Part 16

But I am wandering a little from Nancy, and the story of our long Sunday. The snow had disappeared, and there were voices of spring in the wind. A French Army motor arrived early, with another French officer, the Capitaine de G----, who proved to be a most interesting and stimulating guide. With him I drove slowly through the beautiful town, looking at the ruined houses, which are fairly frequent in its streets. For Nancy has had its bombardments, and there is one gun of long range in particular, surnamed by the town--"la grosse Bertha," which has done, and still does, at intervals, damage of the kind the German loves. Bombs, too, have been dropped by aeroplanes both here and at Lunéville, in streets crowded with non-combatants, with the natural result. It has been in reprisal for this and similar deeds elsewhere, and in the hope of stopping them, that the French have raided German towns across the frontier. But the spirit of Nancy remains quite undaunted. The children of its schools, drilled to run down to the cellars at the first alarm as our children are drilled to empty a school on a warning of a Zeppelin raid, are the gayest and most spirited creatures, as I saw them at their games and action songs; unless indeed it be the children of the réfugiés, in whose faces sometimes one seems to see the reflection of scenes that no child ought to have witnessed and not even a child can forget. For these children come from the frontier villages, ravaged by the German advance, and still, some of them, in German occupation. And the orgy of murder, cruelty, and arson which broke out at Nomény, Badonviller, and Gerbéviller, during the campaign of 1914, has scarcely been surpassed elsewhere--even in Belgium. Here again, as at Vareddes, the hideous deeds done were largely owing to the rage of defeat. The Germans, mainly Bavarians, on the frontier, had set their hearts on Nancy, as the troops of Von Kluck had set their hearts on Paris; and General Castelnau, commanding the Second Army, denied them Nancy, as Maunoury's Sixth Army denied Paris to Von Kluck.

But more of this presently. We started first of all for a famous point in the fighting of 1914, the farm and hill of Léomont. By this time the day had brightened into a cold sunlight, and as we sped south from Nancy on the Lunéville road, through the old town of St. Nicholas du Port, with its remarkable church, and past the great salt works at Dombasle, all the country-side was clear to view.

Good fortune indeed!--as I soon discovered when, after climbing a steep hill to the east of the road, we found ourselves in full view of the fighting lines and a wide section of the frontier, with the Forest of Parroy, which is still partly German, stretching its dark length southward on the right, while to the north ran the famous heights of the Grand Couronné;--name of good omen!--which suggests so happily the historical importance of the ridge which protects Nancy and covers the French right. Then, turning westward, one looked over the valley of the Meurthe, with its various tributaries, the Mortagne in particular, on which stands Gerbéviller; and away to the Moselle and the Meuse. But the panoramic view was really made to live and speak for me by the able man at my side. With French precision and French logic, he began with the geography of the country, its rivers and hills and plateaux, and its natural capacities for defence against the German enemy; handling the view as though it had been a great map, and pointing out, as he went, the disposition of the French frontier armies, and the use made of this feature and that by the French generals in command.

This Lorraine Campaign, at the opening of the war, is very little realised outside France. It lasted some three weeks. It was preceded by the calamitous French reverse at Morhange, where, on August 20th, portions of the 15th and 16th Corps of the Second Army, young troops drawn from south-western France--who in subsequent actions fought with great bravery--broke in rout before a tremendous German attack. The defeat almost gave the Germans Nancy. But General Castelnau and General Foch, between them, retrieved the disaster. They fell back on Nancy and the line of the Mortagne, while the Germans, advancing farther south, occupied Luneville (August 22nd) and burnt Gerbéviller. On the 23rd, 24th, and 25th there was fierce fighting on and near this hill on which we stood. Capitaine de G---- with the 2nd Battalion of Chausseurs, under General Dubail, had been in the thick of the struggle, and he described to me the action on the slopes beneath us, and how, through his glasses, he had watched the enemy on the neighbouring hill forcing parties of French civilians to bury the German dead and dig German trenches, under the fire of their own people.

The hill of Léomont, and the many graves upon it, were quiet enough as we stood talking there. The old farm was in ruins; and in the fields stretching up the hill there were the remains of trenches. All around and below us spread the beautiful Lorraine country, with its rivers and forests; and to the south-east one could just see the blue mass of Mont Donon, and the first spurs of the Vosges.

"Can you show me exactly where the French line runs?" I asked my companion. He pointed to a patch of wood some six miles away. "There is a French battalion there. And you see that other patch of wood a little farther east? There is a German battalion there. Ah!" Suddenly he broke off, and the younger officer with us, Capitaine de B----, came running up, pointing overhead. I craned my neck to look into the spring blue above us, and there--7,000 to 8,000 feet high, according to the officers--were three Boche aeroplanes pursued by two French machines. In and out a light band of white cloud, the fighters in the air chased each other, shrapnel bursting all round them like tufts of white wool. They were so high that they looked mere white specks. Yet we could follow their action perfectly--how the Germans climbed, before running for home, and how the French pursued! It was breathless while it lasted! But we did not see the end. The three Taubes were clearly driven back; and in a few seconds they and the Frenchmen had disappeared in distance and cloud towards the fighting-line. The following day, at a point farther to the north, a well-known French airman was brought down and killed, in just such a fight.

Beyond Léomont we diverged westward from the main road, and found ourselves suddenly in one of those utterly ruined villages which now bestrew the soil of Northern, Central, and Eastern France; of that France which has been pre-eminently for centuries, in spite of revolutions, the pious and watchful guardian of what the labour of dead generations has bequeathed to their sons. Vitrimont, however, was destroyed in fair fight during the campaign of 1914. Bombardment had made wreck of the solid houses, built of the warm red stone of the country. It had destroyed the church, and torn up the graveyard; and when its exiled inhabitants returned to it by degrees, even French courage and French thrift quailed before the task of reconstruction. But presently there arrived a quiet American lady, who began to make friends with the people of Vitrimont, to find out what they wanted, and to consult with all those on the spot who could help to bring the visions in her mind to pass,--with the Préfet, with the officials, local and governmental, of the neighbouring towns, with the Catholic women of the richer Lorraine families, gentle, charitable, devout, who quickly perceived her quality, and set themselves to co-operate with her. It was the American lady's intention--simply--to rebuild Vitrimont. And she is steadily accomplishing it, with the help of generous money subsidies coming, month by month, from one rich American woman--a woman of San Francisco--across the Atlantic. How one envies that American woman!

The sight of Miss Polk at work lives indeed, a warm memory, in one's heart. She has established herself in two tiny rooms in a peasant's cottage, which have been made just habitable for her. A few touches of bright colour, a picture or two, a book or two, some flowers, with furniture of the simplest--amid these surroundings on the outskirts of the ruined village, with one of its capable, kindly faced women to run the ménage, Miss Polk lives and works, realising bit by bit the plans of the new Vitrimont, which have been drawn for her by the architect of the department, and following loyally old Lorraine traditions. The church has been already restored and reopened. The first mass within its thronged walls was--so the spectators say--a moving sight. "That sad word--Joy"--Landor's pregnant phrase comes back to one, as expressing the bitter-sweet of all glad things in this countryside, which has seen--so short a time ago--death and murder and outrage at their worst. The gratitude of the villagers to their friend and helper has taken various forms. The most public mark of it, so far, has been Miss Folk's formal admission to the burgess rights of Vitrimont, which is one of the old communes of France. And the village insists that she shall claim her rights! When the time came for dividing the communal wood in the neighbouring forest, her fellow citizens arrived to take her with them and show her how to obtain her share. As to the affection and confidence with which she is regarded, it was enough to walk with her through the village, to judge of its reality.

But it makes one happy to think that it is not only Americans who have done this sort of work in France. Look, for instance, at the work of the Society of Friends in the department of the Marne,--on that fragment of the battlefield which extends from Bar-le-Duc to Vitry St. François. "Go and ask," wrote a French writer in 1915, "for the village of Huiron, or that of Glannes, or that other, with its name to shudder at, splashed with blood and powder--Sermaize. Inquire for the English Quakers. Books, perhaps, have taught you to think of them as people with long black coats and long faces. Where are they? Here are only a band of workmen, smooth-faced--not like our country folk. They laugh and sing while they make the shavings fly under the plane and the saw. They are building wooden houses, and roofing them with tiles. Around them are poor people whose features are stiff and grey like those of the dead. These are the women, the old men, the children, the weaklings of our sweet France, who have lived for months in damp caves and dens, till they look like Lazarus rising from the tomb. But life is beginning to come back to their eyes and their lips. The hands they stretch out to you tremble with joy. To-night they will sleep in a house, in their house. And inside there will be beds and tables and chairs, and things to cook with.... As they go in and look, they embrace each other, sobbing."

By June 1915, 150 "Friends" had rebuilt more than 400 houses, and rehoused more than seven hundred persons. They had provided ploughs and other agricultural gear, seeds for the harvest fields and for the gardens, poultry for the farmyards. And from that day to this, the adorable work has gone on. "By this shall all men know that ye are My disciples, if ye love one another."

* * * * *

It is difficult to tear oneself away from themes like this, when the story one has still to tell is the story of Gerbéviller. At Vitrimont the great dream of Christianity--the City of God on earth--seems still reasonable.

At Hérémenil, and Gerbéviller, we are within sight and hearing of deeds that befoul the human name, and make one despair of a world in which they can happen.

At luncheon in a charming house of old Lorraine, with an intellectual and spiritual atmosphere that reminded me of a book that was one of the abiding joys of my younger days--the Récit d'une Soeur--we heard from the lips of some of those present an account of the arrival at Lunéville of the fugitives from Gerbéviller, after the entry of the Bavarians into the town. Women and children and old men, literally mad with terror, had escaped from the burning town, and found their way over the thirteen kilomètres that separate Gerbéviller from Lunéville. No intelligible account could be got from them; they had seen things that shatter the nerves and brain of the weak and old; they were scarcely human in their extremity of fear. And when, an hour later, we ourselves reached Gerbéviller, the terror which had inspired that frenzied flight became, as we listened to Soeur Julie, a tangible presence haunting the ruined town.

Gerbéviller and Soeur Julie are great names in France to-day. Gerbéviller, with Nomény, Badonviller, and Sermaize, stand in France for what is most famous in German infamy; Soeur Julie, the "chère soeur" of so many narratives, for that form of courage and whole-hearted devotion which is specially dear to the French, because it has in it a touch of panache, of audacity! It is not too meek; it gets its own back when it can, and likes to punish the sinner as well as to forgive him. Sister Julie of the Order of St. Charles of Nancy, Madame Rigard, in civil parlance, had been for years when the war broke out the head of a modest cottage hospital in the small country town of Gerbéviller. The town was prosperous and pretty; its gardens ran down to the Mortagne flowing at its feet, and it owned a country house in a park, full of treasures new and old--tapestries, pictures, books--as Lorraine likes to have such things about her.

But unfortunately, it occupied one of the central points of the fighting in the campaign of Lorraine, after the defeat of General Castelnau's Army at Morhange on August 20th, 1914. The exultant and victorious Germans pushed on rapidly after that action. Lunéville was occupied, and the fighting spread to the districts south and west of that town. The campaign, however, lasted only three weeks, and was determined by the decisive French victory of September 8th on the Grand Couronné. By September 12th Nancy was safe; Lunéville and Gerbéviller had been retaken; and the German line had been driven back to where we saw it from the hill of Léomont. But in that three weeks a hell of cruelty, in addition to all the normal sufferings of war, had been let loose on the villages of Lorraine; on Nomény to the north of Nancy, on Badonviller, Baccarat, and Gerbéviller to the south. The Bavarian troops, whose record is among the worst in the war, got terribly out of hand, especially when the tide turned against them; and if there is one criminal who, if he is still living, will deserve and, I hope, get an impartial trial some day before an international tribunal, it will be the Bavarian General, General Clauss.

Here is the first-hand testimony of M. Mirman, the Prefét of the Department. At Gerbeviller, he writes, the ruin and slaughter of the town and its inhabitants had nothing to do with legitimate war:

"We are here in presence of an inexpiable crime. The crime was signed. Such signatures are soon rubbed out. I saw that of the murderer--and I bear my testimony.

"The bandits who were at work here were assassins: I have seen the bodies of their victims, and taken the evidence on the spot. They shot down the inhabitants like rabbits, killing them haphazard in the streets, on their doorsteps, almost at arm's length. Of these victims it is still difficult to ascertain the exact number; it will be more than fifty. Most of the victims had been buried when I first entered the town; here and there, however, in a garden, at the entrance to a cellar the corpses of women still awaited burial. In a field just outside the town, I saw on the ground, their hands tied, some with their eyes bandaged--fifteen old men--murdered. They were in three groups of five. The men of each group had evidently clung to each other before death. The clenched hand of one of them still held an old pipe. They were all old men--with white hair. Some days had elapsed since their murder; but their aspect in death was still venerable; their quiet closed eyes seemed to appeal to heaven. A staff officer of the Second Army who was with me photographed the scene; with other pièces de conviction; the photograph is in the hands of the Governmental Commission charged with investigating the crimes of the Germans during this war."

The Bavarian soldiers in Gerbéviller were not only murderers--they were incendiaries, even more deliberate and thorough-going than the soldiers of Von Kluck's army at Senlis. With the exception of a few houses beyond the hospital, spared at the entreaty of Soeur Julie, and on her promise to nurse the German wounded, the whole town was deliberately burnt out, house by house, the bare walls left standing, the rest destroyed. And as, after the fire, the place was twice taken and retaken under bombardment, its present condition may be imagined. It was during the burning that some of the worst murders and outrages took place. For there is a maddening force in triumphant cruelty, which is deadlier than that of wine; under it men become demons, and all that is human perishes.

The excuse, of course, was here as at Senlis--"les civils ont tiré!" There is not the slightest evidence in support of the charge. As at Senlis, there was a French rear-guard of 57 Chasseurs--left behind to delay the German advance as long as possible. They were told to hold their ground for five hours; they held it for eleven, fighting with reckless bravery, and firing from a street below the hospital. The Germans, taken by surprise, lost a good many men before, at small loss to themselves, the Chasseurs retreated. In their rage at the unexpected check, and feeling, no doubt, already that the whole campaign was going against them, the Germans avenged themselves on the town and its helpless inhabitants.

Our half-hour in Soeur Julie's parlour was a wonderful experience! Imagine a portly woman of sixty, with a shrewd humorous face, talking with French vivacity, and with many homely turns of phrase drawn straight from that life of the soil and the peasants amid which she worked; a woman named in one of General Castelnau's Orders of the Day and entitled to wear the Legion of Honour; a woman, too, who has seen horror face to face as few women, even in war, have seen it, yet still simple, racy, full of irony, and full of heart, talking as a mother might talk of her "grands blessés"! but always with humorous asides, and an utter absence of pose or pretence; flashing now into scorn and now into tenderness, as she described the conduct of the German officers who searched her hospital for arms, or the helplessness of the wounded men whom she protected. I will try and put down some of her talk. It threw much light for me on the psychology of two nations.

"During the fighting, we had always about 300 of our wounded (nos chers blessés) in this hospital. As fast as we sent them off, others came in. All our stores were soon exhausted. I was thankful we had some good wine in the cellars--about 200 bottles. You understand, Madame, that when we go to nurse our people in their farms, they don't pay us, but they like to give us something--very often it is a bottle of old wine, and we put it in the cellar, when it comes in handy often for our invalids. Ah! I was glad of it for our blessés! I said to my Sisters--'Give it them! and not by thimblefuls--give them enough!' Ah, poor things!--it made some of them sleep. It was all we had. One day, I passed a soldier who was lying back in his bed with a sigh of satisfaction. 'Ah, ma Soeur, ça resusciterait un mort!' (That would bring a dead man to life!) So I stopped to ask what they had just given him. And it was a large glass of Lachryma Christi!

"But then came the day when the Commandant, the French Commandant, you understand, came to me and said--'Sister, I have sad news for you. I am going. I am taking away the wounded--and all my stores. Those are my orders.'

"'But, mon Commandant, you'll leave me some of your stores for the grands blessés, whom you leave behind--whom you can't move? What!--you must take it all away? Ah, ça--non! I don't want any extras--I won't take your chloroform--I won't take your bistouris--I won't take your electric things--but--hand over the iodine! (en avant l'iode!) hand over the cotton-wool!--hand over the gauze! Come, my Sisters!' I can tell you I plundered him!--and my Sisters came with their aprons, and the linen-baskets--we carried away all we could."

Then she described the evacuation of the French wounded at night--300 of them--all but the 19 worst cases left behind. There were no ambulances, no proper preparation of any kind.

"Oh! it was a confusion!--an ugly business!" (ce n'etait pas rose!). The Sisters tore down and split up the shutters, the doors, to serve as stretchers; they tore sheets into long strips and tied "our poor children" on to the shutters, and hoisted them into country carts of every sort and description. "Quick!--Quick!" She gave us a wonderful sense of the despairing haste in which the night retreat had to be effected. All night their work went on. The wounded never made a sound--"they let us do what we would without a word. And as for us, my Sisters bound these big fellows (ces gros et grands messieurs) on to the improvised stretchers, like a mother who fastens her child in its cot. Ah! Jésus! the poverty and the misery of that time!"

By the early morning all the French wounded were gone except the nineteen helpless cases, and all the French soldiers had cleared out of the village except the 57 Chasseurs, whose orders were to hold the place as long as they could, to cover the retreat of the rest.