And what appalling things they told us, in trembling voices and shaking
with sobs!
Not only their homes, their domestic animals and their furniture had
been harried by fire and sword--it cannot be otherwise in war, I
suppose, for it has no mercy.
It had been here as it had been in Belgium--the soldiers were
intoxicated with savagery and the lust of destruction. In such an army
there may be a thousand scoundrels amongst a hundred thousand decent
men; but scoundrels create new scoundrels, drink begets coarseness,
and coarseness begets violence. Old men are mocked and tortured, women
outraged without mercy, and innocent little children are made to suffer
without pity. Men have to pay for their hate and their defiance, even
though honest and justifiable, with military retribution, merely
because one of them has been impudent. He has stirred up and set ablaze
passionate instincts that no one can quench.
I knew what might happen--I had been through the whole affair in
Belgium. I knew from experience all that they told me, and a great deal
more.... But I can assure you now, and I shall dare to say it on the
day I have to stand before my Eternal Judge, I have never of my own
impulse harmed any civilian; I have no murder or other deed of shame
on my conscience. The guilt of whatever I have had a share in doing is
entirely on the heads of those who could demand it of me. They could
demand of me that I should do my duty and whip me into doing it, or
shoot me if I refused. I had long since sworn loyalty to the colours.
That oath is sacred, like any other oath. And I was a subject of the
country I served and had to serve.
That being so, may I not be allowed to say that while I was appalled
at what I now saw, I was at the same time filled with a certain
satisfaction. It appalled me because all horror appals, yet at the same
time there was a certain satisfaction about it, because I saw in it a
just retribution for all that we had done in Belgium--a mild and very
lenient retribution, by the way.
Don't you think one may be allowed to say that without being stamped as
cruel and merciless?
There is, amongst my Russian experiences, an incident which I shall
always be glad to cherish with the warmest gratitude, because it
represents to me what we mortals usually call Nemesis--that is,
chastising justice, or whatever name you prefer to give it.
I call it the judgment of God because it seemed as if there was a
leading and guiding hand in it--a hand that struck one who was guilty
and gave atonement for two whose lives had been taken.
The rearguard to which I belonged--I think we were only a couple of
thousand men--had been billeted for a day in a fairly large village
not far from the Russian frontier. It was one of the first places to
be laid waste. There were not many farms or houses left that were not
in ruins. The cattle had been taken and the corn trodden down. Many
homes were quite deserted, and no one knew where the inmates were.
Besides, who could know at such a time, when each one had enough to do
to save himself and those belonging to him. Perhaps they were dead;
perhaps terror had driven them to madness; perhaps they had dragged
themselves along, weary to death, in the train of the fleeing crowds
and had fallen by the wayside in a ditch or at the edge of a forest,
left behind by the others who continued their insensate flight and took
heed of naught but themselves and their own affairs.
Perhaps they lay by the roadside gazing towards the home that was now a
ruin, at the fires blazing over the flat country, and up to the heavens
where it seemed to them that everything was forgotten--mercy, goodness,
justice.
Perhaps they murmured a prayer, the last, the very last, and then lay
down and waited for what was to come--for silent, reconciling death,
that would bring them peace and alleviation for all that they had not
been able to endure in a world that seemed to them to have been quite
forsaken by God.
I know that old men were found with their hands folded on their breasts
and the reconciling peace of death on their wasted, rigid faces.
I know that young women were found with their infants pressed close to
their bare breasts, as if trying to give them their last warmth, until
they had both gone into the land of everlasting peace, slain by cold
and hunger and terror.