Towards The Goal - Mrs. Humphry Ward
* * * * *
This combination of the Cure's written and spoken account is as close to
the facts as I can make it. His narrative as he gave it to me, of what
he had seen and felt, was essentially simple, and, to judge from the
French official reports, with which I have compared it, essentially
true. There are some discrepancies in detail, but nothing that matters.
The murder of M. Odent, of the other hostages, of the civilians placed
in front of the German troops, and of four or five other victims; the
burning out by torch and explosive of half a flourishing town, because
of a discreditable mistake, the fruit of panic and passion,--these
crimes are indelibly marked on the record of Germany. She has done worse
elsewhere. All the same, this too she will never efface. Let us imagine
such things happening at Guildford, or Hatfield, or St. Albans!
We parted with M. le Cure just in time to meet a pleasant party of war
correspondents at the very inn, the Hotel du Cerf, which had been the
German Headquarters during the occupation. The correspondents were on
their way between the French Headquarters and the nearest points of the
French line, Soissons or Compiegne, from whose neighbourhood every day
the Germans were slowly falling back, and where the great attacks of the
month of April were in active preparation. Then, after luncheon, we
sallied out into the darkening afternoon, through the Forest of
Ermenonville, and up to the great plateau, stretching north towards
Soissons, southwards towards Meaux, and eastwards towards the Ourcq,
where Maunoury's Sixth Army, striking from Paris and the west, and the
English Army, striking from the south--aided by all the gallant French
line from Chateau Thierry to the Grand Couronne--dealt that staggering
blow against the German right which flung back the German host, and,
weary as the way has been since, weary as it may still be, in truth,
decided the war.
But the clouds hang lower as we emerge on the high bare plain. A few
flakes--then, in a twinkling, a whirling snow-storm through which we can
hardly see our way. But we fight through it, and along the roads every
one of which is famous in the history of the battle. At our northernmost
point we are about thirty miles from Soissons and the line. Columns of
French infantry on the march, guns, ammunition, stores, field kitchens,
pass us perpetually; the motor moves at a foot's pace, and we catch the
young faces of the soldiers through the white thickened air. And our
most animated and animating companion, Monsieur P----, with his
wonderful knowledge of the battle, hails every landmark, identifies
every farm and wood, even in what has become, in less than an hour, a
white wilderness. But it is of one village only, of these many whose
names are henceforth known to history, that I wish to speak--the
village of Vareddes. In my next letter I propose to tell the ghastly
story of the hostages of Vareddes.
No. 8
_May 17th_, 1917.
DEAR MR. ROOSEVELT,--Shall I ever forget that broad wintry plateau of
the Ourcq, as it lay, at the opening of March, under its bed of snow,
with its ruined villages, its graves scattered over the fields, its
utter loneliness, save for the columns of marching soldiers in the
roads, and the howling wind that rushed over the fields, the graves, the
cemeteries, and whistled through the gaping walls of the poor churches
and farms? This high spreading plain, which before the war was one scene
of rural plenty and industrious peace, with its farm lands and orchards
dropping gently from the forest country of Chantilly, Compiegne, and
Ermenonville, down to the Ourcq and the Marne, will be a place of
pilgrimage for generations to come. Most of the Battle of the Marne was
fought on so vast a scale, over so wide a stretch of country--about 200
miles long, by 50 broad--that for the civilian spectator of the future
it will never be possible to realise it as a whole, and very difficult
even to realise any section of it, topographically, owing to the
complication of the actions involved. But in the Battle of the Ourcq,
the distances are comparatively small, the actions comparatively simple
and intelligible, while all the circumstances of the particular struggle
are so dramatic, and the stakes at issue so vast, that every incident
is, as it were, writ large, and the memory absorbs them more easily.
An Englishwoman, too, may be glad it was in this conspicuous section of
the battle-field, which will perhaps affect the imagination of posterity
more easily than any other, that it fell to the British Army to play its
part. To General Joffre the glory of the main strategic conception of
the great retreat; to General Gallieni the undying honour of the rapid
perception, the quick decision, which flung General Maunoury, with the
6th Army, on Von Kluck's flank and rear, at the first hint of the German
general's swerve to the southeast; to General Maunoury himself, and his
splendid troops, the credit of the battle proper, across the broad
harvest fields of the Ourcq plateau. But the advance of the British
troops from the south of the Marne, on the heels of Von Kluck, was in
truth all-important to the success of Maunoury on the Ourcq. It was the
British Expeditionary Force which made the hinge of the battle-line, and
if that hinge had not been strong and supple--in all respects equal to
its work--the sudden attack of the 6th Army, on the extreme left of the
battle-line, and the victory of General Foch in the centre, might not
have availed. In other words, had Von Kluck found the weak spot he
believed in and struck for, all would have been different. But the weak
spot existed only in the German imagination. The British troops whom Von
Kluck supposed to be exhausted and demoralised, were in truth nothing of
the sort. Rested and in excellent condition, they turned rejoicing upon
the enemy, and, in concert with the French 6th Army, decided the German
withdrawal. Every one of the six Armies aligned across France, from
Paris to the Grand Couronne, had its own glorious task in the defeat of
the German plans. But we were then so small a proportion of the whole,
with our hundred and twenty thousand men, and we have become since so
accustomed to count in millions, that perhaps our part in the "miracle
of the Marne" is sometimes in danger of becoming a little blurred in the
popular English--and American--conception of the battle. Is not the
truth rather that we had a twofold share in it? It was Von Kluck's
miscalculation as to the English strength that tempted him to his
eastward march; it was the quality of the British force and leadership,
when Sir John French's opportunity came, that made the mistake a
fatal one.
How different the aspect of the Ourcq plateau at the opening of the
battle in 1914, from the snowy desolation under which we saw it! Perfect
summer weather--the harvest stacks in the fields--a blazing sun by day,
and a clear moon by night. For the first encounters of the five days'
fighting, till the rain came down, Nature could not have set a fairer
scene. And on the two anniversaries which have since passed, summer has
again decked the battle-field. Thousands have gone out to it from Paris,
from Meaux, and the whole country-side. The innumerable graves, single
or grouped, among the harvest fields and the pastures, have been covered
with flowers, and bright, mile after mile, with the twinkling tricolour,
as far as the eye could see. At Barcy and Etrepilly, the centres of the
fight, priests have blessed the graves, and prayed for the dead.
There has been neither labour nor money indeed as yet wherewith to
rebuild the ruined villages and farms, beyond the most necessary
repairs. They stand for the most part as the battle left them. And the
fields are still alive with innumerable red flags--distinct from the
tricolour of the graves--which mark where the plough must avoid an
unexploded shell. In a journal of September 1914, a citizen of Senlis
describes passing in a motor through the scene of the fight, immediately
after the departure of the Germans, when the scavenging and burying
parties were still busy.
"How can I describe it? Where to begin? Abandoned farms, on hills of
death! The grain-giving earth, empty of human beings. No labourers--no
household smoke. The fire of the burning villages has smouldered out,
and round the houses, and in the courtyards, lie the debris of their
normal life, trampled, dirty and piecemeal, under foot. Poor farms of
the Ile-de-France!--dwellings of old time, into whose barns the rich
harvests of the fields had been joyously gathered year by year--old
tiled roofs, clothed with ancestral moss--plain hospitable rooms where
masters and servants met familiarly together:--you are no more than
calcined and blackened stones! Not a living animal in the ruined stalls,
not an ox, not a horse, not a sheep. One flies from the houses, only to
find a scene more horrible in the fields. Corpses everywhere, of men and
horses. And everywhere in the fields unexploded shells, which it would
be death to touch, which have already made many unsuspecting victims.
"Sometimes, as the motor draws near, a man or a woman emerges from a
building, having still on their faces the terror of the hours they have
lived through. They scarcely look at us. They are absorbed in their
losses, in the struggle to rescue something from the wreck. As soon as
they are sure it is not the Germans come back, they turn away, with slow
steps, bewildered by what they have suffered."
The small party in the motor includes a priest, and as it passes near
Betz, at the northern end of the battle-field, they see a burying-party
of French Territorials at work. The officer in charge beckons to the
priest, and the priest goes to speak to him.
"Monsieur l'Abbe, we have just buried here twenty-two French soldiers."
He points to a trench freshly dug, into which the earth has just been
shovelled.
"They are Breton soldiers," the officer explains, "and the men of my
burying company are Bretons too. They have just discovered that these
dead men we have gathered from the fields were soldiers from a regiment
recruited in their own district. And _seven_ of them have recognised
among these twenty-two dead, one a son, one a son-in-law, one a brother.
Will you come, Monsieur l'Abbe, and say a few words to these
poor fellows?"
So the Abbe goes to the new-made grave, reads the _De Profundis_, says a
prayer, gives the benediction, and then speaks. Tears are on the strong,
rugged faces of the bare-headed Bretons, as they gather round him. A
group, some little distance off, which is writing the names of the dead
on a white cross, pauses, catches what is going on, and kneels too, with
bent heads....
It is good to linger on that little scene of human sympathy and
religious faith. It does something to protect the mind from the horror
of much that has happened here.
* * * * *
In spite of the storm, our indefatigable guide carried us through all
the principal points of the battle-line--St. Soupplets--Marcilly--
Barcy--Etrepilly--Acy-en-Multien; villages from which one by one, by
keen, hard fighting, the French attack, coming eastwards from Dammartin
to Paris, dislodged the troops of Von Kluck; while to our right lay
Trocy, and Vareddes, a village on the Ourcq, between which points ran
the strongest artillery positions of the enemy. At Barcy, we stopped a
few minutes, to go and look at the ruined church, with its fallen bell,
and its graveyard packed with wreaths and crosses, bound with the
tricolour. At Etrepilly, with the snow beating in our faces, and the
wind howling round us, we read the inscription on the national monument
raised to those fallen in the battle, and looking eastwards to the spot
where Trocy lay under thick curtains of storm, we tried to imagine the
magnificent charge of the Zouaves, of the 62nd Reserve Division, under
Commandant Henri D'Urbal, who, with many a comrade, lies buried in the
cemetery of Barcy.
Five days the battle swayed backwards and forwards across this scene,
especially following the lines of the little streams flowing eastwards
to the Ourcq, the Therouanne, the Gergogne, the Grivette. "From village
to village," says Colonel Buchan, "amid the smoke of burning haystacks
and farmsteads, the French bayonet attack was pressed home."
"Terrible days of life-and-death fighting! [writes a Meaux resident,
Madame Koussel-Lepine] battles of Chambry, Barcy, Puisieux,
Acy-en-Multien, the 6th, 7th, and 8th of September--fierce days to which
the graves among the crops bear witness. Four hundred volunteers sent to
attack a farm, from which only seven come back! Ambuscades, barricades
in the streets, loopholes cut in the cemetery walls, trenches hastily
dug and filled with dead, night fighting, often hand to hand, surprises,
the sudden flash of bayonets, a rain of iron, a rain of fire, mills and
houses burning like torches--fields red with the dead and with the
flaming corn fruit of the fields, and flower of the race!--the sacrifice
consummated, the cup drunk to the lees."
Moving and eloquent words! They gain for me a double significance as I
look back from them to the little scene we saw at Barcy under the
snow--a halt of some French infantry, in front of the ruined church. The
"_salut an drapeau_" was going on, that simple, daily rite which, like a
secular mass, is the outward and visible sign to the French soldier of
his country and what he owes her. This passion of French
patriotism--what a marvellous force, what a regenerating force it has
shown itself in this war! It springs, too, from the heart of a race
which has the Latin gift of expression. Listen to this last entry in the
journal of Captain Robert Dubarle, the evening before his death
in action:
"This attack to-morrow, besides the inevitable emotion it rouses in
one's thoughts, stirs in me a kind of joyous impatience, and the pride
of doing my duty--which is to fight gladly, and die victorious. To the
last breath of our lives, to the last child of our mothers, to the last
stone of our dwellings, all is thine, my country! Make no hurry. Choose
thine own time for striking. If thou needest months, we will fight for
months; if thou needest years, we will fight for years--the children of
to-day shall be the soldiers of to-morrow.
"Already, perhaps, my last hour is hastening towards me. Accept the gift
I make thee of my strength, my hopes, my joys and my sorrows, of all my
being, filled with the passion of thee. Pardon thy children their errors
of past days. Cover them with thy glory--put them to sleep in thy flag.
Rise, victorious and renewed, upon their graves. Let our holocaust save
thee--_Patrie, Patrie_!"
An utterance which for tragic sincerity and passion may well compare
with the letter of an English officer I printed at the end of
_England's Effort_.
On they go, into the snow and the mist, the small sturdy soldiers, bound
northwards for those great and victorious attacks on the Craonne
plateau, and the Chemin des Dames, which were to follow so close on our
own British victory on the Vimy Ridge. They pass the two ladies in the
motor car, looking at us with friendly, laughing eyes, and disappear
into the storm.
Then we move on to the northern edge of the battle-field, and at Rosoy
we turn south towards Meaux, passing Vareddes to our left. The weather
clears a little, and from the high ground we are able to see Meaux to
the west, lying beside its great river, than which our children's
children will greet no more famous name. The Marne winds, steely grey,
through the white landscape, and we run down to it quickly. Soon we are
making our way on foot through the dripping streets of Meaux to the old
bridge, which the British broke down--one of three--on their retreat--so
soon to end! Then, a few minutes in the lovely cathedral--its beauty was
a great surprise to me!--a greeting to the tomb of Bossuet--ah! what a
_Discours_ he would have written on the Battle of the Marne!--and a
rapid journey of some twenty-five miles back to Paris.
But there is still a story left to tell--the story of Vareddes.
"Vareddes"--says a local historian of the battle--"is now a very quiet
place. There is no movement in the streets and little life in the
houses, where some of the injuries of war have been repaired." But there
is no spot in the wide battle-field where there burns a more passionate
hatred of a barbarous enemy. "Push open this window, enter this house,
talk with any person whatever whom you may happen to meet, and they will
tell you of the torture of old men, carried off as hostages and murdered
in cold blood, or of the agonies of fear deliberately inflicted on old
and frail women, through a whole night."
The story of Vareddes is indeed nearly incredible. That English, or
French, or Italian troops could have been guilty of this particular
crime is beyond imagination. Individual deeds of passion and lust are
possible, indeed, in all armies, though the degree to which they have
prevailed in the German army is, by the judgment of the civilised world
outside Germany, unprecedented in modern history. But the instances of
long-drawn-out, cold-blooded, unrelenting cruelty, of which the German
conduct of the war is full, fill one after a while with a shuddering
sense of something wholly vile, and wholly unsuspected, which Europe has
been sheltering, unawares, in its midst. The horror has now thrown off
the trappings and disguise of modern civilisation, and we see it and
recoil. We feel that we are terribly right in speaking of the Germans as
barbarians; that, for all their science and their organisation, they
have nothing really in common with the Graeco-Latin and Christian
civilisation on which this old Europe is based. We have thought of them,
in former days,--how strange to look back upon it!--as brothers and
co-workers in the human cause. But the men who have made and are
sustaining this war, together with the men, civil and military, who have
breathed its present spirit into the German Army, are really moral
outlaws, acknowledging no authority but their own arrogant and cruel
wills, impervious to the moral ideals and restraints that govern other
nations, and betraying again and again, under the test of circumstance,
the traits of the savage and the brute.
And as one says these things, one could almost laugh at them!--so strong
is still the memory of what one used to feel towards the poetic, the
thinking, the artistic Germany of the past. But that Germany was a mere
blind, hiding the real Germany.
Listen, at least, to what this old village of the Ile-de-France knows of
Germany.
With the early days of September 1914, there was a lamentable exodus
from all this district. Long lines of fugitives making for safety and
the south, carts filled with household stuff and carrying the women and
children, herds of cattle and sheep, crowded the roads. The Germans were
coming, and the terror of Belgium and the Ardennes had spread to these
French peasants of the centre. On September 1st, the post-mistress of
Vareddes received orders to leave the village, after destroying the
telephone and telegraphic connections. The news came late, but panic
spread like wildfire. All the night, Vareddes was packing and going. Of
800 inhabitants only a hundred remained, thirty of them old men.
One of the emigrants did not get far from home. He was a man of seventy,
Louis Denet by name. He left Vareddes with his wife, in a farm-cart,
driving a cow with them. They went a day's journey, and put up for a few
days at the farm of a friend named Roger. On Sunday the 6th, in the
morning, four Germans arrived at the farm. They went away and came back
again in the afternoon. They called all the inmates of the farm out into
the yard. Denet and Roger appeared. "You were three men this morning,
now you are only two!" said one of the Germans. And immediately they
took the two old men a little distance away, and shot them both, within
half a mile of the farm. The body of Roger was found by his wife the day
after; that of Denet was not discovered for some time. Nobody has any
idea to this day why those men were shot. It is worth while to try and
realise the scene--the terror-stricken old men dragged away by their
murderers--the wives left behind, no doubt under a guard--the sound of
the distant shots--the broken hearts of the widow and the orphan.
But that was a mere prelude.
On Friday, September 4th, a large detachment of Von Kluck's army invaded
Vareddes, coming from Barcy, which lies to the west. It was no doubt
moving towards the Marne on that flank march which was Von Kluck's
undoing. The troops left the village on Saturday the 5th, but only to
make a hurried return that same evening. Von Kluck was already aware of
his danger, and was rapidly recalling troops to meet the advance of
Maunoury. Meanwhile the French Sixth Army was pressing on from the west,
and from the 6th to the 9th there was fierce fighting in and round
Vareddes. There were German batteries behind the Presbytere, and the
church had become a hospital. The old Cure, the Abbe Fossin, at the age
of seventy-eight, spent himself in devoted service to the wounded
Germans who filled it. There were other dressing stations near by. The
Mairie, and the school, were full of wounded, of whom there were
probably some hundreds in the village. Only 135 dead were buried in the
neighbourhood; the Germans carried off the others in great lorries
filled with corpses.
By Monday the 7th, although they were still to hold the village till the
9th, the Germans knew they were beaten. The rage of the great defeat, of
the incredible disappointment, was on them. Only a week before, they had
passed through the same country-side crying "Nach Paris!" and polishing
up buttons, belts, rifles, accoutrements generally, so as to enter the
French capital in _grande tenue._ For whatever might have been the real
plans of the German General Staff, the rank and file, as they came south
from Creil and Nanteuil, believed themselves only a few hours from the
Boulevards, from the city of pleasure and spoil.
What had happened? The common cry of men so sharply foiled went up.
"Nous sommes trahis!" The German troops in Vareddes, foreseeing
immediate withdrawal, and surrounded by their own dead and dying, must
somehow avenge themselves, on some one. "Hostages! The village has
played us false! The Cure has been signalling from the church. We are in
a nest of spies!"
So on the evening of the 7th, the old Cure, who had spent his day in the
church, doing what he could for the wounded, and was worn out, had just
gone to bed when there was loud knocking at his door. He was dragged out
of bed, and told that he was charged with making signals to the French
Army from his church tower, and so causing the defeat of the Germans.
He pointed out that he was physically incapable of climbing the tower,
that any wounded German of whom the church was full could have seen him
doing it, had the absurd charge been true. He reminded them that he had
spent his whole time in nursing their men. No use! He is struck,
hustled, spat upon, and dragged off to the Mairie. There he passed the
night sitting on a hamper, and in the morning some one remembers to have
seen him there, his rosary in his hand.
In one of the local accounts there is a touching photograph, taken, of
course, before the war, of the Cure among the boys of the village. A
mild reserved face, with something of the child in it; the face of a man
who had had a gentle experience of life, and might surely hope for a
gentle death.
Altogether some fourteen hostages, all but two over sixty years of age,
and several over seventy, were taken during the evening and night. They
ask why. The answer is, "The Germans have been betrayed!" One man is
arrested because he had said to a German who was boasting that the
German Army would be in Paris in two days--"All right!--but you're not
there yet!" Another, because he had been seen going backwards and
forwards to a wood, in which it appeared he had hidden two horses whom
he had been trying to feed. One old man of seventy-nine could only walk
to the yard in which the others were gathered by the help of his wife's
arm. When they arrived there a soldier separated them so roughly that
the wife fell.
Imagine the horror of the September night!--the terror of the women who,
in the general exodus of the young and strong, had stayed behind with
their husbands, the old men who could not be persuaded to leave the
farms and fields in which they had spent their lives. "What harm can
they do to us--old people?" No doubt that had been the instinctive
feeling among those who had remained to face the invasion.
But the Germans were not content without wreaking the instinct--which is
the savage instinct--to break and crush and ill-treat something which
has thwarted you, on the women of Vareddes also. They gathered them out
of the farmyard to which they had come, in the hopes of being allowed to
stay with the men, and shut them up in a room of the farm. And there,
with fixed bayonets, the soldiers amused themselves with terrifying
these trembling creatures during a great part of the night. They made
them all kneel down, facing a file of soldiers, and the women thought
their last hour had come. One was seventy-seven years old, three
sixty-seven, the two others just under sixty. The eldest, Madame
Barthelemy, said to the others--"We are going to die. Make your
'contrition' if you can." (The Town Librarian of Meaux, from whose
account I take these facts, heard these details from the lips of poor
Madame Barthelemy herself.) The cruel scene shapes itself as we think of
it--the half-lit room--the row of kneeling and weeping women, the
grinning soldiers, bayonet in hand, and the old men waiting in the
yard outside.