Towards The Goal - Mrs. Humphry Ward
By June 1915, 150 "Friends" had rebuilt more than 400 houses, and
rehoused more than seven hundred persons. They had provided ploughs and
other agricultural gear, seeds for the harvest fields and for the
gardens, poultry for the farmyards. And from that day to this, the
adorable work has gone on. "_By this shall all men know that ye are My
disciples, if ye love one another_."
* * * * *
It is difficult to tear oneself away from themes like this, when the
story one has still to tell is the story of Gerbeviller. At Vitrimont
the great dream of Christianity--the City of God on earth--seems still
reasonable.
At Heremenil, and Gerbeviller, we are within sight and hearing of deeds
that befoul the human name, and make one despair of a world in which
they can happen.
At luncheon in a charming house of old Lorraine, with an intellectual
and spiritual atmosphere that reminded me of a book that was one of the
abiding joys of my younger days--the _Recit d'une Soeur_--we heard from
the lips of some of those present an account of the arrival at Luneville
of the fugitives from Gerbeviller, after the entry of the Bavarians into
the town. Women and children and old men, literally mad with terror, had
escaped from the burning town, and found their way over the thirteen
kilometres that separate Gerbeviller from Luneville. No intelligible
account could be got from them; they had seen things that shatter the
nerves and brain of the weak and old; they were scarcely human in their
extremity of fear. And when, an hour later, we ourselves reached
Gerbeviller, the terror which had inspired that frenzied flight became,
as we listened to Soeur Julie, a tangible presence haunting the
ruined town.
Gerbeviller and Soeur Julie are great names in France to-day.
Gerbeviller, with Nomeny, Badonviller, and Sermaize, stand in France for
what is most famous in German infamy; Soeur Julie, the "chere soeur" of
so many narratives, for that form of courage and whole-hearted devotion
which is specially dear to the French, because it has in it a touch of
_panache_, of audacity! It is not too meek; it gets its own back when it
can, and likes to punish the sinner as well as to forgive him. Sister
Julie of the Order of St. Charles of Nancy, Madame Rigard, in civil
parlance, had been for years when the war broke out the head of a modest
cottage hospital in the small country town of Gerbeviller. The town was
prosperous and pretty; its gardens ran down to the Mortagne flowing at
its feet, and it owned a country house in a park, full of treasures new
and old--tapestries, pictures, books--as Lorraine likes to have such
things about her.
But unfortunately, it occupied one of the central points of the fighting
in the campaign of Lorraine, after the defeat of General Castelnau's
Army at Morhange on August 20th, 1914. The exultant and victorious
Germans pushed on rapidly after that action. Luneville was occupied, and
the fighting spread to the districts south and west of that town. The
campaign, however, lasted only three weeks, and was determined by the
decisive French victory of September 8th on the Grand Couronne. By
September 12th Nancy was safe; Luneville and Gerbeviller had been
retaken; and the German line had been driven back to where we saw it
from the hill of Leomont. But in that three weeks a hell of cruelty, in
addition to all the normal sufferings of war, had been let loose on the
villages of Lorraine; on Nomeny to the north of Nancy, on Badonviller,
Baccarat, and Gerbeviller to the south. The Bavarian troops, whose
record is among the worst in the war, got terribly out of hand,
especially when the tide turned against them; and if there is one
criminal who, if he is still living, will deserve and, I hope, get an
impartial trial some day before an international tribunal, it will be
the Bavarian General, General Clauss.
Here is the first-hand testimony of M. Mirman, the Prefet of the
Department. At Gerbeviller, he writes, the ruin and slaughter of the
town and its inhabitants had nothing to do with legitimate war:
"We are here in presence of an inexpiable crime. The crime was signed.
Such signatures are soon rubbed out. I saw that of the murderer--and I
bear my testimony.
"The bandits who were at work here were assassins: I have seen the
bodies of their victims, and taken the evidence on the spot. They shot
down the inhabitants like rabbits, killing them haphazard in the
streets, on their doorsteps, almost at arm's length. Of these victims it
is still difficult to ascertain the exact number; it will be more than
fifty. Most of the victims had been buried when I first entered the
town; here and there, however, in a garden, at the entrance to a cellar
the corpses of women still awaited burial. In a field just outside the
town, I saw on the ground, their hands tied, some with their eyes
bandaged--fifteen old men--murdered. They were in three groups of five.
The men of each group had evidently clung to each other before death.
The clenched hand of one of them still held an old pipe. They were all
old men--with white hair. Some days had elapsed since their murder; but
their aspect in death was still venerable; their quiet closed eyes
seemed to appeal to heaven. A staff officer of the Second Army who was
with me photographed the scene; with other _pieces de conviction_; the
photograph is in the hands of the Governmental Commission charged with
investigating the crimes of the Germans during this war."
The Bavarian soldiers in Gerbeviller were not only murderers--they were
incendiaries, even more deliberate and thorough-going than the soldiers
of Von Kluck's army at Senlis. With the exception of a few houses beyond
the hospital, spared at the entreaty of Soeur Julie, and on her promise
to nurse the German wounded, the whole town was deliberately burnt out,
house by house, the bare walls left standing, the rest destroyed. And
as, _after the fire_, the place was twice taken and retaken under
bombardment, its present condition may be imagined. It was during the
burning that some of the worst murders and outrages took place. For
there is a maddening force in triumphant cruelty, which is deadlier than
that of wine; under it men become demons, and all that is
human perishes.
The excuse, of course, was here as at Senlis--"les civils ont tire!"
There is not the slightest evidence in support of the charge. As at
Senlis, there was a French rear-guard of 57 Chasseurs--left behind to
delay the German advance as long as possible. They were told to hold
their ground for five hours; they held it for eleven, fighting with
reckless bravery, and firing from a street below the hospital. The
Germans, taken by surprise, lost a good many men before, at small loss
to themselves, the Chasseurs retreated. In their rage at the unexpected
check, and feeling, no doubt, already that the whole campaign was going
against them, the Germans avenged themselves on the town and its
helpless inhabitants.
Our half-hour in Soeur Julie's parlour was a wonderful experience!
Imagine a portly woman of sixty, with a shrewd humorous face, talking
with French vivacity, and with many homely turns of phrase drawn
straight from that life of the soil and the peasants amid which she
worked; a woman named in one of General Castelnau's Orders of the Day
and entitled to wear the Legion of Honour; a woman, too, who has seen
horror face to face as few women, even in war, have seen it, yet still
simple, racy, full of irony, and full of heart, talking as a mother
might talk of her "grands blesses"! but always with humorous asides, and
an utter absence of pose or pretence; flashing now into scorn and now
into tenderness, as she described the conduct of the German officers who
searched her hospital for arms, or the helplessness of the wounded men
whom she protected. I will try and put down some of her talk. It threw
much light for me on the psychology of two nations.
"During the fighting, we had always about 300 of our wounded (_nos chers
blesses_) in this hospital. As fast as we sent them off, others came in.
All our stores were soon exhausted. I was thankful we had some good wine
in the cellars--about 200 bottles. You understand, Madame, that when we
go to nurse our people in their farms, they don't pay us, but they like
to give us something--very often it is a bottle of old wine, and we put
it in the cellar, when it comes in handy often for our invalids. Ah! I
was glad of it for our _blesses_! I said to my Sisters--'Give it them!
and not by thimblefuls--give them enough!' Ah, poor things!--it made
some of them sleep. It was all we had. One day, I passed a soldier who
was lying back in his bed with a sigh of satisfaction. '_Ah, ma Soeur,
ca resusciterait un mort!_' (That would bring a dead man to life!) So I
stopped to ask what they had just given him. And it was a large glass of
Lachryma Christi!
"But then came the day when the Commandant, the French Commandant, you
understand, came to me and said--'Sister, I have sad news for you. I am
going. I am taking away the wounded--and all my stores. Those are
my orders.'
"'But, mon Commandant, you'll leave me some of your stores for the
grands blesses, whom you leave behind--whom you can't move? _What_!--you
must take it all away? Ah, ca--_non_! I don't want any extras--I won't
take your chloroform--I won't take your bistouris--I won't take your
electric things--but--hand over the iodine! (_en avant l'iode_!) hand
over the cotton-wool!--hand over the gauze! Come, my Sisters!' I can
tell you I plundered him!--and my Sisters came with their aprons, and
the linen-baskets--we carried away all we could."
Then she described the evacuation of the French wounded at night--300 of
them--all but the 19 worst cases left behind. There were no ambulances,
no proper preparation of any kind.
"Oh! it was a confusion!--an ugly business!" (_ce n'etait pas rose_!).
The Sisters tore down and split up the shutters, the doors, to serve as
stretchers; they tore sheets into long strips and tied "our poor
children" on to the shutters, and hoisted them into country carts of
every sort and description. "Quick!--Quick!" She gave us a wonderful
sense of the despairing haste in which the night retreat had to be
effected. All night their work went on. The wounded never made a
sound--"they let us do what we would without a word. And as for us, my
Sisters bound these big fellows (_ces gros et grands messieurs_) on to
the improvised stretchers, like a mother who fastens her child in its
cot. Ah! Jesus! the poverty and the misery of that time!"
By the early morning all the French wounded were gone except the
nineteen helpless cases, and all the French soldiers had cleared out of
the village except the 57 Chasseurs, whose orders were to hold the place
as long as they could, to cover the retreat of the rest.
Then, when the Chasseurs finally withdrew, the Bavarian troops rushed up
the town in a state of furious excitement, burning it systematically as
they advanced, and treating the inhabitants as M. Mirman has described.
Soon Soeur Julie knew that they were coming up the hill towards the
hospital. I will quote the very language--homely, Biblical, direct--in
which she described her feelings. "_Mes reins flottaient comme ca--ils
allaient tomber a mes talons. Instantanement, pas une goutte de salive
dans la bouche!_" Or--to translate it in the weaker English idiom--"My
heart went down into my heels--all in a moment, my mouth was dry as
a bone!"
The German officers drew up, and asked for the Superior of the hospital.
She went out to meet them. Here she tried to imitate the extraordinary
arrogance of the German manner.
"They told me they would have to burn the hospital, as they were
informed men had been shooting from it at their troops.
"I replied that if anyone had been shooting, it was the French
Chasseurs, who were posted in a street close by, and had every right
to shoot!"
At last they agreed to let the hospital alone, and burn no more houses,
if she would take in the German wounded. So presently the wards of the
little hospital were full again to overflowing. But while the German
wounded were coming in the German officers insisted on searching the
nineteen French wounded for arms.
"I had to make way for them--I _had_ to say, '_Entrez, Messieurs!_'"
Then she dropped her voice, and said between her teeth--"Think how hard
that was for a Lorrainer!"
So two German officers went to the ward where the nineteen Frenchmen
lay, all helpless cases, and a scene followed very like that in the
hospital at Senlis. One drew his revolver and covered the beds, the
other walked round, poniard in hand, throwing back the bedclothes to
look for arms. But they found nothing--"_only blood_! For we had had
neither time enough nor dressings enough to treat the wounds properly
that night."
A frightful moment!--the cowering patients--the officers in a state of
almost frenzied excitement, searching bed after bed. At the last bed,
occupied by a badly wounded and quite helpless youth, the officer
carrying the dagger brought the blade of it so near to the boy's throat
that Soeur Julie rushed forward, and placed her two hands in front of
the poor bare neck. The officer dropped both arms to his side, she said,
"as if he had been shot," and stood staring at her, quivering all over.
But from that moment she had conquered them.
For the German wounded, Soeur Julie declared she had done her best, and
the officer in charge of them afterwards wrote her a letter of thanks.
Then her mouth twisted a little. "But I wasn't--well, I didn't _spoil_
them! (_Je n'etais pas trop tendre_); I didn't give them our best wine!"
And one officer whose wounds she dressed, a Prussian colonel who never
deigned to speak to a Bavarian captain near him, was obliged to accept a
good many home truths from her. He was convinced that she would poison
his leg unless he put on the dressings himself. But he allowed her to
bandage him afterwards. During this operation--which she hinted she had
performed in a rather Spartan fashion!--"he whimpered all the time," and
she was able to give him a good deal of her mind on the war and the
behaviour of his troops. He and the others, she said, were always
talking about their Kaiser; "one might have thought they saw him sitting
on the clouds."
In two or three days the French returned victorious, to find the burnt
and outraged village. The Germans were forced, in their turn, to leave
some badly wounded men behind, and the French _poilus_ in their mingled
wrath and exultation could not resist, some of them, abusing the German
wounded through the windows of the hospital. But then, with a keen
dramatic instinct, Soeur Julie drew a striking picture of the contrast
between the behaviour of the French officer going down to the basement
to visit the wounded German officers there, and that of the German
officers on a similar errand. She conveyed with perfect success the cold
civility of the Frenchman, beginning with a few scathing words about the
treatment of the town, and then proceeding to an investigation of the
personal effects of the Boche officers.
"Your papers, gentlemen? Ah! those are private letters--you may retain
them. Your purses?"--he looks at them--"I hand them back to you. Your
note-books? _Ah! ca--c'est mon affaire!_ (that's my business). I wish
you good morning."
Soeur Julie spoke emphatically of the drunkenness of the Germans. They
discovered a store of "Mirabelle," a strong liqueur, in the town, and
had soon exhausted it, with apparently the worst results.
Well!--the March afternoon ran on, and we could have sat there listening
till dusk. But our French officers were growing a little impatient, and
one of them gently drew "the dear sister," as every one calls her,
towards the end of her tale. Then with regret one left the plain
parlour, the little hospital which had played so big a part, and the
brave elderly nun, in whom one seemed to see again some of those
qualities which, springing from the very soil of Lorraine, and in the
heart of a woman, had once, long years ago, saved France.
* * * * *
How much there would be still to say about the charm and the kindness of
Lorraine, if only this letter were not already too long! But after the
tragedy of Gerbeviller I must at any rate find room for the victory
of Amance.
Alas!--the morning was dull and misty when we left Nancy for Amance and
the Grand Couronne; so that when we stood at last on the famous ridge
immediately north of the town which saw, on September 8th, 1914, the
wrecking of the final German attempt on Nancy, there was not much
visible except the dim lines of forest and river in the plain below. Our
view ought to have ranged as far, almost, as Metz to the north and the
Vosges to the south. But at any rate there, at our feet, lay the Forest
of Champenoux, which was the scene of the three frantic attempts of the
Germans debouching from it on September 8th to capture the hill of
Amance, and the plateau on which we stood. Again and again the 75's on
the hill mowed down the advancing hordes and the heavy guns behind
completed their work. The Germans broke and fled, never to return. Nancy
was saved, the right of the six French Armies advancing across France,
at that very moment, on the heels of the retreating Germans, in the
Battle of the Marne, was protected thereby from a flank attack which
might have altered all the fortunes of the war, and the course of
history; and General Castelnau had written his name on the memory
of Europe.
_But_--the Kaiser was not there! Even Colonel Buchan in his admirable
history of the war, and Major Whitton in his recent book on the campaign
of the Marne, repeat the current legend. I can only bear witness that
the two French staff officers who walked with us along the Grand
Couronne--one of whom had been in the battle of September 8th--were
positive that the Kaiser was not in the neighbourhood at the time, and
that there was no truth at all in the famous story which describes him
as watching the battle from the edge of the Forest of Champenoux, and
riding off ahead of his defeated troops, instead of making, as he had
reckoned, a triumphant entry into Nancy. Well, it is a pity the gods did
not order it so!--"to be a tale for those that should come after."
One more incident before we leave Lorraine! On our way up to the high
village of Amance, we had passed some three or four hundred French
soldiers at work. They looked with wide eyes of astonishment at the two
ladies in the military car. When we reached the village, Prince R----,
the young staff officer from a neighbouring Headquarters who was to meet
us there, had not arrived, and we spent some time in a cottage, chatting
with the women who lived in it. Then--apparently--while we were on the
ridge word reached the men working below, from the village, that we were
English. And on the drive down we found them gathered, three or four
hundred, beside the road, and as we passed them they cheered us
heartily, seeing in us, for the moment, the British alliance!
So that we left the Grand Couronne with wet eyes, and hearts all
passionate sympathy towards Lorraine and her people.
No. 10
_June 1st_, 1917.
DEAR MR. ROOSEVELT,--In looking back over my two preceding letters, I
realise how inadequately they express the hundredth part of that vast
and insoluble debt of a guilty Germany to an injured France, the
realisation of which became--for me--in Lorraine, on the Ourcq, and in
Artois, a burning and overmastering thing, from which I was rarely or
never free. And since I returned to England on March 16th, the conduct
of the German troops, under the express orders of the German Higher
Command, in the French districts evacuated since February by
Hindenburg's retreating forces, has only sharpened and deepened the
judgment of civilised men, with regard to the fighting German and all
his ways, which has been formed long since, beyond alteration or recall.
Think of it! It cries to heaven. Think of Reims and Arras, of Verdun and
Ypres, think of the hundreds of towns and villages, the thousands of
individual houses and farms, that lie ruined on the old soil of France;
think of the sufferings of the helpless and the old, the hideous loss of
life, of stored-up wealth, of natural and artistic beauty; and then let
us ask ourselves again the old, old question--why has this happened? And
let us go back again to the root facts, from which, whenever he or she
considers them afresh--and they should be constantly considered
afresh--every citizen of the Allied nations can only draw fresh courage
to endure. The long and passionate preparation for war in Germany; the
half-mad literature of a glorified "force" headed by the Bernhardis and
Treitschkes, and repeated by a thousand smaller folk, before the war;
the far more illuminating manifestoes of the intellectuals since the
war; Germany's refusal of a conference, as proposed and pressed by Great
Britain, in the week before August 4th, France's acceptance of it;
Germany's refusal to respect the Belgian neutrality to which she had
signed her name, France's immediate consent; the provisions of mercy and
of humanity signed by Germany in the Hague Convention trampled, almost
with a sneer, under foot; the jubilation over the _Lusitania_, and the
arrogant defence of all that has been most cruel and most criminal in
the war, as necessary to Germany's interests, and therefore moral,
therefore justified; let none--none!--of these things rest forgotten in
our minds until peace is here, and justice done!
The German armies are capable of "_no undisciplined cruelty_," said the
93 Professors, without seeing how damning was the phrase. No!--theirs
was a cruelty by order, meditated, organised, and deliberate. The
stories of Senlis, of Vareddes, of Gerbeviller which I have specially
chosen, as free from that element of sexual horror which repels many
sensitive people from even trying to realise what has happened in this
war, are evidences--one must insist again--of a national mind and
quality, with which civilised Europe and civilised America can make no
truce. And what folly lies behind the wickedness! Let me recall to
American readers some of the phrases in the report of your former
Minister in Belgium--Mr. Brand Whitlock--on the Belgian deportations,
the "slave hunts" that Germany has carried out in Belgium and "which
have torn from nearly every humble home in the land, a husband, father,
son, or brother."
These proceedings [says Mr. Whitlock] place in relief the German
capacity for blundering almost as sharply as the German capacity for
cruelty. They have destroyed for generations any hope whatever of
friendly relations between themselves and the Belgian people. For these
things were done not, as with the early atrocities, in the heat of
passion and the first lust of war, but by one of those deeds that make
one despair of the future of the human race--a deed coldly planned,
studiously matured, and deliberately and systematically executed, a deed
so cruel that German soldiers are said to have wept in its execution,
and so monstrous that even German officers are now said to be ashamed.
But the average German neither weeps nor blames. He is generally amazed,
when he is not amused, by the state of feeling which such proceedings
excite. And if he is an "intellectual," a professor, he will exhaust
himself in ingenious and utterly callous defences of all that Germany
has done or may do. An astonishing race--the German professors! The year
before the war there was an historical congress in London. There was a
hospitality committee, and my husband and I were asked to entertain some
of the learned men. I remember one in particular--an old man with white
hair, who with his wife and daughter joined the party after dinner. His
name was Professor Otto von Gierke of the University of Berlin. I
gathered from his conversation that he and his family had been very
kindly entertained in London. His manner was somewhat harsh and
over-bearing, but his white hair and spectacles gave him a venerable
aspect, and it was clear that he and his wife and daughter belonged to a
cultivated and intelligent _milieu_. But who among his English hosts
could possibly have imagined the thoughts and ideas in that grey head? I
find a speech of his in a most illuminating book by a Danish professor
on German Chauvinist literature. [_Hurrah and Hallelujah!_ By J. P.
Bang, D.D., Professor of Theology at the University of Copenhagen,
translated by Jessie Broechner.] The speech was published in a collection
called _German Speeches in Hard Times_, which contains names once so
distinguished as those of Von Wilamovitz and Harnack.
Professor von Gierke's effusion begins with the usual German falsehoods
as to the origin of the war, and then continues--"But now that we
Germans are plunged in war, we will have it in _all its grandeur and
violence_! Neither fear nor _pity_ shall stay our arm before it has
completely brought our enemies to the ground." They shall be reduced to
such a condition that they shall never again dare even to snarl at
Germany. Then German Kultur will show its full loveliness and strength,
enlightening "the understanding of the foreign races absorbed and
incorporated into the Empire, and making them see that only from German
kultur can they derive those treasures which they need for their own
particular life."