Our Part in the Great War

IX

AN APPEAL TO THE SMALLER AMERICAN COMMUNITIES

Burned villages are like ruins of an ancient civilization. To wander through them was as if I were stepping among the bones of a dead age. Only the green fields that flowed up to the wrecked cottages and the handful of sober-faced peasants – only these were living in that belt of death that cuts across the face of France, like the scar from a whip on a prisoner's cheek. French soil is sacred to a Frenchman. I saw a little shop with pottery and earthenware in the window: vases, and jars, and toilet cases. The sign read:

"La terre de nos Grés – c'est la même terre que défendent nos soldats dans les tranchées."

("The earth which made these wares is the same earth which our soldiers defend in the trenches.")

I want the people at home to understand this war. So I am telling of it in terms that are homely. I asked the authorities to let me wander through the villages and talk with the inhabitants. What a village suffers, what a storekeeper suffers, will mean something to my friends in Iowa and Connecticut. Talk of artillery duels with big guns and bayonet charges through barbed wire falls strangely on peaceful ears. But what a druggist's wife has seen, what a school-teacher tells, will come home to Americans in Eliot, Maine, and down the Mississippi Valley. What one cares very much to reach is the solid silent public opinion of the smaller cities, the towns and villages. The local storekeeper, the village doctor, the farmer, these are the men who make the real America – the America which responds slowly but irresistibly to a sound presentation of facts. The alert newspaper editor, the hustling real-estate man, the booster for a better-planned town, these citizens shape our public opinion. If once our loyal Middle Westerners know the wrong that has been done people just like themselves, they will resent it as each of us resents it that has seen it. This is no dim distant thing. This is a piece of cold-planned injustice by murder and fire done to our friends in the sister republic. I should like a representative committee from South Norwalk, Conn., Emporia, Kansas, and Sherman, Texas, to see Gerbéviller as I have seen it, to walk past its 475 burned houses, to talk with its impoverished but spirited residents. I should like them to catch the spirit of Sermaize, building its fresh little red-brick homes out of the rubble of the wrecked place.

I had thought that I had some slight idea of French spirit. I had thought that five months with their soldiers at Melle, Dixmude, and Nieuport had given me a hint of France in her hour of greatness. But I found that not even the cheery first line men, not even the democratic officers, are the best of France. They are lovable and wonderful. But the choicest persons in France are the women in the devastated districts. They can make or break morale. What the people back of the trenches are feeling, the talk that they make in the village inn – these are the decisive factors that give heart to an army or that crumble its resistance. No government, no military staff can continue an unpopular war. But by these people who have lost their goods by fire, and their relatives by assassination, the spirit of France is reinforced. The war is safe in their hands.

The heaviest of all the charges that rests against Germany is that of preparedness in equipment for incendiary destruction. They had not only prepared an army for fighting the enemy troops with rifle, machine-gun and howitzer. They had supplied that army with a full set of incendiary material for making war on non-combatants. Immediately on crossing the frontier, they laid waste peaceful villages by fire. And that wholesale burning was not accomplished by extemporized means. It was done by instruments "made in Germany" before the war, instruments of no value for battle, but only for property destruction, house by house. Their manufacture and distribution to that first German army of invasion show the premeditation of the destruction visited on the invaded country. On his arm the soldier carried a rifle, in his sack the stuff for fires. He marched against troops and against non-combatants. His war was a war of extermination. The army carried a chemical mixture which caught fire on exposure to the air, by being broken open; another chemical which fired up from a charge of powder; incendiary bombs which spread flames when exploded; pellets like lozenges which were charged with powders, and which slipped easily into the bag. These were thrown by the handful into the house, after being started by match or the gun. When the Germans came to a village, where they wished to spread terror, they burned it house by house. I have seen their chalk-writing on the doors of unburned houses. One of their phrases which they scribbled on those friendly doors was "Nicht anzünden." Now "anzünden" does not mean simply "Do not burn." It means "Do not burn with incendiary methods." Wherever a spy lived, or a peasant innkeeper friendly with drinks, or wherever there was a house which an officer chose for his night's rest, there the Germans wrote the phrase that saved the house. The other houses to right and left were "burned with incendiary methods." That phrase is as revealing as if in a village where there were dead bodies of children with bayonet wounds upon them, you discovered one child walking around with a tag hung round her neck reading "Do not murder this little girl by bayonet."

That military hierarchy which extends from the sergeant to the Emperor, controlling every male in Germany, came down upon Belgium and France, prepared to crush, not alone the military power, but every spiritual resource of those nations. I have a bag of German incendiary pastilles given me by Jules Gaxotte, Mayor of Revigny. On one side is inked

On the other side

indicating the company and the regiment and the division. The pellets are square, the size of a fingernail. They burn with intensity, like a Fourth of July torch. That little bag has enough bits of lively flame in it, to burn an ancient church and destroy a village of homes. Packets like it have seared the northern provinces of France. Not one of those millions of pellets that came down from Germany was used against a soldier. Not one was used against a military defense. All were used against public buildings and homes. All were used against non-combatants, old men, women and children. The clever chemist had coöperated with the General Staff in perfecting a novel warfare. The admirable organization had equipped its men for the new task of a soldier. In their haste the Germans left these pellets everywhere along the route. The Mayor of Revigny has a collection. So has the Mayor of Clermont. Monsieur Georges Payelle, premier president de la Cour des Comptes, and head of the French Government Inquiry, has a still larger collection. These three gentlemen have not told me, but have shown me this evidence. The purpose of the German military can be reconstructed from that one little bag which I hold.

But not only have the Germans dropped their scraps of evidence as they went along, as if they were playing hare-and-hounds. They have put into words what they mean. The German War Book, issued to officers, outlines their new enlarged warfare.

Madame Dehan of Gerbéviller said to me:

"A high officer arrived this same day (when she was prisoner) and said:

"'It is necessary to put to death the people here. They must be shot. This nation must disappear.'"

Monsieur Guilley of Nomeny told me how Charles Michel, a boy of seventeen, was killed. He said: "A patrol of scouts, composed of six Bavarians, said: 'We are going down there to kill, yes, kill all the people of Nomeny.'

"Arrived at Nomeny, they asked where the farm was. They then came along the side of the farm where there was a little door. Three entered there, the other three came around by the big door. We were ready for supper, sitting around a table. We heard blows on blows of the bayonets before the doors, with cries and exclamations in German. They came into the place where we were sitting to eat, and placed themselves facing us, with nothing to say. They took all that they wanted from the table. Five of them left, going by a way in front of the farm. The sixth stayed there, ruminating and thinking. I believed that he was meditating to himself a crime, but I thought to myself, 'They wouldn't kill a man as they would kill a rabbit.'

"We went into the kitchen. The man was always there. I closed the door. Two men of my farm were eating in the kitchen. Now, from the kitchen leading into the stable there was a door. The little Michel went out by this door. He did not see the German who was there. The soldier fired at him. I heard the rifle shot go. Then I saw the man following the same way that the others had taken, to rejoin them at a trot."

"How long did he remain there thinking before he accomplished his crime?" we asked.

"Plenty long, a good quarter of an hour. He was a Bavarian, big and strong."

I find that strange racial brooding and melancholy in the diary of a sub-officer of the Landwehr. On September 3, 1914, he writes:

"It is well enough that Germany has the advantage everywhere up to the present; I am not able to conquer a singular impression, a presentiment that, in spite of all that, the end will be bad."

In his case it is accompanied by horror at the wrong-doing of his comrades, a noble pity for wasted France. But in others, that brooding turned to sudden cruelty. Any act, however savage, is a relief from that dark inner burden.

Madame Dauger of Gondrecourt-Aix (Meuse) said to me:

"On the night of Christmas, 1914, with fixed bayonets they came to get us to dance with them – the dances were entirely unseemly. Ten persons were forced out to dance. We danced from five in the evening till half past six."

"Were they soldiers or officers?"

"Only officers; and when they were sufficiently drunk, we made the most of that advantage to save ourselves."

It was Christmas night – the time to dance. So they chose partners, by the compulsion of the bayonet, with the women of an invaded and outraged race. The same rich, childlike sentiment floods their eyes with tears at thought of the mother at home. Cruel, sentimental, melancholy, methodical, they are a race that needs wise leadership. And they have not received that. They have been led by men who do not believe in them. Every evil trait has been played upon, to the betrayal of the simple rather primitive personality, which in other hands would have gone gently all its days. But the homely goodness has been stultified, and we have a race, of our own stock, behaving like savages under the cool guidance of its masters.

The next piece of testimony was given me by a woman who was within a few days of giving birth to a child by a German father. I withhold her name and the name of her village.

"I was maltreated by them, Monsieur. They abused me. Last year in the month of October, 1915, they arrived. I was learning how to take care of the cattle, to help my father, who already had enough with what the Germans required him to do outside in the fields. My father had not returned; I was entirely alone. I was in the bottom of the barn; my children were in the house with my mother. They were upon me; I did not see them. They threw me down and held me. They were the soldiers who lodged with my parents. I cried out three or four times for some one to come, but it was finished. I got up from the straw."

"Have you told your parents or any one?"

"No. Never to a person, Monsieur. I am too much ashamed. But I always think of it. My eldest child is eleven years old, the next seven years, the third six years, and the last I have had since the war. The one I wait for now, of course, I do not count on bringing up."

Monsieur Mirman, the Prefect, replied:

"Since you must have him, you will tell me at the time, so that I may take action and give you assistance."

Through the courtesy of Mrs. Charles Prince, I spent an afternoon with a French nurse, Marie Louise Vincent, of Launois, in the Ardenne.

The Germans came. She was on the road, one hundred yards away, when she saw this:

"I saw an old French beggar, whom everybody knew, hobbling down the road. He passed through our village every week. He was called "Père Noël" (Father Christmas) because of his big beard. He was seventy-five years old. It was the 29th of August, about 8 o'clock in the morning. Officers ordered twelve men to step out from the ranks. They took the old man and tied him to a tree. An officer ordered the men to shoot. One or two of the sous-officers fired when the men fired. So they shot Père Noël. The villagers found thirteen bullet holes in him.

"That day the soldiers burned the first four houses of our village. They made a big blaze, and if the wind had turned the whole village would have burned.

"The commander came to our hospital. He patted me on the cheek and said he had a big daughter at home like me, and she was in Red Cross work like me."

"He said he was very thirsty. I gave him three glasses of water. I had good wine in the cellar, but not for him. He talked with the doctor and me. He asked for the Burgomaster. We said he had gone away. He asked for those next in authority to the Burgomaster. We said they had gone away.

"'Why? Why?' asked the commander. 'The Belgians have told you we are barbarians, that is why. We have done things a little regrettable, but we were forced to it by the Belgians. The colonel whose place I took was killed by a little girl, fourteen years old. She fired at him point-blank. We shot the girl and burned the village.'

"Then the French doctor with me asked the commander why his men had burned the four farmhouses. They were making a bright blaze with their barns of hay. We could see it.

"'Why, that – that's nothing,' said the commander. ('Ce n'est rien. C'est tout petit peu.')

"A sous-officer came in to our hospital. He showed us a bottle of Bordeaux which he had taken from the cellar of one of our houses. He said:

"'I know it is good wine. I sold it myself to the woman a couple of months ago. I thought she wouldn't have had time to drink it all up.'

"'You know France?' asked the doctor.

"'I know it better than many Frenchmen,' replied the officer. 'For eight years I have been a wine agent in the Marne district.'

"'At Rheims?'

"'At Rheims.'

"'For the house of Pommery?'

"'No, no. Not that house.'

"After the fighting of August 27 and 28, some of the peasants began to come back to their homes. Near us at the little village of Thin-le-Moutier a few returned. Nine old men and boys came back on the morning of the 29th. The Germans put them against a wall and shot them. I saw traces of blood on the wall and bullet marks. The youngest boy was too frightened to stand quietly against the wall. He struggled. So they tied him to a signpost. I saw traces of his blood on the post. The old sacristan of the village church was forced to witness the shooting. The bodies were guarded by a sentinel for three days. On the third day, August 31, a German officer ordered an old man and his wife, of the place, to bring a cart. They carried the bodies to the graveyard. The officer had the two old people dig one deep hole. The old man asked permission to take out the bodies, one by one. But the officer had the cart upturned, and the bodies, all together, dumped into the hole.

"A few days later a poor woman came along the road, asking every one she met if anybody had seen her boys. They were among the nine that had been shot.

"A sous-officer, a Jew named Goldstein, a second lieutenant, came to our hospital. While our French doctor was held downstairs Lieutenant Goldstein took out the medical notes about the cases from the pocket of the doctor's military coat. I protested. I said that it was not permitted by international law.

"'What do you make of the convention of Geneva?' I asked him.

"'Ah, I laugh at it" he answered. "He was a professor of philosophy at Darmstadt."

With all the methodical work of murder and destruction the figure of the officer in command is always in the foreground.

The Curé of Gerbéviller said to me:

"They ordered me to go on my knees before the major. As I did not go down on the ground, an officer, who was there, quickly gave me a blow with the bayonet in the groin.

"'Your parishioners are the traitors, the assassins; they have fired on our soldiers with rifles; they are going to get fire, all of your people,' the major said to me.

"I replied, No, that was not possible, that at Gerbéviller there were only old men, women, and children.