Our Part in the Great War

X

THE EVIDENCE

I have told in these chapters of the peasants of Northern France, and I have given their life in war in their own words. I want to tell here how this material was gathered, because the power of its appeal rests on the recognition of its accuracy. A small part of the testimony I followed in long hand as it was spoken. The rest, three-quarters of the total testimony, was taken down in short-hand by one or the other of two stenographers. I have used about one-fifth of the collected material.

My companions were the well-known American writers, Will Irwin and Herbert Corey. Other companions have been Lieutenant Louis Madelin, the distinguished historian, whose work on the French Revolution was crowned by the French Academy; Lieutenant Jules Basdevant, Professor of International Law at the University of Grenoble; Lieutenant Monod, once of Columbia University, and always a friend of our country; Captain Callet, Professor of Geography at Saint-Cyr, now of the Etat Major of the Third Army; and the Baron de la Chaise. I don't wish to imply that the French Army is exclusively composed of scholarly gentlemen with an established position in the world of letters. But it happened to be the good pleasure of the French Minister of War and of the Foreign Office to make of our trips a delightful social experience. Most important, these men are worthy witnesses of the things I have seen, and the statements I have recorded.

In the civil world the corroborating witnesses are equally authoritative. I was accompanied, for much of the territory visited, by Leon Mirman, Prefect of the Department of Meurthe-et-Moselle.

It is no easy job to penetrate the war zone, wander through villages at leisure, and establish relations of confidence with the peasants. The whole experience would have been impossible but for the help of Émile Hovelaque. This distinguished essayist, Director of Public Education, went with us to all the villages. The success of the visit was due to him. He understands American public opinion more accurately than any other man whom I have met abroad. His human sympathy wins the peasants. A woman brought me her burned granddaughter, five years old. A mother brought me the cap of her fourteen-year-old son, and the rope with which the Germans had hanged him. A woman told me how her mother, seventy-eight years old, was shot before her eyes. I could not have had their stories, I should not have been permitted to enter these secret places of their suffering, if it had not been for Monsieur Hovelaque.

The pain it cost them to tell these things I shall not forget. There was one decent married woman, within a few weeks of the birth of her child by a German father, who had been outraged by German soldiers. She had never before told her story, because of the shame of it. She had not told her parents nor her sister. I cannot forget that she told it to me. I cannot rest easily till her suffering and the suffering of the others with whom I have been living for two years means something to my people at home. I have kept all personal feeling out of my record. It would have been unforgivable if, in rendering the ruin of Lorraine, I had given way to anger. But this I have not done. I have only added many days of detailed work on evidence that was already conclusive. But this coolness of reporting does not mean that I think these details of cruelty should leave us detached spectators.

Let us remember these peasants when the Allies advance to the Rhine. Let us remember them when Belgium is indemnified, when Alsace and Lorraine are cut loose, when the German military power is crushed, when the individual officers who ordered these acts are singled out for the extremity of punishment. We must teach our memory not to forget.

Certain German officers must be executed. General Clauss must be executed. He has left a trail of blood. The officers in command of the 17th and the 60th Bavarian Regiments, who slaughtered the women, the children and the old men of Gerbéviller, must be executed. The officers of the 2nd and 4th Regiments of Bavarian Infantry, who murdered fifty men, women and children of Nomeny, in a cold, methodical hate, with a peculiar care for the women, must be executed.

In the closing passages of Browning's "Ring and the Book," the aged prelate, about to go before his maker, is confronted with the task of giving judgment. Count Guido, intelligent and powerful, had murdered Pompilia and her parents. He did it by the aid of four assassins. Pope Innocent, eighty-six years old, is called on to decide whether the five guilty men shall be killed for their evil doings. Friends urge him to be merciful. The aged Pope replies:

So he orders that Count Guido and his henchmen be killed on the morrow.

XI

SISTER JULIE

This is the story of Sister Julie. The Germans entered her village of Gerbéviller, where she was head of the poor-house and hospital. As they came southward through the place they burned every house on every street, 475 houses. In a day they wiped out seven centuries of humble village history. In her little street they burned Numbers 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, and 12, but they did not burn Number 14, the house where Sister Julie lived. There they stopped, for she stopped them. And the twenty houses beyond her hospital still stand, because that August day there was a great woman in that little village. They killed men, women and children throughout the village, but they did not kill the thirteen French wounded soldiers whom she was nursing, nor the five Roman Catholic sisters whom she directed as Mother Superior. Outside of a half dozen generals, she is perhaps the most famous character whom the war has revealed, and one of the greatest personages whom France has produced: even France in her long history. The last days of Gerbéviller live in her story. I write her account word for word as she gives it. Her recital is touched with humor in spite of the horror that lay heaped around her. She raises the poignard of the German Colonel: you see it held over her head ready to strike. By pantomime she creates the old paralytic men, the hobbling women, the man who went "fou."

Because she remained through the days of fire and blood, and succored his troops, General Castelnau cited her in an Order of the Day. The Legion of Honor has placed its scarlet ribbon on the black of her religious dress. The great of France – the President and the Premier, senators and poets – have come to see her where she still lives on in the ruins of the little village.

Amélie Rigard, whose religious name is Sister Julie, is a peasant woman, sixty-two years old, belonging to the Order of Saint Charles of Nancy. She is of the solid peasant type, with square chin and wide brown eyes. Everything about her is compact, deep-centered, close-growing; the fingers are stubby, the arms held closely to the body, and when the gesture comes it is a strong pushing out from the frame, as if pushing away a weight. Whenever she puts out power, she seems to be delivering a straight blow with the full weight of the body. With Sister Julie it is not only a genius of simple goodness. She carries a native shrewdness, with a salient tang. She knows life. This is no meek person, easily deceived by people, thinking every one good and harmless. She reads motives. Power is what I feel in her – direct, sheer power. The wonder is not that she rose to one of the supreme crises of history, and did a work which has passed into the consciousness of France. The wonder is that she remained hidden in a country village for sixty-two years. Her gift of language, her strength of nature, had vitality enough to burn through obscurity. The person she made me think of was that great man whom I once knew, Dwight Moody. Here was the same breadth of beam, the simplicity, the knowledge of human nature, the same native instinct for the fitting word that comes from being fed on the greatest literature in the world, and from using the speech of powerful, uneducated persons. When she entered the room, the room was filled. When she left, there was a vacancy.

Here follows the account in her own words, of the last days of Gerbéviller. The phrase that speaks through all her recital is "feu et sang," "fire and blood." The Germans said on entering that they would give "fire and blood" to the village. The reason was this: A handful of French chasseurs, about sixty in number, had held up the German Army for several hours, in order to give the French Army time to retreat. This battle had taken place at the bridge outside the village. When at last the Germans broke through, they were irritated by the firm resistance which had delayed their plans. So they vented their ill-will by burning the houses and murdering the peasants.

The Germans reached the Lunéville road at the entrance of Gerbéviller at 10 minutes after seven in the morning. They saw the barricades, for our troops had built a barricade, and they said to a woman, Madame Barthélemy:

"Madame, remove the barricades." As she waited undecided for a few seconds, they said:

"You refuse. Then fire and blood."

They then began to set fire to all the houses and they shot six men. They threw a man into an oven, a baker, Joseph Jacques, a fine fellow of fifty years of age, married, with children. It was necessary to eat, even at Gerbéviller, and it was necessary to work out a way to make bread. The former baker had been mobilized, and his good old papa was infirm and unable to work. So Monsieur Jacques was busy at this time with the baking. They killed him when they came. It was about eight o'clock in the morning. The fires of the oven had already started.

For a long time I did not believe it, but I have had a confirmation since. You will see how by what follows. When there was an attack in Champagne, a youth of Gerbéviller, Florentin, whose father was the gardener at the chateau, found himself in front of certain Germans who wished to give themselves up as prisoners. He looked at them, and said:

"You are not 'Comrades' ('Kamerade' is the word the German calls out when he surrenders). You know what you did at Gerbéviller. So don't call yourselves 'Comrades.'"

A German said to him, "It was I who flung the man into the oven. I was ordered to do it, or else I should have been 'kaput.'" (This is slang for a "dead one").

A search was then made, and in the oven was found the thigh bone of the unfortunate baker.

I have seen many other things. I have seen a man, Barthélemy of Chanteheux. I have seen that man spread out spitted on the ground by a bayonet.

Here is what they have done. It was half-past six in the evening. I heard their fifes. Our little chasseurs had retreated. The Germans had made fire and blood all the day long. I saw them and watched them well in this street. I was at the door. Yes, there were six of us at this door. They put fire to the houses, house by house, shouting as they burned them. Picture to yourself a human wave, where the bank has been broken down. They poured into the street precipitately, with their "lightning conductors," which shone brilliant in the sun (the point of their helmets). They sat down, seven and eight in front of a house. They kept going by in great numbers, but these who were ordered remained behind in front of each house. There these sat before the houses, while those others went past without a word. They put their knapsacks on the ground. They took out something that looked like macaroni. They hurled it into the house. There wasn't a pane of glass left in our windows, because of the pom-pom of cannon on the Fraimbois road. I saw them ordered to go on with their work of firing the houses, when they coolly stopped for a tiny minute to talk. Then, afresh, I saw them look in their knapsacks, and next I heard a detonation. But it was not a detonation like that of the report of a rifle or revolver. This was like the crackle of powder priming, of crackers, if you prefer. They were incendiary pastilles which they had thrown into the fire to hasten the destruction. At the end of a few minutes the fire picked up with greater intensity, and directly the roofs broke in one after the other with a crash. Many of our people did not see the burning, because they stayed in the cellars, lying hidden there, frightened, under the rubbish.

In one of the burning houses a woman was living in her room on the first floor. Two Germans came to our house and said:

"My sister, come quick and look for a woman who is in the fire."

The woman was Madame Zinius. It is our sisters who went there at their risk and peril.

The Germans had their destruction organized. In all the well-to-do houses they began by plundering. They did not burn these as they passed.

A few minutes later we saw five or six vehicles draw up, the "Guimbardes," vans, for plundering and carrying away the linen and the clothing. Women came with these vans, young women, well dressed, rich enough. They were not "bad."

[When the Germans captured a town, their organization of loot was sometimes carried out by women, who brought up motor lorries, which the soldiers filled with the plunder from the larger houses, and which the women then drove away. Sometimes these women were dressed as Red Cross nurses. I can continue the proof by other witnesses elsewhere than in Gerbéviller. The organization of murder, arson and pillage is participated in by German men and women.]

Monsieur Martin had at his place many sewing-machines, with the trade-mark Victoria. The Germans carried them away.

I have told you that they threw persons into the fire. Monsieur Pottier was forced back into the fire. His wife moaned and called for help.

"Help me get my husband out of the fire," she cried.

"Go die with him," they answered her, and she, too, was pushed into the flames.

"They" kept coming on, playing the fife. We awaited them at the door. Only thirteen wounded French soldiers had stayed with us. They had been scattered through the different rooms. But we put them up in one room in order to simplify the service and give them a bit of "coddling."

We saw four officers on horseback approach. They dismounted in front of our town-hall, twenty meters away. They entered the building, and there they put everything upside down. They tumbled out all the waste paper, the entire office desk, determined to find the records.

They remounted and rode up in front of our house. They sat there looking at us for a moment. They had the manner guttural and hard, which is the German way. They began speaking German. When they showed signs of listening to my reply, I said to them:

"Speak French. That is the least courtesy you can show me. Speak French, I beg of you, and I will answer you."

"You have French soldiers hidden in your house with their arms," said one of them.

And he tramped hither and thither like a madman, and he sputtered and clattered. (Et il se promenait de long en large comme un fou, et il bavait et degoisait.)

I answered:

"We have no French soldiers here – "

The German: "You have French soldiers."

"Yes, we have French soldiers, but they are wounded. They have no arms."

One of them, mighty, with a truculent air, pulled out his sword.

"They have their arms," he shouted, and he brandished his sword.

"They won't hurt you. Enter," I said.

A Lorraine to say to a German "Enter," that means mischief. (Un Lorraine dire à un Allemand "Entrez": Que cela fait mal!)

Two of the officers dismounted. Each of them hid a dagger somewhere in his breast. That thought that they could harm my poor little wounded men made me turn my look a few seconds on the action. And as they took out their revolvers at the same time, I did not see where they had hidden the daggers.

The finger on the trigger, they nodded their head for me to go on in front of them. I went in front and led the way into this room where there was nothing but four walls, and no furniture except the thirteen beds of my wounded. I entered by this door, not knowing in the least what they wanted to do. Imagine this room with the first bed here, and then the second here, et cetera, et cetera. I went automatically to the first and, more involuntarily still, placed my hand on the bed of wounded Number One, a dragoon wounded by a horse.

See, now, what took place: the imposing one of them walked in with his dagger in his left hand (son poignard, la gauche); the other man with his revolver was there, ready. With his dagger in his left hand, the first man stripped the bed for its full length, lifting the sheet, the coverlet and the bedclothes. He looked down in a manner evil, malevolent, ill-natured (méchante, malveillante, mauvaise).

No response from the wounded men.

He did not say anything when he had seen what he wished to see. He stepped up to the head of the wounded man. I made a half turn toward him. I was separated from him by our wounded man who was between the two of us.

He said to my poor unfortunate, with a harsh gesture:

"You and your men, you make our wounded suffer on the battlefield. You cut off their ears. You put out their eyes. You make them suffer."

Still no response. (Pas réponse encore.)

When I saw the state of mind he was in, I went round at once on the left side of the wounded, and I said:

"This is a wounded man, and this place is the Red Cross. Here we do well for all and ill for none, and if you mean well, do not hurt us. Leave us in peace as you do everywhere else. We will nurse your wounded and nurse them well."

He had turned around to watch the smoke of the fires which was pouring into the room through that opening, and he stood there several seconds with set face.

My little wounded men hardly ventured to breathe. Seeing that calm, that brooding which did not bode anything good, I exerted myself to repeat once more:

"If you mean well, do not hurt us. We will nurse your wounded."

And, at last, to help him come out of his speechlessness:

"See, there, everything is on fire over there."

He answered me:

"We are not barbarians. No, we are not barbarians. And if the civilians had not fired on us with rifles, we should not have had any burning here."

"Those were not civilians. Those were soldiers."

"Civilians," he said.

"No. No. No. Soldiers."

"Civilians," he repeated; "I know well what I am saying. I saw them."

He made a gesture to show me that men had fired, while he cried in my ears with all his might "Civilians."

He went in front of me, and stripped the second bed. I feared that he might speak to my wounded, and I thought I should do well if I placed myself at the head of each of the beds as he uncovered them. I stepped between the two beds, and I feared what would come of it all. In this way I made the round of the room with them, standing at each of the thirteen points, always placing myself at the pillow of each wounded man, while "they" advanced bed by bed, and cautiously.

I did not know how they had arranged their weapons, but it seemed to me that they always had their finger placed on the trigger.

The second man with his revolver held his gun a little low.

I followed them, shutting the door, when they went to the Infirmary of the old men. They did not say anything and they did not promise that they would not set fire to us. How should I go about getting that promise?

A third time I asked them:

"It is clearly understood that we shall nurse your wounded, and that you will not burn this house."

"They" start to leave, and go toward the door, walking slowly. When the chief was just leaving, I said again to him:

"It is clearly understood that you will not harm us nor burn our house."

"No, no."

I looked to see if he gave the order to any of his soldiers. I didn't see that, but I noticed one of our sisters who was drawing a wheelbarrow with an old man in it, who weighed at least seventy-five kilos and who was paralyzed.

"Where are you going?" I asked her.

"Over there; the soldiers tell me that they are coming to set fire to the hospital," she replied. "One of our old men cried out to me, 'My sister, do not make us stay here. Let us go and die in peace, since they are killing everybody here. We would rather leave and die of hunger in the fields.' So I said, 'Come along, then.'"

For the moment I am all alone in this room with my thirteen wounded men. I said to myself, "My God, what will become of me all alone in the midst of fire and blood."

I stood a few seconds in the doorway and then went in to see our little soldiers.

"My poor children, I ask your forgiveness for bringing in such a visitation, but I assure you that I thought my last quarter hour had come. I thought they were going to kill us all."

"My sister, stay with us," they said; "stay with us."

"I will bear the impossible, my children, to save your life."

I remained there a few minutes, and then two German soldiers presented themselves with fixed bayonets. I stepped down the two stairs; see what an escort was there for me!

"Why is this house shut up? There are French in it, lying hidden with their arms."

"The owner has been mobilized, and so has gone away. His wife and children have gone away."

They kept on insisting: "The French. Hidden. In there."

They indicated the place with a gesture.

I thought to myself, What is happening? What will they do? Here are the men who will set fire to the house.

"Why will you set fire to this house?" I asked. "Your chiefs don't wish it. They have promised me that they won't burn here. You want to set fire here out of excitement (par contagion). Will you put out the fire?"

I said again to them:

"It is wicked to set fire here, because we shall nurse your wounded."

While this was going on, our sisters upstairs were not able to subdue the poor father Prévost. He is an old man of eighty-eight years, partly paralyzed in leg and arm. I was at the doorway. I heard him call out:

"They shoved me into the fire. They have gone away and left me. I am going to fall out of the window."

I climbed to the fourth floor of the house where he was, to try to attract him away, but he did not wish to come. He was foolish. I knew that he was fond of white sugar. I went up to him and showed him the sugar. I took his jacket and put his snowboots on him, so that he could get away more quickly. You know those boots which fasten by means of two or three buckles, very primitive, and which are so speedily put on. At last I led him to the edge of the doorway here.