Towards The Goal - Mrs. Humphry Ward
But with the morning, the French mitrailleuses are heard. The soldiers
disappear.
The poor old women are free; they are able to leave their prison.
But their husbands are gone--carried off as hostages by the Germans.
There were nineteen hostages in all. Three of them were taken off in a
north-westerly direction, and found some German officers quartered in a
chateau, who, after a short interrogation, released them. Of the other
sixteen, fifteen were old men, and the sixteenth a child. The Cure is
with them, and finds great difficulty, owing to his age, the exhaustion
of the night, and lack of food, in keeping up with the column. It was
now Thursday the 10th, the day following that on which, as is generally
believed, the Kaiser signed the order for the general retreat of the
German armies in France. But the hostages are told that the French Army
has been repulsed, and the Germans will be in Paris directly.
At last the poor Cure could walk no farther. He gave his watch to a
companion. "Give it to my family when you can. I am sure they mean to
shoot me." Then he dropped exhausted. The Germans hailed a passing
vehicle, and made him and another old man, who had fallen out, follow in
it. Presently they arrive at Lizy-sur-Ourcq, through which thousands of
German troops are now passing, bound not for Paris, but for Soissons and
the Aisne, and in the blackest of tempers. Here, after twenty-four more
hours of suffering and starvation, the Cure is brought before a
court-martial of German officers sitting in a barn. He is once more
charged with signalling from the church to the French Army. He again
denies the charge, and reminds his judges of what he had done for the
German wounded, to whose gratitude he appeals. Then four German soldiers
give some sort of evidence, founded either on malice or mistake. There
are no witnesses for the defence, no further inquiry. The president of
the court-martial says, in bad French, to the other hostages who stand
by: "The Cure has lied--he is a spy--_il sera juge_."
What did he mean--and what happened afterwards? The French witnesses of
the scene who survived understood the officer's words to mean that the
Cure would be shot. With tears, they bade him farewell, as he sat
crouched in a corner of the barn guarded by two German soldiers. He was
never seen again by French eyes; and the probability is that he was shot
immediately after the scene in the barn.
Then the miserable march of the other old men began again. They are
dragged along in the wake of the retreating Germans. The day is very
hot, the roads are crowded with troops and lorries. They are hustled and
hurried, and their feeble strength is rapidly exhausted. The older ones
beg that they may be left to die; the younger help them as much as they
can. When anyone falls out, he is kicked and beaten till he gets up
again. And all the time the passing troops mock and insult them. At
last, near Coulombs, after a march of two hours and a half, a man of
seventy-three, called Jourdaine, falls. His guards rush upon him, with
blows and kicks. In vain. He has no strength to rise, and his murderers
finish him with a ball in the head and one in the side, and bury him
hastily in a field a few metres off.
The weary march goes on all day. When it ends, another old
man--seventy-nine years old--"le pere Milliardet"--can do no more. The
next morning he staggered to his feet at the order to move, but fell
almost immediately. Then a soldier with the utmost coolness sent his
bayonet through the heart of the helpless creature. Another falls on the
road a little farther north--then another--and another. All are killed,
as they lie.
The poor Maire, Lievin, struggles on as long as he can. Two other
prisoners support him on either side. But he has a weak heart--his face
is purple--he can hardly breathe. Again and again he falls, only to be
brutally pulled up, the Germans shouting with laughter at the old man's
misery. (This comes from the testimony of the survivors.) Then he, too,
falls for the last time. Two soldiers take him into the cemetery of
Chouy. Lievin understands, and patiently takes out his handkerchief and
bandages his own eyes. It takes three balls to kill him.
Another hostage, a little farther on, who had also fallen was beaten to
death before the eyes of the others.
The following day, after having suffered every kind of insult and
privation, the wretched remnant of the civilian prisoners reached
Soissons, and were dispatched to Germany, bound for the concentration
camp at Erfurt.
Eight of them, poor souls! reached Germany, where two of them died. At
last, in January 1915, four of them were returned to France through
Switzerland. They reached Schaffhausen with a number of other
_rapatries,_ in early February, to find there the boundless pity with
which the Swiss know so well how to surround the frail and tortured
sufferers of this war. In a few weeks more, they were again at home,
among the old farms and woods of the Ile-de-France. "They are now in
peace," says the Meaux Librarian--"among those who love them, and whose
affection tries, day by day, to soften for them the cruel memory of
their Calvary and their exile."
A monument to the memory of the murdered hostages is to be erected in
the village market-place, and a _plaque_ has been let into the wall of
the farm where the old men and the women passed their first night
of agony.
* * * * *
What is the moral of this story? I have chosen it to illustrate again
the historic words which should be, I think--and we know that what is in
our hearts is in your hearts also!--the special watchword of the Allies
and of America, in these present days, when the German strength _may_
collapse at any moment, and the problems of peace negotiations _may_ be
upon us before we know.
_Reparation_--_Restitution_--_Guarantees_!
The story of Vareddes, like that of Senlis, is not among the vilest--by
a long, long way--of those which have steeped the name of Germany in
eternal infamy during this war. The tale of Gerbeviller--which I shall
take for my third instance--as I heard it from the lips of
eye-witnesses, plunges us in deeper depths of horror; and the pages of
the Bryce report are full of incidents beside which that of Vareddes
looks almost colourless.
All the same, let us insist again that no Army of the Allies, or of
America, or of any British Dominion, would have been capable of the
treatment given by the soldiers of Germany to the hostages of Vareddes.
It brings out into sharp relief that quality, or "mentality," to use the
fashionable word, which Germany shares with Austria--witness the
Austrian doings in Serbia--and with Turkey--witness Turkey's doings in
Armenia--but not with any other civilised nation. It is the quality of,
or the tendency to, deliberate and pitiless cruelty; a quality which
makes of the man or nation who shows it a particularly terrible kind of
animal force; and the more terrible, the more educated. Unless we can
put it down and stamp it out, as it has become embodied in a European
nation, European freedom and peace, American freedom and peace, have
no future.
But now, let me carry you to Lorraine!--to the scenes of that short but
glorious campaign of September 1914, by which, while the Battle of the
Marne was being fought, General Castelnau was protecting the right of
the French armies; and to the devastated villages where American
kindness is already at work, rebuilding the destroyed, and comforting
the broken-hearted.
No. 9
_May 24th_, 1917.
DEAR MR. ROOSEVELT,--To any citizen of a country allied with France in
the present struggle, above all to any English man or woman who is
provided with at least some general knowledge of the Battle of the
Marne, the journey across France from Paris to Nancy can never fail to
be one of poignant interest. Up to a point beyond Chalons, the "Ligne de
l'Est" follows in general the course of the great river, and therefore
the line of the battle. You pass La Fertee-sous-Jouarre, where the Third
Corps of General French's army crossed the river; Charly-sur-Marne,
where a portion of the First Corps found an unexpectedly easy crossing,
owing, it is said, to the hopeless drunkenness of the enemy rear-guard
charged with defending the bridge; and Chateau Thierry, famous in the
older history of France, where the right of the First Corps crossed
after sharp fighting, and, in the course of "a gigantic man-hunt" in and
around the town, took a large number of German prisoners, before, by
nightfall, coming into touch with the left of the French Fifth Army
under Franchet d'Espercy. At Dornans you are only a few miles north of
the Marshes of St. Gond, where General Foch, after some perilous
moments, won his brilliant victory over General Billow and the German
Second Army, including a corps of the Prussian Guards; while at Chalons
I look up from a record I am reading of the experiences of the Diocese
during the war, written by the Bishop, to watch for the distant
cathedral, and recall the scene of the night of September 9th, when the
German Headquarters Staff in that town, "flown with insolence and wine,"
after what is described as "an excellent dinner and much riotous
drinking," were roused about midnight by a sudden noise in the Hotel,
and shouts of "The French are here!" "In fifteen minutes," writes an
officer of the Staff of General Langle de Gary, "the Hotel was empty."
At Epernay and Chalons those French officers who were bound for the
fighting line in Champagne, east and west of Reims, left the train; and
somewhere beyond Epernay I followed in thought the flight of an
aeroplane which seemed to be heading northwards across the ridges which
bound the river valley--northwards for Reims, and that tragic ghost
which the crime of Germany has set moving through history for ever,
never to be laid or silenced--Joan of Arc's Cathedral. Then, at last, we
are done with the Marne. We pass Bar-le-Duc, on one of her tributaries,
the Ornain; after which the splendid Meuse flashes into sight, running
north on its victorious way to Verdun; then the Moselle, with Toul and
its beautiful church on the right; and finally the Meurthe, on which
stands Nancy. A glorious sisterhood of rivers! The more one realises
what they have meant to the history of France, the more one understands
that strong instinct of the early Greeks, which gave every river its
god, and made of the Simois and the Xanthus personages almost as real as
Achilles himself.
But alas! the whole great spectacle, here as on the Ourcq, was sorely
muffled and blurred by the snow, which lay thick over the whole length
and breadth of France, effacing the landscape in one monotonous
whiteness. If I remember rightly, however, it had ceased to fall, and
twenty-four hours after we reached Nancy, it had disappeared. It lasted
just long enough to let us see the fairy-like Place Stanislas raise its
beautiful gilded gates and white palaces between the snow and the
moon-light--a sight not soon forgotten.
We were welcomed at Nancy by the Prefet of the Department, Monsieur Leon
Mirman, to whom an old friend had written from Paris, and by the
courteous French officer, Capitaine de B., who was to take us in charge,
for the French Army, during our stay. M. Mirman and his active and
public-spirited wife have done a great work at Nancy, and in the
desolated country round it. From the ruined villages of the border, the
poor _refugies_ have been gathered into the old capital of Lorraine, and
what seemed to me a remarkably efficient and intelligent philanthropy
has been dealing with their needs and those of their children. Nor is
this all. M. Mirman is an old Radical and of course a Government
official, sent down some years ago from Paris. Lorraine is ardently
Catholic, as we all know, and her old Catholic families are not the
natural friends of the Republican _regime_. But President Poincare's
happy phrase, _l'union sacree_--describing the fusion of all parties,
classes, and creeds in the war service of France, has nowhere found a
stronger echo than in Lorraine. The Prefet is on the friendliest of
terms with the Catholic population, rich and poor; and they, on their
side, think and speak warmly of a man who is clearly doing his patriotic
best for all alike.
Our first day's journeyings were to show us something of the qualities
of this Catholic world of Lorraine. A charming and distinguished
Frenchwoman who accompanied us counted, no doubt, for much in the warmth
of the kindness shown us. And yet I like to believe--indeed I am
sure--that there was more than this in it. There was the thrilling sense
of a friendship between our two nations, a friendship new and
far-reaching, cemented by the war, but looking beyond it, which seemed
to me to make the background of it all. Long as I have loved and admired
the French, I have often--like many others of their English friends and
admirers--felt and fretted against the kind of barrier that seemed to
exist between their intimate life and ours. It was as though, at bottom,
and in the end, something cold and critical in the French temperament,
combined with ignorance and prejudice on our own part, prevented a real
contact between the two nationalities. In Lorraine, at any rate, and for
the first time, I felt this "something" gone. Let us only carry forward
_intelligently_, after the war, the process of friendship born from the
stress and anguish of this time--for there is an art and skill in
friendship, just as there is an art and skill in love--and new horizons
will open for both nations. The mutual respect, the daily intercourse,
and the common glory of our two armies fighting amid the fields and
woods of France--soon to welcome a third army, your own, to their great
fellowship!--are the foundations to-day of all the rest; and next come
the efforts that have been made by British and Americans to help the
French in remaking and rebuilding their desolated land, efforts that
bless him that gives and him that takes, but especially him that gives;
of which I shall have more to say in the course of this letter. But a
common victory, and a common ardour in rebuilding the waste places, and
binding up the broken-hearted: even they will not be enough, unless,
beyond the war, all three nations, nay, all the Allies, do not set
themselves to a systematic interpenetration of life and thought,
morally, socially, commercially. As far as France and England are
concerned, English people must go more to France; French people must
come more to England. Relations of hospitality, of correspondence, of
wide mutual acquaintance, must not be left to mere chance; they must be
furthered by the mind of both nations. Our English children must go for
part of their education to France; and French children must be
systematically wooed over here. Above all the difficulty of language
must be tackled as it has never been yet, so that it may be a real
disadvantage and disgrace for the boy or girl of either country who has
had a secondary education not to be able to speak, in some fashion, the
language of the other. As for the working classes, and the country
populations of both countries, what they have seen of each other, as
brothers in arms during the war, may well prove of more lasting
importance than anything else.
* * * * *
But I am wandering a little from Nancy, and the story of our long
Sunday. The snow had disappeared, and there were voices of spring in the
wind. A French Army motor arrived early, with another French officer,
the Capitaine de G----, who proved to be a most interesting and
stimulating guide. With him I drove slowly through the beautiful town,
looking at the ruined houses, which are fairly frequent in its streets.
For Nancy has had its bombardments, and there is one gun of long range
in particular, surnamed by the town--"la grosse Bertha," which has done,
and still does, at intervals, damage of the kind the German loves.
Bombs, too, have been dropped by aeroplanes both here and at Luneville,
in streets crowded with non-combatants, with the natural result. It has
been in reprisal for this and similar deeds elsewhere, and in the hope
of stopping them, that the French have raided German towns across the
frontier. But the spirit of Nancy remains quite undaunted. The children
of its schools, drilled to run down to the cellars at the first alarm as
our children are drilled to empty a school on a warning of a Zeppelin
raid, are the gayest and most spirited creatures, as I saw them at their
games and action songs; unless indeed it be the children of the
_refugies_, in whose faces sometimes one seems to see the reflection of
scenes that no child ought to have witnessed and not even a child can
forget. For these children come from the frontier villages, ravaged by
the German advance, and still, some of them, in German occupation. And
the orgy of murder, cruelty, and arson which broke out at Nomeny,
Badonviller, and Gerbeviller, during the campaign of 1914, has scarcely
been surpassed elsewhere--even in Belgium. Here again, as at Vareddes,
the hideous deeds done were largely owing to the rage of defeat. The
Germans, mainly Bavarians, on the frontier, had set their hearts on
Nancy, as the troops of Von Kluck had set their hearts on Paris; and
General Castelnau, commanding the Second Army, denied them Nancy, as
Maunoury's Sixth Army denied Paris to Von Kluck.
But more of this presently. We started first of all for a famous point
in the fighting of 1914, the farm and hill of Leomont. By this time the
day had brightened into a cold sunlight, and as we sped south from Nancy
on the Luneville road, through the old town of St. Nicholas du Port,
with its remarkable church, and past the great salt works at Dombasle,
all the country-side was clear to view.
Good fortune indeed!--as I soon discovered when, after climbing a steep
hill to the east of the road, we found ourselves in full view of the
fighting lines and a wide section of the frontier, with the Forest of
Parroy, which is still partly German, stretching its dark length
southward on the right, while to the north ran the famous heights of the
Grand Couronne;--name of good omen!--which suggests so happily the
historical importance of the ridge which protects Nancy and covers the
French right. Then, turning westward, one looked over the valley of the
Meurthe, with its various tributaries, the Mortagne in particular, on
which stands Gerbeviller; and away to the Moselle and the Meuse. But the
panoramic view was really made to live and speak for me by the able man
at my side. With French precision and French logic, he began with the
geography of the country, its rivers and hills and plateaux, and its
natural capacities for defence against the German enemy; handling the
view as though it had been a great map, and pointing out, as he went,
the disposition of the French frontier armies, and the use made of this
feature and that by the French generals in command.
This Lorraine Campaign, at the opening of the war, is very little
realised outside France. It lasted some three weeks. It was preceded by
the calamitous French reverse at Morhange, where, on August 20th,
portions of the 15th and 16th Corps of the Second Army, young troops
drawn from south-western France--who in subsequent actions fought with
great bravery--broke in rout before a tremendous German attack. The
defeat almost gave the Germans Nancy. But General Castelnau and General
Foch, between them, retrieved the disaster. They fell back on Nancy and
the line of the Mortagne, while the Germans, advancing farther south,
occupied Luneville (August 22nd) and burnt Gerbeviller. On the 23rd,
24th, and 25th there was fierce fighting on and near this hill on which
we stood. Capitaine de G---- with the 2nd Battalion of Chausseurs, under
General Dubail, had been in the thick of the struggle, and he described
to me the action on the slopes beneath us, and how, through his glasses,
he had watched the enemy on the neighbouring hill forcing parties of
French civilians to bury the German dead and dig German trenches, under
the fire of their own people.
The hill of Leomont, and the many graves upon it, were quiet enough as
we stood talking there. The old farm was in ruins; and in the fields
stretching up the hill there were the remains of trenches. All around
and below us spread the beautiful Lorraine country, with its rivers and
forests; and to the south-east one could just see the blue mass of Mont
Donon, and the first spurs of the Vosges.
"Can you show me exactly where the French line runs?" I asked my
companion. He pointed to a patch of wood some six miles away. "There is
a French battalion there. And you see that other patch of wood a little
farther east? There is a German battalion there. Ah!" Suddenly he broke
off, and the younger officer with us, Capitaine de B----, came running
up, pointing overhead. I craned my neck to look into the spring blue
above us, and there--7,000 to 8,000 feet high, according to the
officers--were three Boche aeroplanes pursued by two French machines. In
and out a light band of white cloud, the fighters in the air chased each
other, shrapnel bursting all round them like tufts of white wool. They
were so high that they looked mere white specks. Yet we could follow
their action perfectly--how the Germans climbed, before running for
home, and how the French pursued! It was breathless while it lasted! But
we did not see the end. The three Taubes were clearly driven back; and
in a few seconds they and the Frenchmen had disappeared in distance and
cloud towards the fighting-line. The following day, at a point farther
to the north, a well-known French airman was brought down and killed, in
just such a fight.
Beyond Leomont we diverged westward from the main road, and found
ourselves suddenly in one of those utterly ruined villages which now
bestrew the soil of Northern, Central, and Eastern France; of that
France which has been pre-eminently for centuries, in spite of
revolutions, the pious and watchful guardian of what the labour of dead
generations has bequeathed to their sons. Vitrimont, however, was
destroyed in fair fight during the campaign of 1914. Bombardment had
made wreck of the solid houses, built of the warm red stone of the
country. It had destroyed the church, and torn up the graveyard; and
when its exiled inhabitants returned to it by degrees, even French
courage and French thrift quailed before the task of reconstruction. But
presently there arrived a quiet American lady, who began to make friends
with the people of Vitrimont, to find out what they wanted, and to
consult with all those on the spot who could help to bring the visions
in her mind to pass,--with the Prefet, with the officials, local and
governmental, of the neighbouring towns, with the Catholic women of the
richer Lorraine families, gentle, charitable, devout, who quickly
perceived her quality, and set themselves to co-operate with her. It was
the American lady's intention--simply--to rebuild Vitrimont. And she is
steadily accomplishing it, with the help of generous money subsidies
coming, month by month, from one rich American woman--a woman of San
Francisco--across the Atlantic. How one envies that American woman!
The sight of Miss Polk at work lives indeed, a warm memory, in one's
heart. She has established herself in two tiny rooms in a peasant's
cottage, which have been made just habitable for her. A few touches of
bright colour, a picture or two, a book or two, some flowers, with
furniture of the simplest--amid these surroundings on the outskirts of
the ruined village, with one of its capable, kindly faced women to run
the _menage_, Miss Polk lives and works, realising bit by bit the plans
of the new Vitrimont, which have been drawn for her by the architect of
the department, and following loyally old Lorraine traditions. The
church has been already restored and reopened. The first mass within its
thronged walls was--so the spectators say--a moving sight. "_That sad
word--Joy_"--Landor's pregnant phrase comes back to one, as expressing
the bitter-sweet of all glad things in this countryside, which has
seen--so short a time ago--death and murder and outrage at their worst.
The gratitude of the villagers to their friend and helper has taken
various forms. The most public mark of it, so far, has been Miss Folk's
formal admission to the burgess rights of Vitrimont, which is one of the
old communes of France. And the village insists that she shall claim her
rights! When the time came for dividing the communal wood in the
neighbouring forest, her fellow citizens arrived to take her with them
and show her how to obtain her share. As to the affection and confidence
with which she is regarded, it was enough to walk with her through the
village, to judge of its reality.
But it makes one happy to think that it is not only Americans who have
done this sort of work in France. Look, for instance, at the work of the
Society of Friends in the department of the Marne,--on that fragment of
the battlefield which extends from Bar-le-Duc to Vitry St. Francois. "Go
and ask," wrote a French writer in 1915, "for the village of Huiron, or
that of Glannes, or that other, with its name to shudder at, splashed
with blood and powder--Sermaize. Inquire for the English Quakers. Books,
perhaps, have taught you to think of them as people with long black
coats and long faces. Where are they? Here are only a band of workmen,
smooth-faced--not like our country folk. They laugh and sing while they
make the shavings fly under the plane and the saw. They are building
wooden houses, and roofing them with tiles. Around them are poor people
whose features are stiff and grey like those of the dead. These are the
women, the old men, the children, the weaklings of our sweet France, who
have lived for months in damp caves and dens, till they look like
Lazarus rising from the tomb. But life is beginning to come back to
their eyes and their lips. The hands they stretch out to you tremble
with joy. To-night they will sleep in a house, in _their_ house. And
inside there will be beds and tables and chairs, and things to cook
with.... As they go in and look, they embrace each other, sobbing."