inhabitants and fortified places of the hostile state alone;
it will endeavor, it ought to endeavor to _destroy equally
all the enemy's intellectual and material resources_.
Humanitarian considerations, that is, consideration for the
persons of individuals and for the sake of propriety, can
have no recognition unless the end and nature of the war
allow it.
And, a little farther on, he reads there:
Profound study of the history of war will make the officer
guard against exaggerated humanitarian concessions, will
teach him that war can not take place without certain
harshness, _that true humanity consists in proceeding
without tenderness_.
Farther along in that book, he reads:
All the methods invented by the technic of modern warfare,
the most perfected as well as the most dangerous, _those
which kill the greatest number at once, are permitted_.
These last are conducive to the quickest end of the war;
they are, if you consider matters carefully, the most humane
methods.... Prisoners may be killed in case of necessity if
there is no other means of guarding them properly.... The
presence of women, children, old men, the sick and the
wounded in a beseiged city can hasten the place's fall; in
consequence it would be very foolish of the beseiger to
renounce this advantage.... They will force the inhabitants
to furnish information concerning their army, military
resources and secrets of their country. The majority of
writers in all nations condemn this usage. _It will be used
none the less_--very regretfully--for military reasons.
Finally, on the volume's last page, is found this extraordinary maxim:
"Any wrong that the war demands, however great it may be, is
allowed."
Therefore the horrors which the Germans performed from the war's very
beginning, which provoked an expression of great indignation from all
the civilized world, were not perpetrated in a moment of orgy or
madness. They have been perpetrated coldly, deliberately,
intentionally.
Besides, not only the officers and the common soldiers have been
taught to make war in this barbarous fashion. It has been taught to
the entire German people. This precept proves the case. It emanates
not from a soldier but from a poet, who is not addressing the military
class but the civilians, the women, the children, and all Germany. It
is the "Hymn of Hate" by the poet Heinrich Vierordt, which, before the
war, was recited in even the German kindergartens:
Hate, Germany! Slit the throats of your millions of enemies.
Raise a monument of their smoking corpses that will rise to
the heavens!
Germany, arm yourself with brazen armor and pierce with your
bayonet the heart of every enemy. Take no prisoners! Strike
them dumb. Transform into deserts the lands that lie near
you!
Hate, Germany! Victory will come from your anger. Shatter
their skulls with blows from your ax and the butt of your
musket. These brigands are timid beasts.... They are not
men.... May your fist perform the judgment of God!
It is useless to say what this spirit has brought about. Germany has
carried on the war with vigor, has armed herself with brazen armor!
She has transformed neighboring lands into deserts! She has slit
throats, laid waste fields, shattered skulls, she has destroyed all
that lay in her path! She has tried to impress the terror she holds
salutary upon the souls of inoffensive old men and women and children!
This is the first of all the reasons why it is necessary now to fight,
and to fight to the death; because these men will understand the
abominable nature of "frightfulness" only when they see that
"frightfulness" does not pay; only when they see the uselessness of
unchaining horror and of beginning another war. Let an assassin go at
liberty and he will commence his killing all over again; send him to
the electric chair and he will regret his crime.
* * * * *
Just as France and Paris were not long in understanding what war meant
in Germany's mind, France and Paris were not long in accounting for
the danger they had passed through on account of the German spy
system, on account of the formidable web of espionage the German
agents had woven around all France.
People felt that this German spy system was there, speculated about it
and talked about it for years and years, but it was only in the first
days of the war that they really appreciated how diabolical it was and
how far it had penetrated into the heart of France.
What happened at Amiens at the beginning of September, 1914, is
especially characteristic of this.
Amiens was occupied twice by the enemy. To use the expression of a
military historian, it seemed as if "the French and the Germans were
playing hide-and-seek around the town." As soon as the blue caps of
the French appeared over the horizon, the yellow pointed helmets of
the Germans disappeared, rapidly. German occupation meant the same
thing it did everywhere else--exactions, brutalities, rape.
Immediately after he had entered the Prefecture, the German governor
levied a war contribution of one million francs. He also demanded that
the citizens furnish his troops with wine, cigars, and tobacco; drew
up a list of hostages; and arrested all the men between the ages of
seventeen and twenty years. Within twenty-four hours they were led
away under guard.
Nothing of all this surprised the brave Picard city. Proudly she
submitted to her fate. But one thing moved her, or rather angered her,
and that was the surety and speed with which the German authorities
went directly to all the places they should occupy. They did not
hesitate an instant about the street to follow or the door at which to
knock. The arrest of the fifteen hundred young hostages occurred with
an unheard-of rapidity. It seemed as if an invisible but exceedingly
clever hand guided each step, regulated each movement of the invaders.
Who could it be who directed, advised and commanded the Germans from
behind a veil?
Doubtless the mystery would never have been solved if, during the
second occupation, the citizens had not been warned that the next day
they would have to keep their shades down and close all shutters
because His Imperial Highness, Prince Eitel Friedrich, the Kaiser's
son, would then make a formal entry into the capital of Picardy. The
shutters were closed; automatically the streets were emptied.
Into a deserted city, to the sound of trumpet and drum, preceded by a
staff gleaming with gold braid and mounted on spirited steeds, the
German army entered in state. All the shades were drawn in the city.
However, behind some of them drawn faces peered forth in sorrow or in
anger. In a house on the principal street was a lady whose husband was
at the front. Her father, an aged general who had fought bravely in
the war of 1870, was with her. Through the drawn shades of her home
she was watching the hated scene. And her glorious old father,
however indignant he felt, was watching by her side.
When the parade was passing by, he made a sudden gesture and said:
"Look at that man on the horse, there, now!"
The man in question seemed to have a horse that pranced a little more
than the others. He rolled around in his saddle a little more than the
others. And the two onlookers had no trouble in recognizing this
aide-de-camp of Prince Eitel's as one of the former directors of a
language school that had had a branch at Amiens!
There is a sequel to the story ... for on the afternoon of that
unhappy day Madame X and ten other society ladies of Amiens at
different times heard a ring at their doors and saw that same
individual, in full regalia, booted and spurred, enter their drawing
rooms. He came to call on them, to pay his respects, as if it were the
most natural thing in the world that he should be there in that
costume. They all had to restrain the feeling of disgust and anger
this spy aroused in their breasts. It was for the sake of the safety
of their homes, for the lives that were dear to them, that they did
this. And he, entirely unconscious in his vileness, was suave and
polite, played the man about town, recalled one thing or another,
mentioned dances and parties....
So we once more find justification for the famous definition of German
contained in Schopenhauer's famous phrase: "The German is remarkable
for the absolute lack of that feeling which the Latins call
'verecundia'--sense of shame."
The essence of this feeling which is found among the most savage
peoples is entirely lacking in the Teutonic race. And once more we
find an abominable ambush placed for French culture, good faith and
generosity.
This is not an isolated incident. When the whole truth is known, there
will be even more surprised indignation felt than there is at present.
Inquiries will have to be made. It will be necessary to know why the
enemy, in certain places, has rushed in as if he came out of a trap
door. It will be necessary to know why, in certain ravaged districts,
some houses have been entirely destroyed and others carefully spared.
It will be necessary to know why tennis courts have been put in
certain places and why certain masses of rhododendrons have been
planted in certain parks....
For we know that the tennis courts have helped the Germans carry out
their schemes, and that the flower beds have had a place in the
machinery of war they were developing, which they kept alive until
they were at our gates. A tennis match seems a mere nothing--something
very innocent in the way of pleasure, far from being war-like. And
then, one fine day the discovery is made that the tennis court has a
foundation of reinforced concrete twenty centimeters thick, fit to
support a house six stories high and, consequently, a heavy gun!
A clump of rhododendrons is very lovely, something very gracious,
charming, most poetic. And one day the discovery is made that the
clump conceals a platform set in concrete on which an entire battery
can be aligned.
All that will have to be investigated. All that will have to be
stopped.... And it makes another reason why it is necessary to fight
today, to fight to the death. For these Germans will understand the
inanity of their Machiavellian scheming and of their spy system only
when they shall see these methods fall to pieces, when they shall see
their system fail absolutely.
In conclusion we may say that France fights for two reasons. The first
reason is because on the third of August at a quarter before seven
o'clock war was declared on her; she was forced to fight; her
territory was invaded, her cities burned to the ground; her fields
ravaged; her citizens massacred. The second reason is because she does
not want to have to fight in the future; she does not wish this horror
to be reproduced a second time; she wishes, in the immortal words of
Washington, "that plague of mankind, war, banished off the earth."
To accomplish this the engine that makes war must be destroyed. The
engine that makes war is "made in Germany." War is the national
industry of the Germans, it has been developed and made perfect in
Germany, it is dear to all German hearts. They are proud of it and
have faith in its power. The machine must not only be stopped; it must
be broken and destroyed, thrown out as scrap iron to prevent the
pieces from being reassembled, readjusted and put in running order
once again.
That is why France is fighting, why the whole world ought to fight to
the end, to death or until victory crowns its efforts.
II
HOW FRANCE IS FIGHTING
Two words, courage and tenacity, will serve the future historian in
his description of how France fought, when the time shall have come
for telling the entire story of the world war.
No one has ever doubted French courage throughout all the centuries of
her tormented history; but skeptical remarks have been made in times
past of the tenacity of the French people.
Ten epigrams do not describe this war; nor do three. But one alone
serves this purpose--know how to endure. No more thoughtful words have
ever been spoken than those of the Japanese, Marshall Nogi: "Victory
is won by the nation that can suffer a quarter of an hour longer than
its opponent."
During the four years of war, France has proven that she knew how to
suffer and was able to suffer a quarter of an hour longer than her
enemies.
They knew how to suffer, those soldiers of General Maunoury's army in
the Battle of the Marne. And they turned the tide of battle in favor
of French arms. They marched, fought and died for five days and five
nights, in the passing of which some battalions marched forty-two
kilometers and did not sleep for more than two hours at a time. The
mobility of the fighting units was such that the commissary department
was absolutely unable to supply them with rations. For three days many
of them had no bread, no meat, nothing at all! They subsisted on
crusts they had with them, or on the food they were able, by the
fortunes of battle, to pick up in the villages where they happened to
be. In spite of all this, whenever the order was given to charge, they
charged the enemy with a sort of inspired madness.
"The fight has been a hard one," Marshall Joffre wrote in an order of
the day that will be famous throughout eternity. "The casualties, the
number of men worn out by the exhaustion due to lack of sleep--and
sometimes of food--passed all imagining.... Comrades, the commander in
chief has asked you to do more than your duty, and you have responded
to this request by accomplishing the impossible." That is the finest
word of praise that has been given fighting men since the world began.
* * * * *
They knew how to suffer, those other soldiers of the Battle of the
Marne who were a part of General Foch's army at Fère-Champenoise. Five
times they attacked the Château de Mondement, and five times they were
driven back. Their officers were consulting as to the best thing to
do; and the men surrounded the officers, begging them with tears in
their eyes to lead them to the assault for the sixth time. For the
sixth time the attack was sounded, and at the sixth assault Château de
Mondement fell.
That officer at Verdun knew how to suffer. He will remain a figure
for the legends of the future for, running to transmit an order, he
received a bullet in the eyes which shattered his optic nerve. He was
completely blinded. Nevertheless, he continued to advance, trying to
grope his way through the night that had fallen upon him. He
encountered something lying on the ground--a something that was a man
just as badly wounded. The blind man besought him for help.
"How can I help you," said the wounded man, "a shell has broken both
my legs."
"What difference does that make," shouted the blinded man, "I am going
to carry you on my back. My legs will be yours, and your eyes will be
mine."
And, one supporting the other, the blinded man and the lamed man
carried on!
* * * * *
That officer knew how to suffer whom one of my brothers met on the
battle field of Lorraine. An artillery officer, his arm was shattered,
a few bits of flesh barely holding it fast to his shoulder. My
brother, when he saw the man painfully dragging himself along, asked
him whether or not he needed help.
"I don't need help," replied the wounded man, "but my battery down
there does. It is retreating."
"If it is retreating, it can't be helped and it is a waste of time for
me to get it ammunition...."
"No," begged the lieutenant, "get the munitions. We Colonials fight
until the last man falls...."
He offered to guide my brother, mounted beside him on the artillery
caisson, and stayed there all day. For after he had supplied his own
battery, it was the battery next it, and then the one next to that,
which he wanted to supply.... Finally, in the evening, at nightfall,
they came to take him off in the ambulance. The major looked at his
shattered arm, examined his frightful wound, and muttered:
"You are in a bad way. Couldn't you have come here sooner?"
The lieutenant replied humbly:
"Pardon me, I lost a lot of time on the way."
* * * * *
Those men I saw for months fighting and dying to the south of Verdun,
at the Butte des Eparges, knew how to suffer.
The Butte des Eparges dominates the great plain of the Woevre, and
from the very beginning it has been the theater of a frightful and
long drawn out battle of the kind one seldom sees in this war. The
Germans have been entrenched on the left side of the Butte, the French
on the right. And day and night for four years there has been an
incessant battle over its summit of grenades, bombs and shells; a
terrible hand-to-hand fight in which neither one of the contestants
yields an inch of ground. A brook of blood runs its interrupted course
on each slope. On the south slope it is red with German blood; with
French blood on the north.
The two slopes of the Butte have been so raked by firing that they
have not a single tree, bush, or blades of grass on them; they stand
out sinister and frightful in their nakedness, seeming to cry out to
the men of the plain:
"See, all of you, the scourge of God has passed over this place."
They are dented, furrowed and blown into crevasses by the explosions
of mines; they are sown over with the enormous funnels in which the
fighters take shelter; they are covered with an incessant smoke from
the projectiles that plow them up.
As for the summit, it is a no man's land, that belongs to the dead men
whose bodies cover it. The summit stopped being a battle field to
become a charnel house. The number of men who have fallen there will
never be known. The most fantastic figures come from the lips of those
who come down ... 5,000, 8,000, 10,000 ... it will never be known. But
what is known is that the dead are always there. They form a parapet
above which the living fight on. These dead rot in the sunshine and in
the rain. In accordance with the wind's being from the east or the
west, the frightful odor of all this rotten flesh strikes the Germans
or the French. They lie there, an indistinguishable mass on the
ground, and the men are unlucky who watch by night in the listening
posts or the trenches. They think they are stumbling against a stone,
and it is a skull their feet are touching; they think they are picking
up the branch of a tree, and they have hold of the arm of a corpse.
However, in the shadow of this human charnel house, at the edge of
this bloody sewer, some little French soldiers come and go, eat and
sleep for months at a time. The dreadfulness of the sights, the stench
in the air, the tragic presence of death has not gripped their souls,
their courage or their nerves. They are no less confident and merry
than the others and, in the evening, when the setting sun adds the
purple of its shadows to the red of all the blood that has been shed
on the Butte, they sing from the depths of their charnel house sweet
love songs.... This is the most regally beautiful sight I have seen in
this war; it is the most splendidly moving example I know of what
personal sacrifice for one's country's sake can do.
One day, in a rest village in the neighborhood, I met a soldier from
one of the battalions which was encamped in the charnel house. He was
a boy twenty years old, who hurried along with a flower in his
buttonhole, whistling a tune.... He was so joyful that I asked him:
"You seem as happy as you can be."
"I have leave, Sir," he answered, "and in a week I shall go to the
country to see my mother. But, for the present, I have to go and take
the trench at Eparges...."
As he mentioned the name of the accursed Butte, I could not repress a
movement. He saw it and said:
"Sir, I am glad to go there."
And he told me his name and the number of his company. Then he hurried
away.
It chanced that precisely one week later I met one of his officers. I
asked him about the merry fellow.
"That man? He was killed the day before yesterday at Eparges."
And my comrade added in a low voice:
"He was shot down at my side, struck with a bullet square in the
chest. The death agony set in at once. As I was trying to do something
for him, passing my hand gently across his forehead, I said to him:
"Courage, my boy, courage."
He murmured the reply:
"Oh, I'm glad to die."
Glad ... the same phrase, the same words I had heard a week ago, which
can be heard everywhere on the French front--and they are glad to go
into all the trenches and into all the charnel houses, and it is with
a happy heart that they rest in peace.
* * * * *
But France has not only fought with all her courage, with all her
soul, with all her tenacity. She has fought with all her living
strength, with her men, her women, even her children.
What can I say which has not already been said about the men? When I
think of my own men, when I think of all the men floundering and
fighting in this mud, I can find no other means of expression than
the words that have already served the Commander in Chief of the
French Army, General Pétain, on the evening of his great victory at
the Chemin des Dames. In receiving the American newspapermen, he said
to them:
"Do not speak of us, the generals and the officers. Speak only of the
men. We have done nothing; the men have done everything. Our men are
wonderful; we, their leaders, can only kneel at their feet."
* * * * *
The women have been no less wonderful. And I want to write a few words
about them.
The women who are at the front have fought like the men. Can you
imagine a more beautiful deed of arms than that of a young girl,
twenty years old, named Marcelle Semer, whose heroic story a French
Cabinet Minister, M. Klotz, told recently at one of the Matinées
Nationales at the Sorbonne.
In August, 1914, there lived at Eclusier, near Frise, a young girl
with gray eyes and blonde hair named Marcelle Semer. She was twenty
years old at the time and kept accounts in addition to overseeing the
work of a factory. At the time of the August invasion, after the
Battle of Charleroi, the French tried to halt the Germans at the
Somme. Not being in sufficient force, they retreated, crossing the
river and the canal. The enemy immediately pursued. Marcelle Semer,
who was following the French troops, had the presence of mind, after
the last soldier had crossed the Somme Canal, to open the drawbridge
in order to prevent the Germans from crossing it, and to hurl the key
to the bridge into the canal in order that they might not take it from
her when they came up. An entire enemy army corps was thus detained
for twenty-four hours by this young girl's presence of mind; and it
was only on the following day that the enemy, having found some boats
on the Somme, made a bridge of them and passed over the canal. But the
French soldiers were already far away.
The Germans were masters of the neighborhood for some days. They
seized the inhabitants as hostages and shut them up in a cave.
Marcelle Semer secretly carried them food. She also carried
sustenance to other inhabitants who had hidden in the woods or in
cellars. She succored and concealed the soldiers whom wounds or
fatigue had prevented from following the main body of troops. She
contrived that sixteen of them, dressed as civilians, escaped. Then
she was apprehended by the Germans, arrested and led into the presence
of a court-martial. The judgment was summary, and after a quarter of
an hour's questioning Marcelle Semer was condemned to death.
"Do you admit," asked the presiding officer, "that you helped French
soldiers to escape?"
"I certainly do," she replied. "I managed it so that sixteen of them
escaped, and they are beyond your reach. Now you can do what you want
to me. I am an orphan. I have only one mother--France. She does not
disturb me when I'm dying."
This was one time when God intervened. Marcelle did not die. Brought
to the place of execution, at the very moment when they were about to
shoot, the French reëntered the village and, by a miracle, she escaped
her executioners. Today she wears the Croix de Guerre and the medal of
the Legion of Honor.
* * * * *
They were Frenchwomen and fighters, these women whose names and deeds
are to be found in the columns of the "Journal Officiel." Read, for
example, this citation concerning Madame Macherez, President of the
Association des Dames Françaises de Soissons:
She willingly assumed the responsibility and the danger of
representing the city before the enemy, and defended or
managed the interests of the population in the absence of
the mayor and the majority of the members of the town
council. In spite of an intense bombardment which partially
ruined the city, she took the most effective means possible
to maintain calm in the city and to protect the lives of the
inhabitants.