Invasion
1
Before this year has ended England will know something of what war
means. In English country towns there will be many familiar faces
missing, many widows and orphans, and many mourning hearts.
Dimly and in a far-off way, the people who have stayed at home will
understand the misery of war and its brutalities. But in spite of all our
national effort to raise great armies, and our immense national
sacrifice in sending the best of our young manhood to foreign
battlefields, the imagination of the people as a whole will still fail to
realize the full significance of war as it is understood in France and
Belgium. They will not know the meaning of invasion.
It is a great luck to be born in an island. The girdle of sea is a
safeguard which gives a sense of security to the whole psychology of
a race, and for that reason there is a gulf of ignorance about the
terrors of war which, happily, may never be bridged by the collective
imagination of English and Scottish people. A continental nation,
divided by a few hills, a river, or a line on the map, from another race
with other instincts and ideals, is haunted throughout its history by a
sense of peril. Even in times of profound peace, the thought is there,
in the background, with a continual menace. It shapes the character
of a people and enters into all their political and educational progress.
To keep on friendly terms with a powerful next-door neighbour, or to
build defensive works high enough to make hostility a safe game, is
the lifework of its statesmen and its politicians. Great crises and
agitations shake the nation convulsively when cowardice or treachery
or laziness has allowed that boundary wall to crumble or has made a
breach in it. The violence of the Dreyfus affair was not so much due
to a Catholic detestation of the Jewish race, but in its root-instincts to
a fear of the German people over the frontier making use of French
corruption to sap the defensive works which had been raised against
them.
The necessity of conscription is obvious beyond argument to a
continental people still cherishing old traditions of nationality, and the
military training which is compulsory for all young men of average
health, not only shapes the bodies of their lads, but also shapes their
minds, so that their outlook upon life is largely different from that of an
island people protected by the sea. They know that they have been
born of women for one primary object--to fight when the time comes
in, defence of the Fatherland, to make one more human brick in the
great wall of blood and spirit dividing their country and race from
some other country and race. At least that is the lesson taught them
from first to last in the schools and in the national assemblies, and
there are only a few minds which are able to see another way of life
when the walls of division may be removed and when the fear of a
next-door neighbour may be replaced by friendship and common
interests.
The difference between the intellectual instincts of an island people
and that of a continental race was the cause of the slow way in which
England groped her way to an understanding of the present war, so
that words of scorn and sarcasm, a thousand mean tricks of
recruiting sergeants in high office, and a thousand taunts had to be
used to whip up the young men of Great Britain, and induce them to
join the Army. Their hearths and homes were not in immediate
danger. They could not see any reasonable prospect of danger upon
English soil. Their women were safe. Their property, bought on the
hire system out of hard-earned wages, was not, they thought, in the
least likely to be smashed into small bits or carried off as loot. They
could not conceive the idea of jerry-built walls which enshrined all the
treasures of their life suddenly falling with a crash like a house of
cards, and burying their babies. The British Expeditionary Force
which they were asked to join was after all only a sporting party going
out to foreign fields for a great adventure.
2
In France there were no such illusions. As soon as war was imminent
the people thought of their frontiers, and prayed God in divers ways
that the steel hedges there were strong enough to keep back the
hostile armies until the general call to the colours had been
answered. Every able-bodied man in France was ready, whatever the
cowardice in his heart, to fling himself upon the frontier to keep out,
with his own body, the inrushing tide of German troops. The memory
of 1870 had taught them the meaning of Invasion.
I saw the meaning of it during the first months of the war, when I
wandered about France. In the north, nearest to the enemy, and
along the eastern frontier, it was a great fear which spread like a
plague, though more swiftly and terribly, in advance of the enemy's
troops. It made the bravest men grow pale when they thought of their
women and children. It made the most callous man pitiful when he
saw those women with their little ones and old people, whose place
was by the hearthside, trudging along the highroads, faint with hunger
and weariness, or pleading for places in cattle-trucks already
overpacked with fugitives, or wandering about un-lighted towns at
night for any kind of lodging, and then, finding none, sleeping on the
doorsteps of shuttered houses and under the poor shelter of
overhanging gables.
For months, in every part of France there were thousands of
husbands who had lost their wives and children, thousands of
families who had been divided hopelessly in the wild confusion of
retreats from a brutal soldiery. They had disappeared into the
maelstrom of fugitives--wives, daughters, sisters, mothers, and old
grandmother, most of them without money and all of them dependent
for their lives upon the hazard of luck. Every day in the French
newspapers there were long lists of inquiries.
"M. Henri Planchet would be deeply grateful to anyone who can
inform him of the whereabouts of his wife, Suzanne, and of his two
little girls, Berthe and Marthe, refugees from Armentières."
"Mme. Tardieu would be profoundly grateful for information about her
daughter, Mme. des Rochers, who fled from the destroyed town of
Albert on October 10, with her four children."
Every day I read some of these lists, finding a tragedy in every line,
and wondering whether any of these missing people were among
those whom I had met in the guard vans of troop trains, huddled
among their bundles, or on wayside platforms, or in the long columns
of retreating inhabitants from a little town deep in a wooded valley
below the hills where German guns were vomiting their shrapnel.
Imagine such a case in England. A man leaves his office in London
and takes the train to Guildford, where his wife and children are
waiting supper for him. At Weybridge the train comes to a dead-halt.
The guard runs up to the engine-driver, and comes back to say that
the tunnel has been blown up by the enemy. It is reported that
Guildford and all the villages around have been invaded. Families
flying from Guildford describe the bombardment of the town. A part of
it is in flames. The Guildhall is destroyed. Many inhabitants have been
killed. Most of the others have fled.
The man who was going home to supper wants to set out to find his
wife and children. His friends hold him back in spite of his struggles.
"You are mad!" they shout. "Mad!"... He has no supper at home that
night. His supper and his home have been burnt to cinders. For
weeks he advertises in the papers for the whereabouts of his wife
and babes. Nobody can tell him. He does not know whether they are
dead or alive.
There were thousands of such cases in France. I have seen this
tragedy--a man weeping for his wife and children swallowed up into
the unknown after the destruction of Fives, near Lille. A new-born
babe was expected. On the first day of life it would receive a baptism
of fire. Who could tell this distracted man whether the mother or child
were alive?
3
There were many villages in France around Lille and Armentières,
Amiens and Arras, and over a wide stretch of country in Artois and
Picardy, where, in spite of all weariness, women who lay down beside
their sleeping babes could find no sleep for themselves. For who
could say what the night would bring forth? Perhaps a patrol of
Uhlans, who shot peasants like rabbits as they ran across the fields,
and who demanded wine, and more wine, until in the madness of
drink they began to burn and destroy for mere lust of ruin. So it was at
Senlis, at Sermaize, and in many villages in the region through which
I passed.
It was never possible to tell the enemy's next move. His cavalry came
riding swiftly far from the main lines of the hostile troops, and owing to
the reticence of official news, the inhabitants of a town or village
found themselves engulfed in the tide of battle before they guessed
their danger. They were trapped by the sudden tearing-up of railway
lines and blowing-up of bridges, as I was nearly trapped one day
when the Germans cut a line a few hundred yards away from my
train.
Yet the terror was as great when no Germans were seen, and no
shells heard. It was enough that they were coming. They had been
reported--often falsely--across distant hills. So the exodus began and,
with perambulators laden with bread and apples, in any kind of
vehicle--even in a hearse--drawn by poor beasts too bad for army
requisitions, ladies of quality left their châteaux and drove in the
throng with peasant women from whitewashed cottages. Often in a
little while both the château and the cottage were buried in the same
heap of ruins.
In a week or two, the enemy was beaten back from some of these
places, and then the most hardy of the townsfolk returned "home." I
saw some of them going home-at Senlis, at Sermaize, and other
places. They came back doubtful of what they would find, but soon
they stood stupefied in front of some charred timbers which were
once their house. They did not weep, but just stared in a dazed way.
They picked over the ashes and found burnt bits of former treasures--
the baby's cot, the old grandfather's chair, the parlour clock. Or they
went into houses still standing neat and perfect, and found that some
insanity of rage had smashed up all their household, as though
baboons had been at play or fighting through the rooms. The chest of
drawers had been looted or its contents tumbled out upon the floor.
Broken glasses, bottles, jugs, were mixed up with a shattered violin,
the medals of a grandfather who fought in '70, the children's broken
toys, clothes, foodstuff, and picture frames. I saw many of such
houses after the coming and going of the German soldiers.
Even for a correspondent in search of a vantage-ground from which
he might see something of this war, with a reasonable chance of
being able to tell the story afterwards, the situation in France during
those early days was somewhat perilous.
It is all very well to advance towards the fighting lines when the
enemy is opposed by allied forces in a known position, but it is a quite
different thing to wander about a countryside with only the vaguest
idea of the direction in which the enemy may appear, and with the
disagreeable thought that he may turn up suddenly round the corner
after cutting off one's line of retreat. That was my experience on more
than one day of adventure when I went wandering with those two
friends of mine, whom I have alluded to as the Strategist and the
Philosopher. Not all the strategy of the one or the philosophy of the
other could save us from unpleasant moments when we blundered
close to the lines of an unexpected enemy.
That was our experience on an early day in October, when we
decided to go to Béthune, which seemed an interesting place in the
war-zone.
It may seem strange in England that railway trains should still be
running in the ordinary way, according to the time-tables of peace, in
these directions, and that civilians should have been allowed to take
their tickets without any hint as to the danger at the journey's end. But
in spite of the horror of invasion, French railway officials showed an
extraordinary sang-froid and maintained their service, even when
they knew that their lines might be cut, and their stations captured,
within an hour or two. Ignorance also helped their courage and, not
knowing the whereabouts of the enemy even as well as I did, they ran
their trains to places already threatened by advancing squadrons.
On this October day, for example, there was no sign of surprise on
the part of the buxom lady behind the guichet of the booking-office
when I asked for a ticket to Béthune, although there had been heavy
fighting in that district only a few hours before, at the end of a great
battle extending over several days.
In the train itself were several commercial gentlemen, on their way to
Lille, by way of the junction at Arques, where they had to change; and
with two or three French soldiers, and a lady entirely calm and self-
possessed, they discussed the possibility of getting into a city round
which the German cavalry were reported to be sweeping in a great
tide. Another man who entered into conversation with me was going
to Béthune. He had a wife and family there and hoped they were
safe. It was only by a sudden thoughtfulness in his eyes that I could
guess that behind that hope was a secret fear, which he did not
express even to himself. We might have been a little party of people
travelling, say, between Surbiton and Weybridge on an autumn
afternoon, when the golf-ball flies across the links. Not one of them
showed the least sign of anxiety, the least consciousness of peril
close at hand.
Looking out of the carriage window I saw that trenches had been dug
in all the adjacent fields, and that new trenches were being made
hastily but efficiently by gangs of soldiers, who had taken off their blue
coats for once, and were toiling cheerily at their task. In all the
villages we passed were battalions of infantry guarding the railway
bridges and level crossings. Patrols of cavalry rode slowly down
the roads. Here and there some of them were dismounted, with
their horses tethered, and from behind the cover of farmhouses
or haystacks, looked across the country, with their carbines slung
across their shoulders, as though waiting for any Uhlans that might
appear that way.
All around us was the noise of guns, firing in great salvoes across the
hills, ten miles or more away. Suddenly, as we approached the
junction at Arques, there was an explosion which sounded very close
to us; and the train came to a dead stop on grinding brakes.
"What's that?" asked a man in the carriage, sharply.
I thrust my head out of the carriage window and saw that all along the
train other faces were staring out. The guard was running down the
platform. The station-master was shouting to the engine-driver. In a
moment or two we began to back, and kept travelling backwards until
we were out of the station... The line had just been blown up beyond
Arques by a party of Uhlans, and we were able to thank our stars that
we had stopped in time. We could get no nearer to Béthune, over
which next day the tide of war had rolled. I wondered what had
happened to the wife and children of the man who was in the carriage
with me.
At Aire-sur-Lys there were groups of women and children who, like so
many others in those days, had abandoned their houses and left all
they had in the world save a few bundles of clothes and baskets of
food. I asked them what they would do when the food was finished.
"There will always be a little charity, m'sieur," said one woman, "and
at least my children are safe."
After the first terror of the invasion those women were calm and
showed astounding courage and resignation.
It was more than pitiful to see the refugees on the roads from
Hazebrouck. There was a constant stream of them in those two
cross-currents, and they came driving slowly along in bakers' carts
and butchers' carts, with covered hoods, in farm carts loaded up with
several families or trudging along with perambulators and
wheelbarrows. The women were weary. Many of them had babies in
their arms. The elder children held on to their mother's skirts or
tramped along together, hand in hand. But there was no trace of
tears. I heard no wailing cry. Some of them seemed utterly indifferent
to this retreat from home. They had gone beyond the need of tears.
From one of these women, a lady named Mme. Duterque, who had
left Arras with a small boy and girl, I heard the story of her
experiences in the bombarded town. There were hundreds of women
who had similar stories, but this one is typical enough of all those
individual experiences of women who quite suddenly, and almost
without warning, found themselves victims of the Invasion.
She was in her dressing-room in one of the old houses of the Grande
Place in Arras, when at half-past nine in the morning the first shell
burst over the town very close to her own dwelling-place. For days
there had been distant firing on the heights round Arras, but now this
shell came with a different, closer, more terrible sound.
"It seemed to annihilate me for a moment," said Mme. Duterque. "It
stunned all my senses with a frightful shock. A few moments later I
recovered myself and thought anxiously of my little girl who had gone
to school as usual a few streets away. I was overjoyed when she
came trotting home, quite unafraid, although by this time the shells
were falling in various parts of the town."
On the previous night Mme. Duterque had already made preparations
in case the town should be bombarded. Her house, like most of the
old houses in Arras, had a great cellar, with a vaulted roof, almost as
strong as a castle dungeon. She had stocked it with a supply of
sardines and bread and other provisions, and as soon as she had
her little daughter safe indoors again she took her children and the
nurse down to this subterranean hiding-place, where there was
greater safety. The cave, as she called it, was dimly lighted with a
paraffin lamp, and was very damp and chilly, but it was good to be
there in this hiding-place, for at regular intervals she could hear the
terrible buzzing noises of a shell, like some gigantic hornet, followed
by its exploding boom; and then, more awful still, the crash of a
neighbouring house falling into ruins.
"Strange to say," said Mme. Duterque, "after my first shock I had no
sense of fear, and listened only with an intense interest to the noise of
these shells, estimating their distance by their sound. I could tell quite
easily when they were close overhead, and when they fell in another
part of the town, and it seemed to me that I could almost tell which of
my friends' houses had been hit. My children, too, were strangely
fearless. They seemed to think it an exciting adventure to be here in
the great cellar, making picnic meals by the light of a dim lamp. My
little boy amused himself by playing canes (hop-scotch), and my
daughter was very cheerful. Still, after a little while we suffered. I had
forgotten to bring down water or wine, and we also craved for
something more comforting than cold sardines. In spite of the noise
of houses falling into ruins--and at any moment mine might fall above
my head--I went upstairs and began to cook some macaroni. I had to
retreat in a hurry, as a shell burst quite close to my house, and for a
moment I thought that I should be buried under my own roof. But I
went up again in one of the intervals of silence, found the macaroni
cooked to a turn and even ventured to peep out of doors. There I saw
a dreadful sight. The whole of the Grande Place was littered with
broken roofs and shattered walls, and several of the houses were
burning furiously. From other parts of the town there came up great
volumes of smoke and the red glare of flames."
For three days Mme. Duterque kept to her cellar. Unknown to herself,
her husband, who had come from Boulogne to rescue her, was
watching the battle from one of the heights outside the town, which he
was forbidden to enter by the soldiers. On a Thursday morning she
resolved to leave the shelter of her underground vault. News had
been brought to her by a daring neighbour that the Germans had
worked round by the railway station and might enter the town.
"I had no fear of German shells," she said, "but I had a great fear of
German officers and soldiers. Imagine my fate if I had been caught by
them, with my little daughter. For the first time I was filled with a
horrible fear, and I decided to fly from Arras at all costs."
With her children and the nurse, she made her way through the
streets, above which the shells were still crashing, and glanced with
horror at all the destruction about her. The Hôtel de Ville was
practically destroyed, though at that time the famous belfry still stood
erect above the ruined town, chiming out the hours of this tragedy.
Mme. Duterque told me her story with great simplicity and without any
self-consciousness of her fine courage. She was only one of those
thousands of women in France who, with a spiritual courage beyond
one's understanding, endured the horrors of this war. It was good to
talk with them, and I was left wondering at such a spirit.
It was with many of these fugitives that I made my way back. Away in
the neighbourhood of Hazebrouck the guns were still booming, and
across the fields the outposts of French cavalry were waiting for the
enemy.
4
It was better for women and children to be in Arras under continual
shell-fire than in some of those villages along the valleys of the Marne
and the Meuse and in the Department of the Seine, through which
the Germans passed on their first march across the French frontier.
It was a nicer thing to be killed by a clean piece of shell than to suffer
the foulness of men whose passions had been unleashed by drink
and the devil and the madness of the first experience of war, and by
fear which made them cruel as beasts.
I think fear was at the heart of a good deal of those atrocious Bets by
which the German troops stained the honour of their race in the first
phases of the war. Advancing into a hostile country, among a people
whom they knew to be reckless in courage and of a proud spirit, the
generals and high officers were obsessed with the thought of peasant
warfare, rifle-shots from windows, murders of soldiers billeted in
farms, spies everywhere, and the peril of franc-tireurs, goading their
troops on the march. Their text-books had told them that all this was
to be expected from the French people and could only be stamped
out by ruthlessness. The proclamations posted on the walls of
invaded towns reveal fear as well as cruelty. The mayor and
prominent citizens were to surrender themselves as hostages. If any
German soldier were killed, terrible reprisals would be exacted. If
there were any attempt on the part of the citizens to convey
information to the French troops, or to disobey the regulations of the
German commander, their houses would be burned and their
property seized, and their lives would pay the forfeit. These bald-
headed officers in pointed helmets, so scowling behind their
spectacles, had fear in their hearts and concealed it by cruelty.
When such official proclamations were posted up on the walls of
French villages, it is no wonder that the subordinate officers and their
men were nervous of the dangers suggested in those documents,
and found perhaps without any conscious dishonesty clear proof of
civilian plots against them. A shot rang out down a village street. "The
peasants are firing on us!" shouted a German soldier of neurotic
temperament. "Shoot them at sight!" said an officer who had learnt
his lesson of ruthlessness. "Burn these wasps out! Lieber Gott, we
will teach them a pretty lesson!"
They had all the material for teaching the pretty lessons of war--
inflammable tablets which would make a house blaze in less than five
minutes after they had been strewn about the floors and touched by a
lighted match (I have a few specimens of the stuff)--incendiary bombs
which worked even more rapidly, torches for setting fire to old barns
and thatched roofs. In the wonderful equipment of the German army
in the field this material of destruction had not been forgotten and it
was used in many little towns and villages where German soldiers
heard real or imaginary shots, suspected betrayal from any toothless
old peasant, and found themselves in the grip of fear because these
Frenchwomen, these old men of the farm and the workshop, and
even the children, stared at them as they passed with contemptuous
eyes and kept an uncomfortable silence even when spoken to with
cheerful Teuton greetings, and did not hide the loathing of their souls.
All this silence of village people, all these black looks seemed to
German soldiers like an evil spell about them. It got upon their nerves
and made them angry. They had come to enjoy the fruits of victory in
France, or at best the fruits of life before death came. So these
women would not smile, eh? Nor give their kisses nor their love with
amiability? Well, a German soldier would have his kisses even
though he had to hold a shrieking woman to his lips. He would take
his love even though he had to kill the creature who refused it. These
Frenchwomen were not so austere as a rule in times of peace. If they
would not be fondled they should be forced. Herr Gott! they should
know their masters.
5
At the little town of Rebais in the department of Seine-et-Marne there
was a pretty Frenchwoman who kept a grocer's shop and did not
care for the way in which some German soldiers made free with her
biscuits and sweetmeats. She was a proud and fearless young
woman, and when the soldiers grinned at her and tried to put their
arms about her she struck them and called them unpleasant names
and drew an open knife. So she wanted her lesson? Well, she had a
soft white neck, and if they could not put their arms about it they
would put a rope round it and hang her with her pride. But she was
strong and quick as well as proud. She cut their rope with her knife
and fought like a wild thing. So they slashed at her with their fists and
bruised all her beauty by the time one of their officers came in and
ordered them away. No one would court her after the lesson they had
given her.
At Saint-Denis-en-Rebais, on September 7, an Uhlan who was eager
for a woman's love saw another pretty woman who tried to hide from
him. There was a mother-in-law with her, and a little son, eight years
of age. But in war-time one has to make haste to seize one's victim or
one's loot. Death is waiting round the corner. Under the cover of his
rifle--he had a restless finger on the trigger--the Uhlan bade the
woman strip herself before him. She had not the pride or the courage
of the other woman. She did not want to die, because of that small
boy who stared with horror in his eyes. The mother-in-law clasped the
child close and hid those wide staring eyes in her skirts, and turned
her own face away from a scene of bestial violence, moaning to the
sound of her daughter's cries.
6
At the town of Coulommiers on September 6 a German soldier came
to the door of a small house where a woman and her husband were
sitting with two children, trying to hide their fear of this invasion
of German troops. It was half-past nine in the evening and almost
dark, except for a glow in the sky. The soldier was like a shadow on
the threshold until he came in, and they saw a queer light in his eyes.
He was very courteous, though rather gruff in his speech. He asked
the husband to go outside in the street to find one of his comrades.
The man, afraid to refuse, left the room on this errand, but before he
had gone far heard piercing cries. It was his wife's voice, screaming in
terror. He rushed back again and saw the German soldier struggling
with his wife. Hearing her husband's shout of rage, the soldier turned,
seized his rifle, and clubbed the man into an adjoining room, where
he stayed with the two little children who had fled there, trying to
soothe them in their fright and listening, with madness in his brain, to
his wife's agony through the open door a yard away. The husband
was a coward, it seems. But supposing he had flung himself upon the
soldier and strangled him, or cut his throat? We know what would
have happened in the Village of Coulommiers.
7
On September 7 ten German horsemen rode into the farm of
Lamermont, in the commune of Lisle-en-Barrois. They were in good
humour, and having drunk plenty of fresh milk, left the farmhouse in a
friendly way. Shortly after their departure, when Farmer Elly and his
friend, the sieur Javelot, breathed more easily and thanked God
because the danger had passed, some rifle-shots rang out.
Somewhere or other a dreadful thing was happening. A new danger
came to the farm at Lamermont, with thirty men of a different patrol,
who did not ask for milk but blood. They accused the farm people of
having killed a German soldier, and in spite of the protests of the two
men, who had been sitting quietly in the kitchen, they were shot in the
yard.
8
At Triaucourt the Germans were irritated by the behaviour of a young
girl named Mlle. Hélène Procès, who was bold enough to lodge a
complaint to one of their officers about a soldier who had tried to
make love to her in the German way. It was a fine thing if German
soldiers were to be punished for a little sport like that in time of war!
"Burn them out!" said one of the men. On a cold autumn night a
bonfire would warm things up a little. ... It was the house of M. Jules
Gaude which started the bonfire. It blazed so quickly after the torch
had touched his thatch that he had to leap through the flames to save
himself, and as he ran the soldiers shot him dead. When the houses
were burning the Germans had a great game shooting at the people
who rushed about the streets. A boy of seventeen, named George
Lecourtier, was killed as he thrust his way through the flames. A
gentleman named Alfred Lallemand--his name ought to have saved
him--was chased by some soldiers when he fled for refuge to the
kitchen of his fellow-citizen Tautelier, and shot there on his
hearthside. His friend had three bullet-wounds in the hand with which
he had tried to protect the hunted man. Mlle. Procès, the young girl
who had made the complaint which led to this trouble, fled into the
garden with her mother and her grandmother and an aunt named
Mile. Mennehard, who was eighty-one years old. The girl was able to
climb over the hedge into the neighbour's garden, where she hid
among the cabbages like a frightened kitten. But the old people could
not go so fast, and as they tried to climb the hedge they were shot
down by flying bullets. The curé of the village crept out into the
darkness to find the bodies of those ladies, who had been his friends.
With both hands he scooped up the scattered brains of Mile.
Mennehard, the poor old dame of eighty-one, and afterwards brought
her body back into her house, where he wept at this death and
destruction which had made a hell of his little village in which peace
had reigned so long.
And while he wept merry music played, and its lively notes rattled out
into the quiet night from an open window quite close to where dead
bodies lay. The German soldiers enjoyed themselves that night in
Triaucourt. Like so many Neros on a smaller scale, they played and
sang while flames leapt up on either side of them. Thirty-five houses
in this village were burnt to cinders after their old timbers had blazed
fiercely with flying sparks which sparkled above the helmets of
drunken soldiery. An old man of seventy named Jean Lecourtier, and
a baby who had been only two months in this strange world of ours
were roasted to death in the furnace of the village. A farmer named
Igier, hearing the stampede of his cattle, tried to save these poor
beasts, but he had to run the gauntlet of soldiers who shot at him as
he stumbled through the smoke, missing him only by a hair's-breadth,
so that he escaped as by a miracle, with five holes in his clothes. The
village priest, Père Viller, leaving the body of his old friend, went with
the courage of despair to the Duke of Wurtemberg, who had his
lodging near by, and complained to him passionately of all these
outrages. The Duke of Wurtemberg shrugged his shoulders. "Que
voulez-vous?" he said. "We have bad soldiers, like you have!"
9
At Montmirail a man named François Fontaine lived with his widowed
daughter, Mme. Naudé, and his little grandchild Juliette. A German
noncommissioned officer demanded lodging at the house, and on the
night of September 5, when all was quiet, he came undressed into
the young widow's room and, seizing her roughly, tried to drag her
into his own chamber. She cried and struggled so that her father
came running to her, trembling with fear and rage. The Unter-qffizier
seems to have given some signal, perhaps by the blowing of a
whistle. It is certain that immediately after the old man had left his
room fifteen or twenty German soldiers burst into the house and
dragged him out into the street, where they shot him dead. At that
moment the child Juliette opened her bedroom window, looking out
into the darkness at this shadow scene. It was not Romeo but Death
who called this little Juliette. A bullet hit her in the stomach, and
twenty-four hours later she died in agony.
I need not add to these stories, nor plunge deeper into the vile
obscenity of all those crimes which in the months of August and
September set hell loose in the beautiful old villages of France along
a front of five hundred miles. The facts are monotonous in the
repetition of their horror, and one's imagination is not helped but
stupefied by long records of outrages upon defenceless women, with
indiscriminate shooting down village streets, with unarmed peasants
killed as they trudged across their fields or burned in their own
homesteads, with false accusations against innocent villagers, so that
hostages were collected and shot in groups as a punishment for
alleged attacks upon German soldiers, with old French châteaux
looted of all their treasures by German officers in search of souvenirs
and trophies of victory for their womenfolk, and with drunken orgies in
which men of decent breeding became mere animals inflamed with
lust.
10
The memory of those things has burnt deep into the brains of the
French people, so deep that in some cases there is the fire of
madness there.
In a small château in France an English friend of mine serving with a
volunteer ambulance column with the French troops on the Meuse
was sitting at ease one night with some of his comrades and fellow-
countrymen. The conversation turned to England, because April was
there, and after ten months of war the thoughts of these men yearned
back to their homes. They spoke of their mothers and wives and
children. One man had a pretty daughter, and read a piece of her
latest letter, and laughed at her gay little jests and her descriptions of
the old pony and the dogs and the antics of a black kitten. Other men
gave themselves away and revealed the sentiment which as a rule
Englishmen hide. In the room was a French officer, who sat very still,
listening to these stories. The candles were burning dim on the table
when he spoke at last in a strange, hard voice:
"It is good for you Englishmen when you go back home. Those who
are not killed out here will be very happy to see their women again.
You do not want to die, because of that. ... If I were to go home now,
gentlemen, I should not be happy. I should find my wife and my
daughter both expecting babies whose fathers are German soldiers...
England has not suffered invasion."
11
The most complete destruction I saw in France was in Champagne,
when I walked through places which had been the villages of
Sermaize, Heiltz-le-Maurupt, Blesmes, and Huiron. Sermaize was
utterly wiped out. As far as I could see, not one house was left
standing. Not one wall was spared. It was laid flat upon the earth, with
only a few charred chimney-stacks sticking out of the piles of bricks
and cinders. Strange, piteous relics of pretty dwelling-places lay about
in the litter, signifying that men and women with some love for the arts
of life had lived here in decent comfort. A notice-board of a hotel
which had given hospitality to many travellers before it became a
blazing furnace lay sideways on a mass of broken bricks with a
legend so frightfully ironical that I laughed among the ruins:
"Chauffage central"--the system of "central heating" invented by
Germans in this war had been too hot for the hotel, and had burnt it to
a wreck of ashes. Half a dozen peasants stood in one of the
"streets"--marked by a line of rubbish-heaps which had once been
their homes. Some of them had waited until the first shells came over
their chimney-pots before they fled. Several of their friends, not so
lucky in timing their escape, had been crushed to death by the falling
houses. But it was not shell-fire which did the work. The Germans
strewed the cottages with their black inflammable tablets, which had
been made for such cases, and set their torches to the window-
curtains before marching away to make other bonfires on their road of
retreat. Sermaize became a street of fire, and from each of its houses
flames shot out like scarlet snakes, biting through the heavy pall of
smoke. Peasants hiding in ditches a mile away stared at the furnace
in which all their household goods were being consumed. Something
of their own life seemed to be burning there, leaving the dust and
ashes of old hopes and happiness.
"That was mine," said one of the peasants, pointing to a few square
yards of wreckage. "I took my woman home across the threshold that
was there. She was a fine girl, with hair like gold, Monsieur. Now her
hair has gone quite white, during these recent weeks. That's what war
does for women. There are many like that hereabouts, white-haired
before their time."
I saw some of those white-haired women in Blesmes and Huiron and
other scrap-heaps of German ruthlessness. They wandered in a
disconsolate way about the ruins, watching rather hopelessly the
building of wooden huts by a number of English "Quakers" who had
come here to put up shelters for these homeless people of France.
They were doing good work--one of the most beautiful works of
charity which had been called out of this war, and giving a new
meaning to their name of the Society of Friends. But though they
were handy in the use of the wood given them by the French
Government for this purpose, not all their industry nor all their
friendliness could bring back the beauty of these old-world villages of
Champagne, built centuries ago by men of art and craft, and chiselled
by Time itself, so that the stones told tales of history to the villagers.
It would be difficult to patch up the grey old tower of Huiron Church,
through which shells had come crashing, or to rebuild its oak roof
whose beams were splintered like the broken ribs of a rotting
carcase. A white-haired priest passed up and down the roadway
before the place in which he had celebrated Mass and praised God
for the blessings of each day. His hands were clenched behind his
bent back, and every now and then he thrust back his broad felt hat
and looked up at the poor, battered thing which had been his church
with immense sadness in his eyes.
There was an old château near Huiron in which a noble family of
France had lived through centuries of war and revolution. It had many
pointed gables and quaint turrets and mullioned windows, overlooking
a garden in which there were arbours for love-in-idleness where
ladies had dreamed awhile on many summer days in the great
yesterday of history. When I passed it, after the Germans had gone
that way, the gables and the turrets had fallen down, and instead of
mullioned windows there were gaping holes in blackened walls. The
gardens were a wild chaos of trampled shrubberies among the
cinder-heaps, the twisted iron, and the wreckage of the old mansion.
A flaming torch or two had destroyed all that time had spared, and the
château of Huiron was a graveyard in which beauty had been killed,
murderously, by outrageous hands.
In one of these villages of Champagne--I think it was at Blesmes--I
saw one relic which had been spared by chance when the flames of
the incendiaries had licked up all other things around, and somehow,
God knows why, it seemed to me the most touching thing in this
place of desolation.
It was a little stone fountain, out of which a jet of water rose playfully,
falling with a splash of water-drops into the sculptured basin. While
the furnace was raging in the village this fountain played and reflected
the glare of crimson light in its bubbling jet. The children of many
generations had dabbled their hands in its basin. Pretty girls had
peeped into their own bright eyes mirrored there. On summer days
the village folk had sauntered about this symbol of grace and beauty.
Now it was as though I had discovered a white Venus in the dust-
heap of a burying-place.
12
The great horror of Invasion did not reach only a few villages in
France and blanch the hair of only a few poor women. During the
long months of this stationary war there was a long black line on all
the maps, printed day after day with depressing repetition in all the
newspapers of the world. But I wonder how many people understood
the meaning of that black line marking the length of the German front
through France, and saw in their mind's eye the blackness of all
those burnt and shattered villages, for ten miles in width, on that
border-line of the war trail? I wonder how many people, searching for
news of heroic bayonet charges or for thrilling stories of how Private
John Smith kept an army corps at bay, single-handed, with a smile on
his face, saw even faintly and from afar the flight of all the fugitives
from that stricken zone, the terror of women and children trapped in
its hell-fire, and the hideous obscenity of that long track across the
fields of France, where dead bodies lay rotting in the rain and sun and
the homesteads of a simple people lay in heaps from Artois to
Lorraine?
Along the valley of the Aisne and of the Vesle the spirit of destruction
established its kingdom. It was a valley of death. In the official reports
only a few villages were mentioned by name, according to their
strategical importance, but there were hundreds of hamlets,
unrecorded in dispatches, which were struck by death and became
the charnel-houses of bones and ruins.
In the single district of Vie-sur-Aisne, the little communities of
Saconin, Pernant, Ambleny, and Ressons--beautiful spots in old days
of peace, where Nature displayed all her graciousness along the
winding river and where Time itself seemed to slumber--French
soldiers stared upon broken roofs, shattered walls, and trampled
gardens, upon the twisted iron of ploughs and the broken woodwork
of farmers' carts, and all the litter of war's ruthless damage. Week
after week, turn and turn about, German, French, and British shells
crashed over these places, making dust and ashes of them.
Peasants who clung to their cots, hid in their cellars and at last fled,
described all this in a sentence or two when I questioned them. They
had no grievance even against fate--their own misery was swallowed
up in that of their neighbours; each family knew a worse case than its
own, and so, with a shake of the head, they said there were many
who suffered these things.
Shopkeepers and peasants of Celles, of Conde, of Attichy, along the
way to Berry-au-Bac and from Billy to Sermoise, all those who have
now fled from the Valley of the Vesle and the valley of the Aisne had
just the same story to tell--monotonous, yet awful because of its
tragedy. It was their fate to be along the line of death. One old fellow
who came from Vailly had lived for two months in a continual
cannonade. He had seen his little town taken and retaken ten times in
turn by the French and the Germans.
When I heard of this eye-witness I thought: "Here is a man who has a
marvellous story to tell. If all he has seen, all the horrors and heroism
of great engagements were written down, just as he describes them
in his peasant speech, it would make an historic document to be read
by future generations."
But what did he answer to eager questions about his experience? He
was hard of hearing and, with a hand making a cup for his right ear,
stared at me a little dazed. He said at last, "It was difficult to get to
sleep."
That was all he had to say about it, and many of these peasants were
like him, repeating some trivial detail of their experience, the loss of a
dog or the damage to an old teapot, as though that eclipsed all other
suffering. But little by little, if one had the patience, one could get
wider glimpses of the truth. Another old man from the village of Soupir
told a more vivid tale. His dwelling-place sheltered some of the
Germans when they traversed the district. The inhabitants of Soupir,
he said, were divided into two groups. Able-bodied prisoners were
sent off to Germany, and women and children who were carried off in
the retreat were afterwards allowed to go back, but not until several
poor little creatures had been killed, and pretty girls subjected to
gross indignities by brutal soldiers. Upon entering Soupir the French
troops found in cellars where they had concealed themselves thirty
people who had gone raving mad and who cried and pleaded to
remain so that they could still hear the shells and gibber at death.
"War is so bracing to a nation," says the philosopher. "War purges
peoples of their vanities." If there is a devil--and there must be many
old-time sceptics who believe now not in one but in a hundred
thousand devils--how the old rogue must chuckle at such words!
13
It was astounding to any student of psychology wandering in the war
zone to see how many of the peasants of France clung to their
houses, in spite of all their terror of German shells and German
soldiers. When in the first month of 1915 the enemy suddenly
swarmed over the ridges of Cuffies and Crouy, to the north of
Soissons, and with overwhelming numbers smashed the French
back across the Aisne at a time, when the rising of the river had
broken many pontoon bridges, so that the way of escape was almost
cut off, they drove out crowds of peasant folk who had remained
along this fifteen miles of front until actually shelled out in that last
attack which put the ruins of their houses into the hands of the
Germans. As long as three months before Crouy itself had been a
target for the enemy's guns, so that hardly a cottage was standing
with solid walls.
Nevertheless, with that homing instinct which is the strongest emotion
in the heart of the French peasant, many of the inhabitants had been
living an underground life in their cellars, obtaining food from French
soldiers and cowering close together as shells came shrieking
overhead, and as the shattered buildings collapsed into greater ruin.
So it was in Rheims and Arras and other towns which were not
spared in spite of the glories of an architecture which can never be
rebuilt in beauty. Only a few days before writing these lines, I stood on
the edge of the greatest battlefield in France and from an observation
post perched like an eyrie in a tree above the valley, looked across to
the cathedral of Rheims, that shrine of history, where the bones of
kings lie, and where every stone speaks of saints and heroes and a
thousand years of worship. The German shells were still falling about
it, and its great walls stood grim and battered in a wrack of smoke.
For nine months the city of Rheims has suffered the wounds of war.
Shrapnel and air-bombs, incendiary shells and monstrous marmites
had fallen within its boundaries week by week; sometimes only one or
two on an idle day, sometimes in a raging storm of fire, but always
killing a few more people, always shattering another house or two,
always spoiling another bit of sculptured beauty. Nevertheless, there
were thousands of citizens, women as well as men, who would not
leave their city. They lived in cellars, into which they had dragged their
beds and stores, and when the shell fire slackened they emerged,
came out into the light of day, looked around at the new damage, and
went about their daily business until cleared underground again by
another storm of death. There were two old ladies with an elderly
daughter who used to sit at table in the salle-à-manger of a hotel in
Paris a week or two ago. I saw them arrive one day, and watched the
placid faces of these stately old dames in black silk with little lace
caps on their white hair. It was hardly possible to believe that for three
months they had lived in a cellar at Rheims, listening through the day
and night to the cannonading of the city, and to the rushing of the
shells above their own house.
Yet I think that even in a cellar those old women of France preserved
their dignity, and in spite of dirty hands (for water was very scarce)
ate their meagre rations with a stately grace.
14
More miserable and less armed with courage were the people of
France who lived in cities held by the enemy and secure from shell-
fire--in Lille, and St. Quentin, and other towns of the North, where the
Germans paraded in their pointed casques. For the most part in
these great centres of population the enemy behaved well. Order was
maintained among the soldiers with ruthless severity by German
officers in high command. There were none of the wild and obscene
acts which disgraced the German army in its first advance to and its
retreat from the Marne. No torch bearers and tablet scatterers were
let loose in the streets. On the contrary any German soldier
misbehaving himself by looting, raping, or drunken beastliness found
a quick death against a white wall. But to the French citizens it was a
daily agony to see those crowds of hostile troops in their streets and
houses, to listen to their German speech, to obey the orders of
generals who had fought their way through Northern France across
the bodies of French soldiers, smashing, burning, killing along the
bloody track of war. These citizens of the captured soil of France
knew bitterness of invasion more poignantly than those who hid in
cellars under shell-fire. Their bodies were unwounded, but their spirits
bled in agony. By official placards posted on the walls they read of
German victories and French defeats. In the restaurants and cafés,
and in their own houses, they had to serve men who were engaged in
slaughtering their kinsfolk. It was difficult to be patient with those
swaggering young officers who gave the glad eye to girls whose
sweethearts lay dead somewhere between the French and German
trenches.
From a lady who had been seven months in St. Quentin, I heard the
story of how invasion came suddenly and took possession of the
people. The arrival of the German troops was an utter surprise to the
population, who had had no previous warning. Most of the French
infantry had left the town, and there remained only a few
detachments, and some English and Scottish soldiers who had lost
their way in the great retreat, or who were lying wounded in the
hospitals. The enemy came into the town at 4 P.M. on August 28,
having completely surrounded it, so that they entered from every
direction. The civil population, panic-stricken, remained for the most
part in their houses, staring through their windows at the columns of
dusty, sun-baked men who came down the streets. Some of the
British soldiers, caught in this trap, decided to fight to the death, which
they knew was inevitable. Several English and Scottish soldiers fired
at the Germans as they advanced into the chief square and were
instantly shot. One man, a tall young soldier, stationed himself at the
corner of the Place du Huit Octobre, and with extraordinary coolness
and rapidity fired shot after shot, so that several German soldiers
were killed or wounded. The enemy brought up a machine gun and
used it against this one man who tried to stop an army. He fell riddled
with bullets, and was blown to pieces as he lay.
On the whole the Germans behaved well at St. Quentin. Their rule
was stern but just, and although the civil population had been put on
rations of black bread, they got enough and it was not, after all, so
bad. As one of the most important bases of the German army in
France, the town was continually filled with troops of every regiment,
who stayed a little while and then passed on. Meanwhile the
permanent troops in occupation of the town settled down and made
themselves thoroughly at home. They established many of their own
shops--bakeries, tailoring establishments, and groceries; and in
consequence of the lack of discipline and decency which prevailed in
some of the cafés and restaurants, these places were conducted by
German officers, who acted as censors of morals and professors of
propriety.
Astounding as it seems, there were Frenchwomen in St. Quentin who
sold themselves for German money and gave their kisses for a price
to men who had ravaged France and killed the sons of France. Such
outrageous scenes took place, that the German order to close some
of the cafés was hailed as a boon by the decent citizens, who saw the
women expelled by order of the German commandant with enormous
thankfulness.
It is strange that the Huns, as they are called, should have been so
strict in moral discipline. Many of them were not so austere in the
villages when they let their passions loose and behaved like drunken
demons or satyrs with flaming torches. There is a riddle in the
psychology of all these contrasts between the iron discipline and
perfect organization by which all outrage was repressed in the large
towns occupied for any length of time by German troops, and the
lawlessness and rapine of the same race in villages through which
they passed hurriedly, giving themselves just time enough to wreak a
cruel ferocity upon unoffending people. Riddle as it is, it holds
perhaps the key to the mystery of the German character and to their
ideal of war. Whenever there was time to establish discipline, the men
were well behaved, and did not dare to disobey the orders of their
chiefs. It was only when special orders for "frightfulness" had been
issued, or when officers in subordinate command let their men get out
of hand, or led the way to devilry by their own viciousness of action,
that the rank and file of the enemy's army committed its brutalities.
Even now, after all that I have seen in the ruined villages in France, I
cannot bring myself to believe that the German race is distinguished
from all other peoples in Europe by the mark of the beast, or that
'they are the exclusive possession of the devil. The prisoners I have
spoken to, the blue-eyed Saxons and plump Bavarians with whom I
travelled for awhile after the battle of Neuve Chapelle, seemed to me
uncommonly like the yokels of our own Somersetshire and
Devonshire. Their officers were polite and well-bred men in whom I
saw no sign of fiendish lusts and cruelties. In normal moods they are
a good-natured people, with a little touch of Teuton grossness
perhaps, which makes them swill overmuch beer, and with an
arrogance towards their womenfolk which is not tolerable to
Englishmen, unless they have revolted from the older courtesies of
English life because the Suffragettes have challenged their authority.
It was in abnormal moods that they committed their atrocities, for in
the hot sun of the first September of the war their blood was
overheated, and in the first intoxication of their march through France,
drunk with the thrill of butcher's work as well as with French wine,
brought back suddenly to the primitive lusts of nature by the spirit of
war, which strips men naked of all refinements and decent veils, they
became for a time savages, with no other restraint than that of Red
Indians on the warpath. They belonged to an Army of Invasion,
marching through hostile territory, and the soul of war robbed the
individual of his own separate soul and put a spell of madness on
him, so that his eyes were bloodshot and his senses inflamed with
lust. In the Peninsular War young Englishmen from decent villages in
quiet countrysides, with pious mothers praying for them at home in
grey old churches, and with pretty sisters engaged in hero-worship,
were bewitched by the same spell of wizardry and did foul and
frightful things which afterwards made them dream of nights and
wake in a cold sweat of shame and horror. There are many young
Germans who will wake out of such dreams when they get back to
Dusseldorf and Bingen-am-Rhein, searching back in their hearts to
find a denial of the deeds which have become incredible after their
awakening from the nightmare. For a little while they had been caught
up in the soul of war and their heroism had been spoilt by obscenity,
and their ideals debased by bestial acts. They will have only one
excuse to their recaptured souls: "It was War." It is the excuse which
man has made through all the ages of his history for the bloody thing
which, in all those ages, has made him a liar to his faith and a traitor
to the gentle gods.