"There on the floor was the body of the owner. In the interior our men

had destroyed everything exactly like vandals.... The sight of the

inhabitants of the village who had been shot beggars any descriptions.

The volley had nearly decapitated certain of them. Every house to the

last corner had been searched and so the inhabitants brought out from

their hiding-places. The men were shot. The women and children put in

the convent. From this convent shooting has come, so the convent will

be burned. Only through the giving up of the guilty and the paying of

15,000 francs can it save itself."

The German phrases of frightfulness have a sound that matches their

meaning:

"Hatten unsere Leute bereits wie die Vandalen gehaust." "Männer

erschossen."

I opened the diary of Private Hassemer of the VIII Corps, and in the

entry at Sommepy (in the district of the Marne) for September 3, 1914,

I read:

"3/9 1914. Ein schreckliches Blutbad, Dorf abgebrannt, die Franzosen in

die brennenden Häuser geworfen, Zivilpersonen alles mitverbrandt."

("A hideous bloodbath (massacre), the village totally burned, the

French hurled into the burning houses, civilians, everybody, burned

together.")

An unsuspected brutality is here revealed. To these men a peasant of

another race is not a father and husband and man. He is as a dog. He is

"Ausländer," beyond the pale--a thing to be chased with bayonets and

burned with fire, to the rollicking amusement of brave soldiers. Back

of the slaughter lies the basic idea of a biological superiority in

the German people, a belief that their duty calls them to a sacred war

to dominate other races, and create a greater Germany. They think they

are a higher order of beings, who can kill creatures of a lesser breed,

as one slays the lower order of animals in the march of progress.

Other races have had dreams of grandeur, but never so mad a dream, so

colossal in its designs on world dominion, so cruel in its methods of

achieving that supremacy.

Soldat Wilhelm Schellenberg, of 106 Reserve Infantry of the XII Reserve

Army Corps, gives his home as Groitzsch bei Leipzig, "am Bahnhof,"

first floor, number 8. "Frau Martha Schellenberg" is to be notified.

His diary is innocent.

I held in my hands the diary of Erich Harlak of the II Company, 38

Fusilier Regiment of the Sixth Army Corps. There is a cut through the

cover and pages of the pamphlet--probably the stab of a bayonet. Harlak

is a Silesian. On the first page he writes in German "Bitte dieses

Buch gütigst meinen Eltern zusenden zu wollen." Then in French "Je prie

aussi Les Français de rendre, s'il vous plait, cet livre à mes parents.

Addresse Lehrer Harlak." "Meinen lieben Eltern gewidmet in Grune bei

Lisser in Posen."

He writes, "I noticed how our cavalry had plundered here." He gives an

instance of how the men broke to pieces what they could not carry away.

"La Guerre est la Guerre." He writes that in French. He runs his table

of values.

1 kleiner sous = 4 pfennig.

1 grosser sous = 8 "

1/2 sous = 2 "

He has a vocabulary of French words in his own handwriting. His record

is one of honest distress at the pillage done by his comrades.

When the French soldiers say "C'est la Guerre"--"that's the way it is

with war"--they refer to the monotony of it, or the long duration, or

some curious ironic contrast between a peaceful farmyard scene and

a Taube dropping bombs. The Germans say it again and again in their

diaries, sometimes in the French phrase, sometimes "Das ist der Krieg,"

and almost always they use it in speaking of a village they have burned

or peasants they have shot. To them that phrase is an absolution for

any abomination. It is the blood-brother of "military necessity."

Carl Zimmer, Lieutenant of the 57th Infantry of the VII Corps, has a

diary that runs from August 2 to October 17, 1914. On August 29 he

tells of marching through a village of Belgium.

"Very many houses burned whose inhabitants had shot at our soldiers.

250 Civilians shot."

At the head of his diary he writes: "Mit Gott für König und Vaterland."

His record is in ink. Bielefeld in Westphalia is his home town.

Prussia has Prussianized Germany. These diaries cover the Empire. The

writers are Rhenish Pomeranian and Brandenburgian, Saxon and Bavarian.

And the very people, such as the Bavarians and Saxons, whom we had

hoped were of a merciful tradition, have bettered the instruction of

the military hierarchy at Berlin. What Prussia preached they have

practiced with the zeal of a recent convert eager to please his master.

Fahlenstein, a reservist of the 34 Fusiliers, II Army Corps, writes on

August 28th:

"They (the French troops) lay heaped up 8 to 10 in a heap, wounded and

dead, always one on top of the other. Those who could still walk were

made prisoners and brought with us. The severely wounded, with a shot

in the head or lungs and so forth, who could not make further effort,

received one more bullet, which ended their life. That is indeed what

we were ordered to do."

[Illustration: "The severely wounded received one more bullet. That is

what we were ordered to do."--The diary of Reservist Fahlenstein of the

34 Fusiliers.]

[Illustration: Photograph of the German Diary, examined by the writer

of this book. It was written by Corporal Menge of the 8th. Company of

the 74th. Reserve Infantry. He reports: "A curé and his sister hanged,

houses burned."]

("Die schwer verwundeten ... bekamen dennoch eine Kugel zu, dass ihr

Leben ein Ende hatte. Das ist uns ja auch befohlen worden.")

His unwillingness to do the wicked thing must be subordinated to the

will of the officer.

Corporal Menge of the Eighth Company of the 74th Reserve Infantry, 10

Reserve Corps, writes in his diary for August 15:

"Wir passieren unter dreimaligen Hurra auf unsern Kaiser u. unter den

Klängen d. Liedes Deutschland über alles die Belgische Grenze. Alle

Bäume ungefällt als Sperre. Pfarrer u. dessen Schwester aufgehängt,

Häuser abgebrannt."

("We passed over the Belgian border under a three times given Hurrah

for our Kaiser, and under the Strain of the song Deutschland über

alles. All the trees were felled as barricades. A curé and his sister

hanged, houses burned.")

This is a neatly written diary, which he wishes to be sent to Fraulein

F. Winkel of Hanover.

Penitential days are coming for the German Empire and for the German

people. For these acts of horror are the acts of the people: man by

man, regiment by regiment, half a million average Germans, peasants

and clerks, stamped down through Belgium and Northern France, using

the incendiary pellet and the bayonet. In the words of the manifesto,

signed by the 93 Wise Men of Germany, referring to the German army,

"Sie kennt keine zuchtlose Grausamkeit": it doesn't know such a thing

as undisciplined cruelty. No, these are the acts of orderly procedure,

planned in advance, carried out systematically. Never for an instant

did the beautiful disciplined efficiency of the regiment relax in

crushing a child and burning an inhabited house. The people of Germany

have bowed their will to the implacable machine. They have lost their

soul in its grinding.

Private Sebastian Weishaupt of the Third Bavarian Infantry, First

Bavarian Corps:

"10.8.1914--Parie das erste Dorf verbrannt, dann gings los; Dorf nach

dem andern in Flammen; über Feld und Acker mit Rad bis wir dann an

Strassengraben kamen, wo wir dann Kirschen assen."

("Octobre 8, 1914. Parux is the first village burned, then things

break loose: 1 village after another to the flames; over field and

meadow with cycle we then come to the roadside ditches, where we ate

cherries.")

It is all in the day's work: the burning of villages, the murder of

peasants, the eating of cherries. Travelers among savage tribes have

told of living among them for years, and then suddenly in a flash the

inmost soul of the tribe has revealed itself in some sudden mystical

debauch of blood. There is an immense unbridled cruelty in certain of

these German soldiers expressing itself in strange, abnormal ways. This

is the explanation of some of the outrages, some of the mutilations.

But, for the most part, the cruelty is not perversion, nor a fierce,

jealous hate. It is merely the blind, brutal expression of imperfectly

developed natures, acting under orders.

Göttsche, now commissioned officer of the 85 Infantry Regiment, 9 Army

Corps, writes:

"The captain summoned us together and said: 'In the fort which is to

be taken there are apparently Englishmen. I wish to see no Englishmen

taken prisoner by the company.' A universal Bravo of agreement was the

answer."

("'Ich wünsche aber Keinen gefangenen Engländer bei: der Kompagnie zu

sehen.' Ein allgemeines Bravo der Zustimmung war die Antwort.")

Forty-three years of preparedness on every detail of treachery and

manslaughter, but not one hour of thought on what responses organized

murder would call out from the conscience of the world, nor what

resistances such cruelty would create. It is curious the way they set

down their own infamy. There is all the naïveté of a primitive people.

Once a black man from an African colony came to where a friend of mine

was sitting. He was happily chopping away with his knife at a human

skull which he wore suspended from his neck. He was as innocent in the

act as a child jabbing a pumpkin with his jack-knife. So it has been

with the Germans. They burn, plunder, murder, with a light heart.

There are noble souls among them who look on with sad and wondering

eyes. What manner of men are these, they ask themselves in that

intimacy of the diary, which is like the talk of a soul with its

maker. These men, our fellow-countrymen, who behave obscenely, who

pour out foulness--what a race is this of ours! That is the burden

of the self-communion, which high-minded Germans have written down,

unconscious that their sadness would be the one light in the dark

affair, unaware that only in such revolt as their own is there any hope

at all of a future for their race.

The most important diary of all is that of an officer whose name I

have before me as I write, but I shall imitate the chivalry of the

French government and not publish that name. It would only subject his

family to reprisal by the German military power. He belongs to the

46th Reserve Infantry Regiment, 5 Reserve Corps. He has a knack at

homely details. He enters a deserted house where the pendulum of the

clock still swings and ticks and sounds the hours. He believes himself

under the direct protection and guidance of God. He sees it when a

shell explodes, killing his comrades. He speaks of the beauty of the

dead French officers, as he sees them lying in a railway station.

He is skeptical about the lies told against French and Belgians. He

realizes that the officers are whipping up a fury in the men, so that

they will obey orders to kill and burn. In his pages you can see the

mighty machine at work, manufacturing the hate which will lead to

murder. The hand on the lever at Berlin sets grinding the wheels, and

each little cog vibrates and moves in unison. He is a simple, pious

man, shocked by the wickedness of his soldiers, offended by the cruelty

of the officers, hating war, longing for its end. He plans to publish

his memoirs of the campaign, with photographs, which he will return to

France to make after the war. He is a natural philosopher. Most of all,

he loves his quiet smoke, which keeps him good-humored. He has written

a page in his diary in praise of tobacco.

"I smoke about ten cigars a day. And if it hadn't been for these cigars

my good-humor in these dangers and fatigues would be much less. Smoking

gives me to a degree calm and content. With it I have something to

occupy my thoughts. It is necessary for one to see these things in

order to understand."

Later he writes:

"October 15, 1914. It had been planned at first that we should go

into quarters at Billy (Billy sous-Nangiennes), where the whole civil

population had been already forced out, and whatever was movable

had been taken away or made useless. This method of conducting war

is directly barbarous. I am astonished how we can make any complaint

over the behavior of the Russians. We conduct ourselves in France much

worse, and on every occasion and on every small pretext we have burned

and plundered. But God is just and sees everything. His mills grind

slowly, but exceedingly small."

("Diese Art kriegführung ist direkt barbarisch ... bei jeder

Gelegenheit wird unter irgend einem Vorwande gebrannt und geplündert.

Aber Gott ist gerecht und sieht alles: seine Mühlen mahlen langsam aber

schrecklich klein.")

[Illustration: "One village after another to the flames. We then came

to the roadside ditches, where we ate cherries"--so writes Sebastian

Weishaupt of the 3 Bavarian Infantry.]

[Illustration: "We have burned and plundered. But God is just and sees

everything. His mills grind slowly, but exceeding small."--The diary of

an officer of the 46 Reserve Infantry Regiment.]

These extracts which I have given are from diaries of which I have

examined the originals, and gone word by word over the German, in the

penciling of the writer. The revelation of these diaries is that the

Germans have not yet built their moral foundations. They have shot up

to some heights. But it is not a deep-centered structure they have

reared. It is scaffolding and fresco. We shall send them back home to

begin again. Sebastian Weishaupt and Private Hassemer and Corporal

Menge must stay at home. They must not come to other countries to try

to rule them, nor to any other peoples, to try to teach them. Their

hand is somewhat bloody. That is my feeling in reading these diaries

of German soldiers--poor lost children of the human race, back in the

twilight of time, so far to climb before you will reach civilization.

We must be very patient with you through the long years it will take to

cast away the slime and winnow out the simple goodness, which is also

there.

III

MORE DIARIES

In former European wars foul practices were committed by individual

members of armies. But the total army in each country was a small hired

band of men, representing only the fractional part of one per cent of

the population. It was in no way representative of the mind of the

people. Of the present German Army, Professor Dr. Max Planck, of the

University of Berlin, a distinguished physicist, has recently written:

"The German Army is nothing but the German people in arms, and the

scholars and artists are, like all other classes, inseparably bound up

with it."

We must regard the acts of the German Army as the acts of the people.

We cannot dodge the problem of their misbehavior by saying they have

not committed atrocities. We have the signed statements of a thousand

German diaries that they have practiced frightfulness village by

village through Belgium and Northern France. We cannot say it was a

handful of drunken, undisciplined soldiers who did these things. It

was "the German people in arms." It was an army that "knows no such

thing as undisciplined cruelty." It was a nation of people that burned

and murdered, acting under orders. Now, we have arrived at the heart of

the problem. Why did they commit these horrors?

Irritated by an unexpectedly firm resistance from the Belgian and

French Armies, fed on lies spread by German officers concerning the

cruelty of French and Belgians, they obeyed the commands to burn houses

and shoot civilians.

These commands released a primitive quality of brutality.

On August 25th, 1914, Reservist Heinrich Bissinger, of the town of

Ingolstadt, of the Second Company, of the First Bavarian Pioneers,

writes of the village of Orchies:

"A woman was shot because she did not stop at the word Halt, but kept

running away. Thereupon we burn the whole place."

("Sämtliche Civilpersonen werden verhaftet. Eine Frau wurde vershossen,

weil sie auf Halt Rufen nicht hielt, sondern ausreissen wollte. Hierauf

Verbrennen der ganzen Ortschaft.")

One wonders if Heinrich Bissinger would wish the treatment he and

his comrades accorded to Orchies, to be applied to his own home town

of Ingolstadt. If some German peasant woman in Ingolstadt failed to

understand a word in a foreign tongue, and were killed, and then if

Ingolstadt were burned, would Heinrich Bissinger feel that "military

necessity" exonerated the soldiers that performed the deed?

Private Philipp, from Kamenz, Saxony, of the First Company, of the

first Battalion of the 178th Regiment, writes: "Kriegs Tagebuch-Soldat

Philipp, 1 Kompanie (Sachsen)," at the head of his diary. On August 23

he writes of a village that had been burned:

"A spectacle terrible and yet beautiful. Directly at the entrance

lay about 50 dead inhabitants who had been shot, because they had

traitorously fired on our troops. In the course of the night many more

were shot, so that we could count over 200. Women and children, lamp in

hand, had to watch the horrible spectacle. Then in the middle of the

corpses we ate our rice; since morning we had eaten nothing. By search

through the houses we found much wine and liquor, but nothing to eat."

("Im Laufe der Nacht wurden noch viele erschossen, sodass wir über 200

zählen konnten. Frauen und Kinder, die Lampe in der Hand, mussten dem

entsetzlichen Schauspiele zusehen. Wir assen dann inmitten der Leichen

unsern Reis, seit Morgen hatten wir nichts gegessen.")

German soldiers obey these orders because their military training and

their general education have made them docile. They have never learned

to exercise independent individual moral judgment on acts ordered by

the state. The state to them is an organism functioning in regions

that lie outside the intellectual and moral life of the individual. In

every German there are separate water-tight compartments: the one for

the life he leads as a husband and father, the other for the acts he

must commit as a citizen of the Empire and as a soldier of the Army. In

his home life he makes choices. In his public life he has no choice.

He must obey without compunctions. So he lays aside his conscience.

In the moral realm the German is a child, which means that he is by

turns cruel, sentimental, forgetful of the evil he has done the moment

before, happy in the present moment, eating enormously, pleased with

little things, crying over a letter from home, weary of the war, with

sore feet and a rebellious stomach, a heavy pack, and no cigars. I

am basing every statement I make on the statements written by German

soldiers. We do not have to guess at German psychology. They have

ripped open their subconsciousness.

The lieutenant of the 5th Battalion of reserves of the Prussian Guard

writes on August 24 at Cirey:

"In the night unbelievable things have taken place. Warehouses

plundered, money stolen, violations simply hair-raising."

("In der Nacht sind unglaubliche Sachen passiert. Läden ausgeplündert,

Geld gestohlen, Vergewaltigungen, Einfach haarsträubend.")

This diary of the lieutenant's has a black cover, a little pocket for

papers, a holder for the pencil. It is written partly in black pencil

and partly in purple. Thirty-two pages are written, 118 are blank. It

covers a space of time from August 1 to September 4, 1914.

Mrs. Wharton has brought to my attention the chronicle of Salimbene,

a Franciscan of the thirteenth century, wherein similar light-hearted

crimes are recorded.

"On one day he (Ezzelino) caused 11,000 men of Padua to be burnt in the

field of Saint George; and when fire had been set to the house in which

they were being burnt, he jousted as if in sport around them with his

knights.

"The villagers dwelt apart, nor were there any that resisted their

enemies or opened the mouth or made the least noise. And that night

they (the soldiers) burned 53 houses in the village."

The orders given by the German commanding general to his officers,

far from recommending prudence and humanity, impose the obligation

of holding the total civil population collectively responsible for

the smallest individual infractions, and of acting against every

tentative infringement with pitiless severity. These officers are as

specialized a class as New York gunmen or Paris apaches. Their career

lies in anti-social conduct. "This wild upper-class of the young German

imperialistic idea" are implacable destroyers. Their promotion is

dependent on the extent of their cruelties.

I have seen an original copy of the order for the day

(Korps-Tagesbefehl) issued on August 12, 1914, by General von Fabeck,

commanding the 13th Army Corps. He says:

"Lieutenant Haag of the 19th Regiment of Uhlans, acting as chief of

patrol, has proceeded energetically against the rioting inhabitants,

and as agreed has employed arms. I express to him my recognition for

his energy and his decision."

("Ich spreche ihm für seinen Schneid und seine Umsicht meine

Anerkennung aus.")

What that gives to Lieutenant Haag is the power of life and death over

non-combatants, with praise for him if he deals out death.

Let us hear General von Fabeck speak again. Here are his instructions

for his troops on August 15, 1914 (I have held the original in my

hands):

"As soon as the territory is entered, the inhabitants are to be held

responsible for maintaining the lines of communication. For that

purpose the commander of the advance guard will arrange a strong

patrol of campaign gendarmes (Feldgendarmerie-Patrouille) to be used

for the interior of the locality held by our troops. Against every

inhabitant who tries to do us a damage, or who does us a damage, it is

necessary to act with pitiless severity."

"Mit rücksichtsloser Strenge."

This order is on long sheets of the nature of our foolscap. It is

written in violet ink.

The copy reads:

gez. v. Fabeck

Für die Richtigkeit der Abschrift

Baessler

Oberlt. und Brig-Adjutant.

Baessler is the aide-de-camp.

Two violations of the rights of non-combatants are in that order. The

requisitioning of inhabitants on military work where they are exposed

to the fire of their own nation; pitiless severity applied to every

non-combatant on the least suspicion of a hostile act.

Actually the state which the simple soldiers obey so utterly is

an inner clique of landed proprietors, captains of industry, and

officers of the army--men of ruthless purpose and vast ambitions. The

sixty-five millions of docile peasants, clerks, artizans and petty

officials are tools for this inner clique.

"The theories of the German philosophers and public men are of one

piece with the collective acts of the German soldiers. The pages

of the Pan-German writers are prophetic. They are not so much the

precursors as the results, the echoes of a something impersonal that

is vaster than their own voice. Here we have acted out the cult of

force, creator of Right, practiced since its dim origins by Prussia,

defended philosophically by Lasson, scientifically by Haeckel and

Ostwald, politically by Treitschke, and in a military way by General

von Bernhardi."

The modern Germany is the victim of an obsession. Under its sentimental

domestic life, its placid beergarden recreation, its methodical

activities, its reveries, its emotional laxity fed on music, it was

generating destructive forces. Year by year it was thinking the

thoughts, inculcated by its famous teachers, until those ideas, pushed

deep down into the subconscious, became an overmastering desire, a

dream of world-grandeur. For once an idea penetrates through to the

subconsciousness, it becomes touched with emotional life, later to leap

back into the light of day in uncontrolled action.

I can produce one of the original bills posted on the walls of Liège by

General von Bulow. Here is the way it reads:

Ordre.

A la population Liègeoise.

La population d'Andenne, après avoir témoigné des intentions

pacifiques à l'égard de nos troupes, les a attaquées de la façon la

plus traîtresse. Avec mon autorisation, le Général qui commandait ces

troupes a mis la ville en cendres et a fait fusilier 110 personnes.

Je porte ce fait à la connaissance de la ville de Liège, pour que ses

habitants sachent à quel sort ils peuvent s'attendre s'ils prennent

une attitude semblable.

Liège, le 22 Août, 1914.

Général von Bulow.

("The inhabitants of the town of Andenne, after having testified to

their peaceful intentions in regard to our troops, attacked them in

a fashion the most treacherous. By my authorization, the General who

commanded the troops has burned the town to ashes and has shot 110

people. I bring this to the knowledge of the town of Liège, in order

that the inhabitants may know what fate they invite if they take a like

attitude.")

It is only in victorious conquest that the German is unendurable. When

he was trounced at the Battle of the Marne, he ceased his wholesale

burnings and massacres throughout that district, and continued his

campaign of frightfulness only in those sections of Belgium around

Antwerp where he was still conquering new territory. His dream of world

conquest will die in a day, when the day comes that sends him home. In

defeat, he is simple, kindly, surprised at humane treatment. He ceases

to be a superman at the touch of failure. All his blown-up grandeur

collapses, and he shrinks to his true stature.

This return to wholesomeness is dependent on two things: a thorough

defeat in this war, so that the German people will see that a machine

fails when it seeks to crush the human spirit, and an internal

revolution in the conception of individual duty to the state, so that

they will regain the virtues of common humanity. The water-tight

compartments, which they have built up between the inner voice of

conscience in the individual life and the outer compulsion of the

state, must be broken through.

IV

THE BOOMERANG

One of the best jokes of the war has been put over on the Germans by

themselves. Here I quote from a German diary of which I have seen the

original. It is written by a sub-officer of the Landwehr, of the 46th

Reserve Regiment, the 9th Company, recruited from the province of

Posen. He and his men are on the march, and the date is August 21. He

writes:

"We are informed of things to make us shudder concerning the wickedness

of the French, as, for instance, that our wounded, lying on the ground,

have their eyes put out, their ears and noses cut. We are told that we

ought to behave without any limits. I have the impression that all this

is told us for the sole purpose that no one shall stay behind or take

the French side; our men also are of the same opinion."

On August 23 he writes:

"I learn from different quarters that the French maltreat our

prisoners; a woman has put out the eyes of an Uhlan."

By August 24 all this begins to have its effect on the imperfectly

developed natures of his comrades, and he writes:

"I find among our troops a great excitability against the French."

There we can see the machinery of hate in full operation. The officers

state the lies to the soldiers. They travel fast by rumor. The

primitive, emotional men respond with ever-increasing excitement till

they readily carry out murder.

Let us see how all this is working back home in the Fatherland. I have

seen the photographic reproduction of a letter written by a German

woman to her husband (from whose body it was taken), in which she tells

him not to spare the French dogs ("Hunden"), neither the soldiers nor

the women. She goes on to give her reason. The French, she says, men

and women, are cruel to German prisoners. The story had reached her.

The German Chancellor in September, 1914, stated in an interview for

the United States:

"Your fellow countrymen are told that German troops have burned Belgian

villages and towns, but you are not told that young Belgian girls have

put out the eyes of the defenseless wounded on the field of battle.

Belgian women have cut the throats of our soldiers as they slept, men

to whom they had given hospitality."

The final consecration of the rumor was given by the Kaiser himself.

On September 8, 1914, he sent a cable to President Wilson, in which he

repeated these allegations against the Belgian people and clergy. Of

course, he knew better, just as his Chancellor and General Staff and

his officers knew better. It was all part of the play to charge the

enemy with things akin to what the Germans themselves were doing. That

makes it an open question, with "much to be said on both sides." That

creates neutrality on the part of non-investigating nations, like the

United States.

But what he and his military clique failed to see was that they had

discharged a boomerang. The comeback was swift. The German Protestants

began to "agitate" against the German Roman Catholics. The old

religious hates revived; a new religious war was on. Now, this was the

last thing desired by the military power. An internal strife would

weaken war-making power abroad. Here was Germany filled with lies told

by the military clique. Those lies were creating internal dissension.

So the same military clique had to go to work and deny the very lies

they had manufactured. They did not deny them out of any large love

for the Belgian and French people. They denied them because of the

anti-Catholic feeling inside Germany which the lies had stirred up.

German official inquiries have established the falsity of the atrocity

charges leveled against the Belgians.

A German priest, R. P. Bernhard Duhr, S. J., published a pamphlet-book,

"Der Lügengeist im Völkekrieg. Kriegsmärchen gesammelt von Bernhard

Duhr, S. J.," (München-Regensburg, Verlagsanstat, Vorm. G. J. Manz,

Buch und Kunstdruckei, 1915). Its title means "The spirit of falsehood

in a people's war. Legends that spring up in war-time." His book was

written as a defense of Roman Catholic interests and for the sake of

the internal peace of his own country. This book I have seen. It is a

small pamphlet of 72 pages, with a red cover. The widest circulation

through the German Empire was given to this proof of the falsity of the

charges laid to the Allies. Powerful newspapers published the denials

and ceased to publish the slanders. Generals issued orders that persons

propagating the calumnies, whether orally, by picture or in writing,

would be followed up without pity. So died the legend of atrocities by

Belgians. The mighty power of the Roman Catholic Church had stretched

out its arm and touched the Kaiser and his war lords to silence.

The charges are treachery, incitement to murder and battle, traitorous

attacks, the hiding of machine guns in church towers, the murder,

poisoning and mutilation of the wounded. The story ran that the civil

population, incited by the clergy, entered actively into hostilities,

attacking troops, signaling to the Allies the positions occupied by the

Germans. The favorite and most popular allegation was that women, old

people and children committed atrocities on wounded Germans, putting

out their eyes, cutting off their fingers, ears and noses; and that

priests urged them on to do these things and played an active part in

perpetrating the crimes. Putting out the eyes became the prize story of

all the collection.

The German priest, Duhr, runs down each lie to its source, and then

prints the official denial. Thus, a soldier of the Landwehr sends the

story to Oberhausen (in the Rhine provinces):

"At Libramont the Catholic priest and the burgomaster, after a sermon,

have distributed bullets to the civil population, with which the

inhabitants fire on German soldiers. A boy of thirteen years has put

out the eyes of a wounded officer, and women, forty to fifty years old,

have mutilated our wounded soldiers. The women, the priest and the

burgomaster have been all together executed at Trèves. The boy has been

condemned to a long term in the home of correction."

The German commander of the garrison at Trèves writes:

"Five Belgian francs-tireurs who had been condemned to death by the

court martial were shot at Trèves. A sixth Belgian, still rather

young, has been condemned to imprisonment for many years. Among the

condemned there were neither women, nor priests nor burgomaster."

This communication is signed by Colonel Weyrach.

Postcards representing Belgian francs-tireurs were placed on sale at

Cassel. The commander of the district writes:

"The commanding general of the XI Army Corps at Cassel has confiscated

the cards."

Wagner Bauer, of the Prussian Ministry of War, writes of another tale:

"The story of the priest and the boy spreads as a rumor among troops on

the march."

The _Herner Zeitung_, an official organ, in its issue of September 9,

printed the following: "Among the French prisoners was a Belgian priest

who had collected his parishioners in the church to fire from hiding on

the German soldiers. Shame that German soil should be defiled by such

trash! And to think that a nation which shields rascals of that sort

dares to invoke the law of humanity!"

Frhr. von Bissing, commanding general of the VII Army Corps, writes:

"The story of a Belgian priest, reported by the _Herner Zeitung_ does

not answer at any point to the truth, as it has since been established.

The facts have been communicated to the _Herner Zeitung_ concerning

their article."

The _Hessische Zeitung_ prints the following under title of "Letters

from the Front by a Hessian Instructor":

"The door of the church opens suddenly and the priest rushes out at the

head of a gang of rascals armed with revolvers."

The Prussian Ministry of War replies:

"The inquiry does not furnish proof in support of the alleged acts."

The _Berliner Tageblatt_, for September 10, has a lively story:

"It was the curé who had organized the resistance of the people, who

had them enter the church, and who had planned the conspiracy against

our troops."

The Prussian Minister of War makes answer: "The curé did not organize

the resistance of inhabitants; he did not have them enter the church,

and he had not planned the conspiracy against our troops."

The dashing German war correspondent, Paul Schweder, writes in

_Landesbote_ an article, "Under the Shrapnel in Front of Verdun." He

says that he saw:

"A convoy of francs-tireurs, at their head a priest with his hands

bound."

The German investigator pauses to wonder why every prisoner and every

suspect is a franc-tireur, and then he goes on with his inquiry, which

results in a statement from the Prussian War Minister:

"Deiber (the priest) had nothing charged against him, was set at

liberty, and, at his own request, has been authorized to live at

Oberhaslach."

The _Frankfurter Zeitung_, September 8, has a spirited account of a

combat with francs-tireurs in Andenne, written by Dr. Alex Berg, of

Frankfort:

"The curé went through the village with a bell, to give the signal for

the fight. The battle began immediately after, very hotly."

The military authority of Andenne, Lieutenant Colonel v. Eulwege:

"My own investigation, very carefully made, shows no proof that the

curé excited the people to a street fight. Every one at Andenne gives a

different account from that, to the effect that most of the people have

seen hardly anything of the battle, so-called, because they had hidden

themselves from fear in the cellars."

Finally, the War Ministry and the press wearied of individual denials,

and one great blanket denial was issued. _Der Völkerkrieg_, which is a

comprehensive chronicle of review of the war, states:

"It is impossible to present any solid proof of the allegation, made by

so many letters from the front, to the effect that the Belgian priests

took part in the war of francs-tireurs. Letters of that kind which we

have heretofore reproduced in our record--for example, the recital of

events at Louvain and Andenne--are left out of the new editions."

_Der Fels_, Organ der Central-Auskunftstelle der katholischen Presse,

states:

"The serious accusations which I have listed are not only inaccurate in

parts and grossly exaggerated, but they are invented in every detail,

and are at every point false."

And, again, it says:

"All the instances, known up to the present and capable of being

cleared up, dealing with the alleged cruelties of Catholic priests

in the war, have been found without exception false or fabrications

through and through."

Turning to the "mutilations," we have the _Nach Feierabend_ publishing

a "letter from the front" which tells of a house of German wounded

being burned by the French inhabitants. Asked for the name of the place

and the specific facts, the editor replied that "you are not the forum

where it is my duty to justify myself. Your proceeding in the midst of

war of representing the German soldiers who fight and die as liars, in

order to save your own skin, I rebuke in the most emphatic way."

But the Minister of War got further with the picturesque editor, and

writes:

"The editorial department of the _Nach Feierabend_ states that it

hasn't any longer in its possession the letter in question."

Now we come to the most famous of all the stories.

"At a military hospital at Aix-la-Chapelle an entire ward was filled

with wounded, who had had their eyes put out in Belgium."

Dr. Kaufmann, an ecclesiastic of Aix-la-Chapelle, writes:

"I send you the testimony of the head doctor of a military hospital

here, a celebrated oculist whom I consulted just because he is an

oculist. He writes me:

"'In no hospital of Aix-la-Chapelle is there any ward of wounded with

their eyes put out. To my knowledge absolutely nothing of the sort has

been verified at Aix-la-Chapelle.'"

The _Kölnische Volkzeitung_, October 28, gives the testimony of

Dr. Vülles, of the hospital in Stephanstrasse, Aix-la-Chapelle, in

reference to the "Ward of Dead Men," where "twenty-eight soldiers lay

with eyes put out." The men laughed heartily when they were asked if

they had had their eyes put out.

"If you wish to publish what you have seen," said Dr. Vüller, "you will

be able to say that my colleague, Dr. Thier, as well as myself, have

never treated a single soldier who had his eyes put out."

Professor Kuhnt, of the clinic for diseases of the eye at Bonn, writes:

"I have seen many who have lost their sight because of rifle bullets or

shell fire. The story is a fable."

The _Weser-Zeitung_ has a moving story of a hospital at Potsdam for

soldiers wounded by the francs-tireurs, where lie officers with their

eyes put out. "Young Belgian girls, of from fourteen to fifteen years

of age, at the incitement of Catholic priests, have committed the

crimes."

The commander at Potsdam writes:

"There is no special hospital here for soldiers wounded by the

francs-tireurs. There are no officers here with eyes put out. The

commander has taken measures to correct the article under dispute, and

also in other publications."

So perish the lies used against Belgium. Lies manufactured by the

General Staff and taught to their officers, to be used among the

soldiers, in order to whip them to hate, because in that hate they

would carry out the cold cruelty of those officers and of that General

Staff. Lies put out in order to blind the eyes of neutrals, like the

government at Washington, to the pillage, the burning and the murder

which the German army was perpetrating as it marched through Belgium

and Lorraine. Lies that later had to be officially denied by the same

military power that had manufactured them, because those lies were

stirring up civil strife at home, and because the Roman Catholic

Germans investigated the sources and silenced the liars.

The Kaiser cabled to our country:

"The cruelties committed in this guerilla warfare by women, children

and priests on wounded soldiers, members of the medical staff and

ambulance workers have been such that my generals have at last been

obliged to resort to the most rigorous measures. My heart bleeds to

see that such measures have been made necessary and to think of the

countless innocents who have lost their life and property because of

the barbarous conduct of those criminals."

Now that he knows that those stories are lies he must feel sorrier yet

that his army killed those countless innocents and burned those peasant

homes.

SECTION IV

THE PEASANTS

I

THE LOST VILLAGES

I was standing in what was once the pleasant village of Sommeilles. It

has been burned house by house, and only the crumbled rock was left in

piles along the roadside. I looked at the church tower. On a September

morning, at fourteen minutes of nine o'clock, an incendiary shell had

cut through the steeple of the church, disemboweled the great clock,

and set the roof blazing. There, facing the cross-roads, the hands

of the clock once so busy with their time-keeping, are frozen. For

twenty-three months, they have registered the instant of their own

stoppage. On the minute hand, which holds a line parallel with that

of the earth, a linnet has built its nest of straw. The hour-hand,

outpaced by its companion at the moment of arrest, was marking time at

a slant too perilous for the home of little birds. Together, the hands

had traveled steadily through the hours which make the years for almost

a century. High over the village street, they had sent the plowman to

his field, and the girl to her milking. Children, late from their

play, had scrambled home to supper, frightened by that lofty record

of their guilt. And how many lovers, straying back from the deep,

protecting meadows, have quickened their step, when the revealing moon

lighted that face. Now it marks only cessation. It tells of the time

when a village ceased to live. Something came down out of the distance,

and destroyed the activities of generations--something that made an

end of play and love. Only the life of the linnet goes on as if the

world was still untroubled. Northern France is held in that cessation.

Suddenly death came, and touched seven hundred villages. Nor can there

ever be a renewal of the old charm. The art of the builders is gone,

and the old sense of security in a quiet, continuing world.

I have been spending the recent days with these peasants in the ruins

of their shattered world. Little wooden baraquements are springing up,

as neat and bare as the bungalows of summer visitors on the shore of

a Maine lake. Brisk brick houses and stores lift out of crumpled rock

with the rawness of a mining camp. It is all very brave and spirited.

But it reminded me of the new wooden legs, with shining leather

supports, and bright metal joints, which maimed soldiers are wearing.

Everything is there which a mechanism can give, but the life-giving

currents no longer flow. A spiritual mutilation has been wrought on

these peasant people in destroying the familiar setting of their life.

They had reached out filaments of habit and love to the deep-set hearth

and ancient rafters. The curve of the village street was familiar to

their eye, and the profile of the staunch time-resisting houses.

From a new wooden structure, with one fair-sized, very neat room in it,

a girl came out to talk with us. She was about twenty years old, with

a settled sadness in her face. Her old home had stood on what was now

a vegetable garden. A fragment of wall was still jutting up out of the

potatoes. Everything that was dear to her had been carefully burned by

the Germans.

"All the same, it is my own home," she said, pointing to the new shack,

"it does very well. But my mother could not stand it that everything

was gone. We ran away for the few days that the Germans were here. My

mother died eight days after we came back."

The 51st Regiment of German Infantry entered the village, and burned it

by squirting petrol on piles of straw in the houses. The machine they

used was like a bicycle pump--a huge syringe. Of the Town Hall simply

the front is standing, carrying its date of 1836. Seventeen steps go up

its exterior, leading to nothing but a pit of rubbish.

"For three days I lay hidden without bread to eat," said a passer-by.

An old peasant talked with us. He told us that the Germans had come

down in the night, and burned the village between four and six in the

morning. A little later, they fired on the church. With petrol on hay

they had burned his own home.

"Tout brûlé," he kept repeating, as he sent his gaze around the wrecked

village. He gestured with his stout wooden stick, swinging it around in

a circle to show the completeness of the destruction. Five small boys

had joined our group. The old man swung his cane high enough to clear

the heads of the youngsters. One of them ran off to switch a wandering

cow into the home path.

"Doucement," said the old man. ("Gently.")

We went to his home, his new home, a brick house, built by the English

Quakers, who have helped in much of this reconstruction work. He and

his wife live looking out on the ruin of their old home.

"Here was my bed," he said, "and here the chimney plate."

He showed the location and the size of each familiar thing by gestures

and measurements of his hands. Nine of the neighbors had lain out in

the field, while the Germans burned the village. He took me down into

the cave, where he had later hidden; the stout vaulted cellar under the

ruined house.

"It is fine and dry," I suggested.

"Not dry," he answered, pointing to the roof. I felt it. It was wet and

cold.

"I slept here," he said, "away from the entrance where I could be seen."

His wife was made easier by talking with us.

"How many milliards will bring us back our happiness?" she asked. "War

is hard on civilians. My husband is seventy-eight years old."

The cupboard in her new home stood gaping, because it had no doors.

"I have asked the carpenter in Revigny to come and make those doors,"

she explained, "but he is always too busy with coffins; twenty-five and

thirty coffins a day."

These are for the dead of Verdun.

When the Germans left Sommeilles, French officers found in one of the

cellars seven bodies: those of Monsieur and Madame Alcide Adnot, a

woman, thirty-five years old, and her four children, eleven years,

five, four, and a year and a half old. The man had been shot, the young

mother with the right forearm cut off, and the body violated, the

little girl violated, one of the children with his head cut off. All

were lying in a pool of blood, with the splatter reaching a distance of

ninety centimeters. The Germans had burned the house, thinking that the

fire would destroy the evidence of their severity, but the flames had

not penetrated to the cellar.

Sommeilles is in one of the loveliest sections of Europe, where the

fields lie fertile under a temperate sun, and the little rivers glide

under green willow trees. Villages of peasants have clustered here

through centuries. One or two of the hundreds of builders that lifted

Rheims and Chartres would wander from the larger work to the village

church and give their skill to the portal, adding a choiceness of stone

carving and some bit of grotesquerie. Scattered through the valleys of

the Marne, and Meuse, and Moselle, you come on these snatches of the

great accent, all the lovelier for their quiet setting and unfulfilled

renown.

The peasant knew he was part of a natural process, a slow,

long-continuing growth, whose beginnings were not yesterday, and

whose purpose would not end with his little life. And the aspect of

the visible world which reinforced this inner sense was the look

of his Town Hall and his church, his own home and the homes of his

neighbors--the work of no hasty builders. In the stout stone house,

with its gray slabs of solidity, he and his father had lived, and his

grandfather, and on back through the generations. There his son would

grow up, and one day inherit the house and its goods, the gay garden

and the unfailing fields.

Things are dear to them, for time has touched them with affectionate

association. The baker's wife at Florent in the Argonne is a strapping

ruddy woman of thirty years of age, instinct with fun and pluck,

and contemptuous of German bombs. But the entrance to her cellar is

protected by sand-bags and enormous logs.

"You are often shelled?" asked my friend.

"A little, nearly every day," she answered. "But it's all right in the

cellar. For instance, I have removed my lovely furniture down there. It

is safe in the shelter."

"Oh, then, you care more for your furniture than you do for your own

safety?"

"Why," she answered, "you can't get another set of furniture so easily

as all that." And she spoke of a clock and other wedding-presents as

precious to her.

A family group in Vassincourt welcomed us in the room they had built

out of tile and beams in what was once the shed. The man was blue-eyed

and fair of hair, the woman with a burning brown eye, the daughter with

loosely hanging hair and a touch of wildness. The family had gone to

the hill at the south and watched their village and their home burn.

They had returned to find the pigs ripped open. The destruction of live

stock was something more to them than lost property, than dead meat.

There is an intimate sense of kinship between a peasant and his live

stock--the horse that carries him to market, his cows and pigs, the

ducks that bathe in the pool of his barnyard and the hens that bathe

in the roadside dust. No other property is so personal. They had lost

their two sons in the war. The woman in speaking of the French soldiers

called them "Ces Messieurs," "these gentlemen."

In this village is a bran-new wooden shed, "Café des Amis," with the

motto, "A la Renaissance," "To the Rebirth."

In Sermaize, nearly five hundred men marched away to fight. When the

Germans fell on the town, 2,200 were living there. Of these 1,700 have

returned. There are 150 wooden sheds for them, and a score of new

brick dwellings, and twenty-four brick houses are now being built.

Six hundred are living in the big hotel, once used in connection with

the mineral springs for which the place was famous: its full name

is Sermaize-les-Bains. Eight hundred of the 840 houses were shelled

and burned--one-third by bombardment, two-thirds by a house to house

burning.

The Hotel des Voyageurs is a clean new wooden shed, with a small

dining-room. This is built on the ruins of the old hotel. The woman

proprietor said to me:

"We had a grand hotel, with twelve great bedrooms and two

dining-rooms. It was a fine large place."

The Café des Alliés is a small wooden shed, looking like the store-room

of a logging camp. We talked with the proprietor and his wife. They

used to be manufacturers of springs, but their business was burned,

their son is dead in the war, and they are too old to get together

money and resume the old work. So they are running a counter of soft

drinks, beer and post cards. The burning of their store has ended their

life for them.

We talked with the acting Mayor of Sermaize, Paul François

Grosbois-Constant. He is a merchant, fifty-four years old. The Germans

burned his six houses, which represented his lifetime of savings.

"The Germans used pastilles in burning our houses," he said, "little

round lozenges, the size of a twenty-five-centime piece (this is the

same size as an American quarter of a dollar). These hop about and

spurt out fire. They took fifty of our inhabitants and put them under

arrest, some for one day, others for three days. Five or six of our

people were made to dress in soldiers' coats and casques, and were

then forced to mount guard at the bridges. The pillage was widespread.

The wife and the daughter of Auguste Brocard were so frightened by the

Germans that they jumped into the river, the river Saulx. Brocard tried

to save them, but was held back by the Germans. Later, when he took

out the dead bodies from the river, he found a bullet hole in the head

of each."

As we drove away from Sermaize, I saw in the village square that a

fountain was feebly playing, lifting a thin jet of water a few inches

above the basin.

II

THE HOMELESS

We are a nomadic race, thriving on change. Apartment houses are our

tents: many of us preempt a new flat every moving day. This is in

part an inheritance from our pioneer readiness to strike camp and go

further. It is the adaptability of a restless seeking. It is also

the gift made by limitless supplies of immigrants, who, having torn

up their roots from places where their family line had lived for a

thousand years, pass from street to street, and from city to city, of

the new country, with no heavy investment of affection in the local

habitation. Once the silver cord of ancestral memory is loosened, there

is little in the new life to bind it together. The wanderer flows on

with the flowing life about him. To many of us it would be an effort of

memory to tell where we were living ten years ago. The outline of the

building is already dim.

The peasant of France has found a truth of life in planting himself

solidly in one place, with an abiding love for his own people, for the

house and the village where he was born. Four centuries ago the French

poet wrote:

_Heureux qui comme Ulysse a fait un beau voyage

Ou comme cestuy-là qui conquit la Toison

Et puis est retourné plein d'usage et raison

Vivre entre ses parents le reste de son âge._

_Quand revoiray-je hélas! de mon petit village

Fumer la cheminée, et en quelle saison

Revoiray-je le clos de ma pauvre maison

Qui m'est une province, et beaucoup davantage._

_Plus me plaist le sejour qu'out basty mes ayeux

Que des palais romains le front audacieux

Plus que le marbre dur me plaist l'ardoise fine._

_Plus mon Loyre gaulois que le Tybre latin

Plus mon petit Liré que le mont Palatin

Et plus que l'air marin la douceur Angevine._

Happy the man who like Ulysses has traveled far and wide,

Or like that other who won the Golden Fleece,

And then wended home full worn and full wise,

To spend among his own folk the remainder of his days.

When shall I see once more alack! above my little hamlet

Rise the chimney smoke, and in what season of the year

Shall I see once more the garden of my humble home,

Which is a wide province in my eyes, and even more.

Dearer to my heart is the home my forefathers built

Than the cloud-capped tops of haughty Roman palaces.

Dearer than hardest marble the fine slate of my roof.

Dearer my Gaulish Loire than Tiber's Latin stream.

Dearer my little hill of Liré than Mount Palatinus,

And than sea-airs the sweet air of Anjou.

Till yesterday that voice still spoke for the unchanging life of

France. The peasant remained where his forefathers had broken the

fields and loaded the wains. Why should he be seeking strange lands,

like the troubled races? He found his place of peace long ago. To what

country can he travel where the sun is pleasanter on happy fields?

What people can he visit who have the dignity and simplicity of his

neighbors?

Then the hordes from the north came down, eager to win this sunny

quietness, curious to surprise the secret of this Latin race, with

its sense of form and style, its charm, its sweet reasonableness. Why

are these Southerners loved? Why do their accomplishments conquer the

world so gently, so irresistibly? Surely this hidden beauty will yield

to violence. So it came, that dark flood from the north, pouring over

the fertile provinces, breaking the peace of these peasants. Something

was destroyed where the human spirit had made its home for a longer

time than the individual life: a channel for the generations. Their

fields are still red with the poppy, but their young men who reaped are

busy on redder fields. Their village street is crumbled stone, through

which the thistle thrusts. The altar of their church is sour with rain

water, and the goodness of life is a legend that was slain in a moment

of time. A modern city can be rebuilt. An ancient village can never be

rebuilt. That soft rhythm of its days was caught from old buildings and

a slowly ripening tradition. Something distinguished has passed out of

life. What perished at Rheims in the matchless unreturning light of its

windows was only a larger loss. A quiet radiance was on these villages,

too.

Still the peasants return to the place they know. Even their dead are

more living than the faces of strangers in cities. The rocks in the

gutter once held their home. There is sadness in a place where people

have lived and been happy, and now count their dead. It is desolate

in a way wild nature never is, for the raw wilderness groups itself

into beauty and order. It would have been better to let the forest

thicken through centuries, than to inherit the home where one day the

roof-tree is razed by the invader. These peasants are not hysterical.

They are only broken-hearted. They tell their story in a quiet key, in

simple words, with a kind of grayness of recital. There are certain

experiences so appalling to the consciousness that it can never reveal

the elements of its distress, because what was done killed what could

tell. But the light of the day is never seen again with the same eyes

after the moment that witnessed a child tortured, or one's dearest shot

down like a clay pigeon. The girl, who was made for happiness, when

she is wife and mother, will pass on a consciousness of pain which had

never been in her line before. The thing that happened in a moment will

echo in the troubled voices of her children, and a familiar music is

broken.

III

"MON GAMIN"

One day when I was in Lorraine, a woman came to me carrying in her

hands a boy's cap, and a piece of rope. She was a peasant woman about

forty years of age, named Madame Plaid. She said:

"You see, Monsieur, I found him in the fields. He was not in the house

when the Germans came here. I thought that my little scamp (mon gamin)

was in danger, so I looked everywhere for him. He was fourteen years

old, only that, at least he would have been in September, but he seemed

to be all of nineteen with his height and his size.

"I asked the Prussians if they had not seen my little scamp. They were

leading me off and I feared that they would take me away with them. The

Prussians said that somebody had fired on them from my house.

"Your son had a rifle with him and he fired on us, just like the

others," they said.

"I answered: 'My little scamp did not do anything, I am sure.'

"'What shirt did he have on?' they asked.

"'A little white shirt with red stripes,' I replied.

"They insisted that he was the one that had fired.

"When the cannonading stopped, the people who had been with me told me

that they had seen a young man lying stretched out in the field, but

they could not tell who it was. I wanted to see who it was that was

lying there dead, and yet I drew back.

"'No,' I said to myself, 'I am too much afraid.'

"But I crossed the field. I saw his cap which had fallen in front of

him. I came closer. It was he. He had his hands tied behind his back.

"See. Here is the cord with which he had been killed. For he had not

been shot. He had been hanged.

(She held out to us the cord--a coil of small but strong rope.)

"And here is the cap.

(She was holding the gray cap in her two hands.)

"When I saw him, I said to the Prussians:

"'Do the same thing to me now. Without my little scamp I cannot go on.

So do the same to me.'

"Three weeks later, I went again to search for my little scamp. I did

not find him any more. The French soldiers had buried him with their

dead."

IV

THE MAYOR ON THE HILLTOP

We were searching for the Mayor of Clermont, not the official Mayor,

but the real Mayor. This war has been a selector of persons. When the

Germans came down on the villages, timid officials sometimes ran and

left their people to be murdered. Then some quiet curé, or village

storekeeper, or nun, took over the leadership. Wherever one of these

strong souls has lived in the region of death, in that village he has

saved life. When the weak and aged were wild with terror, and hunted

to their death, he has spoken bravely and acted resolutely. The sudden

rise to power of obscure persons throughout Northern France reminds

an American of the life history of Ulysses Grant. So at Clermont, the

Mayor took to his heels, but Edouard Jacquemet, then sixty-eight years

old, and his wife, stayed through the bonfire of their village and

their home. And ever since, they have stayed and administered affairs.

[Illustration: One of the new little red-brick houses of reconstructed

France.]

[Illustration: The Mayor of Clermont and his wife, who did not run away

when the invaders came.]

Clermont was a village of one thousand inhabitants. Thirty-eight

persons remained--old people, religious sisters and the Jacquemets.

The Germans burned 195 houses. The credit falls equally to a corps of

Uhlans with the Prince of Wittgenstein at their head, and to the XIII

corps from Württemberg, commanded by General von Urach. The particular

regiments were the 121st and 122d Infantry.

We inquired of soldiers where we could find the Mayor.

"He is up above," they said. We were glad to leave the hot little

village, with its swarms of flies, its white dust that lay on top of

the roadbed in thick, puffy heaps, and its huddles of ruined houses.

Each whirring camion, minute by minute, grinding its heavy wheels into

the crumbling road, lifted white mists of dust, which slowly drifted

upon the leaves of trees, the grass of the meadows, and the faces

of soldiers. Eyebrows were dusted, hair went white, mustaches grew

fanciful. Nature and man had lost all variety, all individuality. They

were powdered as if for a Colonial ball. The human eye and the eyes of

cattle and horses were the only things that burned with their native

color through that veil of white that lay on Clermont.

We went up a steep, shaded hill, where the clay still held the summer

rains. The wheels of our car buzzed on the slush--"All out," and we did

the last few hundred yards on foot. We were bringing the Mayor good

news. The Rosette of the Legion of Honor had just been granted him.

We found him in a little vine-covered old stone house on the hilltop,

where he took refuge after his village was burned. He wept when my

friend told him that the emblem of the highest honor in France was on

its way.

"It means I have done something for my country," he said.

He is a cripple with one leg short. He goes on crutches, but he goes

actively. He has fulfilled his life. His sons are fighting for France,

and he, too, has served, and his service has been found acceptable

in her sight. He is bright and cheery, very patient and sweet, with

that gentleness which only goes with high courage. But underneath that

kindliness and utter acceptance of fate, I felt that "deep lake of

sadness," which comes to one whose experience has been over-full.

So we came through the dust of the plain and the clay of the climb to a

good green place. It is a tiny community set on a hill. That hill was

covered with stately trees--a lane of them ran down the center of the

plateau, as richly green and fragrant as the choicest pine grove of New

England. The head of the lane lost itself in a smother of low-lying

bushes and grasses, lush-green and wild. But just before it broke into

lawlessness, one stout tree, standing alone, shot up; and tacked to

its stalwart trunk, this notice fronts the armies of France:

"CANTONNEMENT DE CLERMONT.

"IL EST FORMELLEMENT INTERDIT AUX VISITEURS OU AUTRES D'ATTACHER DES

CHEVAUX AUX ARBRES. TOUTE DÉGRADATION AUX ARBRES SERA SEVÈREMENT

REPRIMÉE.

"ORDRE DU COMMANDANT DE CANTONNEMENT.

"IT IS ABSOLUTELY FORBIDDEN TO VISITORS OR ANYBODY ELSE TO TIE THEIR

HORSES TO THE TREES. ANY DAMAGE TO THE TREES WILL BE SEVERELY PUNISHED.

"BY ORDER OF THE COMMANDER."

Little strips of bark from the protected tree framed the notice.

There was the voice of France, mindful of the eternal compulsions of

beauty, even under the guns. No military necessity must destroy a

grove. In the wreckage of almost every precious value in that Argonne

village, the one perfect thing remaining must be cherished.

Nowhere else have I ever seen that combination of wildness and

stateliness, caught together in one little area, except on some

hill crest of New Hampshire. For the first time in two years I felt

utterly at home. This was the thing I knew from childhood. Nothing

that happened here could seem strange. Nothing spoken in that grove

of firs would fall in an alien tongue. The lane was doubly flanked

by great growths, planted in 1848--the inner line of cypresses, the

outer windshield of fir trees. One lordly fir had been blown down by

a shell, and cut up for kindling. Other shell-holes pitted the grove.

We were standing on an historic spot. In the XIV century, Yolande of

Flanders built her castle here, high above danger. She was the Countess

of Bar-le-Duc, the Catherine de Medici of her district. When a little

village to the North protested at her heavy taxes, she burned the

village. The Bishop sent two vicars to expostulate. She drowned the

two vicars, then built three churches in expiation, one more for good

measure than the number of vicars, and died in the odor of sanctity.

One of her chapels is on the plateau where we were standing. On the

outer wall is a sun dial in colors, with a Latin inscription around the

rim.

"As many darts as there are hours. Fear only one dart, the last one."

So the old illuminator had written on this Chapel of Saint Anne.

"Only one shell will get you--your own shell. No need to worry till

that comes, and then you won't worry," how often the soldiers of France

have said that to me, as they go forward in their blithe fatalism.

Little did the hand that groined that chapel aisle and fashioned that

inscription in soft blue and gold know in what sad sincerity his

words would fall true. When he lettered in his message for the hidden

years, he never thought it would speak centuries away to the intimate

experience of fighting men on the very spot, and that his hilltop would

be gashed with shell-pits where the great 220's had come searching,

till the one fated shell should find its mark.

The Mayor led me down the grove, his crutches sinking into the conifer

bed of the lane. From the rim of the plateau, we looked out on one of

the great panoramas of France. The famous roads from Varenne and Verdun

come into Clermont and pass out to Chalons and Paris. Clermont is the

channel through the heart of France. From here the way lies straight

through Verdun to Metz and Mayence. We could see rolling fields,

and mounting hills, ridge on ridge, for distances of from twelve to

twenty-five miles. To the South-East, the East, and the North and the

West, the sweep of land lay under us and in front of us: an immense

brown and green bountiful farm country. There we were, lifted over the

dust and strife. In a practice field, grenades clattered beneath us.

From over the horizon line, the guns that nest from Verdun to the

Somme grumbled like summer thunder.

"I have four sons in the war," said the Mayor. "One is a doctor. He is

now a prisoner with the Germans. The other three are Hussar, Infantry

and Artillery."

We turned back toward the house. His wife was walking a little ahead of

us, talking vivaciously with a couple of officers.

"My wife," he went on, "has the blood of four races in her, English,

Greek, Spanish and French. She is a very energetic woman, and brave.

She is a soul. She is a somebody. (_Elle est une âme. Elle est

quelqu'un._)"

We talked with her. She is brown-eyed and of an olive skin, with

gayety and ever-changing expression in the face. But she is near the

breaking-point with the grief of her loss, and the constant effort

to choke down the hurt. Her laughter goes a little wild. I felt that

tears lay close to the lightest thing she said. Her maiden name was

Marie-Amélie-Anne Barker.

"When the Germans began to bombard our village," she told me, "my

husband and I went down into the cellar. He stayed there a few minutes.

"'Too damp,' he said. He climbed upstairs and sat in the drawing-room

through the rest of the bombardment. Every little while I went up to

see him, and then came back into the cellar.

"After their bombardment they came in person. In the twilight of early

morning they marched in, a very splendid sight, with their great coats

thrown over the shoulder. I heard them smash the doors of my neighbors.

The people had fled in fright. The soldiers piled the household stuff

out in the street. I saw them load a camion with furniture taken from

the home of M. Desforges and with material taken from Nordmann, our

merchant of novelties.

"A doctor, with the rank of Major, seized the surgical dressings of our

hospital, although it was under the Red Cross flag.

"I stood in my door, watching the men go by.

"You are not afraid?" asked one.

"I am not afraid of you," I replied.

"I believed my house would not be burned. It was the house where the

German Emperor William the First spent four days in 1870. It was the

house where he and Bismarck and Von Moltke mapped out the plan of

Sedan. You see it was the finest house in this part of France. Each

year since 1871, three or four German officers have come to visit

it, taking photographs of it, because of the part it played in their

history. I was sure it would not be burned by them.

"I left all my things in it--the silverware, the little trinkets and

souvenirs, handed down in my family, and gathered through my lifetime.

I said to myself, if I take them out, they will treat it as a deserted

house. I will show them we are living there, with everything in sight.

I was working through the day at the hospital, caring for the German

wounded.

"The soldiers began their burning with the house of a watchmaker. They

burned my house. I saw it destroyed bit by bit (morceau par morceau).

I saw my husband's study go, and then the drawing-room, and the

dining-room. The ivories, the pictures, the bibelots, everything that

was dear to me, everything that time had brought me, was burned.

"I said to the German doctor that it was very hard.

"He replied: 'If I had known it was Madame's house, I should have

ordered it to be spared.'"

We were silent for a moment. Then Madame Jacquemet said:

"Come and see what we have now."

She led us upstairs to a room which the two beds nearly filled.

"All that I own I keep under the beds," she explained. "See, there are

two chairs, two beds. Nothing more. And we had such a beautiful room."

"Why did you burn our homes?" I asked a German officer, after the

village was in ruins.

"We didn't burn the place," he answered. "It was French shells that

destroyed it."

"I was here," I answered. "There were no French shells."

"The village people fired on our troops," he said.

"I was here," I told him. "The village people did not fire on your

troops. The village people ran away."

"An empty town is a town to be pillaged," he explained.

The Mayor took up the story.

"A German officer took me into his room, one day," he said. "He closed

the door, and began:

"I am French at heart. I believe that your village was burned as a

spectacle for the Crown Prince who has his headquarters over yonder at

a village a few kilometers away."

The picture he summoned was so vivid that I said, "Nero--Nero, for whom

the destruction of a city and its people was a spectacle. Only this is

a little Nero. Out of date and comic, not grandiose and convincing."

Monsieur Jacquemet went on:

"They burned our houses with pastilles, the little round ones with a

hole in the middle that jump as they burn. In the Maison Maucolin we

found three liters of them. The Thirty-first French Regiment picked

them up when they came through, so that no further damage should

come of them. The Germans left a sackful in the park belonging to M.

Desforges. The sack contained 500 little bags, and each bag had 100

pastilles. Monsieur Grasset threw the sack into water, as a measure of

safety."

The Mayor had saved a few pastilles as evidence, and passed one of them

around. He has an exact turn of mind. He made out a map of his hilltop,

marking with spots and dates the shells that seek his home.

Under one of the oldest of the linden trees--the historian of our

party, Lieutenant Madelin, wondered how old: "four, five centuries,

perhaps"--we ate an open-air luncheon. Our hosts were the Mayor and

his wife. Our fellow-guests were the Captain and the Major--the Major

a compact, ruddy, sailor type of man, with the far-seeing look in his

blue eyes of one whose gaze comes to focus at the horizon line.

It seemed to me like the simple farm-meals I had so often eaten on the

New England hills, in just that rapid sunlight playing through the

leaves of great trees, in just that remote clean lift above the dust

and hurt of things. I thought to myself, I shall always see the beauty

of this little hill rising clear of the ruin of its village.

Then we said good-by, and I saw on the doorstep, sitting motionless

and dumb, the mother of a soldier. Her white hair was almost vivid

against the decent somber black of her hood, and dress. There was a

great patience in her figure, as she sat resting her chin on her hand

and looking off into the trees, as if time was nothing any more. For

many days the carpenters had not been able to work fast enough to

make coffins for the dead of Clermont. She was waiting on the Mayor's

doorstep for the coffin of her son.

V

THE LITTLE CORPORAL

We were in the barracks of the Eighth Regiment of Artillery. They have

been converted into a home for refugees, but the old insignia of famous

victories still adorn the walls. We were talking with Madame Derlon.

She is a refugee from Pont-à-Mousson, widowed by German severity. But

unlike so many women of Lorraine whom I met, she still could look to

her line continuing. For while she sat, slightly bent over and tired,

Charles, her fifteen-year-old son ("fifteen and a half, Monsieur"),

stood tall and straight at her side. While the mother told me her

story, I looked up from her and saw on the wall the escutcheon of the

Regiment, and I read in illuminated letters the names of the battles in

which it had fought:

"Austerlitz--1805.

Friedland--1807.

Sebastopol--1854.

Solferino--1859."

At the beginning of the war, her husband was ferryman of the Moselle,

she said. He carried civilians and soldiers across. Their little son,

then thirteen years old, liked to be near him, and watch the river

and the passing of people. The boy had discovered a cellar under the

bridge--a fine underground room, well-vaulted, where boy-like he had

hidden tobacco and where he often stayed for hours, dreaming of the

bold things he would do when his time came, and he would be permitted

to enlist. His day was closer than he guessed. A cave is as wonderful

to a French boy as it was to Tom Sawyer. Sometimes he made a full

adventure of it and slept the night through there.

During the early battles, the bridge had been blown up. So Father

Derlon was kept very busy ferrying peasants and stray soldiers from

bank to bank. One day three German patrols came along. Charles was

standing by the bridge, watching his father sitting in the wherry. The

boy stepped down into his underground room to get some tobacco. He was

gone only five minutes. When he came back, the three Germans said to

him:

"Your father is dead."

It was so. They had climbed the bridge, and fired three times; one

explosive bullet had entered the ferryman's head, and two had shattered

his arm. The Germans said he had been carrying soldiers across, and

that it was wrong to carry soldiers.

"The little one came home crying," said Madame Derlon. "Since that

moment, the little one left home without telling me. He did not send me

any news of himself. I searched everywhere to try to find a trace of

him. Monsieur Louis Marin, the Deputy, told me he had seen a boy like

my little one following the soldiers. Actually he had been adopted by

the 95th Territorial Regiment."

He told the soldiers that he had just seen his father killed by the

Germans. One of the captains took him under his protection. The

boy insisted on becoming a fighter. He was brave and they made him

Corporal. He fell wounded in action, winning the Croix de Guerre.

Charles Derlon, the little Corporal of the 95th Infantry, has a

bright open face, but it is a face into which has passed the look of

responsibility. In one moment, he became a man, and he has that quiet

dignity of a boy whom older men respect and make a comrade of. He holds

himself with the trim shoulders and straight carriage of a little

soldier of France.

One of us asked him:

"And weren't you afraid, my boy, of the fight?"

"It is all the same to me," he replied, "when I get used to it."

[Illustration: The Little French Corporal, who joined the army at 14

years of age and, wounded, won the Cross of War.]

[Illustration: The Curé of Triaucourt (at the right) who stayed with

his people when the village was burned. Next him, in trench helmet,

stands one of the thousands of French priests who serve by day and

night at the front, rescuing the wounded, and cheering the fighting

men.]

"And why," we pressed him, "did you run away without going to your

mother? Didn't you think she might be anxious?"

"Because I knew very well," he said, "that she would not want to let me

go."

"And you are away from the army now, 'on permission'?" we asked.

Very proudly he answered:

"No, Monsieur. I am on leave of convalescence for three months. I have

been wounded in three places, two wounds in my arm, and one in my leg."

VI

THE GOOD CURÉ

What was true of Joan of Arc is true to-day. There is no leadership

like the power of a holy spirit. It lends an edge to the tongue in

dealing with unworthy enemies. It gives dignity to sudden death.

Religion, where it is sincere, is still a mighty power in the lives of

simple folk to lift them to greatness. Out beyond Rheims, at the front

line trenches, the tiny village of Bétheny is knocked to pieces. The

parish church is entirely destroyed except for the front wall. Against

that wall, an altar has been built, where the men of the front line

gather for service. Over the altar I read the words

_Que le Coeur de Jésus sauve la France_.

In that name many in France are working. Such a one is Paul Viller,

curé of Triaucourt. The burning of the village is the world's end for

a peasant, because the village was his world. When the peasants of

Triaucourt saw their little local world rocking, they turned to the

curé. He was ready.

"It is better to run," said the Mayor; "they kill, those Germans."

As the curé said to the German lieutenant who tried to force him up

the bell-tower, "That ascension will give me the vertigo," so he felt

about running away: his legs were not built for it. He would like to

"oblige," but he was not fashioned for such flights.

Curé Viller is 55 years old, short and ruddy and sturdy. In his books

and his travel, and wellgrounded Latin education, he is far removed

from the simple villagers he serves. But he has learned much from them.

He has taken on their little ways. He has their simplicity which is

more distinguished than the manners of cities. With them and with him

I felt at home. That is because he was at home with himself, at home

in life. His house was full of travel pictures--Brittany fishermen and

nooks of scenery. He had the magazine litter, scattered through all

the rooms, of a reading man who cannot bear to destroy one printed

thing that has served a happy hour. His volumes ranged through theology

up to the history of Thiers. His desk was the desk of an executive,

orderly, pigeon-holed, over which the transactions of a village flow

each day. A young priest entered and stated a case of need. The curé

opened a little drawer, peeled off five franc notes from a bundle, and

saw the young man to the door. It was as clean-cut as the fingering of

a bank-cashier. The only difference was the fine courtesy exchanged by

the men.

The curé talked with us about the Germans. We asked him how the

peasants felt toward them, after the burning and the murders.

"I will tell you how the village electrician felt," replied he. "He

came back after the troops had left and took a look about the village.

"'If I ever get hold of those Germans, I'll chew them up,' he said to

me.

"'Some of them are still here,' I replied.

"'Show them to me quick,' he demanded.

"'They are in the church--grievously wounded.'

"We went there. A German was lying too high on his stretcher, groaning

from his wound and the uncomfortable position.

"'Here, you, what are you groaning about?' thundered the electrician.

He lit a cigarette and puffed at it, as he glared at his enemy.

"'Uncomfortable, are you? I'll fix you,' he went on, sternly. Very

gently he eased the German down into the softer part of the stretcher,

and tucked in his blankets.

"'Now, stop your groaning,' he commanded. He stood there a moment in

silence, then burst out again angrily:

"'What are you eyeing me for? Want a cigarette, do you?'

"He pulled out a cigarette, put it in the lips of the wounded man and

lit it. Then he came home with me and installed electric lights for me.

That was the way he chewed up the Germans.

"As for me, I lost twenty pounds of weight because of those fellows.

After they have been in a room, it is a chaos: men's clothing, women's

undergarments, petticoats, skirts, shoes, napkins, cloths, hats,

papers, boxes, trunks, curtains, carpets, furniture overturned and

broken, communicants' robes--everything in a mess. I have seen them

take bottles of gherkins, cherries, conserves of vegetables, pots of

grease, lard, hams, everything they could eat or drink. What they

couldn't carry, they destroyed. They opened the taps of wine casks,

barrels of oil and vinegar, and set flowing the juice of fruits ready

for distillation.

"The official pillage of precious objects which are to be sent to

Germany is directed by an officer. He has a motor car and men. I have

sometimes asked for vouchers for the objects, stolen in that way.

The vouchers are marked with the signature of the officer doing the

requisitioning, and with the stamp of the regiment. But who will do

the paying, and when will they do it? The plunderer who takes bottles

of wine gives vouchers. I have seen some of them which were playfully

written in German, reading:

"'Thanks, good people, we will drink to your health.'

"They don't always have good luck with their pillage. A Boche, who is

an amateur of honey, rummages a hive. The valiant little bees hurl

themselves on the thief and give him such a face that he can't open

his mouth or his eyes for a couple of days. A Boche once held out to

me a handful of papers which he took for checks of great value. They

were receipts filched from the drawers of Madame Albert Fautellier. The

biter was well bitten.

"When the Germans entered my house they held revolvers in their hand.

It is so always and everywhere. If all they are asking of you is a

match, or a word of advice, the Boche takes out his revolver from its

holster, and plunges it back in, when he has got what he wishes. With a

revolver bullet he shoots a steer, and knocks down a pig with the butt

of his rifle. The animals are skinned. He doesn't take anything but the

choice morsels. He leaves the rest in the middle of the street, or a

court or garden, the head, the carcass and the hide."

No man in France had a busier time during the German occupation than

this village curé. He went on with his recital:

"On Sunday morning, the Germans set our church clock by German time,

but the bell was recalcitrant and continued to sound the French hour,

while the hands galloped on according to their whim. While they were

here, the hour didn't matter. We lost all notion of time. We hardly

knew what day it was. My cellar is deep and well vaulted. I placed

there a pick-ax, spades and a large shovel. Every precaution was taken.

I placed chairs, and brought down water. Wax tapers, jammed in the

necks of empty bottles, gave us light enough. That Sunday and the days

following I had the pleasure of offering hospitality to 76 persons. My

parishioners knew that my home was wide open to them. When you are in

numbers, you have less fear.

"The men went into the garden to listen and see whether the battle was

coming closer. I recited the rosary in a loud tone. The little children

knelt on their knees on the pavement and prayed. Cavalry and infantry

passed my door in silence. Once only, I heard the Teutons chanting;

it was the third day of the battle: a regiment, muddy and frightened,

reentered Friaucourt chanting.

"The hours go slowly. Suddenly we saw to the East a high column of

smoke. Can that be the village of Evres on fire? I think it is, but to

reassure my people I tell them that it is a flax-mill burning, or the

smoke of cannon. At night we sleep on chairs. The children lie down on

an immense carpet, which I fold over them, and in that portfolio they

are able to sleep.

"Monday was a day of glorious sunshine. Nature seemed to be en fête.

After I had buried seven French and German dead, and was walking home,

I saw coming toward me Madame Procès, her daughter Hélène, in tears, a

German officer and a soldier. The officer asked me:

"'Do you know these ladies?'

"'Very well,' I answered, 'they are honest people of my parish.'

"'All right. This soldier has not shown proper respect to the young

lady. He will be rebuked. If he had gone further he would be shot.'

"The officer then reprimanded the soldier in my presence. The man,

stiff at attention, listened to the rebuke in such a resentful, hateful

way that I thought to myself there is going to be trouble. The soldier,

his rifle over his shoulder, went toward the Mayor's office.

"About twenty minutes later I heard firing from the direction of the

Mayor's office, two shots, several shots, then a regular fusilade. The

sullen soldier had gone down there, clapped his hand to his head, said

he was wounded, and fired. When I heard the first firing, I thought it

was only one more of their performances. I had seen them kill a cow

and a pig in the street by shooting them.

"But at the sound of these shots the Germans ran out from the houses

and the streets, rifle and revolver in hand, shouting to me:

"'Your people have fired on us.'

"I protested with all my power, saying that all our arms had been put

in the Mayor's office, and that no one of us had done the firing. But

they only shouted the louder:

"'Your people have fired on us.'

"Flames broke out in the homes of Mr. Edouard Gand, and Mr. Gabriel

Géminel. We saw the Boches set them on fire with incendiary fuses.

Later on, we found the remnants of those fuses.

"Women began running to me, weeping and saying:

"'Curé, save my father.' 'My child is in the flames.' 'They are killing

my children.'

"The shooting went on. The fire spread and made a hot cauldron of two

streets. Cattle and crops and houses burned.

"Then a strange thing happened. Some Germans aided in saving clothing

and furniture from two or three of the houses. But most of them watched

the destruction, standing silent and showing neither pleasure nor

regret. I could tell it was no new sight for them. In two hours, there

was nothing left of the thirty-five houses on two streets.

"Our people ran out, chased by angry Germans who fired on them as if

they were hunter's game. Jules Gand, 58 years old, was shot down at

the threshold of his door. A seventeen-year-old boy named Georges

Lecourtier, taking refuge with me, was shot. Alfred Lallemand hid

himself in a kitchen. His body was riddled with bullets. We found it

burned and lying in the rubbish, eight days later. He was 54 years old.

Men, women and children fled into the gardens and the fields. They

forded the river without using the bridge which was right there. They

ran as far as Brizeaux and Senard. My cook ran. She had a packet of my

bonds, which I had given her for safe-keeping, and she had a basket of

her own valuables. In her fear she threw away her basket, and kept my

bonds.

"The daughter of one of our women, shot in this panic, came to me and

said:

"'My mother had fifty thousand francs, somewhere about her.'

"The body had been buried in haste, with none of the usual rites paid

the dead, of washing and undressing. So no examination had been made.

We dug the body up and found a bag.

"'Is that the bag?' I asked the daughter.

"'It looks like it,' she replied. It was empty.

"A day later we found another bag in the dead woman's room, and in it

were the bonds for fifty thousand francs. That shows the haste and

panic in which our people had fled, picking up the wrong thing, leaving

the thing of most value.

"It was in the garden of the Procès family that the worst was done.

It was Hélène Procès, you remember, who was insulted by the German

soldier. The grandmother, 78 years old, Miss Laure Mennehand, the aunt,

who was 81 years old, the mother, 40 years old, and Hélène, who was 18,

ran down the garden. They placed a little ladder against the low wire

fence which separated their back yard from their neighbor's. Hélène was

the first one over, and turned to help the older women. The Germans had

followed them, and riddled the three women with bullets. They fell one

on the other. Hélène hid herself in the cabbages.

"That same evening some of the villagers went with me to the garden.

The women looked as if they were sleeping. They had no trace of

suffering in the face. Miss Mennehand had her little toilet bag,

containing 1,000 francs, fastened to her left wrist, and was still

holding her umbrella in her right hand. Her brains had fallen out. I

collected them on a salad leaf and buried them in the garden.

"We carried the three bodies to their beds in their home. In one bed,

as I opened it, I saw a gold watch lying. From Monday evening till

Wednesday morning, the bodies lay there, with no wax taper burning, and

no one to watch and pray. By night the Germans played the piano, close

by.

"'Your people fired on our soldiers,' said a Captain to me next day.

'I'll show you the window.'

"He led me down the street, and pointed.

"'It is unfortunate you have chosen that window,' I replied to him; 'at

the time you started burning our village the only person in the house

was a paralytic man, who was burned in his bed.'

"It was the house of Jean Lecourtier, 70 years old.

"In front of the Poincaré house, I met a General, who, they said, was

the Duke of Württemberg. He said to me:

"'I am glad to see you, Curé. I congratulate you. You are the first

chaplain I have seen. Generally, when we get to a village, the mayor

and the curé have run away. We officers are angry at what has taken

place here. You have treated us well.'

"'Perhaps you will be able to stop the horror,' I said to him.

"'Ah, what can you expect? It is war. There are bad soldiers in your

army and in ours.'

"The next day I saw him getting ready to enter a magnificent car. His

arm was bandaged.

"'You are wounded, General?' I asked him.

"'No, not that,' he answered.

"'A strained ligament (_entorse_)?' I asked.

"'No,' he said, 'don't tell me the French word,' He opened a pocket

dictionary with his unhurt hand, wetting his finger and turning the

pages.

"'It is a sprain (_luxation_),' he said.

"That is the way they learn a language as they go along.

"'You are leaving us?' I asked.

"Yes, I am going to my own country to rest."

The afternoon had passed while we were talking. We rose to make our

good-bys.

"Come with me," said the curé. He led us down the village street, to a

small house, whose backyard is a little garden on the little river. All

the setting was small and homelike and simple, like the village itself

and the curé. A young woman stepped out from the kitchen to greet us.

"This is the girl," said Father Viller. Hélène Procès is twenty years

old, with the dark coloring, soft, slightly olive skin, brown eyes, of

a thousand other young women in the valley of the Meuse. But the look

in her eyes was the same look that a friend of mine carries, though it

is now twelve years since the hour when her mother was burned to death

on board the _General Slocum_. Sudden horror has fixed itself on the

face of this girl of Triacourt, whose mother and grandmother and aunt

were shot in front of her in one moment.

She led us through the garden. There were only a few yards of it: just

a little homely place. She brought us to the fence--a low wire affair,

cheaply made, and easy to get over.

"The bullets were splashing around me," she said.

The tiny river, which had hardly outgrown its beginnings as a brook,

went sliding past. It seemed a quiet place for a tragedy.

VII

THE THREE-YEAR-OLD WITNESS

Two persons came in the room at Lunéville where I was sitting. One was

Madame Dujon, and the other was her granddaughter. Madame Dujon had a

strong umbrella, with a crook handle. Her tiny granddaughter had a tiny

umbrella which came as high as her chin. As the grandmother talked,

the sadness of the remembrance filled her eyes with tears. Her voice

had pain in it, and sometimes the pain, in spite of her control, came

through in sobbing. The little girl's face was burned, and the wounds

had healed with scars of ridged flesh on the little nose and cheek. The

emotion of the grandmother passed over into the child. With a child's

sensitiveness she caught each turn of the suffering. Troubled by the

voice overhead, she looked up and saw the grandmother's eyes filled

with tears. Her eyes filled. When her grandmother, telling of the dying

boy, sobbed, the tiny girl sobbed. The story of the murder tired the

grandmother, and she leaned on her umbrella. The little girl put her

chin on her tiny umbrella, and rested it there.

Madame Dujon said:

"I will try to tell you the beginning of what I have passed through,

Monsieur, but I do not promise that I shall arrive at the end. It is

too hard. The day of the twenty-fifth of August, which was a Monday----"

As she spoke her words were cut by sobs. She went on:

"When the Germans came to our house, my son had to go all over the

house to find things that they wanted. I did not understand them, and

they were becoming menacing. I said to them:

"'I am not able to do any better. Fix things yourself. I give you

everything here. I am going to a neighbor's house.'"

She went with the tiny grand-girl, who was three years old, her son,

Lucien, fourteen years old, and another son, sixteen. The Germans came

here too, breaking in the windows, and firing their rifles. The house

was by this time on fire. The face of the little girl was burned.

"My poor boys wished to make their escape, but the fourteen-year-old

was more slow than the other, because the little fellow was a bit

paralyzed, and he already had his hands and body burned. He tried to

come out as far as the pantry. I saw the poor little thing stretched on

the ground, dying.

"'My God,' he said, 'leave me. I am done for. Mamma, see my bowels.'

"I saw his bowels. They were hanging like two pears from the sides of

his stomach. Just then the Germans came, shooting. I said to them:

"'He has had enough.'

"The little one turned over and tried to get the strength to cry out to

them: