THE INVADED COUNTRY
I have seen the German under many conditions. In the early days of the
war, I used to listen to his songs—sung very well. But, he does not sing
now. I have watched the smoke rise, in the early morning, as he cooked
his breakfast. I have dodged his flares, his grenades, and his
sentinels, at night. I have heard his shovels ring as he dug himself
down, and have listened to his talk to his neighbor. I have seen him
come up on all fours, from his dugout, crying “Kamarad”; and I cannot
say, that, as a common soldier, he is a bad fellow.
The brutality seems to start with the sous-officer. It gets more refined
and cruel as rank goes up. I have noticed the dazed, hopeless expression
of pregnant women at Sillery-Sur-Marne. They stayed under fire of the
guns, rather than carry their grief into safety. They emerged from their
Calvary, with faces as of the dead, impassive, masklike, hiding scars of
agony.
I talked with a young woman shop-keeper at Verpeliers. The Germans had
been in her house—slept on the floor, thick as sardines in a box. They
ate up her stock and did not pay. Was she not afraid? She laughed a
happy laugh. “What me, Monsieur, afraid? I am Francaise. What do I care
for those swine? The sous-officers tried to make me give in. They
pointed guns at me, and tried to pull me along with them when the French
returned. I screamed and fought. Four of my lodgers are where those
crosses are at the bend of the road. The others are prisoners. I am
paid, all right, and am satisfied.” “Yes,” she continued, “they charged
our old men with being in telephonic communication with the French Army.
Twelve were arrested, marked with a blue cross on the right cheek, and
have not been heard from since. Two, M. Poizeaux, aged 47, and M.
Vassel, 78 years old, were brought back and shot the same evening.”
At Rodern, in reconquered Alsace, where the natives spoke German, the
streets were marked in German letters, German proclamations were on the
walls, and German money was current, I sat with Tex Bondt, in a low
Alsatian room, by candle light. The heavy family bed was let into a wall
and screened off by a curtain, the floor was of stone, the furniture
primitive. A short, squat woman was bewailing her misfortunes. This
mother had six sons and three daughters. Three boys mobilized with the
German Army. Two were killed. The other is on the Russian front. Of the
three, who ran away, and joined the French army, one was killed and two
wounded. Two of her girls, nurses in the German Army, were killed during
a bombardment. As she listened, I watched emotion come and go in the
eyes of the remaining daughter.
In the hospital at Montreuil-Ballay, I met an old man, wounded in the
arm. The wound would not knit. Unable to sleep, weeping relieved him. He
said, “My wife and I were at home near Lille, in bed one night. The
Germans broke in the door, came upstairs, jabbed me with a bayonet and
made me get out. I kept going and joined the French Army.”
“And your wife, what of her?”
“I don’t know, I have neither seen nor heard from her from that day to
this.”
Again, in the hospital at Pont de Veyle, a young man on a neighboring
cot told me, “Yes, I am from the invaded country. My name is La Chaise.
Before the war, my father was Inspector General of railroads for the
Department of the North, with headquarters at Lille. When the Germans
advanced he was taken prisoner. I ran away, joined the French Army, and
my mother and sister were left at our home. A German Colonel billeted
himself in the house. He liked my sister,—she was very beautiful. This
is her photograph, and these are tresses of her hair when she was twelve
and eighteen year of age. This is her last letter to me. One night the
Colonel tried to violate my sister. She screamed, my mother ran in, shot
him twice with a revolver and killed him. The sentry entered, took my
mother and sister to prison; and, next morning they were lined up
against a wall and shot.”
One night at Madame’s,—the bake-shop across the road from the hospital
at La Croix aux Mines, with Leary, an Irishman, Simpson, a New
Zealander, and an Englishman who was in charge of the Lloyds Ambulance
service, we listened to Madame.
“Yes, the Germans descended on us from the hilltops like a swarm of
locusts, ate and drank up everything in sight, hunted us women out of
our houses into the road and told us it was our last chance for liberty.
We ran and the Germans followed. We did not know we were being used as a
screen, that we were sheltering the Boche behind. The French would not
shoot at us but they got the Germans just the same, from the flank. I
shall never forget our selfishness. All we thought about was getting to
our French friends, and we were covering the advance of our enemies! If
we had known, we’d have died first.”
The Englishman, who had been in the retreat from Mons, drawled
out,—“Yes, you Americans think the Germans are not bad people. I used to
think so, too, but when I listened to the Belgians telling how some
little girls were treated, though I felt they were telling the truth, it
was too horrible to believe. So three of us Red Cross men went out one
night,—where they told us the girls were buried. We dug them up; and,
let me tell you, no person on earth will ever make me associate with a
German again.”
At Nestle, they carried away 164 women. The official German explanation
was that they should work in Germany, while the cynical officers said
they would use them as orderlies. On August 29, 1914, when the Germans
entered the city, a mother of seven children was violated by three
soldiers. Later, she was knocked down and again assaulted, by an
officer. Five inhabitants were lined up against a wall to be shot, when
a French counter-attack liberated them.
In the spring of 1917, at Vraignes, in the invaded district, the Germans
told the people they were to be evacuated. After the inhabitants had
gathered their personal belongings, they were driven into the courtyard,
stripped and robbed of their possessions. Twenty-four young women were
carried away from this town of 253 population.
At Le Bouage, a suburb of Chauny, before the Germans retreated, the
French refugees were lined up a distance of two kilometers on the
Chauny-Noyon road and kept there, in a pouring rain, four hours. Even
the invalids were carried out on stretchers. German officers passed
along the line and picked out thirty-one young girls and women, one an
invalid girl, thirteen years of age, and carried them away with the
retreating army. Of the remainder within two weeks after fifty persons
succumbed from the exposure.
On February 18th, at Noyon, when the Germans were compelled to retreat,
in addition to burning, wrecking and looting, they carried away by force
fifty young girls between fourteen and twenty-one years of age. They
looted the American Relief store, dynamited the building, then turned
the canal water into the basement.
From Roubaix, Turcoing and Lille 25,000 civilians were deported.
“These slave raids commenced, April 22, 1916, at 3 o’clock in the
morning. Troops, with fixed bayonets, barred the streets, machine guns
commanded the roads, against unarmed people. Soldiers made their way
into the houses, officers pointed out the people who were to go. Half an
hour later, everybody was driven, pell-mell, into an adjacent factory,
from then to the station, whence they departed.” Taken from the Yellow
Book, published by the Minister of War, dated June 30, 1916.
At Warsage, August 4, 1914, the day Belgium was violated, three
civilians were shot, six hanged, nine murdered.
At Luneville, eighteen civilians were killed, including one boy of
twelve, shot, and an old woman of ninety-eight, bayoneted.
At Liege, twenty-nine civilians were murdered, some shot and others
bayoneted—yet others burned alive.
At Seilles, fifty civilians were killed.
At Audenne, August 20 and 21, 1914, 250 civilians were killed, according
to French records, while General Von Bulow, over his own signature, in a
written order to the people of Liege, dated August 22, says that he
commanded the town to be reduced to ashes and ordered 110 persons shot.
The process of terrorism is invariably the same:—First, the crushing
blow of invasion, followed by pillage, rape and murder; then, when the
victims are paralyzed, crushed in spirit, shocked to the heart’s core,
obnoxious regulations are published and enforced to prevent their
recuperating.
At La Fontenelle, Ban de Sept, and many other villages along the front,
manure had been thrown into the wells, the fruit trees were cut down,
the copper was taken from coffins of the dead, the farm houses were
demolished, and all property was taken away or destroyed. One would not
pay $10 for the whole outfit of a peasant farmer’s home: table, a half
dozen chairs, a bedstead in the corner, a crucifix hanging on the wall,
a marriage certificate and a picture of the virgin, yet all was gone.
The ammunition trains that came up from Germany went back loaded with
such poor people’s belongings. Nothing left, an old woman’s bonnet on a
dung-heap, a baby’s shoe in a corner, a broken picture frame or
two—that’s all.
Talk about forgiving the Germans! Robbing the poor, the destruction of
property, possibly may be forgiven. Property can be replaced. But, the
systematic, deliberate ruin of non-combatant, innocent women and
children, is a crime against civilization that can never be forgiven or
forgotten. For generations to come, the German will be treated as an
outlaw. He will be shunned—worse than a beast. Unclean, he will have to
purge himself before he may be again accepted in the society of decent
women and men.
Think of those fine-grained, sensitive French girls, compelled to live
with brutes—generally surly, often drunk, who have killed their
husbands, their brothers, their fathers! They have broken all the rules
of war. They have outraged every decency. They are so sunk in the abyss
of shame that they know neither respect for the living nor reverence for
the dead.