the first time, I felt this "something" gone. Let us only carry forward
_intelligently_, after the war, the process of friendship born from the
stress and anguish of this time--for there is an art and skill in
friendship, just as there is an art and skill in love--and new horizons
will open for both nations. The mutual respect, the daily intercourse,
and the common glory of our two armies fighting amid the fields and
woods of France--soon to welcome a third army, your own, to their great
fellowship!--are the foundations to-day of all the rest; and next come
the efforts that have been made by British and Americans to help the
French in remaking and rebuilding their desolated land, efforts that
bless him that gives and him that takes, but especially him that gives;
of which I shall have more to say in the course of this letter. But a
common victory, and a common ardour in rebuilding the waste places, and
binding up the broken-hearted: even they will not be enough, unless,
beyond the war, all three nations, nay, all the Allies, do not set
themselves to a systematic interpenetration of life and thought,
morally, socially, commercially. As far as France and England are
concerned, English people must go more to France; French people must
come more to England. Relations of hospitality, of correspondence, of
wide mutual acquaintance, must not be left to mere chance; they must be
furthered by the mind of both nations. Our English children must go for
part of their education to France; and French children must be
systematically wooed over here. Above all the difficulty of language
must be tackled as it has never been yet, so that it may be a real
disadvantage and disgrace for the boy or girl of either country who has
had a secondary education not to be able to speak, in some fashion, the
language of the other. As for the working classes, and the country
populations of both countries, what they have seen of each other, as
brothers in arms during the war, may well prove of more lasting
importance than anything else.
* * * * *
But I am wandering a little from Nancy, and the story of our long
Sunday. The snow had disappeared, and there were voices of spring in the
wind. A French Army motor arrived early, with another French officer,
the Capitaine de G----, who proved to be a most interesting and
stimulating guide. With him I drove slowly through the beautiful town,
looking at the ruined houses, which are fairly frequent in its streets.
For Nancy has had its bombardments, and there is one gun of long range
in particular, surnamed by the town--"la grosse Bertha," which has done,
and still does, at intervals, damage of the kind the German loves.
Bombs, too, have been dropped by aeroplanes both here and at Lunéville,
in streets crowded with non-combatants, with the natural result. It has
been in reprisal for this and similar deeds elsewhere, and in the hope
of stopping them, that the French have raided German towns across the
frontier. But the spirit of Nancy remains quite undaunted. The children
of its schools, drilled to run down to the cellars at the first alarm as
our children are drilled to empty a school on a warning of a Zeppelin
raid, are the gayest and most spirited creatures, as I saw them at their
games and action songs; unless indeed it be the children of the
_réfugiés_, in whose faces sometimes one seems to see the reflection of
scenes that no child ought to have witnessed and not even a child can
forget. For these children come from the frontier villages, ravaged by
the German advance, and still, some of them, in German occupation. And
the orgy of murder, cruelty, and arson which broke out at Nomény,
Badonviller, and Gerbéviller, during the campaign of 1914, has scarcely
been surpassed elsewhere--even in Belgium. Here again, as at Vareddes,
the hideous deeds done were largely owing to the rage of defeat. The
Germans, mainly Bavarians, on the frontier, had set their hearts on
Nancy, as the troops of Von Kluck had set their hearts on Paris; and
General Castelnau, commanding the Second Army, denied them Nancy, as
Maunoury's Sixth Army denied Paris to Von Kluck.
But more of this presently. We started first of all for a famous point
in the fighting of 1914, the farm and hill of Léomont. By this time the
day had brightened into a cold sunlight, and as we sped south from Nancy
on the Lunéville road, through the old town of St. Nicholas du Port,
with its remarkable church, and past the great salt works at Dombasle,
all the country-side was clear to view.
Good fortune indeed!--as I soon discovered when, after climbing a steep
hill to the east of the road, we found ourselves in full view of the
fighting lines and a wide section of the frontier, with the Forest of
Parroy, which is still partly German, stretching its dark length
southward on the right, while to the north ran the famous heights of the
Grand Couronné;--name of good omen!--which suggests so happily the
historical importance of the ridge which protects Nancy and covers the
French right. Then, turning westward, one looked over the valley of the
Meurthe, with its various tributaries, the Mortagne in particular, on
which stands Gerbéviller; and away to the Moselle and the Meuse. But the
panoramic view was really made to live and speak for me by the able man
at my side. With French precision and French logic, he began with the
geography of the country, its rivers and hills and plateaux, and its
natural capacities for defence against the German enemy; handling the
view as though it had been a great map, and pointing out, as he went,
the disposition of the French frontier armies, and the use made of this
feature and that by the French generals in command.
This Lorraine Campaign, at the opening of the war, is very little
realised outside France. It lasted some three weeks. It was preceded by
the calamitous French reverse at Morhange, where, on August 20th,
portions of the 15th and 16th Corps of the Second Army, young troops
drawn from south-western France--who in subsequent actions fought with
great bravery--broke in rout before a tremendous German attack. The
defeat almost gave the Germans Nancy. But General Castelnau and General
Foch, between them, retrieved the disaster. They fell back on Nancy and
the line of the Mortagne, while the Germans, advancing farther south,
occupied Luneville (August 22nd) and burnt Gerbéviller. On the 23rd,
24th, and 25th there was fierce fighting on and near this hill on which
we stood. Capitaine de G---- with the 2nd Battalion of Chausseurs, under
General Dubail, had been in the thick of the struggle, and he described
to me the action on the slopes beneath us, and how, through his glasses,
he had watched the enemy on the neighbouring hill forcing parties of
French civilians to bury the German dead and dig German trenches, under
the fire of their own people.
The hill of Léomont, and the many graves upon it, were quiet enough as
we stood talking there. The old farm was in ruins; and in the fields
stretching up the hill there were the remains of trenches. All around
and below us spread the beautiful Lorraine country, with its rivers and
forests; and to the south-east one could just see the blue mass of Mont
Donon, and the first spurs of the Vosges.
"Can you show me exactly where the French line runs?" I asked my
companion. He pointed to a patch of wood some six miles away. "There is
a French battalion there. And you see that other patch of wood a little
farther east? There is a German battalion there. Ah!" Suddenly he broke
off, and the younger officer with us, Capitaine de B----, came running
up, pointing overhead. I craned my neck to look into the spring blue
above us, and there--7,000 to 8,000 feet high, according to the
officers--were three Boche aeroplanes pursued by two French machines. In
and out a light band of white cloud, the fighters in the air chased each
other, shrapnel bursting all round them like tufts of white wool. They
were so high that they looked mere white specks. Yet we could follow
their action perfectly--how the Germans climbed, before running for
home, and how the French pursued! It was breathless while it lasted! But
we did not see the end. The three Taubes were clearly driven back; and
in a few seconds they and the Frenchmen had disappeared in distance and
cloud towards the fighting-line. The following day, at a point farther
to the north, a well-known French airman was brought down and killed, in
just such a fight.
Beyond Léomont we diverged westward from the main road, and found
ourselves suddenly in one of those utterly ruined villages which now
bestrew the soil of Northern, Central, and Eastern France; of that
France which has been pre-eminently for centuries, in spite of
revolutions, the pious and watchful guardian of what the labour of dead
generations has bequeathed to their sons. Vitrimont, however, was
destroyed in fair fight during the campaign of 1914. Bombardment had
made wreck of the solid houses, built of the warm red stone of the
country. It had destroyed the church, and torn up the graveyard; and
when its exiled inhabitants returned to it by degrees, even French
courage and French thrift quailed before the task of reconstruction. But
presently there arrived a quiet American lady, who began to make friends
with the people of Vitrimont, to find out what they wanted, and to
consult with all those on the spot who could help to bring the visions
in her mind to pass,--with the Préfet, with the officials, local and
governmental, of the neighbouring towns, with the Catholic women of the
richer Lorraine families, gentle, charitable, devout, who quickly
perceived her quality, and set themselves to co-operate with her. It was
the American lady's intention--simply--to rebuild Vitrimont. And she is
steadily accomplishing it, with the help of generous money subsidies
coming, month by month, from one rich American woman--a woman of San
Francisco--across the Atlantic. How one envies that American woman!
The sight of Miss Polk at work lives indeed, a warm memory, in one's
heart. She has established herself in two tiny rooms in a peasant's
cottage, which have been made just habitable for her. A few touches of
bright colour, a picture or two, a book or two, some flowers, with
furniture of the simplest--amid these surroundings on the outskirts of
the ruined village, with one of its capable, kindly faced women to run
the _ménage_, Miss Polk lives and works, realising bit by bit the plans
of the new Vitrimont, which have been drawn for her by the architect of
the department, and following loyally old Lorraine traditions. The
church has been already restored and reopened. The first mass within its
thronged walls was--so the spectators say--a moving sight. "_That sad
word--Joy_"--Landor's pregnant phrase comes back to one, as expressing
the bitter-sweet of all glad things in this countryside, which has
seen--so short a time ago--death and murder and outrage at their worst.
The gratitude of the villagers to their friend and helper has taken
various forms. The most public mark of it, so far, has been Miss Folk's
formal admission to the burgess rights of Vitrimont, which is one of the
old communes of France. And the village insists that she shall claim her
rights! When the time came for dividing the communal wood in the
neighbouring forest, her fellow citizens arrived to take her with them
and show her how to obtain her share. As to the affection and confidence
with which she is regarded, it was enough to walk with her through the
village, to judge of its reality.
But it makes one happy to think that it is not only Americans who have
done this sort of work in France. Look, for instance, at the work of the
Society of Friends in the department of the Marne,--on that fragment of
the battlefield which extends from Bar-le-Duc to Vitry St. François. "Go
and ask," wrote a French writer in 1915, "for the village of Huiron, or
that of Glannes, or that other, with its name to shudder at, splashed
with blood and powder--Sermaize. Inquire for the English Quakers. Books,
perhaps, have taught you to think of them as people with long black
coats and long faces. Where are they? Here are only a band of workmen,
smooth-faced--not like our country folk. They laugh and sing while they
make the shavings fly under the plane and the saw. They are building
wooden houses, and roofing them with tiles. Around them are poor people
whose features are stiff and grey like those of the dead. These are the
women, the old men, the children, the weaklings of our sweet France, who
have lived for months in damp caves and dens, till they look like
Lazarus rising from the tomb. But life is beginning to come back to
their eyes and their lips. The hands they stretch out to you tremble
with joy. To-night they will sleep in a house, in _their_ house. And
inside there will be beds and tables and chairs, and things to cook
with.... As they go in and look, they embrace each other, sobbing."
By June 1915, 150 "Friends" had rebuilt more than 400 houses, and
rehoused more than seven hundred persons. They had provided ploughs and
other agricultural gear, seeds for the harvest fields and for the
gardens, poultry for the farmyards. And from that day to this, the
adorable work has gone on. "_By this shall all men know that ye are My
disciples, if ye love one another_."
* * * * *
It is difficult to tear oneself away from themes like this, when the
story one has still to tell is the story of Gerbéviller. At Vitrimont
the great dream of Christianity--the City of God on earth--seems still
reasonable.
At Hérémenil, and Gerbéviller, we are within sight and hearing of deeds
that befoul the human name, and make one despair of a world in which
they can happen.
At luncheon in a charming house of old Lorraine, with an intellectual
and spiritual atmosphere that reminded me of a book that was one of the
abiding joys of my younger days--the _Récit d'une Soeur_--we heard from
the lips of some of those present an account of the arrival at Lunéville
of the fugitives from Gerbéviller, after the entry of the Bavarians into
the town. Women and children and old men, literally mad with terror, had
escaped from the burning town, and found their way over the thirteen
kilomètres that separate Gerbéviller from Lunéville. No intelligible
account could be got from them; they had seen things that shatter the
nerves and brain of the weak and old; they were scarcely human in their
extremity of fear. And when, an hour later, we ourselves reached
Gerbéviller, the terror which had inspired that frenzied flight became,
as we listened to Soeur Julie, a tangible presence haunting the
ruined town.
Gerbéviller and Soeur Julie are great names in France to-day.
Gerbéviller, with Nomény, Badonviller, and Sermaize, stand in France for
what is most famous in German infamy; Soeur Julie, the "chère soeur" of
so many narratives, for that form of courage and whole-hearted devotion
which is specially dear to the French, because it has in it a touch of
_panache_, of audacity! It is not too meek; it gets its own back when it
can, and likes to punish the sinner as well as to forgive him. Sister
Julie of the Order of St. Charles of Nancy, Madame Rigard, in civil
parlance, had been for years when the war broke out the head of a modest
cottage hospital in the small country town of Gerbéviller. The town was
prosperous and pretty; its gardens ran down to the Mortagne flowing at
its feet, and it owned a country house in a park, full of treasures new
and old--tapestries, pictures, books--as Lorraine likes to have such
things about her.
But unfortunately, it occupied one of the central points of the fighting
in the campaign of Lorraine, after the defeat of General Castelnau's
Army at Morhange on August 20th, 1914. The exultant and victorious
Germans pushed on rapidly after that action. Lunéville was occupied, and
the fighting spread to the districts south and west of that town. The
campaign, however, lasted only three weeks, and was determined by the
decisive French victory of September 8th on the Grand Couronné. By
September 12th Nancy was safe; Lunéville and Gerbéviller had been
retaken; and the German line had been driven back to where we saw it
from the hill of Léomont. But in that three weeks a hell of cruelty, in
addition to all the normal sufferings of war, had been let loose on the
villages of Lorraine; on Nomény to the north of Nancy, on Badonviller,
Baccarat, and Gerbéviller to the south. The Bavarian troops, whose
record is among the worst in the war, got terribly out of hand,
especially when the tide turned against them; and if there is one
criminal who, if he is still living, will deserve and, I hope, get an
impartial trial some day before an international tribunal, it will be
the Bavarian General, General Clauss.
Here is the first-hand testimony of M. Mirman, the Prefét of the
Department. At Gerbeviller, he writes, the ruin and slaughter of the
town and its inhabitants had nothing to do with legitimate war:
"We are here in presence of an inexpiable crime. The crime was signed.
Such signatures are soon rubbed out. I saw that of the murderer--and I
bear my testimony.
"The bandits who were at work here were assassins: I have seen the
bodies of their victims, and taken the evidence on the spot. They shot
down the inhabitants like rabbits, killing them haphazard in the
streets, on their doorsteps, almost at arm's length. Of these victims it
is still difficult to ascertain the exact number; it will be more than
fifty. Most of the victims had been buried when I first entered the
town; here and there, however, in a garden, at the entrance to a cellar
the corpses of women still awaited burial. In a field just outside the
town, I saw on the ground, their hands tied, some with their eyes
bandaged--fifteen old men--murdered. They were in three groups of five.
The men of each group had evidently clung to each other before death.
The clenched hand of one of them still held an old pipe. They were all
old men--with white hair. Some days had elapsed since their murder; but
their aspect in death was still venerable; their quiet closed eyes
seemed to appeal to heaven. A staff officer of the Second Army who was
with me photographed the scene; with other _pièces de conviction_; the
photograph is in the hands of the Governmental Commission charged with
investigating the crimes of the Germans during this war."
The Bavarian soldiers in Gerbéviller were not only murderers--they were
incendiaries, even more deliberate and thorough-going than the soldiers
of Von Kluck's army at Senlis. With the exception of a few houses beyond
the hospital, spared at the entreaty of Soeur Julie, and on her promise
to nurse the German wounded, the whole town was deliberately burnt out,
house by house, the bare walls left standing, the rest destroyed. And
as, _after the fire_, the place was twice taken and retaken under
bombardment, its present condition may be imagined. It was during the
burning that some of the worst murders and outrages took place. For
there is a maddening force in triumphant cruelty, which is deadlier than
that of wine; under it men become demons, and all that is
human perishes.
The excuse, of course, was here as at Senlis--"les civils ont tiré!"
There is not the slightest evidence in support of the charge. As at
Senlis, there was a French rear-guard of 57 Chasseurs--left behind to
delay the German advance as long as possible. They were told to hold
their ground for five hours; they held it for eleven, fighting with
reckless bravery, and firing from a street below the hospital. The
Germans, taken by surprise, lost a good many men before, at small loss
to themselves, the Chasseurs retreated. In their rage at the unexpected
check, and feeling, no doubt, already that the whole campaign was going
against them, the Germans avenged themselves on the town and its
helpless inhabitants.
Our half-hour in Soeur Julie's parlour was a wonderful experience!
Imagine a portly woman of sixty, with a shrewd humorous face, talking
with French vivacity, and with many homely turns of phrase drawn
straight from that life of the soil and the peasants amid which she
worked; a woman named in one of General Castelnau's Orders of the Day
and entitled to wear the Legion of Honour; a woman, too, who has seen
horror face to face as few women, even in war, have seen it, yet still
simple, racy, full of irony, and full of heart, talking as a mother
might talk of her "grands blessés"! but always with humorous asides, and
an utter absence of pose or pretence; flashing now into scorn and now
into tenderness, as she described the conduct of the German officers who
searched her hospital for arms, or the helplessness of the wounded men
whom she protected. I will try and put down some of her talk. It threw
much light for me on the psychology of two nations.
"During the fighting, we had always about 300 of our wounded (_nos chers
blessés_) in this hospital. As fast as we sent them off, others came in.
All our stores were soon exhausted. I was thankful we had some good wine
in the cellars--about 200 bottles. You understand, Madame, that when we
go to nurse our people in their farms, they don't pay us, but they like
to give us something--very often it is a bottle of old wine, and we put
it in the cellar, when it comes in handy often for our invalids. Ah! I
was glad of it for our _blessés_! I said to my Sisters--'Give it them!
and not by thimblefuls--give them enough!' Ah, poor things!--it made
some of them sleep. It was all we had. One day, I passed a soldier who
was lying back in his bed with a sigh of satisfaction. '_Ah, ma Soeur,
ça resusciterait un mort!_' (That would bring a dead man to life!) So I
stopped to ask what they had just given him. And it was a large glass of
Lachryma Christi!
"But then came the day when the Commandant, the French Commandant, you
understand, came to me and said--'Sister, I have sad news for you. I am
going. I am taking away the wounded--and all my stores. Those are
my orders.'
"'But, mon Commandant, you'll leave me some of your stores for the
grands blessés, whom you leave behind--whom you can't move? _What_!--you
must take it all away? Ah, ça--_non_! I don't want any extras--I won't
take your chloroform--I won't take your bistouris--I won't take your
electric things--but--hand over the iodine! (_en avant l'iode_!) hand
over the cotton-wool!--hand over the gauze! Come, my Sisters!' I can
tell you I plundered him!--and my Sisters came with their aprons, and
the linen-baskets--we carried away all we could."
Then she described the evacuation of the French wounded at night--300 of
them--all but the 19 worst cases left behind. There were no ambulances,
no proper preparation of any kind.
"Oh! it was a confusion!--an ugly business!" (_ce n'etait pas rose_!).
The Sisters tore down and split up the shutters, the doors, to serve as
stretchers; they tore sheets into long strips and tied "our poor
children" on to the shutters, and hoisted them into country carts of
every sort and description. "Quick!--Quick!" She gave us a wonderful
sense of the despairing haste in which the night retreat had to be
effected. All night their work went on. The wounded never made a
sound--"they let us do what we would without a word. And as for us, my
Sisters bound these big fellows (_ces gros et grands messieurs_) on to
the improvised stretchers, like a mother who fastens her child in its
cot. Ah! Jésus! the poverty and the misery of that time!"
By the early morning all the French wounded were gone except the
nineteen helpless cases, and all the French soldiers had cleared out of
the village except the 57 Chasseurs, whose orders were to hold the place
as long as they could, to cover the retreat of the rest.
Then, when the Chasseurs finally withdrew, the Bavarian troops rushed up
the town in a state of furious excitement, burning it systematically as
they advanced, and treating the inhabitants as M. Mirman has described.
Soon Soeur Julie knew that they were coming up the hill towards the
hospital. I will quote the very language--homely, Biblical, direct--in
which she described her feelings. "_Mes reins flottaient comme ça--ils
allaient tomber à mes talons. Instantanément, pas une goutte de salive
dans la bouche!_" Or--to translate it in the weaker English idiom--"My
heart went down into my heels--all in a moment, my mouth was dry as
a bone!"
The German officers drew up, and asked for the Superior of the hospital.
She went out to meet them. Here she tried to imitate the extraordinary
arrogance of the German manner.
"They told me they would have to burn the hospital, as they were
informed men had been shooting from it at their troops.
"I replied that if anyone had been shooting, it was the French
Chasseurs, who were posted in a street close by, and had every right
to shoot!"
At last they agreed to let the hospital alone, and burn no more houses,
if she would take in the German wounded. So presently the wards of the
little hospital were full again to overflowing. But while the German
wounded were coming in the German officers insisted on searching the
nineteen French wounded for arms.
"I had to make way for them--I _had_ to say, '_Entrez, Messieurs!_'"
Then she dropped her voice, and said between her teeth--"Think how hard
that was for a Lorrainer!"
So two German officers went to the ward where the nineteen Frenchmen
lay, all helpless cases, and a scene followed very like that in the
hospital at Senlis. One drew his revolver and covered the beds, the
other walked round, poniard in hand, throwing back the bedclothes to
look for arms. But they found nothing--"_only blood_! For we had had
neither time enough nor dressings enough to treat the wounds properly
that night."
A frightful moment!--the cowering patients--the officers in a state of
almost frenzied excitement, searching bed after bed. At the last bed,
occupied by a badly wounded and quite helpless youth, the officer
carrying the dagger brought the blade of it so near to the boy's throat
that Soeur Julie rushed forward, and placed her two hands in front of
the poor bare neck. The officer dropped both arms to his side, she said,
"as if he had been shot," and stood staring at her, quivering all over.
But from that moment she had conquered them.
For the German wounded, Soeur Julie declared she had done her best, and
the officer in charge of them afterwards wrote her a letter of thanks.
Then her mouth twisted a little. "But I wasn't--well, I didn't _spoil_
them! (_Je n'étais pas trop tendre_); I didn't give them our best wine!"
And one officer whose wounds she dressed, a Prussian colonel who never
deigned to speak to a Bavarian captain near him, was obliged to accept a
good many home truths from her. He was convinced that she would poison
his leg unless he put on the dressings himself. But he allowed her to
bandage him afterwards. During this operation--which she hinted she had
performed in a rather Spartan fashion!--"he whimpered all the time," and
she was able to give him a good deal of her mind on the war and the
behaviour of his troops. He and the others, she said, were always
talking about their Kaiser; "one might have thought they saw him sitting
on the clouds."
In two or three days the French returned victorious, to find the burnt
and outraged village. The Germans were forced, in their turn, to leave
some badly wounded men behind, and the French _poilus_ in their mingled
wrath and exultation could not resist, some of them, abusing the German
wounded through the windows of the hospital. But then, with a keen
dramatic instinct, Soeur Julie drew a striking picture of the contrast
between the behaviour of the French officer going down to the basement
to visit the wounded German officers there, and that of the German
officers on a similar errand. She conveyed with perfect success the cold
civility of the Frenchman, beginning with a few scathing words about the
treatment of the town, and then proceeding to an investigation of the
personal effects of the Boche officers.
"Your papers, gentlemen? Ah! those are private letters--you may retain
them. Your purses?"--he looks at them--"I hand them back to you. Your
note-books? _Ah! ça--c'est mon affaire!_ (that's my business). I wish
you good morning."
Soeur Julie spoke emphatically of the drunkenness of the Germans. They
discovered a store of "Mirabelle," a strong liqueur, in the town, and
had soon exhausted it, with apparently the worst results.
Well!--the March afternoon ran on, and we could have sat there listening
till dusk. But our French officers were growing a little impatient, and
one of them gently drew "the dear sister," as every one calls her,
towards the end of her tale. Then with regret one left the plain
parlour, the little hospital which had played so big a part, and the
brave elderly nun, in whom one seemed to see again some of those
qualities which, springing from the very soil of Lorraine, and in the
heart of a woman, had once, long years ago, saved France.
* * * * *
How much there would be still to say about the charm and the kindness of
Lorraine, if only this letter were not already too long! But after the
tragedy of Gerbéviller I must at any rate find room for the victory
of Amance.
Alas!--the morning was dull and misty when we left Nancy for Amance and
the Grand Couronné; so that when we stood at last on the famous ridge
immediately north of the town which saw, on September 8th, 1914, the
wrecking of the final German attempt on Nancy, there was not much
visible except the dim lines of forest and river in the plain below. Our
view ought to have ranged as far, almost, as Metz to the north and the
Vosges to the south. But at any rate there, at our feet, lay the Forest
of Champenoux, which was the scene of the three frantic attempts of the
Germans debouching from it on September 8th to capture the hill of
Amance, and the plateau on which we stood. Again and again the 75's on
the hill mowed down the advancing hordes and the heavy guns behind
completed their work. The Germans broke and fled, never to return. Nancy
was saved, the right of the six French Armies advancing across France,
at that very moment, on the heels of the retreating Germans, in the
Battle of the Marne, was protected thereby from a flank attack which
might have altered all the fortunes of the war, and the course of
history; and General Castelnau had written his name on the memory
of Europe.
_But_--the Kaiser was not there! Even Colonel Buchan in his admirable
history of the war, and Major Whitton in his recent book on the campaign
of the Marne, repeat the current legend. I can only bear witness that
the two French staff officers who walked with us along the Grand
Couronné--one of whom had been in the battle of September 8th--were
positive that the Kaiser was not in the neighbourhood at the time, and
that there was no truth at all in the famous story which describes him
as watching the battle from the edge of the Forest of Champenoux, and
riding off ahead of his defeated troops, instead of making, as he had
reckoned, a triumphant entry into Nancy. Well, it is a pity the gods did
not order it so!--"to be a tale for those that should come after."
One more incident before we leave Lorraine! On our way up to the high
village of Amance, we had passed some three or four hundred French
soldiers at work. They looked with wide eyes of astonishment at the two
ladies in the military car. When we reached the village, Prince R----,
the young staff officer from a neighbouring Headquarters who was to meet
us there, had not arrived, and we spent some time in a cottage, chatting
with the women who lived in it. Then--apparently--while we were on the
ridge word reached the men working below, from the village, that we were
English. And on the drive down we found them gathered, three or four
hundred, beside the road, and as we passed them they cheered us
heartily, seeing in us, for the moment, the British alliance!
So that we left the Grand Couronné with wet eyes, and hearts all
passionate sympathy towards Lorraine and her people.