In the contemplation of the great griefs of those who have lost their
own, of those who have given their all; in the contemplation of the
bravest country in the world--Belgium--ravaged from frontier to
frontier, laid barren and waste, smoked, ruined, devastated and scarred
by wholesale massacre of civilian women and children, our hearts have
been crushed. Our souls have been appalled by the burdens of others,
and by the future problems of Belgium, not to speak of one quarter
of France. Much of the north has been wiped out, and the stories of
individual suffering and insults too terrible to dwell upon, you will
say.
One of my old clerks in the Bon Marché has had his little nephew come
back to him from Germany--a peaceful young middle-class man pursuing
his studies in a German town--with both his hands cut off!
The other day in the Gare du Nord, waiting for a train, there was a
stunning Belgian officer--not a private--he was a captain in one of
the crack regiments. His excitement was terrible, he was almost beside
himself with anguish and with anger. In a little village he had seen
one woman violated by seven Germans in the presence of her husband;
then the husband shot, the woman shot and her little baby cut in four
pieces on a butcher's block. You can hardly call this the common
course of war. He was a Belgian gentleman, and I should consider this
a document of truth.
But there are so many that I cannot prolong, and will not--what is the
use? Every now and then a people needs to be wiped off the face of the
earth, or a contingent blotted out that a newer and finer civilization
shall prevail. Certainly this is the case with Germany. They say here
that the Emperor and Crown Prince will be tried by law and sentenced
to death as common criminals, the Emperor as a murderer and the Crown
Prince as a robber, for his goods trains were stacked with booty and
loot. Think of it, a Prince! Everywhere the Germans pass they leave
their filthy insults behind them, in the beautiful châteaux and in the
delicate rooms of the French women--the indications of their passing,
not deeds of noble heroism that can be told of foes as well as of
friends, but filthy souvenirs of the passing of creatures for whom the
word "barbarism" is too mild!
* * * * *
Here is a more spiritual picture.
Robert Le Roux, jun., was buried yesterday. You will have read in the
previous pages here the story of his exploits on the battlefield--the
closing of his young life in bravely leading his troops up the hill to
certain death. And yesterday I went to St. Germain to his funeral.
The last time I had seen young Robert he was a little boy, in short
breeches and socks. His mother brought him to Versailles and he played
with us in the garden there--a strong, splendid-looking young French
boy. Now I was going to his funeral, and he was engaged to be married,
with all his hopes before him, and on this same train was his little
fiancée, in her long crêpe veil, broken-hearted; and his little sister,
and the father, who had followed his son's campaign with such ardor and
such tenderness; and his uncle, Dr. D., of whom I spoke previously--the
splendid sergeant-major whose only son had just been killed by the
enemy. A train of sorrow!--and only one of so many, so many.
The church at St. Germain is simple and very old. The doors were all
hung with heavy snow-white cloth, and before the door stood the funeral
car drawn by white horses, all in white, and instead of melancholy
hearse plumes there were bunches of flags, and over all hung the
November mist enveloping, softening, and there was a big company of
Cuirassiers guarding the road.
We went in, and the church was crowded from the nave to the doors, and
all the nave and the little chapels were blazing with the lily lights
of the candles. It was all so white and so pure, so effulgent, so
starry. There was an uplift about it, an élan; tragic as it all was,
there was ever that feeling of beyond, beyond!
Before the altar lay the young man's coffin--that leaden coffin that
had stood by his father in the fortress of Toul for three weeks,
waiting for the dead. It was completely covered by the French flag, and
the candles burnt around it.
Beside me was a woman with her husband. She wept so bitterly through
the whole service that my heart was just wrung for her, and her
husband's face, as his red-lidded eyes stared out in the misty church,
was one of the most tragic things I ever saw. I wept, of course, and I
have not cried very much since the war broke out, but her grief was too
much for me. Finally she turned to me and said: "Madame, I only had one
son, he was so charming, so good; he has fallen before the enemy, and I
don't know where he is buried!" Just think of it! There she was, at the
funeral of another man's son because he was a soldier! Link upon link
of sorrow and suffering--such broken hearts....
The whole service was musical, nothing else but violins and harps. It
was the most beautiful thing I ever heard, so quiet and so sweet; and
that little group touched me profoundly--Le Roux with his daughter and
the little fiancée--and that was all. In that coffin lying under the
flag Bessie had placed at Toul her little silk pillow for the young
soldier's head, and his love-letters in a little packet lay by his
side. Around his arm he had worn a little ribbon taken from the hair of
his sweetheart, and at the very last when he was dying and the hospital
nurse was about to unknot it--I don't know why--the boy put up his
feeble hand to prevent her; of course they buried it with him, and, as
you think of it, you can hear that unknown voice on the battlefield,
that, as the stretcher-bearers came to look for the wounded, called
out: "Take him, he is engaged to be married; and leave me."
Oh, if out of it all arise a better civilization, purer motives, less
greed for money, more humanitarian and unselfish aims, we can bear it.
I think of America with an ever-increasing love; I am proud to belong
to that young and far-off country, but if our voice is raised now
in encouragement for Belgium, encouragement for the Allies, and in
reprobation of these acts of dishonorable warfare and cruel barbarism,
I shall love my country more.
How superb the figure of the Belgian king is, standing there among the
remnant of his army, and surrounded by his destroyed and ruined empire,
and the cries of the people in his ears--a sublime figure....