IN former European wars foul practices were committed by individual members of armies. But the total army in each country was a small hired band of men, representing only the fractional part of one per cent of the population. It was in no way representative of the mind of the people. Of the present German Army, Professor Dr. Max Planck, of the University of Berlin, a distinguished physicist, has recently written:
"The German Army is nothing but the German people in arms, and the scholars and artists are, like all other classes, inseparably bound up with it."
We must regard the acts of the German Army as the acts of the people. We cannot dodge the problem of their misbehavior by saying they have not committed atrocities. We have the signed statements of a thousand German diaries that they have practiced frightfulness village by village through Belgium and Northern France. We cannot say it was a handful of drunken, undisciplined soldiers who did these things. It was "the German people in arms." It was an army that "knows no such thing as undisciplined cruelty." It was a nation of people that burned and murdered, acting under orders. Now, we have arrived at the heart of the problem. Why did they commit these horrors?
Irritated by an unexpectedly firm resistance from the Belgian and French Armies, fed on lies spread by German officers concerning the cruelty of French and Belgians, they obeyed the commands to burn houses and shoot civilians.
These commands released a primitive quality of brutality.
On August 25th, 1914, Reservist Heinrich Bissinger, of the town of Ingolstadt, of the Second Company, of the First Bavarian Pioneers, writes of the village of Orchids:
"A woman was shot because she did not stop at the word Halt, but kept running away. Thereupon we burn the whole place."
("Sämtliche Civilpersonen weren verhaftet. Eine Frau wurde vershossen, weil sie auf Halt Rufen nicht hilt, sondern ausreissen wollte. Hierauf Verbrennen der ganzen Ortschaft.")
One wonders if Heinrich Bissinger would wish the treatment he and his comrades accorded to Orchids, to be applied to his own home town of Ingolstadt. If some German peasant woman in Ingolstadt failed to understand a word in a foreign tongue, and were killed, and then if Ingolstadt were burned, would Heinrich Bissinger feel that "military necessity" exonerated the soldiers that performed the deed?
Private Philips, from Kamenz, Saxons,. of the First Company, of the first Battalion of the 178th Regiment, writes: "Kriegs Tagebuch-Soldat Philips, 1 Kompanie (Sachsen)," at the head of his diary. On August 23 he writes of a village that had been burned:
"A spectacle terrible and yet beautiful. Directly at the entrance lay about 50 dead inhabitants who had been shot, because they had traitorously fired on our troops. In the course of the night many more were shot, so that we could count over 200. Women and children, lamp in hand, had to watch the horrible spectacle. Then in the middle of the corpses we ate our rice; since morning we had eaten nothing. By search through the houses we found much wine and liquor, but nothing to eat."
("Im Laufe der Nacht wurden noch viele erschossen, sodass wir über 200 zählen konnten. Frauen und Kinder, die Lampe in der Hand, mussten dem entsetzlichen Schauspiele zusehen. Wir assen dann inmitten der Leichen unsern Reis, seit Morgen hatten wir nichts gegessen.")
German soldiers obey these orders because their military training and their general education have made them docile. They have never learned to exercise independent individual moral judgment on acts ordered by the state. The state to them is an organism functioning in regions that lie outside the intellectual and moral life of the individual. In every German there are separate water-tight compartments: the one for the life he leads as a husband and father, the other for the acts he must commit as a citizen of the Empire and as a soldier of the Army. In his home life he makes choices. In his public life he has no choice. He must obey without compunctions. So he lays aside his conscience. In the moral realm the German is a child, which means that he is by turns cruel, sentimental, forgetful of the evil he has done the moment before, happy in the present moment, eating enormously, pleased with little things, crying over a letter from home, weary of the war, with sore feet and a rebellious stomach, a heavy pack, and no cigars. I am basing every statement I make on the statements written by German soldiers. We do not have to guess at German psychology. They have ripped open their subconsciousness.
The lieutenant of the 5th Battalion of reserves of the Prussian-Guard writes on August 24 at Cirey:
"In the night unbelievable things have taken place. Warehouses plundered, money stolen, violations simply hair-raising."
("In der Nacht sind unglaubliche Sachen passiert. Läden ausgeplündert, Geld gestohlen, Vergewaltigungen, Einfach haarsträubend.")
This diary of the lieutenant's has a black cover, a little pocket for papers, a holder for the pencil. It is written partly in black pencil and partly in purple. Thirty-two pages are written, 118 are blank. It covers a space of time from August 1 to September 4, 1914.
Mrs. Wharton has brought to my attention the chronicle of Salimbene, a Franciscan of the thirteenth century, wherein similar light-hearted crimes are recorded.
"On one day he (Ezzelino) caused 11,000 men of Padua to be burnt in the field of Saint George; and when fire had been set to the house in which they were being burnt, he jousted as if in sport around them with his knights.
"The villagers dwelt apart, nor were there any that resisted their enemies or opened the mouth or made the least noise. And that night they (the soldiers) burned 53 houses in the village."
The orders given by the German commanding general to his officers, far from recommending prudence and humanity, impose the obligation of holding the total civil population collectively responsible for the smallest individual infractions, and of acting against every tentative infringement with pitiless severity. These officers are as specialized a class as New York gunmen or Paris apaches. Their career lies in anti-social conduct. "This wild upperclass of the young German imperialistic idea" are implacable destroyers. Their promotion is dependent on the extent of their cruelties.
I have seen an original copy of the order for the day (Korps-Tagesbefehl) issued on August 12, 1914, by General von Fabeck, commanding the 13th Army Corps. He says:
"Lieutenant Haag of the 19th Regiment of Uhlans, acting as chief of patrol, has proceeded energetically against the rioting inhabitants, and as agreed has employed arms. I express to him my recognition for his energy and his decision."
("Ich spreche ihm für seinen Schneid und seine Umsicht meine Anerkennung aus.")
What that gives to Lieutenant Haag is the power of life and death over non-combatants, with praise for him if he deals out death.
Let us hear General von Fabeck speak again. Here are his instructions for his troops on August 15, 1914 (I have held the original in my hands):
"As soon as the territory is entered, the inhabitants are to be held responsible for maintaining the lines of communication. For that purpose the commander of the advance guard will arrange a strong patrol of campaign gendarmes (Feldgendarmerie-Patrouille) to be used for the interior of the locality held by our troops. Against every inhabitant who tries to do us a damage, or who does us a damage, it is necessary to act with pitiless severity."
"Mit rucksichtsloser Strenge."
This order is on long sheets of the nature of our foolscap. It is written in violet ink.
The copy reads:
Baessler is the aide-de-camp.
Two violations of the rights of non-combatants are in that order. The requisitioning of inhabitants on military work where they are exposed to the fire of their own nation; pitiless severity applied to every non-combatant on the least suspicion of a hostile act.
Actually the state which the simple soldiers obey so utterly is an inner clique of landed proprietors, captains of industry, and officers of the army---men of ruthless purpose and vast ambitions. The sixty five millions of docile peasants, clerks, artizans and petty officials are tools for this inner clique.
"The theories of the German philosophers and public men are of one piece with the collective acts of the German soldiers. The pages of the Pan-German writers are prophetic. They are not so much the precursors as the results, the echoes of a something impersonal that is vaster than their own voice. Here we have acted out the cult of force, creator of Right, practiced since its dim origins by Prussia, defended philosophically by Lasson, scientifically by Haeckel and Ostwald, politically by Treitschke, and in a military way by General von Bernhardi."
The modern Germany is the victim of an obsession. Under its sentimental domestic life, its placid beergarden recreation, its methodical activities, its reveries, its emotional laxity fed on music, it was generating destructive forces. Year by year it was thinking the thoughts, inculcated by its famous teachers, until those ideas, pushed deep down into the subconscious, became an overmastering desire, a dream of world-grandeur. For once an idea penetrates through to the subconsciousness, it becomes touched with emotional life, later to leap back into the light of day in uncontrolled action.
I can produce one of the original bills posted on the walls of Liège by General von Bulow. Here is the way it reads:
Ordre. à la population Liégeoise. La population d'Andenne, après avoir témoigné des intentions pacifiques à l'égard de nos troupes, les a attaquées de la façon la plus traîtresse. Avec mon autorisation, le Général qui commandait ces troupes a mis la ville en cendres et a fait fusiller 110 personnes. Je porte ce fait à la connaissance de la ville de Liège, pour que ses habitants sachent à quel sort ils peuvent s'attendre s'ils prennent une attitude semblable.
Liège, le 22 Août, 1914.
Général von Bulow.("The inhabitants of the town of Andenne, after having testified to their peaceful intentions in regard to our troops, attacked them in a fashion the most treacherous. By my authorization, the General who commanded the troops has burned the town to ashes and has shot 110 people. I bring this to the knowledge of the town of Liège, in order that the inhabitants may know what fate they invite if they take a like attitude.")
It is only in victorious conquest that the German is unendurable. When he was trounced at the Battle of the Marne, he ceased his wholesale burnings and massacres throughout that district, and continued his campaign of frightfulness only in those sections of Belgium around Antwerp where he was still conquering new territory. His dream of world conquest will die in a day, when the day comes that sends him home. In defeat, he is simple, kindly, surprised at humane treatment. He ceases to he a superman at the touch of failure. All his blown-up grandeur collapses, and he shrinks to his true stature.
This return to wholesomeness is dependent on two things: a thorough defeat in this war, so that the German people will see that a machine fails when it seeks to crush the human spirit, and an internal revolution in the conception of individual duty to the state, so that they will regain the virtues of common humanity. The water-tight compartments, which they have built up between the inner voice of conscience in the individual life and the outer compulsion of the state, must be broken through.
ONE of the best jokes of the war has been put over on the Germans by themselves. Here I quote from a German diary of which I have seen the original. It is written by a subofficer of the Landwehr, of the 46th Reserve Regiment, the 9th Company, recruited from the province of Posen. He and his men are on the march, and the date is August 21. He writes:
"We are informed of things to make us shudder concerning the wickedness of the French, as, for instance, that our wounded, lying on the ground, have their eyes put out, their ears and noses cut. We are told that we ought to behave without any limits. I have the impression that all this is told us for the sole purpose that no one shall stay behind or take the French side; our men also are of the same opinion."
On August 23 he writes:
"I learn from different quarters that the French maltreat our prisoners; a woman has put out the eyes of an Uhlan."
By August 24 all this begins to have its effect on the imperfectly developed natures of his comrades, and he writes:
"I find among our troops a great excitability against the French."
There we can see the machinery of hate in full operation. The officers state the lies to the soldiers. They travel fast by rumor. The primitive, emotional men respond with ever-increasing excitement till they readily carry out murder.
Let us see how all this is working back home in the Fatherland. I have seen the photographic reproduction of a letter written by a German woman to her husband (from whose body it was taken), in which she tells him not to spare the French dogs ("Hunden"), neither the soldiers nor the women. She goes on to give her reason. The French, she says, men and women, are cruel to German prisoners, The story had reached her.
The German Chancellor in September, 1914, stated in an interview for the United States:
"Your fellow countrymen are told that German troops have burned Belgian villages and towns, but you are not told that young Belgian girls have put out the eyes of the defenseless wounded on the field of battle. Belgian women have cut the throats of our soldiers as they slept, men to whom they had given hospitality."
The final consecration of the rumor was given by the Kaiser himself. On September 8, 1914, he sent a cable to President Wilson, in which he repeated these allegations against the Belgian people and clergy. Of course, he knew better, just as his Chancellor and General Staff and his officers knew better. It was all part of the play to charge the enemy with things akin to what the Germans themselves were doing. That makes it an open question, with "much to be said on both sides." That creates neutrality on the part of non-investigating nations, like the United States.
But what he and his military clique failed to see was that they had discharged a boomerang. The comeback was swift. The German Protestants began to "agitate" against the German Roman Catholics. The old religious hates revived; a new religious war was on. Now, this was the last thing desired by the military power. An internal strife would weaken war-making power abroad. Here was Germany filled with lies told by the military clique. Those lies were creating internal dissension. So the same military clique had to go to work and deny the very lies they had manufactured. They did not deny them out of any large love for the Belgian and French people. They denied them because of the anti-Catholic feeling inside Germany which the lies had stirred up. German official inquiries have established the falsity of the atrocity charges leveled against the Belgians.
A German priest, R. P. Bernhard Duhr, S.J., published a pamphlet-book, "Der Lügengeist im Völkekrieg. Kriegsmärchen gesammelt von Bernhard Duhr, S. J.," (München-Regensburg, Verlagsanstat, Vorm. G. J. Manz, Buch und Kunst druckei, 1915). Its title means "The spirit of falsehood in a people's war. Legends that spring up in wartime." His book was written as a defense of Roman Catholic interests and for the sake of the internal peace of his own country. This book I have seen. It is a small pamphlet of 72 pages, with a red cover. The widest circulation through the German Empire was given to this proof of the falsity of the charges laid to the Allies. Powerful newspapers published the denials and ceased to publish the slanders.
Generals issued orders that persons propagating the calumnies, whether orally, by picture or in writing, would be followed up without pity. So died the legend of atrocities by Belgians. The mighty power of the Roman Catholic Church had stretched out its arm and touched the Kaiser and his War lords to silence.
The charges are treachery, incitement to murder and battle, traitorous attacks, the hiding of machine guns in church towers, the murder, poisoning and mutilation of the wounded. The story ran that the civil population, incited by the clergy, entered actively into hostilities, attacking troops, signaling to the Allies the positions occupied by the Germans. The favorite and most popular allegation was that women, old people and children committed atrocities on wounded Germans, putting out their eyes, cutting off their fingers, ears and noses; and that priests urged them on to do these things and played an active part in perpetrating the crimes. Putting out the eyes became the prize story of all the collection.
The German priest, Duhr, runs down each lie to its source, and then prints the official denial. Thus, a soldier of the Landwehr sends the story to Oberhausen (in the Rhine provinces):
"At Libramont the Catholic priest and the burgomaster, after a sermon, have distributed bullets to the civil population, with which the inhabitants fire on German soldiers. A boy of thirteen years has put out the eyes of a wounded officer, and women, forty to fifty years old, have mutilated our wounded soldiers. The women, the priest and the burgomaster have been all together executed at Trèves. The boy has been condemned to a long term in the home of correction."
The German commander of the garrison at Trèves writes:
"Five Belgian francs-tireurs who had been condemned to death by the court martial were shot at Trèves. A sixth Belgian, still rather young, has been condemned to imprisonment for many years. Among the condemned there were neither women, nor priests nor burgomaster."
This communication is signed by Colonel Weyrach.
Postcards representing Belgian francs-tireurs were placed on sale at Cassel. The commander of the district writes:
"The commanding general of the XI Army Corps at Cassel has confiscated the cards."
Wagner Bauer, of the Prussian Ministry of War, writes of another tale:
"The story of the priest and the boy spreads as a rumor among troops on the march."
The Herner Zeitung, an official organ, in its issue of September 9, printed the following: "Among the French prisoners was a Belgian priest who had collected his parishioners in the church to fire from hiding on the German soldiers. Shame that German soil should be defiled by such trash! And to think that a nation which shields rascals of that sort dares to invoke the law of humanity!"
Frhr. von Bissing, commanding general of the VII Army Corps, writes:
"The story of a Belgian priest, reported by the Herner Zeitung does not answer at any point to the truth, as it has since been established. The facts have been communicated to the Herner Zeitung concerning their article."
The Hessische Zeitung prints the following under title of "Letters from the Front by a Hessian Instructor":
"The door of the church opens suddenly and the priest rushes out at the head of a gang of rascals armed with revolvers."
The Prussian Ministry of War replies:
"The inquiry does not furnish proof in support of the alleged acts."
The Berliner Tageblatt, for September 10, has a lively story:
"It was the curé who had organized the resistance of the people, who had them enter the church, and who had planned the conspiracy against our troops."
The Prussian Minister of War makes answer: "The curé did not organize the resistance of inhabitants; he did not have them enter the church, and he had not planned the conspiracy against our troops."
The dashing German war correspondent, Paul Schweder, writes in Landesbote an article, "Under the Shrapnel in Front of Verdun." He says that he saw:
"A convoy of francs-tireurs, at their head a priest with his hands bound."
The German investigator pauses to wonder why every prisoner and every suspect is a franc-tireur, and then he goes on with his inquiry, which results in a statement from the Prussian War Minister:
"Deiber (the priest) had nothing charged against him, was set at liberty, and, at his own request, has been authorized to live at Oberhaslach."
The Frankfurter Zeitung, September 8, has a spirited account of a combat with francs-tireurs in Andenne, written by Dr. Alex Berg, of Frankfort:
"The curé went through the village with a bell, to give the signal for the fight. The battle began immediately after, very hotly."
The military authority of Andenne, Lieutenant Colonel v. Eulwege:
"My own investigation, very carefully made, shows no proof that the curé excited the people to a street fight. Every one at Andenne gives a different account from that, to the effect that most of the people have seen hardly anything of the battle, so-called, because they had hidden themselves from fear in the cellars."
Finally, the War Ministry and the press wearied of individual denials, and one great blanket denial was issued. Der Völkerkrieg, which is a comprehensive chronicle of review of the war, states:
"It is impossible to present any solid proof of the allegation, made by so many letters from the front, to the effect that the Belgian priests took part in the war of francs-tireurs. Letters of that kind which we have heretofore reproduced in our record ---for example, the recital of events at Louvain and Andenne---are left out of the new editions."
Der Fels, Organ der Central-Auskunftstelle der katholischen Presse, states:
"The serious accusations which I have listed are not only inaccurate in parts and grossly exaggerated, but they are invented in every detail, and are at every point false."
And, again, it says:
"All the instances, known up to the present and capable of being cleared up, dealing with the alleged cruelties of Catholic priests in the war, have been found without exception false or fabrications through and through."
Turning to the "mutilations," we have the Nach Feierabend publishing a "letter from the front" which tells of a house of German wounded being burned by the French inhabitants. Asked for the name of the place and the specific facts, the editor replied that "you are not the forum where it is my duty to justify myself. Your proceeding in the midst of war of representing the German soldiers who fight and die as liars, in order to save your own skin, I rebuke in the most emphatic way."
But the Minister of War got further with the picturesque editor, and writes:
"The editorial department of the Nach Feierabend states that it hasn't any longer in its possession the letter in question."
Now we come to the most famous of all the stories.
"At a military hospital at Aix-la-Chapelle an entire ward was filled with wounded, who had had their eyes put out in Belgium."
Dr. Kaufmann, an ecclesiastic of Aix-la-Chapelle, writes:
"I send you the testimony of the head doctor of a military hospital here, a celebrated oculist whom I consulted just because he is an oculist. He writes me:
" 'In no hospital of Aix-la-Chapelle is there any ward of wounded with their eyes put out. To my knowledge absolutely nothing of the sort has been verified at Aix-la-Chapelle."'
The Kölnische Volkzeitung, October 28, gives the testimony of Dr. Vülles, of the hospital in Stephanstrasse, Aix-la-Chapelle, in reference to the "Ward of Dead Men," where "twenty-eight soldiers lay with eyes put out." The men laughed heartily when they were asked if they had had their eyes put out.
"If you wish to publish what you have seen," said Dr. Vüllers, "you will be able to say that my colleague, Dr. Thier, as well as myself, have never treated a single soldier who had his eyes put out."
Professor Kuhnt, of the clinic for diseases of the eye at Bonn, writes:
"I have seen many who have lost their sight because of rifle bullets or shell fire. The story is a fable."
The Weser-Zeitung has a moving story of a hospital at Potsdam for soldiers wounded by the francs-tireurs, where lie officers with their eyes put out. "Young Belgian girls, of from fourteen to fifteen years of age, at the incitement of Catholic priests, have committed the crimes."
The commander at Potsdam writes:
"There is no special hospital here for soldiers wounded by the francs-tireurs. There are no officers here with eyes put out. The commander has taken measures to correct the article under dispute, and also in other publications."
So perish the lies used against Belgium. Lies manufactured by the General Staff and taught to their officers, to be used among the soldiers, in order to whip them to hate, because in that hate they would carry out the cold cruelty of those officers and of that General Staff. Lies put out in order to blind the eyes of neutrals, like the government at Washington, to the pillage, the burning and the murder which the German army was perpetrating as it marched through Belgium and Lorraine. Lies that later had to be officially denied by the same military power that had manufactured them, because those lies were stirring up civil strife at home, and because the Roman Catholic Germans investigated the sources and silenced the liars.
The Kaiser cabled to our country:
"The cruelties committed in this guerilla warfare by women, children and priests on wounded soldiers, members of the medical staff and ambulance workers have been such that my generals have at last been obliged to resort to the most rigorous measures. My heart bleeds to see that such measures have been made necessary and to think of the countless innocents who have lost their life and property because of the barbarous conduct of those criminals."
Now that he knows that those stories are lies he must feel sorrier yet that his army killed those countless innocents and burned those peasant homes.
I WAS standing in what was once the pleasant village of Sommeilles. It has been burned house by house, and only the crumbled rock was left in piles along the roadside. I looked at the church tower. On a September morning, at fourteen minutes of nine o'clock, an incendiary shell had cut through the steeple of the church, disemboweled the great clock, and set the roof blazing. There, facing the cross-roads, the hands of the clock once so busy with their time-keeping, are frozen. For twenty-three months, they have registered the instant of their own stoppage. On the minute hand, which holds a line parallel with that of the earth, a linnet has built its nest of straw. The hour-hand, outpaced by its companion at the moment of arrest, was marking time at a slant too perilous for the home of little birds. Together, the hands had traveled steadily through the hours which make the years for almost a century. High over the village street, they had sent the plowman to his field, and the girl to her milking. Children, late from their play, had scrambled home to supper, frightened by that lofty record of their guilt. And how many lovers, straying back from the deep, protecting meadows, have quickened their step, when the revealing moon lighted that face. Now it marks only cessation. It tells of the time when a village ceased to live. Something came down out of the distance, and destroyed the activities of generations---something that made an end of play and love. Only the life of the linnet goes on as if the world was still untroubled. Northern France is held in that cessation. Suddenly death came, and touched seven hundred villages. Nor can there ever be a renewal of the old charm. The art of the builders is gone, and the old sense of security in a quiet, continuing world.
I have been spending the recent days with these peasants in the ruins of their shattered world. Little, wooden baraquements are springing up, as neat and bare as the bungalows of summer visitors on the shore of a Maine lake. Brisk brick houses and stores lift out of crumpled rock with the rawness of a mining camp. It is all very brave and spirited. But it reminded me of the new wooden legs, with shining leather supports, and bright metal joints, which maimed soldiers are wearing. Everything is there which a mechanism can give, but the life-giving currents no longer flow. A spiritual mutilation has been wrought on these peasant people in destroying the familiar setting of their life. They had reached out filaments of habit and love to the deepset hearth and ancient rafters. The curve of the village street was familiar to their eye, and the profile of the staunch time-resisting houses.
From a new wooden structure, with one fair-sized, very neat room in it, a girl came out to talk with us. She was about twenty years old, with a settled sadness in her face. Her old home had stood on what was now a vegetable garden. A fragment of wall was still jutting up out of the potatoes. Everything that was dear to her had been carefully burned by the Germans.
"All the same, it is my own home," she said, pointing to the new shack, "it does very well. But my mother could not stand it that everything was gone. We ran away for the few days that the Germans were here. My mother died eight days after we came back."
The 51st Regiment of German Infantry entered the village, and burned it by squirting petrol on piles of straw in the houses. The machine they used was like a bicycle pump--a huge syringe. Of the Town Hall simply the front is standing, carrying its date of 1836. Seventeen steps go up its exterior, leading to nothing but a pit of rubbish.
"For three days I lay hidden without bread to eat," said a passer-by.
An old peasant talked with us. He told us that the Germans had come down in the night, and burned the village between four and six in the morning. A little later, they fired on the church. With petrol on hay they had burned his own home.
"Tout brûlé," he kept repeating, as he sent his gaze around the wrecked village. He gestured with his stout wooden stick, swinging it around in a circle. to show the completeness of the destruction. Five small boys had joined our group. The old man swung his cane high enough to clear the heads of the youngsters. One of them ran off to switch a. wandering cow into the home path.
"Doucement," said the old man. ("Gently.")
We went to his home, his new home, a brick house, built by the English Quakers, who have helped in much of this reconstruction work. He and his wife live looking out on the ruin of their old home.
"Here was my bed," he said, "and here the chimney plate."
He showed the location and the size of each familiar thing by gestures and measurements of his hands. Nine of the neighbors had lain out in the field, while the Germans burned the village. He took me down into the cave, where he had later hidden; the stout vaulted cellar under the ruined house.
"It is fine and dry," I suggested.
"Not dry," he answered, pointing to the roof. I felt it. It was wet and cold.
"I slept here," he said, "away from the entrance where I could be seen."
His wife was made easier by talking with us.
"How many milliards will bring us back our happiness ?" she asked. "War is hard on civilians. My husband is seventy-eight years old."
The cupboard in her new home stood gaping, because it had no doors.
"I have asked the carpenter in Revigny to come and make those doors," she explained, "but he is always too busy with coffins; twenty-five and thirty coffins a day."
These are for the dead of Verdun.
When the Germans left Sommeilles, French officers found in one of the cellars seven bodies: those of Monsieur and Madame Alcide Adnot, a woman, thirty-five years old, and her four children, eleven years, five, four, and a year and a half old. The man had been shot, the young mother with the right forearm cut off, and the body violated, the little girl violated, one of the children with his head cut off. All were lying in a pool of blood, with the splatter reaching a distance of ninety centimeters. The Germans had burned the house, thinking that the fire would destroy the evidence of their severity, but the flames had not penetrated to the cellar.
Sommeilles is in one of the loveliest sections of. Europe, where the fields lie fertile under a temperate sun, and the little rivers glide under green willow trees. Villages of peasants have clustered here through centuries. One or two of the hundreds. of builders that lifted Rheims and Chartres would wander from the larger work to the village church and give their skill to the portal, adding a choiceness of stone carving and some bit of grotesquerie. Scattered through the valleys of the Marne, and Meuse, and Moselle, you come on these snatches of the great accent, all the lovelier for their quiet setting and unfulfilled renown.
The peasant knew he was part of a natural process, a slow, long-continuing growth, whose beginnings were not yesterday, and whose purpose would not end with his little life. And the aspect of the visible world which reinforced this inner sense was the look of his Town Hall and his church, his own home and the homes of his neighbors---the work of no hasty builders. In the stout stone house, with its gray slabs of solidity, he and his father had lived, and his grandfather, and on back through the generations. There his son would grow up, and one day inherit the house and its goods, the gay garden and the unfailing fields.
Things are dear to them, for time has touched them with affectionate association. The baker's wife at Florent in the Argonne is a strapping ruddy woman of thirty years of age, instinct with fun and pluck, and contemptuous of German bombs. But the entrance to her cellar is protected by sand-bags and enormous logs.
"You are often shelled?" asked my friend.
"A little, nearly every day," she answered. "But it's all right in the cellar. For instance, I have removed my lovely furniture down there. It is safe in the shelter."
"Oh, then, you care more for your furniture than you do for your own safety?"
"Why," she answered, "you can't get another set of furniture so easily as all that." And she spoke of a clock and other wedding-presents as precious to her.
A family group in Vassincourt welcomed us in the room they had built out of tile and beams in what was once the shed. The man was blue-eyed and fair of hair, the woman with a burning brown eye, the daughter with loosely hanging hair and a touch of wildness. The family had gone to the hill at the south and watched their village and their home bum. They had returned to find the pigs ripped open. The destruction of live stock was something more to them than lost property, than dead meat.
There is an intimate sense of kinship between a peasant and his live stock---the horse that carries him to market, his cows and pigs, the ducks that bathe in the pool of his barnyard and the hens that bathe in the roadside dust. No other property is so personal. They had lost their two sons in the war. The woman in speaking of the French soldiers called them "Ces Messieurs," "these gentlemen."
In this village is a bran-new wooden shed, "Café des Amis," with the motto, "A la Renaissance," "To the Rebirth."
In Sermaize, nearly five hundred men marched away to fight. When the Germans fell on the town, 2,200 were living there. Of these 1,700 have returned. There are 150 wooden sheds for them, and a score of new brick dwellings, and twenty-four brick houses are now being built. Six hundred are living in the big hotel, once used in connection with the mineral springs for which the place was famous: its full name is Sermaize-les-Bains. Eight hundred of the 840 houses were shelled and burned--one-third by bombardment, two-thirds by a house to house burning.
The Hotel des Voyageurs is a clean new wooden shed, with a small dining-room. This is built on the ruins of the old hotel. The woman proprietor said to me:
"We had a grand hotel, with twelve great bedrooms and two dining-rooms. It was a fine large place."
The Café des Alliés is a small wooden shed, looking like the store-room of a logging camp. We talked with the proprietor and his wife. They used to be manufacturers of springs, but their business was burned, their son is dead in the war, and they are too old to get together money and resume the old work. So they are running a counter of soft drinks, beer and post cards. The burning of their store has ended their life for them.
We talked with the acting Mayor of Sermaize, Paul François Grosbois-Constant. He is a merchant, fifty-four years old. The Germans burned his six houses, which represented his lifetime of savings.
"The Germans used pastilles in burning our houses," he said, "little round lozenges, the size of a twenty-five-centime piece (this is the same size as an American quarter of a dollar). These hop about and spurt out fire. They took fifty of our inhabitants and put them under arrest, some for one day, others for three days. Five or six of our people were made to dress in soldiers' coats and casques, and were then forced to mount guard at the bridges. The pillage was widespread. The wife and the daughter of Auguste Brocard were so frightened by the Germans that they jumped into the river, the river Saulx. Brocard tried to save them, but was held back by the Germans. Later, when he took out the dead bodies from the river, he found a bullet hole in the head of each."
As we drove away from Sermaize, I saw in the village square that a fountain was feebly playing, lifting a thin jet of water a few inches above the basin.
WE are a nomadic race, thriving on change. Apartment houses are our tents: many of us preëmpt a new flat every moving day. This is in part an inheritance from our pioneer readiness to strike camp and go further. It is the adaptability of a restless seeking. It is also the gift made by limitless supplies of immigrants, who, having torn up their roots from places where their family line had lived for a thousand years, pass from street to street, and from city to city, of the new country, with no heavy investment of affection in the local habitation. Once the silver cord of ancestral memory is loosened, there is little in the new life to bind it together. The wanderer flows on with the flowing life about him. To many of us it would be an effort of memory to tell where we were living ten years ago. The outline of the building is already dim.
The peasant of France has found a truth of life in planting himself solidly in one place, with an abiding love for his own people, for the house and the village where he was born. Four centuries ago the French poet wrote:
Heureux qui comme Ulysse a fait un beau voyage
Ou comme cestuy-là qui conquit la Toison
Et puis est retourné plein d'usage et raison
Vivre entre ses parents le reste de son âge.Quand revoiray-je hélas! de mon petit village
Fumer la cheminée, et en quelle saison
Revoiray-je le clos de ma pauvre maison
Qui m'est une province, et beaucoup davantage.Plus me plaist le séjour qu'ont basty mes ayeux
Que des palais romains le front audacieux
Plus que le marbre dur me plaist l'ardoise fine.Plus mon Loyre gaulois que le Tybre latin
Plus mon petit Liré que le mont Palatin
Et plus que l'air marin la douceur Angevine.Happy the man who like Ulysses has traveled far and wide,
Or like that other who won the Golden Fleece,
And then wended home full worn and full wise,
To spend among his own folk the remainder of his days.When shall I see once more alack! above my little hamlet
Rise the chimney smoke, and in what season of the year
Shall I see once more the garden of my humble home,
Which is a wide province in my eyes, and even more.Dearer to my heart is the home my forefathers built
Than the cloud-capped tops of haughty Roman palaces.
Dearer than hardest marble the fine slate of my roof.Dearer my Gaulish Loire than Tiber's Latin stream.
Dearer my little hill of Liré than Mount Palatinus,
And than sea-airs the sweet air of Anjou.
Till yesterday that voice still spoke for the unchanging life of France. The peasant remained where his forefathers had broken the fields and loaded the wains. Why should he be seeking strange lands, like the troubled races? He found his place of peace long ago. To what country can he travel where the sun is pleasanter on happy fields? What people can he visit who have the dignity and simplicity of his neighbors?
Then the hordes from the north came down, eager to win this sunny quietness, curious to surprise the secret of this Latin race, with its sense of form and style, its charm, its sweet reasonableness. Why are these Southerners loved? Why do their accomplishments conquer the world so gently, so irresistibly? Surely this hidden beauty will yield to violence. So it came, that dark flood from the north, pouring over the fertile provinces, breaking the peace of these peasants. Something was destroyed where the human spirit had made its home for a longer time than the individual life: a channel for the generations. Their fields are still red with the poppy, but their young men who reaped are busy on redder fields. Their village street is crumbled stone, through which the thistle thrusts. The altar of their church is sour with rain water, and the goodness of life is a legend that was slain in a moment of time. A modern city can be rebuilt. An ancient village can never be rebuilt. That soft rhythm of its days was caught from old buildings and a slowly ripening tradition. Something distinguished has passed out of life. What perished at Rheims in the matchless unreturning light of its windows was only a larger loss. A quiet radiance was on these villages, too.
Still the peasants return to the place they know. Even their dead are more living than the faces of strangers in cities. The rocks in the gutter once held their home. There is sadness in a place where people have lived and been happy, and now count their dead. It is desolate in a way wild nature never is, for the raw wilderness groups itself into beauty and order. It would have been better to let the forest thicken through centuries, than to inherit the home where one day the roof-tree is razed by the invader. These peasants are not hysterical. They are only broken-hearted. They tell their story in a quiet key, in simple words, with a kind of grayness of recital. There are certain experiences so appalling to the consciousness that it can never reveal the elements of its distress, because what was done killed what could tell. But the light of the day is never seen again with the same eyes after the moment that witnessed a child tortured, or one's dearest shot down like a clay pigeon. The girl, who was made for happiness, when she is wife and mother, will pass on a consciousness of pain which had never been in her line before. The thing that happened in a moment will echo in the troubled voices of -her children, and a familiar music is broken.
ONE day when I was in Lorraine, a woman came to me carrying in her hands a boy's cap, and a piece of rope. She was a peasant woman about forty years of age, named Madame Plaid. She said:
"You see, Monsieur, I found him in the fields. He was not in the house when the Germans came here. I thought that my little scamp (mon gamin) was in danger, so I looked everywhere for him. He was fourteen years old, only that, at least he would have been in September, but he seemed to be all of nineteen with his height and his size.
"I asked the Prussians if they had not seen my little scamp. They were leading me off and I feared that they would take me away with them. The Prussians said that somebody had fired on them from my house.
"Your son had a rifle with him and he fired on us, just like the others," they said.
"I answered: 'My little scamp did not do anything, I am sure.'
" 'What shirt did he have on?' they asked.
" 'A little white shirt with red stripes,' I replied.
"They insisted that he was the one that had fired.
"When the cannonading stopped, the people who had been with me told me that they had seen a young man lying stretched out in the field, but they could not tell who it was. I wanted to see who it was that was lying there dead, and yet I drew back.
"'No,' I said to myself, 'I am too much afraid.'
"But I crossed the field. I saw his cap which had fallen in front of him. I came closer. It was he. He had his hands tied behind his back.
"See. Here is the cord with which he had been killed. For he had not been shot. He had been hanged.
(She held out to us the cord---a coil of small but strong rope.)
"And here is the cap.
(She was holding the gray cap in her two hands.)
"When I saw him, I said to the Prussians:
"'Do the same thing to me now. Without my little scamp I cannot go on. So do the same to me.'
"Three weeks later, I went again to search for my little scamp. I did not find him any more. The French soldiers had buried him with their dead."
WE were searching for the Mayor of Clermont, not the official Mayor, but the real Mayor. This war has been a selector of persons. When the Germans came down on the villages, timid officials sometimes ran and left their people to be murdered. Then some quiet curé, or village store-keeper, or nun, took over the leadership. Wherever one of these strong souls has lived in the region of death, in that village he has saved life. When the weak and aged were wild with terror, and hunted to their death, he has spoken bravely and acted resolutely. The sudden rise to power of obscure persons throughout Northern France reminds an American of the life history of Ulysses Grant. So at Clermont, the Mayor took to his heels, but Edouard Jacquemet, then sixty-eight years old, and his wife, stayed through the bonfire of their village and their home. And ever since, they have stayed and administered affairs. Clermont was a village of one thousand inhabitants. Thirty-eight persons remained---old people, religious sisters and the Jacquemets. The Germans burned 195 houses. The credit falls equally to a corps of Uhlans with the Prince of Wittgenstein at their head, and to the XIII corps from Württemberg, commanded by General von Urach. The particular regiments were the 121st and 122d Infantry.
We inquired of soldiers where we could find the Mayor.
"He is up above," they said. We were glad to leave the hot little village, with its swarms of flies, its white dust that lay on top of the roadbed in thick, puffy heaps, and its huddles of ruined houses. Each whirring camion, minute by minute, grinding its heavy wheels into the crumbling road, lifted white mists of dust, which slowly drifted upon the leaves of trees, the grass of the meadows, and the faces of soldiers. Eyebrows were dusted, hair went white, mustaches grew fanciful. Nature and man had lost all variety, all individuality. They were powdered as if for a Colonial ball. The human eye and the eyes of cattle and horses were the only things that burned with their native color through that veil of white that lay on Clermont.
We went up a steep, shaded hill, where the clay still held the summer rains. The wheels of our car buzzed on the slush---"All out," and we did the last few hundred yards on foot. We were bringing the Mayor good news. The Rosette of the Legion of Honor had just been granted him.
We found him in a little vine-covered old stone house on the hilltop, where he took refuge after his village was burned. He wept when my friend told him that the emblem of the highest honor in France was on its way.
"It means I have done something for my country," he said.
He is a cripple with one leg short. He goes on crutches, but he goes actively. He has fulfilled his life. His sons are fighting for France, and he, too, has served, and his service has been found acceptable in her sight. He is bright and cheery, very patient and sweet, with that gentleness which only goes with high courage. But underneath that kindliness and utter acceptance of fate, I felt that "deep lake of sadness," which comes to one whose experience has been over-full.
So we came through the dust of the plain and the clay of the climb to a good green place. It is a tiny community set on a hill. That hill was covered with stately trees---a lane of them ran down the center of the plateau, as richly green and fragrant as the choicest pine grove of New England. The head of the lane lost itself in a smother of low-lying bushes and grasses, lush-green and wild. But just before it broke into lawlessness, one stout tree, standing alone, shot up; and tacked to its stalwart trunk, this notice fronts the armies of France:
"CANTONNEMENT DE CLERMONT.
"IL EST FORMELLEMENT INTERDIT AUX VISITEURS OU AUTRES D'ATTACHER DES CHEVAUX AUX ARBRES. TOUTE DÉGRADATION AUX ARBRES SERA SEVÈREMENT REPRIMÉE.
"ORDRE DU COMMANDANT DE CANTONNEMENT.
"IT IS ABSOLUTELY FORBIDDEN TO VISITORS OR ANYBODY ELSE TO TIE THEIR HORSES TO THE TREES. ANY DAMAGE TO THE TREES WILL BE SEVERELY PUNISHED.
"BY ORDER OF THE COMMANDER."
Little strips of bark from the protected tree framed the notice.
There was the voice of France, mindful of the eternal compulsions of beauty, even under the guns. No military necessity must destroy a grove. In the wreckage of almost every precious value in that Argonne village, the one perfect thing remaining must be cherished.
Nowhere else have I ever seen that combination of wildness and stateliness, caught together in one little area, except on some hill crest of New Hampshire. For the first time in two years I felt utterly at home. This was the thing I knew from childhood. Nothing that happened here could seem strange. Nothing spoken in that grove of firs would fall in an alien tongue. The lane was doubly, flanked by great growths, planted in 1848---the inner line of cypresses, the outer windshield of fir trees. One lordly fir had been blown down by a shell, and cut up for kindling. Other shell-holes pitted the grove. We were standing on an historic spot. In the XIV century, Yolande of Flanders built her castle here, high above danger. She was the Countess of Bar-le-Duc, the Catherine de Medici of her district. When a little village to the North protested at her heavy taxes, she burned the village. The Bishop sent two vicars to expostulate. She drowned the two vicars, then built three churches in expiation, one more for good measure than the number of vicars, and died in the odor of sanctity. One of her chapels is on the plateau where we were standing. On the outer wall is a sun dial in colors, with a Latin inscription around the rim.
"As many darts as there are hours. Fear only one dart, the last one."
So the old illuminator had written on this Chapel of Saint Anne.
"Only one shell will get you---your own shell. No need to worry till that comes, and then you won't worry," how often the soldiers of France have said that to me, as they go forward in their blithe fatalism.
Little did the hand that groined that chapel aisle and fashioned that inscription in soft blue and gold know in what sad sincerity his words would fall true. When he lettered in his message for the hidden years, he never thought it would speak centuries away to the intimate experience of fighting men on the very spot, and that his hilltop would be gashed with shell-pits where the great 220's had come searching, till the one fated shell should find its mark.
The Mayor led me down the grove, his crutches sinking into the conifer bed of the lane. From the rim of the plateau, we looked out on one of the great panoramas of France. The famous roads from Varenne and Verdun come into Clermont and pass out to Chalons and Paris. Clermont is the channel through the heart of France. From here the way lies straight through Verdun to Metz and Mayence. We could see rolling fields, and mounting hills, ridge on ridge, for distances of from twelve to twenty-five miles. To the South-East, the East, and the North and the West, the sweep of land lay under us and in front of us: an immense brown and green bountiful farm country. There we were, lifted over the dust and strife. In a practice field, grenades clattered beneath us. From over the horizon line, the guns that nest from Verdun to the Somme grumbled like summer thunder.
"I have four sons in the war," said the Mayor. "One is a doctor. He is now a prisoner with the Germans. The other three are Hussar, Infantry and Artillery."
We turned back toward the house. His wife was walking a little ahead of us, talking vivaciously with a couple of officers.
"My wife," he went on, "has the blood of four races in her, English, Greek, Spanish and French. She is a very energetic woman, and brave. She is a soul. She is a somebody. (Elle est une âme. Elle est quelqu'un.) "
We talked with her. She is brown-eyed and of an olive skin, with gayety and ever-changing expression in the face. But she is near the breaking point with the grief of her loss, and the constant effort to choke down the hurt. Her laughter goes a little wild. I felt that tears lay close to the lightest thing she said. Her maiden name was Marie-Amélie-Anne Barker.
"When the Germans began to bombard our village," she told me, "my husband and I went down into the cellar. He stayed there a few minutes.
"'Too damp,' he said. He climbed upstairs and sat in the drawing-room through the rest of the bombardment. Every little while I went up to see him, and then came back into the cellar.
"After their bombardment they came in person. In the twilight of early morning they marched in, a very splendid sight, with their great coats thrown over the shoulder. I heard them smash the doors of my neighbors. The people had fled in fright. The soldiers piled the household stuff out in the street. I saw them load a camion with furniture taken from the home of M. Desforges and with material taken from Nordmann, our merchant of novelties.
"A doctor, with the rank of Major, seized the surgical dressings of our hospital, although it was under the Red Cross flag.
"I stood in my door, watching the men go by.
"You are not afraid?" asked one.
"I am not afraid of you," I replied.
"I believed my house would not be burned. It was the house where the German Emperor William the First spent four days in 1870, It was the house where he and Bismarck and Von Moltke mapped out the plan of Sedan. You see it was the finest house in this part of France. Each year since 1871, three or four German officers have come to visit it, taking photographs of it, because of the part it played in their history. I was sure it would not be burned by them.
"I left all my things in it---the silverware, the little trinkets and souvenirs, handed down in my family, and gathered through my lifetime. I said to myself, if I take them out, they will treat it as a deserted house. I will show them we are living there, with everything in sight. I was working through the day at the hospital, caring for the German wounded.
"The soldiers began their burning with the house of a watchmaker. They burned my house. I saw it destroyed bit by bit (morceau par morceau). I saw my husband's study go, and then the drawing-room, and the dining-room. The ivories, the pictures, the bibelots, everything that was dear to me, everything that time had brought me, was burned.
"I said to the German doctor that it was very hard.
"He replied: 'If I had known it was Madame's house, I should have ordered it to be spared.' "
We were silent for a moment. Then Madame Jacquemet said:
"Come and see what we have now."
She led us upstairs to a room which the two beds nearly filled.
"All that I own I keep under the beds," she explained. "See, there are two chairs, two beds. Nothing more. And we had such a beautiful room."
"Why did you burn our homes?" I asked a German officer, after the village was in ruins.
"We didn't burn the place," he answered. "It was French shells that destroyed it."
"I was here," I answered. "There were no French shells."
"The village people fired on our troops," he said.
"I was here," I told him. "The village people did not fire on your troops. The village people ran away."
"An empty town is a town to be pillaged," he explained.
The Mayor took up the story.
"A German officer took me into his room, one day," be said. "He closed the door, and began:
"I am French at heart. I believe that your village was burned as a spectacle for the Crown Prince who has his headquarters over yonder at a village a few kilometers away."
The picture he summoned was so vivid that I said, "Nero---Nero, for whom the destruction of a city and its people was a spectacle. Only this is a little Nero. Out of date and comic, not grandiose and convincing."
Monsieur Jacquemet went on:
"They burned our houses with pastilles, the little round ones with a hole in the middle that jump as they burn. In the Maison Maucolin we found three liters of them. The Thirty-first French Regiment picked them up when they came through, so that no further damage should come of them. The Germans left a sackful in the park belonging to M. Desforges. The sack contained 500 little bags, and each bag had 100 pastilles. Monsieur Grasset threw the sack into water, as a measure of safety."
The Mayor had saved a few pastilles as evidence, and passed one of them around. He has an exact turn of mind. He made out a map of his hilltop, marking with spots and dates the shells that seek his home.
Under one of the oldest of the linden trees---the historian of our party, Lieutenant Madelin, wondered how old: "four, five centuries, perhaps"---we ate an open-air luncheon. Our hosts were the Mayor and his wife. Our fellow-guests were the Captain and the Major---the Major a compact, ruddy, sailor type of man, with the far-seeing look in his blue eyes of one whose gaze comes to focus at the horizon line.
It seemed to me like the simple farm-meals I had so often eaten on the New England hills, in just that rapid sunlight playing through the leaves of great trees, in just that remote clean lift above the dust and hurt of things. I thought to myself, I shall always see the beauty of this little hill rising clear of the ruin of its village.
Then we said good-by, and I saw on the doorstep, sitting motionless and dumb, the mother of a soldier. Her white hair was almost vivid against the decent somber black of her hood, and dress. There was a great patience in her figure, as she sat resting her chin on her hand and looking off into the trees, as if time was nothing any more. For many days the carpenters had not been able to work fast enough to make coffins for the dead of Clermont. She was waiting on the Mayor's doorstep for the coffin of her son.