seen at a glance to-day. From the railroad station at one end of
the town to the green fields beyond the hospital on the Chantilly
road at the other end, a black swath of burned and ruined buildings
is the memento. These houses and stores were not shelled: they were
burned methodically. The Germans arrived late in the afternoon of
the 2d of September, in that state of nervous excitement and hysterical
fear of _francs-tirailleurs_ that characterized them from the time
they passed Liége. The Mayor of Senlis, an old man over seventy, was
made to understand that he would be held responsible for the conduct
of the citizens, and was ordered to have water and lights turned on
in the town and a dinner for the German staff prepared at the chief
hotel. While he was busy with these commands,--most of the inhabitants
had fled that morning,--shots were exchanged in the lower end of the
town between the Germans and the retreating French. Thereupon the usual
order to burn and destroy was given, and the buildings along the main
thoroughfare were set on fire. The mayor and six other citizens,
gathered haphazard on the streets, were taken to a field outside the
town and shot. There were other moving and significant incidents in
the occupation of Senlis which are well authenticated, characteristic
of the German method, but need not be repeated here.
The older part of the town, the cathedral, the Roman wall fortunately
escaped with only a few chance shell holes here and there. The black
scar runs through the place from end to end, incontrovertible instance
of the German thing, which has been visited by thousands of French and
foreigners the past year. The wounds of Senlis are not deep: by
comparison with much else done by the Germans they are almost trivial.
The murder of the Mayor of Senlis was not a large crime in the German
scale. But the whole is nicely typical: Senlis is the kindergarten
lesson in the German method of making war.
* * * * *
As every one knows, the Germans breaking into France at Namur and
Mons came on with unexampled rapidity from the north and east toward
the south and west, circled somewhat to the west as they neared Paris,
and then the 5th of September recoiled under the shock of the French
offensive. For the better part of a week two millions of men struggled
on a thousand different battlefields from Nancy and Verdun on the east
to Coulommiers, Meaux, and Amiens on the south and west. This was the
great battle of the Marne, which checked the German invasion. The
pressure of this human cyclone, in general from northeast to southwest,
was more intense in some places than others. One of the bloodiest storm
centers lay east and west from the town of Vitry-le-François--from
Sermaize-les-Bains on the east to Fère-le-Champenoise, Montmirail, and
Esternay on the west. For fifty miles there in the heart of Champagne
the path of the cyclone can be traced by the blackened villages, the
gutted churches, the countless crosses in the midst of green fields.
One thinks of Champagne as a land of vineyards, but here in the
center and south of the fertile province there are few vines, mostly
fields of ripening wheat, green alfalfa, or beets--long undulating
swales of rich fields, cut by little copses of thick woods and by
white poplar-lined highways as everywhere in France. It has peculiarly
that smiling and gracious air of _la douce France_--gently sloping
fields and woods and little gray stone villages each with its small
church ornamented by the square tower and spire of Champenoise Gothic.
And it was here that the blast struck hardest, along the little streams,
in the thick copses, up and down the straight roads whose deep ditches
lent themselves to entrenchment, and in almost every village and
crossroads hamlet.
It is a country of few towns, of many small villages, farm and manor
houses. The buildings cluster in the hollows or about the crossroads,
and sometimes they escaped the storm because the shells exchanged
from hill to hill went quite over their roofs; again, as was the
case with Huiron just outside Vitry or with Maurupt near by, they
could not escape because they were perched on hills, and they were
almost completely razed by the fierce fire that raked them for days.
Sometimes they escaped shell and machine gun to be burned to the
ground vengefully with incendiary bombs, as at Sermaize-les-Bains,
where of nine hundred buildings less than forty were left standing
after the Germans retreated. These instances are the saddest of all
because so wanton! There was scarcely a single collection of houses
in that fifty miles which I traversed which did not bear its ugly
scar of fire and shell, scarcely a farmhouse that was not crumbled
or peppered with machine-gun bullets. Miles of desolation may be
seen in a couple of hours' drive around Vitry-le-François,--Favresse,
Blesmes, Écrinnes, Thiéblemont, Maurupt, Vauclerc,--with acre upon
acre of ruined buildings, a chimney standing here and there, heaps
of twisted iron that once were farm machines, withered trees--and
graves, everywhere soldiers' graves.
The churches suffered most, probably because they were used for
temporary defense. At Huiron the upper half of the thirteenth-century
Gothic church had been shaved off--in the ten-foot deep mass of débris
lay the richly carved capitals of the massive pillars. At Écrinnes near
by the apse of the exquisite little church had been blown off, leaving
the front and spire intact. At Maurupt the whole edifice, which commanded
the rolling countryside for miles, was riddled from end to end. Again,
I would enter an apparently sound building to find a pile of rubbish in
the nave, a gaping hole in the roof. And the same thing was true about
Bar-le-Duc to the east and Meaux to the west. It is safe to say that in
a fifty-mile wide stretch from Nancy to the English Channel not one
village in ten has escaped the scourge.
* * * * *
I speak of the churches because of their irreplaceable
beauty, the human tenderness of their relation with the earth.
But even more poignant, perhaps, were the wrecks of little country
homes--the stacks of ruined farm machinery, the gutted barns, the
burned houses. In many cases not a habitable building was left after
the cyclone passed. In one hamlet of thirty houses near Esternay I
remember, all but seven had been devastated--by incendiary fire.
Indeed, it was clearly distinguishable--the "legitimate" wrack of
war, from the deliberate spite of incendiarism. Maurupt was the one
case, Sermaize-les-Bains (where there was no fighting) the other. If
it had been simple war, shell and machine gun, probably fifty per cent
or more of the devastation would have been saved. But the German makes
war against an entire country, inanimate as well as animate.
The inhabitants of these ruins had come back in many instances--where
else had they to go? Swept up before the blast of the cyclone, they had
fled south over the fields and hard white roads, then crept back a few
days after the cyclone had passed to find their homes pillaged, burned,
their villages blackened scars on the earth. But they stayed there! The
English Society of Friends has given some money with which to put up
wooden huts, on which old men and Belgian refugees were working when I
passed that way. There is a French charity that tries to outfit these
new homes in the devastated districts, one of the numberless efforts of
the French to put their national house in order. But for all that charity
can do, the lot of these villagers is a bitter one: their strong men have
gone to the front; old men, women, and children are left to scratch the
fields, and exist miserably in the cellars, underneath bits of corrugated
iron roof, in tiny wooden huts. But they have planted their potatoes, in
the ruins in some cases, and have taken up sturdily the struggle of
existence in the wreck of their old homes. The children play among the
crumbling walls, the women go barefoot to the public well for water. The
fields have been sown and harvested somehow. Until the Germans can kill
off the French peasant women, they can never hope to conquer France.
Compared with the burning of homes, the razing of villages, mere
pilfering and looting seem commonplace, unreprehensible crimes. Yet
the loss of property by plain theft is no inconsiderable item in that
bill which France expects to present some day. The old châteaux that
were fouled and gutted by the invader, the trainloads of plunder that
went back to German cities, the emptied cellars and ransacked houses
have fed the fire of disgust and loathing which the French feel for
their foe. Yet they should not begrudge the invader the extraordinary
quantity of good wine which he consumed on his raid, because the
victory of the Marne was doubtless won in part by the aid of the
champagne bottle!
* * * * *
When I passed through the Marne valley the fields were being harvested
for the first time since those fatal days in September. Among the
harvesters were a number of middle-aged men with the soldiers' _képi_,
who had been given leave to make the crop, which was unusually abundant.
The fields of old Champagne, watered with the best blood of France, had
yielded their richest returns. Outside the charred and crumbled ruins
of the villages one might have forgotten the fact of war were it not for
the graves. Here and there the corner of some wood where a battery had
been placed was mowed as if cut by a giant reaper. The tall poplars
along the roadsides had been ripped and torn as by a violent storm. Some
hillsides were scarred with ripples from burrowing shells, and hastily
made trenches had not yet been ploughed completely under. But over the
undulating golden fields it would be difficult to trace the course of
the tempest were it not for the crosses above the graves, thousands upon
thousands of them,--singly, in clumps, in long lines where the dead
bodies had been brought out of the copses and buried side by side in
trenches, or where at a crossroads a little cemetery had been made to
receive the dead of the vicinity.
Often as you crawled along in a train you could follow the battle by
the bare spots left in the fields around the graves. They will never
be ploughed under and sown, not even the graves of Germans, not in
the richest land. Generally they were carefully fenced off, almost
always with a simple cross on the point of which hung the soldier's
_képi_ whenever it was found with the body. It is remarkable, considering
the scarcity of hands, the desolation of the country, the difficulty of
existence, what tender care has been given these graves of the unknown
dead. Many of them were decorated with fresh flowers or those metal
wreaths that the Europeans use, and where a company lay together a
little monument had been erected with a simple inscription. It would
seem that these Champenoise peasants still retain some of that pagan
reverence for the dead which their Latin ancestors had cultivated,
mingled with passionate love for those who gave themselves in defense
of _la patrie._
So for years to come the beautiful fields of France will be strewn
with these little spots of sanctuary where Frenchmen died fighting
the invader. The fields are already green again: Nature is doing her
best to remove the scars of battle from this land where so often in
the past ages she has been called upon to heal the wounds inflicted
by men. Nature will have completed her task long before the ruined
villages can be restored, long, long before the scars in men's hearts
made by this ruthless invasion can be healed. Another generation,
that of the little children playing in the ruins of their fathers'
homes, must grow up with hate in their hearts and die before the
wounds can be forgotten.
* * * * *
The Germans were shelling Rheims the day I was there. From the
little Mountain of Rheims, five miles away on the Épernay road, I
could see the gray and black clouds from bursting shells rise in the
mist around the massive cathedral. An observation balloon was floating
calmly over the hill beyond, directing the fire on the desolated city.
It was necessary to wait outside the town until a lull came in the
bombardment, and when our motor at last entered, it was like speeding
through a city of the dead, with crushed walls, weed-grown streets,
and empty silence everywhere save for the low whine of the big shells.
With the five or six hundred large shells hurled into Rheims that one
day, the Germans killed three civilians, wounded eighteen more, and
knocked over some hollow houses already gutted in previous bombardments.
They did not damage the cathedral that day, though several explosions
occurred within a few feet of the building.
There were no soldiers, no artillery in Rheims--there have not been
any for many months. Of its one hundred and thirty thousand people,
only twenty thousand were left hiding in cellars, skulking along the
walls, clinging to their homes in the immense desolation of the city
with that tenacity which is peculiarly French. In the afternoon when
the fire ceased the boys were playing in the streets and women sat in
front of their cellar homes sewing. They have adapted themselves to
sudden death. They move about from hole to hole in the wilderness of
shattered buildings. For the city had been gutted by the acre: street
after street was nothing but an empty shell of walls that crumpled up
from time to time and tottered over. Within lay an indescribable mass
of household articles, merchandise, all that once had been homes and
stores and factories. Around the cathedral there was a peculiar silence,
for this quarter of the city which received most of the shells is
absolutely deserted. The grass grew high between the stones in the
pavement all about. The sun was throwing golden cross-lights over the
battered walls as I came into the deserted square and stood beside the
little figure of Jeanne d'Arc before the great portal. As seen from
afar, now in the full nearer view, the amazing thing was the majesty
of the windowless, roofless, defaced cathedral. Acres of other buildings
have crumbled utterly, but not even the German guns have succeeded in
smashing the dignity out of this ancient altar of French royalty. It
still stands firm and mighty, dominating its ruined city, as if too old,
too deeply rooted in the soil of France to be crushed by her enemies.
After a year of bombardment it still raised its mutilated face in dumb
protest above the crumbling dwellings of its people, whom it could no
longer protect from the barbarian.
Not that the Germans have spared the cathedral in their senseless
bombardment of Rheims! From that first day, when their own wounded
lay within its walls and were carried out of the burning building
by the French, until the morning I was there, when a shell tore at
the ground beneath the buttresses hitherto untouched, the Germans
seem to have taken a special malignant delight in shelling the
cathedral. They have already damaged it beyond the possibility of
complete repair, even should their hearts at this late day be
miraculously touched by shame for what they have done and their guns
should cease from further desecration. The glorious glass has already
been broken into a million fragments; many of the finely executed
mouldings and figures--irreplaceable specimens of a forgotten art--have
been crushed; great wall spaces pounded and marred. It is as if a huge,
fat German hand had ground itself across a delicately moulded face,
smearing and smudging with vindictive energy its glorious beauty.
Rheims Cathedral must bear these brutal German scars forever, even
should the vandal hand be stayed now. It can never again be what it
was--the full, marvelous flowering of Gothic art, precious heritage
from dim centuries long past. Like a woman at the full flower of her
life who has been raped and defiled, all the perfection of her ripened
being defaced in a moment of lust, she will live on afterward with a
certain grandeur of horror in her eyes, of tragic dignity that can
never utterly be erased from her outraged person....
A French officer, speculating on the German intentions with that
admirably dispassionate intelligence with which the French consider
these brutal manifestations of the German mind, remarked, "At present
they seem engaged in ringing the cathedral with their fire, as if to
see how close they can come without hitting the building itself, but
of course from that distance they must sometimes miss." One theory
why the enemy pursues this unmilitary monument with such peculiarly
relentless ferocity is that they enjoy the outcry which their vandalism
creates. Moreover, it is a way of boasting to the world that they have
not yet been expelled from their positions behind Rheims, are not being
driven back. If any special explanation were needed, I should find it
rather in the fact that Rheims is peculiarly associated with French
history,--minster of her kings,--and its destruction would be especially
bruising to French pride. William the Second probably swells with
magnitude at the thought of destroying with his big guns this sanctuary
of French kings. Some of the graven kings still cling to their niches
in the lofty façade. Two have been taken to the ground for safety and
look out with horror in their blind eyes at the ruin all about them.
The little figure of Jeanne d'Arc, rescuer of a French king, still
stands untouched before the great portal, astride her prancing horse,
bravely waving her bronze flag. Around her were heaped garlands of
fresh flowers, touching evidence that the city of Rheims still holds
stout souls with faith in the ultimate salvation of their great church,
who lay their tribute at the feet of the virgin warrior. Once she
protected their ancestors from a less barbarous enemy.
What use to enumerate the wounds and outrages in minute detail? For
by to-day more of this unique beauty has gone to that everlasting
grave from which no German skill can resurrect it.... Within, the
cathedral has been less spoiled, but is even sadder. One walked over
the stone pavement crunching fragments of the purple glass that had
fallen from the gorgeous windows, now sightless. Once at this hour
it was all aglow with color, radiating a mysterious splendor into
the vaults of transept and nave. A shell had blasted its way into
one corner, another had rent the roof vaulting near the crossing of
transept and nave. The columns and arches were blackened by the smoke
of that fire which caught in the straw on which the German wounded
lay. There was something peculiarly forlorn, ghostly within the dim
ruins of what was once so great, and I was glad to escape to the old
hospital in the close, now turned into a hospital for the cathedral
itself. Here on benches and in piles about the floor of the low-vaulted
room had been gathered those fragments of statue and moulding that a
pious search could rescue from the débris around the cathedral. In this
room, while the German guns were still raining shells upon Rheims, an
old man in workman's apron was already moulding casts of the faces and
lines of the shattered stones so that in some happier day an effort to
reproduce them might be made. I saw between his trembling old fingers
the fine features of a stone angel which he was covering with clay. I
know of nothing more beautifully eloquent of the French spirit than
this labor of preservation. Within range of shell fire this old man
was calmly working to save what he might of the beauty that had been
so prodigally murdered. If spiritual laws are still operative in this
mad world of ours, the Latin must endure and conquer because of his
unshakable faith....
At the hill on the Épernay road I looked back for a last view of the
cathedral. The evening mist was already creeping over its scarred
walls. With the two towers lifting the great portal to the sky, it
dominated the valley, the ruined city at its feet, a monument of men's
aspirations raising its head high into the sky in spite of the unseen
missiles that even then were beginning once more their attack. I would
that these words might go to swell that cry which has gone up from all
civilized peoples at the sacrilege to Rheims! Even now something of its
majesty and its glory might be saved if the German guns were silenced--if
within the German nation there were left any respect for the ancient
decencies and traditions of man. But I know too well with what contempt
the Germans view such pleas for beauty, for old memories and loves. They
are but "sentimental weakness," in the words of the "War Book," along
with respect for defenseless women and children. The people who gloried
in the sinking of the Lusitania will hardly be moved to refrain from the
destruction of a cathedral. Rheims--unless saved by a miracle--is doomed.
And it is because neither beauty nor humanity, neither ancient tradition
nor common pity can touch the modern German, that this war must be fought
to a real finish. There is not room in this world for the German ideal
and the Latin ideal: one must die.
* * * * *
The tragedy of Rheims has been repeated again and again--at Soissons,
at Arras, at Ypres, in every town and village throughout that blackened
band of invaded France from the Vosges to the sea. Also the tragedy of
exiled and imprisoned country folk, of ruined farms and houses, of mere
destruction.
The wounds of France are so many, the outward physical bleeding of
the land is so vast, that volumes have been written already as the
record. Very little can be said or written about another wound,--the
lives of those in the invaded provinces behind the German lines,--for
almost nothing is known as to what has happened there, what is going
on now. A word now and then comes from that dead, no man's land; a
rare fugitive escapes from the conqueror's hand. The military rule
forbids any correspondence through neutrals, as is permitted prisoners
of war, to those held "behind the lines." The inhabitants are kept as
prisoners. Worse, they have been used at certain places along the front
as bucklers against the fire of their countrymen--in a quarry near
Soissons, at Saint-Mihiel. It is known that heavy imposts are laid upon
them, as at Lille, and that the invader is exploiting this richest part
of France's industrial territory. This last wound is, perhaps, the most
serious of all for France, in this modern, machine war. Latterly rumor
has it that the treatment of the inhabitants imprisoned behind the
German lines has become less rigorous, because, as a French general
explained,--"They hope to make peace with us--_quelle sale race!_"
These wounds are still bleeding. They cannot be ignored. They, as
well as the death, suffering, and agony of the long trench combat,
make the faces of the French tense, silent. "To think that they are
still here after a whole year since this happened!" a young Frenchman
exclaimed in bitterness of soul as we looked out over the thickly
scattered graves in the fields around Bercy. To him it was as if a
crazed and drunken marauder had taken possession of his house, burned
a part of it, and still caroused in another wing. The unforgettable,
unforgivable wounds of France!
The French, so clear-seeing, so reasonable even about their own
tragedies, are bitter to the soul when they think of the brutality
done to their _"douce France."_ To the French, quite as much as to
the Bryanited American, war is a senseless, inhuman thing; but it
becomes direfully necessary when the home has been burned and laid
waste. The Gallic spirit cannot understand that spirit of malevolent
destruction which vengefully wreaks its spite against defenseless and
inanimate works of age to be reverenced, of art to be loved. There are
certain scrupulosities of soul in the Latin that divide him from his
enemy, more effectually than a thousand years of life and an entire
world of space.
III
_The Barbarian_