Part 15

Imagine the horror of the September night!--the terror of the women who, in the general exodus of the young and strong, had stayed behind with their husbands, the old men who could not be persuaded to leave the farms and fields in which they had spent their lives. "What harm can they do to us--old people?" No doubt that had been the instinctive feeling among those who had remained to face the invasion.

But the Germans were not content without wreaking the instinct--which is the savage instinct--to break and crush and ill-treat something which has thwarted you, on the women of Vareddes also. They gathered them out of the farmyard to which they had come, in the hopes of being allowed to stay with the men, and shut them up in a room of the farm. And there, with fixed bayonets, the soldiers amused themselves with terrifying these trembling creatures during a great part of the night. They made them all kneel down, facing a file of soldiers, and the women thought their last hour had come. One was seventy-seven years old, three sixty-seven, the two others just under sixty. The eldest, Madame Barthélemy, said to the others--"We are going to die. Make your 'contrition' if you can." (The Town Librarian of Meaux, from whose account I take these facts, heard these details from the lips of poor Madame Barthélemy herself.) The cruel scene shapes itself as we think of it--the half-lit room--the row of kneeling and weeping women, the grinning soldiers, bayonet in hand, and the old men waiting in the yard outside.

But with the morning, the French mitrailleuses are heard. The soldiers disappear.

The poor old women are free; they are able to leave their prison.

But their husbands are gone--carried off as hostages by the Germans. There were nineteen hostages in all. Three of them were taken off in a north-westerly direction, and found some German officers quartered in a château, who, after a short interrogation, released them. Of the other sixteen, fifteen were old men, and the sixteenth a child. The Curé is with them, and finds great difficulty, owing to his age, the exhaustion of the night, and lack of food, in keeping up with the column. It was now Thursday the 10th, the day following that on which, as is generally believed, the Kaiser signed the order for the general retreat of the German armies in France. But the hostages are told that the French Army has been repulsed, and the Germans will be in Paris directly.

At last the poor Curé could walk no farther. He gave his watch to a companion. "Give it to my family when you can. I am sure they mean to shoot me." Then he dropped exhausted. The Germans hailed a passing vehicle, and made him and another old man, who had fallen out, follow in it. Presently they arrive at Lizy-sur-Ourcq, through which thousands of German troops are now passing, bound not for Paris, but for Soissons and the Aisne, and in the blackest of tempers. Here, after twenty-four more hours of suffering and starvation, the Curé is brought before a court-martial of German officers sitting in a barn. He is once more charged with signalling from the church to the French Army. He again denies the charge, and reminds his judges of what he had done for the German wounded, to whose gratitude he appeals. Then four German soldiers give some sort of evidence, founded either on malice or mistake. There are no witnesses for the defence, no further inquiry. The president of the court-martial says, in bad French, to the other hostages who stand by: "The Curé has lied--he is a spy--il sera jugé."

What did he mean--and what happened afterwards? The French witnesses of the scene who survived understood the officer's words to mean that the Curé would be shot. With tears, they bade him farewell, as he sat crouched in a corner of the barn guarded by two German soldiers. He was never seen again by French eyes; and the probability is that he was shot immediately after the scene in the barn.

Then the miserable march of the other old men began again. They are dragged along in the wake of the retreating Germans. The day is very hot, the roads are crowded with troops and lorries. They are hustled and hurried, and their feeble strength is rapidly exhausted. The older ones beg that they may be left to die; the younger help them as much as they can. When anyone falls out, he is kicked and beaten till he gets up again. And all the time the passing troops mock and insult them. At last, near Coulombs, after a march of two hours and a half, a man of seventy-three, called Jourdaine, falls. His guards rush upon him, with blows and kicks. In vain. He has no strength to rise, and his murderers finish him with a ball in the head and one in the side, and bury him hastily in a field a few metres off.

The weary march goes on all day. When it ends, another old man--seventy-nine years old--"le père Milliardet"--can do no more. The next morning he staggered to his feet at the order to move, but fell almost immediately. Then a soldier with the utmost coolness sent his bayonet through the heart of the helpless creature. Another falls on the road a little farther north--then another--and another. All are killed, as they lie.

The poor Maire, Liévin, struggles on as long as he can. Two other prisoners support him on either side. But he has a weak heart--his face is purple--he can hardly breathe. Again and again he falls, only to be brutally pulled up, the Germans shouting with laughter at the old man's misery. (This comes from the testimony of the survivors.) Then he, too, falls for the last time. Two soldiers take him into the cemetery of Chouy. Liévin understands, and patiently takes out his handkerchief and bandages his own eyes. It takes three balls to kill him.

Another hostage, a little farther on, who had also fallen was beaten to death before the eyes of the others.

The following day, after having suffered every kind of insult and privation, the wretched remnant of the civilian prisoners reached Soissons, and were dispatched to Germany, bound for the concentration camp at Erfurt.

Eight of them, poor souls! reached Germany, where two of them died. At last, in January 1915, four of them were returned to France through Switzerland. They reached Schaffhausen with a number of other rapatriés, in early February, to find there the boundless pity with which the Swiss know so well how to surround the frail and tortured sufferers of this war. In a few weeks more, they were again at home, among the old farms and woods of the Ile-de-France. "They are now in peace," says the Meaux Librarian--"among those who love them, and whose affection tries, day by day, to soften for them the cruel memory of their Calvary and their exile."

A monument to the memory of the murdered hostages is to be erected in the village market-place, and a plaque has been let into the wall of the farm where the old men and the women passed their first night of agony.

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What is the moral of this story? I have chosen it to illustrate again the historic words which should be, I think--and we know that what is in our hearts is in your hearts also!--the special watchword of the Allies and of America, in these present days, when the German strength may collapse at any moment, and the problems of peace negotiations may be upon us before we know.

Reparation--Restitution--Guarantees!

The story of Vareddes, like that of Senlis, is not among the vilest--by a long, long way--of those which have steeped the name of Germany in eternal infamy during this war. The tale of Gerbéviller--which I shall take for my third instance--as I heard it from the lips of eye-witnesses, plunges us in deeper depths of horror; and the pages of the Bryce report are full of incidents beside which that of Vareddes looks almost colourless.

All the same, let us insist again that no Army of the Allies, or of America, or of any British Dominion, would have been capable of the treatment given by the soldiers of Germany to the hostages of Vareddes. It brings out into sharp relief that quality, or "mentality," to use the fashionable word, which Germany shares with Austria--witness the Austrian doings in Serbia--and with Turkey--witness Turkey's doings in Armenia--but not with any other civilised nation. It is the quality of, or the tendency to, deliberate and pitiless cruelty; a quality which makes of the man or nation who shows it a particularly terrible kind of animal force; and the more terrible, the more educated. Unless we can put it down and stamp it out, as it has become embodied in a European nation, European freedom and peace, American freedom and peace, have no future.

But now, let me carry you to Lorraine!--to the scenes of that short but glorious campaign of September 1914, by which, while the Battle of the Marne was being fought, General Castelnau was protecting the right of the French armies; and to the devastated villages where American kindness is already at work, rebuilding the destroyed, and comforting the broken-hearted.

No. 9

May 24th, 1917.

DEAR MR. ROOSEVELT,--To any citizen of a country allied with France in the present struggle, above all to any English man or woman who is provided with at least some general knowledge of the Battle of the Marne, the journey across France from Paris to Nancy can never fail to be one of poignant interest. Up to a point beyond Châlons, the "Ligne de l'Est" follows in general the course of the great river, and therefore the line of the battle. You pass La Fertée-sous-Jouarre, where the Third Corps of General French's army crossed the river; Charly-sur-Marne, where a portion of the First Corps found an unexpectedly easy crossing, owing, it is said, to the hopeless drunkenness of the enemy rear-guard charged with defending the bridge; and Château Thierry, famous in the older history of France, where the right of the First Corps crossed after sharp fighting, and, in the course of "a gigantic man-hunt" in and around the town, took a large number of German prisoners, before, by nightfall, coming into touch with the left of the French Fifth Army under Franchet d'Espercy. At Dornans you are only a few miles north of the Marshes of St. Gond, where General Foch, after some perilous moments, won his brilliant victory over General Billow and the German Second Army, including a corps of the Prussian Guards; while at Châlons I look up from a record I am reading of the experiences of the Diocese during the war, written by the Bishop, to watch for the distant cathedral, and recall the scene of the night of September 9th, when the German Headquarters Staff in that town, "flown with insolence and wine," after what is described as "an excellent dinner and much riotous drinking," were roused about midnight by a sudden noise in the Hôtel, and shouts of "The French are here!" "In fifteen minutes," writes an officer of the Staff of General Langle de Gary, "the Hôtel was empty."

At Épernay and Châlons those French officers who were bound for the fighting line in Champagne, east and west of Reims, left the train; and somewhere beyond Épernay I followed in thought the flight of an aeroplane which seemed to be heading northwards across the ridges which bound the river valley--northwards for Reims, and that tragic ghost which the crime of Germany has set moving through history for ever, never to be laid or silenced--Joan of Arc's Cathedral. Then, at last, we are done with the Marne. We pass Bar-le-Duc, on one of her tributaries, the Ornain; after which the splendid Meuse flashes into sight, running north on its victorious way to Verdun; then the Moselle, with Toul and its beautiful church on the right; and finally the Meurthe, on which stands Nancy. A glorious sisterhood of rivers! The more one realises what they have meant to the history of France, the more one understands that strong instinct of the early Greeks, which gave every river its god, and made of the Simois and the Xanthus personages almost as real as Achilles himself.

But alas! the whole great spectacle, here as on the Ourcq, was sorely muffled and blurred by the snow, which lay thick over the whole length and breadth of France, effacing the landscape in one monotonous whiteness. If I remember rightly, however, it had ceased to fall, and twenty-four hours after we reached Nancy, it had disappeared. It lasted just long enough to let us see the fairy-like Place Stanislas raise its beautiful gilded gates and white palaces between the snow and the moon-light--a sight not soon forgotten.

We were welcomed at Nancy by the Préfet of the Department, Monsieur Léon Mirman, to whom an old friend had written from Paris, and by the courteous French officer, Capitaine de B., who was to take us in charge, for the French Army, during our stay. M. Mirman and his active and public-spirited wife have done a great work at Nancy, and in the desolated country round it. From the ruined villages of the border, the poor réfugiés have been gathered into the old capital of Lorraine, and what seemed to me a remarkably efficient and intelligent philanthropy has been dealing with their needs and those of their children. Nor is this all. M. Mirman is an old Radical and of course a Government official, sent down some years ago from Paris. Lorraine is ardently Catholic, as we all know, and her old Catholic families are not the natural friends of the Republican régime. But President Poincaré's happy phrase, l'union sacrée--describing the fusion of all parties, classes, and creeds in the war service of France, has nowhere found a stronger echo than in Lorraine. The Préfet is on the friendliest of terms with the Catholic population, rich and poor; and they, on their side, think and speak warmly of a man who is clearly doing his patriotic best for all alike.

Our first day's journeyings were to show us something of the qualities of this Catholic world of Lorraine. A charming and distinguished Frenchwoman who accompanied us counted, no doubt, for much in the warmth of the kindness shown us. And yet I like to believe--indeed I am sure--that there was more than this in it. There was the thrilling sense of a friendship between our two nations, a friendship new and far-reaching, cemented by the war, but looking beyond it, which seemed to me to make the background of it all. Long as I have loved and admired the French, I have often--like many others of their English friends and admirers--felt and fretted against the kind of barrier that seemed to exist between their intimate life and ours. It was as though, at bottom, and in the end, something cold and critical in the French temperament, combined with ignorance and prejudice on our own part, prevented a real contact between the two nationalities. In Lorraine, at any rate, and for the first time, I felt this "something" gone. Let us only carry forward intelligently, after the war, the process of friendship born from the stress and anguish of this time--for there is an art and skill in friendship, just as there is an art and skill in love--and new horizons will open for both nations. The mutual respect, the daily intercourse, and the common glory of our two armies fighting amid the fields and woods of France--soon to welcome a third army, your own, to their great fellowship!--are the foundations to-day of all the rest; and next come the efforts that have been made by British and Americans to help the French in remaking and rebuilding their desolated land, efforts that bless him that gives and him that takes, but especially him that gives; of which I shall have more to say in the course of this letter. But a common victory, and a common ardour in rebuilding the waste places, and binding up the broken-hearted: even they will not be enough, unless, beyond the war, all three nations, nay, all the Allies, do not set themselves to a systematic interpenetration of life and thought, morally, socially, commercially. As far as France and England are concerned, English people must go more to France; French people must come more to England. Relations of hospitality, of correspondence, of wide mutual acquaintance, must not be left to mere chance; they must be furthered by the mind of both nations. Our English children must go for part of their education to France; and French children must be systematically wooed over here. Above all the difficulty of language must be tackled as it has never been yet, so that it may be a real disadvantage and disgrace for the boy or girl of either country who has had a secondary education not to be able to speak, in some fashion, the language of the other. As for the working classes, and the country populations of both countries, what they have seen of each other, as brothers in arms during the war, may well prove of more lasting importance than anything else.

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