  THE PEASANTS
ITHE LOST VILLAGES 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 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 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 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 burn. 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. 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 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 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. IITHE HOMELESS We are a nomadic race, thriving on change. Apartment houses are our tents: many of us preempt 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 Heureux qui comme Ulysse a fait un beau voyage Quand revoiray-je hÉlas! de mon petit village Plus me plaist le sejour qu'out basty mes ayeux Plus mon Loyre gaulois que le Tybre latin Happy the man who like Ulysses has traveled far and wide, When shall I see once more alack! above my little hamlet Dearer to my heart is the home my forefathers built Dearer my Gaulish Loire than Tiber's Latin stream. 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. 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 III"MON GAMIN" 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." IVTHE MAYOR ON THE HILLTOP 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 storekeeper, 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. One of the new little red-brick houses of reconstructed France. The Mayor of Clermont and his wife, who did not run away when the invaders came. 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 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 "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. "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 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, "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 "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," he 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 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. VTHE LITTLE CORPORAL We were in the barracks of the Eighth Regiment of Artillery. They have been converted into a home for refugees, but the old insignia of famous victories still adorn the walls. We were talking with Madame Derlon. She is a refugee from Pont-À-Mousson, widowed by German severity. But unlike so many women of Lorraine whom I met, she still could look to her line continuing. For while she sat, slightly bent over and tired, Charles, her fifteen-year-old son ("fifteen and a half, Monsieur"), stood tall and straight at her side. While the mother told me her story, I looked up from her and saw on the wall the escutcheon of the Regiment, and I read in illuminated letters the names of the battles in which it had fought: "Austerlitz—1805. At the beginning of the war, her husband was ferryman of the Moselle, she said. He carried civilians and soldiers across. Their little son, then thirteen years old, liked to be near him, and watch the river and the passing of people. The boy had discovered a cellar under the bridge—a fine underground room, well-vaulted, where boy-like he had hidden tobacco and where he often stayed for hours, dreaming of the bold things he would do when his time came, and he would be permitted to enlist. His day was closer than he guessed. A cave is as wonderful to a French boy as it was to Tom Sawyer. Sometimes he made a full adventure of it and slept the night through there. During the early battles, the bridge had been blown up. So Father Derlon was kept very busy ferrying peasants and stray soldiers from bank to bank. One day three German patrols came along. Charles was standing by the bridge, watching his father sitting in the wherry. The boy stepped down into his underground room to get some tobacco. He was gone only five minutes. When he came back, the three Germans said to him: "Your father is dead." It was so. They had climbed the bridge, and fired three times; one explosive bullet had entered the ferryman's head, and two had shattered his arm. "The little one came home crying," said Madame Derlon. "Since that moment, the little one left home without telling me. He did not send me any news of himself. I searched everywhere to try to find a trace of him. Monsieur Louis Marin, the Deputy, told me he had seen a boy like my little one following the soldiers. Actually he had been adopted by the 95th Territorial Regiment." He told the soldiers that he had just seen his father killed by the Germans. One of the captains took him under his protection. The boy insisted on becoming a fighter. He was brave and they made him Corporal. He fell wounded in action, winning the Croix de Guerre. Charles Derlon, the little Corporal of the 95th Infantry, has a bright open face, but it is a face into which has passed the look of responsibility. In one moment, he became a man, and he has that quiet dignity of a boy whom older men respect and make a comrade of. He holds himself with the trim shoulders and straight carriage of a little soldier of France. One of us asked him: "And weren't you afraid, my boy, of the fight?" "It is all the same to me," he replied, "when I get used to it." The Little French Corporal, who joined the army at 14 years of age and, wounded, won the Cross of War. The CurÉ of Triaucourt (at the right) who stayed with his people when the village was burned. Next him, in trench helmet, stands one of the thousands of French priests who serve by day and night at the front, rescuing the wounded, and cheering the fighting men. "And why," we pressed him, "did you run away without going to your mother? Didn't you think she might be anxious?" "Because I knew very well," he said, "that she would not want to let me go." "And you are away from the army now, 'on permission'?" we asked. Very proudly he answered: "No, Monsieur. I am on leave of convalescence for three months. I have been wounded in three places, two wounds in my arm, and one in my leg." VITHE GOOD CURÉ What was true of Joan of Arc is true to-day. There is no leadership like the power of a holy spirit. It lends an edge to the tongue in dealing with unworthy enemies. It gives dignity to sudden death. Religion, where it is sincere, is still a mighty power in the lives of simple folk to lift them to greatness. Out beyond Rheims, at the front line trenches, the tiny village of BÉtheny is knocked to pieces. The parish church is entirely destroyed except for the front wall. Against that wall, an altar has been built, where the men of the front line gather for service. Over the altar I read the words Que le Coeur de JÉsus sauve la France. In that name many in France are working. Such a one is Paul Viller, curÉ of Triaucourt. The burning of the village is the world's end for a peasant, because the village was his world. When the peasants of Triaucourt saw their little local world rocking, they turned to the curÉ. He was ready. "It is better to run," said the Mayor; "they kill, those Germans." As the curÉ said to the German lieutenant who tried to force him up the bell-tower, "That ascension will give me the vertigo," so he felt about running away: his legs were not built for it. He would like to "oblige," but he was not fashioned for such flights. CurÉ Viller is 55 years old, short and ruddy and sturdy. In his books and his travel, and wellgrounded Latin education, he is far removed from the simple villagers he serves. But he has learned much from them. He has taken on their little ways. He has their simplicity which is more distinguished than the manners of cities. With them and with him I felt at home. That is because he was at home with himself, at home in life. His house was full of travel pictures—Brittany fishermen and nooks of scenery. He had the magazine litter, scattered through all the rooms, of a reading man who cannot bear to destroy one printed thing that has served a happy hour. His volumes ranged through theology up to the history of Thiers. His desk was the desk of an executive, orderly, pigeon-holed, over which the transactions of a village flow each day. A young priest entered and stated a case of need. The curÉ opened a little drawer, peeled off five franc notes from a bundle, and saw the young man to the door. The curÉ talked with us about the Germans. We asked him how the peasants felt toward them, after the burning and the murders. "I will tell you how the village electrician felt," replied he. "He came back after the troops had left and took a look about the village. "'If I ever get hold of those Germans, I'll chew them up,' he said to me. "'Some of them are still here,' I replied. "'Show them to me quick,' he demanded. "'They are in the church—grievously wounded.' "We went there. A German was lying too high on his stretcher, groaning from his wound and the uncomfortable position. "'Here, you, what are you groaning about?' thundered the electrician. He lit a cigarette and puffed at it, as he glared at his enemy. "'Uncomfortable, are you? I'll fix you,' he went on, sternly. Very gently he eased the German down into the softer part of the stretcher, and tucked in his blankets. "'Now, stop your groaning,' he commanded. He stood there a moment in silence, then burst out again angrily: "'What are you eyeing me for? Want a cigarette, do you?' "He pulled out a cigarette, put it in the lips of the wounded man and lit it. Then he came home with me and installed electric lights for me. That was the way he chewed up the Germans. "As for me, I lost twenty pounds of weight because of those fellows. After they have been in a room, it is a chaos: men's clothing, women's undergarments, petticoats, skirts, shoes, napkins, cloths, hats, papers, boxes, trunks, curtains, carpets, furniture overturned and broken, communicants' robes—everything in a mess. I have seen them take bottles of gherkins, cherries, conserves of vegetables, pots of grease, lard, hams, everything they could eat or drink. What they couldn't carry, they destroyed. They opened the taps of wine casks, barrels of oil and vinegar, and set flowing the juice of fruits ready for distillation. "The official pillage of precious objects which are to be sent to Germany is directed by an officer. He has a motor car and men. I have sometimes asked for vouchers for the objects, stolen in that way. The vouchers are marked with the signature of the officer doing the requisitioning, and with the stamp of the regiment. But who will do the paying, and when will they do it? The plunderer who takes bottles "'Thanks, good people, we will drink to your health.' "They don't always have good luck with their pillage. A Boche, who is an amateur of honey, rummages a hive. The valiant little bees hurl themselves on the thief and give him such a face that he can't open his mouth or his eyes for a couple of days. A Boche once held out to me a handful of papers which he took for checks of great value. They were receipts filched from the drawers of Madame Albert Fautellier. The biter was well bitten. "When the Germans entered my house they held revolvers in their hand. It is so always and everywhere. If all they are asking of you is a match, or a word of advice, the Boche takes out his revolver from its holster, and plunges it back in, when he has got what he wishes. With a revolver bullet he shoots a steer, and knocks down a pig with the butt of his rifle. The animals are skinned. He doesn't take anything but the choice morsels. He leaves the rest in the middle of the street, or a court or garden, the head, the carcass and the hide." No man in France had a busier time during the German occupation than this village curÉ. He went on with his recital: "On Sunday morning, the Germans set our church clock by German time, but the bell was recalcitrant and continued to sound the French hour, while the hands galloped on according to their whim. While they were here, the hour didn't matter. We lost all notion of time. We hardly knew what day it was. My cellar is deep and well vaulted. I placed there a pick-ax, spades and a large shovel. Every precaution was taken. I placed chairs, and brought down water. Wax tapers, jammed in the necks of empty bottles, gave us light enough. That Sunday and the days following I had the pleasure of offering hospitality to 76 persons. My parishioners knew that my home was wide open to them. When you are in numbers, you have less fear. "The men went into the garden to listen and see whether the battle was coming closer. I recited the rosary in a loud tone. The little children knelt on their knees on the pavement and prayed. Cavalry and infantry passed my door in silence. Once only, I heard the Teutons chanting; it was the third day of the battle: a regiment, muddy and frightened, reentered Friaucourt chanting. "The hours go slowly. Suddenly we saw to the East a high column of smoke. Can that be the village of Evres on fire? I think it is, but to reassure my people I tell them that it is a flax-mill burning, or the smoke of cannon. At night we sleep on "Monday was a day of glorious sunshine. Nature seemed to be en fÊte. After I had buried seven French and German dead, and was walking home, I saw coming toward me Madame ProcÈs, her daughter HÉlÈne, in tears, a German officer and a soldier. The officer asked me: "'Do you know these ladies?' "'Very well,' I answered, 'they are honest people of my parish.' "'All right. This soldier has not shown proper respect to the young lady. He will be rebuked. If he had gone further he would be shot.' "The officer then reprimanded the soldier in my presence. The man, stiff at attention, listened to the rebuke in such a resentful, hateful way that I thought to myself there is going to be trouble. The soldier, his rifle over his shoulder, went toward the Mayor's office. "About twenty minutes later I heard firing from the direction of the Mayor's office, two shots, several shots, then a regular fusilade. The sullen soldier had gone down there, clapped his hand to his head, said he was wounded, and fired. When I heard the first firing, I thought it was only one more of their "But at the sound of these shots the Germans ran out from the houses and the streets, rifle and revolver in hand, shouting to me: "'Your people have fired on us.' "I protested with all my power, saying that all our arms had been put in the Mayor's office, and that no one of us had done the firing. But they only shouted the louder: "'Your people have fired on us.' "Flames broke out in the homes of Mr. Edouard Gand, and Mr. Gabriel GÉminel. We saw the Boches set them on fire with incendiary fuses. Later on, we found the remnants of those fuses. "Women began running to me, weeping and saying: "'CurÉ, save my father.' 'My child is in the flames.' 'They are killing my children.' "The shooting went on. The fire spread and made a hot cauldron of two streets. Cattle and crops and houses burned. "Then a strange thing happened. Some Germans aided in saving clothing and furniture from two or three of the houses. But most of them watched the destruction, standing silent and showing neither pleasure nor regret. I could tell it was no new "Our people ran out, chased by angry Germans who fired on them as if they were hunter's game. Jules Gand, 58 years old, was shot down at the threshold of his door. A seventeen-year-old boy named Georges Lecourtier, taking refuge with me, was shot. Alfred Lallemand hid himself in a kitchen. His body was riddled with bullets. We found it burned and lying in the rubbish, eight days later. He was 54 years old. Men, women and children fled into the gardens and the fields. They forded the river without using the bridge which was right there. They ran as far as Brizeaux and Senard. My cook ran. She had a packet of my bonds, which I had given her for safe-keeping, and she had a basket of her own valuables. In her fear she threw away her basket, and kept my bonds. "The daughter of one of our women, shot in this panic, came to me and said: "'My mother had fifty thousand francs, somewhere about her.' "The body had been buried in haste, with none of the usual rites paid the dead, of washing and undressing. So no examination had been made. We dug the body up and found a bag. "'Is that the bag?' I asked the daughter. "'It looks like it,' she replied. It was empty. "A day later we found another bag in the dead woman's room, and in it were the bonds for fifty thousand francs. That shows the haste and panic in which our people had fled, picking up the wrong thing, leaving the thing of most value. "It was in the garden of the ProcÈs family that the worst was done. It was HÉlÈne ProcÈs, you remember, who was insulted by the German soldier. The grandmother, 78 years old, Miss Laure Mennehand, the aunt, who was 81 years old, the mother, 40 years old, and HÉlÈne, who was 18, ran down the garden. They placed a little ladder against the low wire fence which separated their back yard from their neighbor's. HÉlÈne was the first one over, and turned to help the older women. The Germans had followed them, and riddled the three women with bullets. They fell one on the other. HÉlÈne hid herself in the cabbages. "That same evening some of the villagers went with me to the garden. The women looked as if they were sleeping. They had no trace of suffering in the face. Miss Mennehand had her little toilet bag, containing 1,000 francs, fastened to her left wrist, and was still holding her umbrella in her right hand. Her brains had fallen out. I collected them on a salad leaf and buried them in the garden. "We carried the three bodies to their beds in their home. In one bed, as I opened it, I saw a gold "'Your people fired on our soldiers,' said a Captain to me next day. 'I'll show you the window.' "He led me down the street, and pointed. "'It is unfortunate you have chosen that window,' I replied to him; 'at the time you started burning our village the only person in the house was a paralytic man, who was burned in his bed.' "It was the house of Jean Lecourtier, 70 years old. "In front of the PoincarÉ house, I met a General, who, they said, was the Duke of WÜrttemberg. He said to me: "'I am glad to see you, CurÉ. I congratulate you. You are the first chaplain I have seen. Generally, when we get to a village, the mayor and the curÉ have run away. We officers are angry at what has taken place here. You have treated us well.' "'Perhaps you will be able to stop the horror,' I said to him. "'Ah, what can you expect? It is war. There are bad soldiers in your army and in ours.' "The next day I saw him getting ready to enter a magnificent car. His arm was bandaged. "'You are wounded, General?' I asked him. "'No, not that,' he answered. "'A strained ligament (entorse)?' I asked. "'No,' he said, 'don't tell me the French word,' He opened a pocket dictionary with his unhurt hand, wetting his finger and turning the pages. "'It is a sprain (luxation),' he said. "That is the way they learn a language as they go along. "'You are leaving us?' I asked. "Yes, I am going to my own country to rest." The afternoon had passed while we were talking. We rose to make our good-bys. "Come with me," said the curÉ. He led us down the village street, to a small house, whose backyard is a little garden on the little river. All the setting was small and homelike and simple, like the village itself and the curÉ. A young woman stepped out from the kitchen to greet us. "This is the girl," said Father Viller. HÉlÈne ProcÈs is twenty years old, with the dark coloring, soft, slightly olive skin, brown eyes, of a thousand other young women in the valley of the Meuse. But the look in her eyes was the same look that a friend of mine carries, though it is now twelve years since the hour when her mother was burned to death on board the General Slocum. Sudden horror has fixed itself on the face of this girl of Triacourt, whose mother and grandmother and aunt were shot in front of her in one moment. She led us through the garden. There were only a few yards of it: just a little homely place. She brought us to the fence—a low wire affair, cheaply made, and easy to get over. "The bullets were splashing around me," she said. The tiny river, which had hardly outgrown its beginnings as a brook, went sliding past. It seemed a quiet place for a tragedy. VIITHE THREE-YEAR-OLD WITNESS Two persons came in the room at LunÉville where I was sitting. One was Madame Dujon, and the other was her granddaughter. Madame Dujon had a strong umbrella, with a crook handle. Her tiny granddaughter had a tiny umbrella which came as high as her chin. As the grandmother talked, the sadness of the remembrance filled her eyes with tears. Her voice had pain in it, and sometimes the pain, in spite of her control, came through in sobbing. The little girl's face was burned, and the wounds had healed with scars of ridged flesh on the little nose and cheek. The emotion of the grandmother passed over into the child. With a child's sensitiveness she caught each turn of the suffering. Troubled by the voice overhead, she looked up and saw the grandmother's eyes filled with tears. Her eyes filled. When her grandmother, telling of the dying boy, sobbed, the tiny girl sobbed. The story of the murder tired the grandmother, and she leaned on her umbrella. The little girl put her chin on her tiny umbrella, and rested it there. Madame Dujon said: "I will try to tell you the beginning of what I have passed through, Monsieur, but I do not promise that I shall arrive at the end. It is too hard. The day of the twenty-fifth of August, which was a Monday——" As she spoke her words were cut by sobs. She went on: "When the Germans came to our house, my son had to go all over the house to find things that they wanted. I did not understand them, and they were becoming menacing. I said to them: "'I am not able to do any better. Fix things yourself. I give you everything here. I am going to a neighbor's house.'" She went with the tiny grand-girl, who was three years old, her son, Lucien, fourteen years old, and another son, sixteen. The Germans came here too, breaking in the windows, and firing their rifles. The house was by this time on fire. The face of the little girl was burned. "My poor boys wished to make their escape, but the fourteen-year-old was more slow than the other, because the little fellow was a bit paralyzed, and he already had his hands and body burned. He tried to come out as far as the pantry. I saw the poor little thing stretched on the ground, dying. "'My God,' he said, 'leave me. I am done for. Mamma, see my bowels.' "I saw his bowels. They were hanging like two pears from the sides of his stomach. Just then the Germans came, shooting. I said to them: "'He has had enough.' "The little one turned over and tried to get the strength to cry out to them: "'Gang of dirty——' ("Bande de sal——") "Every one called to us to come out of the fire. The fire was spreading all over the house. I did not want to understand what they were saying. I went upstairs again where the little girl was, to try to save her (see still the marks which she received). I succeeded, not without hurt, in carrying away the little girl out of the flames. "I had to leave my boy in the flames, and, like a mad person, save myself with the little girl. "I have two sons-in-law, of whom one is the father of this little girl here. Look at her face marked with scars." "Yes. They burned me," said the tiny girl. She held up her hand to the scars on her face. "My other little boy escaped from the fire. He was hidden all one day in a heap of manure. He did not wish to make me sad by telling how his brother had cried out to die." Madame Dujon sobbed quietly and could not go "Madame has not told you—the Germans finished off the poor child. Seeing that he was nearly dead, they threw him into the fire and closed the door." VIIIMIRMAN AND "MES ENFANTS" When I went across to France there was one man whom I wished to meet. It was the Prefect of the Meurthe-et-Moselle. I wanted to meet him because he is in charge of the region where German frightfulness reached its climax. Leon Mirman has maintained a high morale in that section of France which has suffered most, and which has cause for despair. Here it was that the Germans found nothing that is human alien to their hate. When they encountered a nun, a priest, or a church, they reacted to the sacred thing and to the religious person with desecration, violation and murder. But that was only because there were many Roman Catholics in the district. They had no race or religious prejudice. When they came to LunÉville there was a synagogue and a rabbi. They burned the synagogue and killed the rabbi. As the sun falling round a helpless thing, their hate embraced all grades of weakness in Lorraine. In Nomeny they distinguished themselves by a fury But not of suffering only. At no place is France stronger than at this point of greatest strain. The district is dotted with great names of the humble—names unknown before the war, and now to be known for as long as France is France. Here Sister Julie held back the German Army and saved her wounded from the bayonet. Here the staunch Mayor of LunÉville and his good wife stayed with their people through the German occupation. Leon Mirman is the Prefect of all this region. He was Director of Public Charities in Paris, but when war broke out he asked to be sent to the post of danger. So he was sent to the city of Nancy to rule the Department of Meurthe-et-Moselle. The Prefect of a Department in France is the same as the Governor of a State in America. But his office in peace is as nothing compared to his power in time of war. He can suspend a Mayor and remove an entire population from one village to another. The morale of France for that section is dependent on the reaction he makes to danger and stress. The answer of the ravaged region to the murder But the parents were agreed on one thing: it was no place for children. So these and other hundreds of little ones have been brought together. The Prefect means that these children, some of whom have seen their homes burned, their mothers hunted by armed men, shall have the evil memory wiped out. He is working that they shall have a better chance than if the long peace had continued. The I attended the classes of domestic science, where little girls plan menus for the family meal. Overhead, the aeroplanes spot the sky. Three times in my days in the district they came and "laid their eggs," in the phrase of the soldiers. Sometimes a mother is killed, sometimes a sister, but the peaceful work goes on. The blackboard is scribbled over with chalk. Piping voices repeat their lesson. I saw the tiny boys at school. I saw the older boys working at trades. Some of them were busy at carpentry, remaking the material for their own village, bureaus, tables and chairs. We talked with boys and girls from Nomeny, where the slaughter fell on women with peculiar severity. These children had seen the Germans come in. Wherever I went I met children who had seen the hand grenades thrown, their homes burning. I visited many hundreds of these children at school. They are orderly and busy. It will take more than fire and murder from unjust men to spoil life for the new generation of France. For that insolence has released a good will in a greater race than the race that sought to offend these little ones. And the same care has been put on the older refugees. I saw the barracks of the famous Twentieth Army Corps—the Iron Divisions—and of the He has given me the statement that follows for the American people. Let us remember in reading it that it comes from the highest official in France in charge of the region where systematic atrocity was practiced in an all-inclusive way. On this chance section of the world's great area, a supreme and undeserved suffering fell. Monsieur Mirman makes here the first official statement of the war on the subject of reprisals. There is something touching in his desire for our understanding. France hoped we would see her agony with the eyes she once turned toward us. She still hopes on, and sends this message of her representative: "I wish you to understand in what spirit we began the war in France, and especially in this district. It was our intention to follow the rules of what you call in English 'Fair Play.' We wished to carry on the war as we had carried on other wars, to our risk "Mention is often made of these two townships where the inhabitants suffered the most severely from the invasion of the enemy, but in many other townships, a long list, the Germans acted in the same way. They burned the streets, they killed men, women and children without cause. Always they gave the pretext, to excuse themselves, that the civilian population had fired on them. On that point, I bring you my personal testimony: I say to you on my honor that this German allegation is absolutely false. "At my request I was appointed the Prefect of Meurthe-et-Moselle on August 9, 1914. In all the townships of this Department, on my arrival, I requested in the most urgent terms that the inhabitants should not give way to restlessness, and should not resort to a single act which I called an unruly act, "If isolated instances of that sort did take place, they could not be admitted as justifying the total of systematic crimes committed by the Germans, but I have not been able to lay hold of a single instance. "I will cite two incidents which will mark out for you, in a clear-cut way, what I believe to be "the French method." "At the beginning of the war a German aviator threw bombs on a town near Nancy. The Mayor, revolted, went to the town-hall, where the arms had been deposited, and took a hunting rifle and fired at the aviator. It is clear that the German aviator was committing a crime contrary to all the laws of war, but I held that the Mayor of that town, by himself firing in that way on a criminal, was disobeying the laws of his country. I proceeded to disciplinary measures against the Mayor: I suspended him from office for many weeks. "Another incident: In the first days of August, 1914, the Germans entering Badonviller, exasperated perhaps by the resistance which our soldiers of "I arrived the next day. The French troops had reentered Badonviller and had taken some German soldiers prisoner. The prisoners were being led to the town-hall. The fires had not yet been put out, and the women whom the Germans had murdered were still unburied. "The Mayor had seen the terrible spectacle. He had seen his young wife murdered at his doorstep in front of her little children. He himself had suffered violence. But he had stuck to his post, and had continued to carry on the affairs of his town. While the prisoners were being led along the inhabitants of Badonviller, who had seen these crimes, recognized the prisoners and surrounded them, threatening them and crying out against them. The Mayor threw himself resolutely between the prisoners and his people. This Mayor, who had had his own flesh and blood murdered and his heart torn, declared with emphasis that those prisoners, no matter what crimes they had committed, were protected by the law, and that it was not permitted to any civilian to touch a hair of their head. "Because he had called to order some of his people whose anger was natural enough, because he had "By these examples, and I could cite many others, you will be able to estimate the ideas with which the French began the war. "The French in more than one instance have run against, not armies, but veritable bands organized for crime. I say 'organized,' and that is the significant fact. In a war when individual accidental excesses are committed, tragic situations, to be sure, arise, but we ought not to conclude that we have found ourselves face to face with a general organization of cruelty and destruction. "In the townships of which I am speaking, it is by the order of the heads that the crimes have been committed. They are not the crimes of individuals: there has been a genuine organization of murder. It is that which will be thrown into the light by the testimony which you will gather—notably at GerbÉviller. "Then I call your attention to what the city of "From the beginning of August, 1914, Nancy has been empty of troops, the numerous barracks have been converted into hospitals; some were used as asylums for our refugees. Nothing remained at Nancy, nothing has come since then. You won't find at the present time a single cannon, a single depot of ammunition, no fortification, no military work. For a garrison there are some dozens of old territorials, barely sufficient in number to keep order. "On the Fourth of September an enemy aviator threw bombs on the square where the Cathedral stands, killing a little girl and an old man. "A few days later, knowing that they were not going to be able to enter Nancy, furious at the thought that they would soon be forced to retire and that they must give up their cherished dreams, in the night of the ninth and tenth of September, those unfortunate men advanced two pieces of artillery under cover of a storm, bombarded our peaceful city, and ripped to pieces houses in various quarters of the town, murdering women and children. "A military point to that bombardment? I challenge any one to state it. Act of cruelty, simply, an act of outlawry. "Ever since then acts against Nancy are multiplied. The list is long of victims stricken in Nancy "And what I say of Nancy is true of the other towns, particularly at LunÉville, where a bomb falling in the full market killed 45 persons, of whom 40 were women. "Adding childishness to violence, with a craving for the histrionic, obsessed by the desire to strike the imagination (or let us say more simply having the souls of 'cabotins'), these outlaws have conceived the bombardment of Nancy by a 380 cannon on the first of January—New Year's, the day of gifts—and on the first of July. In that New Year bombardment they so arranged it that the first shell fell on Nancy at the last stroke of midnight. I will show the little furnished house which that shell crushed, killing six persons, of whom four were women. "For a long while we were content to suffer those crimes, protesting in the name of law. We did not wish to defend ourselves. We shrink from the thought of reprisals. But public opinion ended by forcing the hand of the Government. Unanimously the nation has demanded that, each time an undefended French town is bombarded by the Germans by aeroplane, Zeppelin or cannon, a reply shall be "I wish to say to you, and I beg you to make it known to your noble nation: it is not with serenity that we see our French soldiers do that work. It is with profound sadness that we resign ourselves to those reprisals. Those methods of defense are imposed upon us. Since all considerations of humanity are to-day alien to the German soul, we are reduced for the protection of our wives and our children to the policy of reprisals and to the assassination in our turn of the children and the women in Germany. The Germans have vociferously rejoiced in the crimes committed by their soldiers; they have made an illumination for the day of the Lusitania crime; they have delighted in the thought that on the first of January the children of Nancy received, as New Year's presents, shells from a 380 cannon. The acts of reprisal to which we are forced do not rejoice us in the least; they sadden us. We speak of them with soberness. And we have here reason for hating Kultur all the more. We French hate the Germans less for the crimes which they have committed on us than for the acts of violence contrary to the laws of war which they have forced us to commit in our turn, and for the reprisals on their children and their women. "I thank you for having come here. You will look about you, you will ask questions, you will easily see the truth. That truth you will make known to your great and free nation. We shall await with confidence the judgment of its conscience." IXAN APPEAL TO THE SMALLER AMERICAN COMMUNITIES Burned villages are like ruins of an ancient civilization. To wander through them was as if I were stepping among the bones of a dead age. Only the green fields that flowed up to the wrecked cottages and the handful of sober-faced peasants—only these were living in that belt of death that cuts across the face of France, like the scar from a whip on a prisoner's cheek. French soil is sacred to a Frenchman. I saw a little shop with pottery and earthenware in the window: vases, and jars, and toilet cases. The sign read: "La terre de nos GrÉs—c'est la mÊme terre que dÉfendent nos soldats dans les tranchÉes." ("The earth which made these wares is the same earth which our soldiers defend in the trenches.") I want the people at home to understand this war. So I am telling of it in terms that are homely. I asked the authorities to let me wander through the villages and talk with the inhabitants. What a village suffers, what a storekeeper suffers, will mean I had thought that I had some slight idea of French spirit. I had thought that five months with their soldiers at Melle, Dixmude, and Nieuport had given me a hint of France in her hour of greatness. But I found that not even the cheery first line men, not even the democratic officers, are the best of France. They are lovable and wonderful. But the choicest persons in France are the women in the devastated districts. They can make or break morale. What the people back of the trenches are feeling, the talk that they make in the village inn—these are the decisive factors that give heart to an army or that crumble its resistance. No government, no military staff can continue an unpopular war. But by these people who have lost their goods by fire, and their relatives by assassination, the spirit of France is reinforced. The war is safe in their hands. The heaviest of all the charges that rests against Germany is that of preparedness in equipment for incendiary destruction. They had not only prepared an army for fighting the enemy troops with rifle, machine-gun and howitzer. They had supplied that army with a full set of incendiary material for making war on non-combatants. Immediately on crossing the frontier, they laid waste peaceful villages by fire. And that wholesale burning was not accomplished by extemporized means. It was done by instruments That military hierarchy which extends from the sergeant to the Emperor, controlling every male in Germany, came down upon Belgium and France, prepared to crush, not alone the military power, but every spiritual resource of those nations. I have a bag of German incendiary pastilles given me by Jules Gaxotte, Mayor of Revigny. On one side is inked
On the other side
indicating the company and the regiment and the division. The pellets are square, the size of a fingernail. They burn with intensity, like a Fourth of July torch. That little bag has enough bits of lively flame in it, to burn an ancient church and destroy a village of homes. Packets like it have seared the But not only have the Germans dropped their scraps of evidence as they went along, as if they were playing hare-and-hounds. They have put into words what they mean. The German War Book, issued to officers, outlines their new enlarged warfare. Madame Dehan of GerbÉviller said to me: "A high officer arrived this same day (when she was prisoner) and said: "'It is necessary to put to death the people here. They must be shot. This nation must disappear.'" Monsieur Guilley of Nomeny told me how Charles Michel, a boy of seventeen, was killed. He said: "A patrol of scouts, composed of six Bavarians, said: 'We are going down there to kill, yes, kill all the people of Nomeny.' "Arrived at Nomeny, they asked where the farm was. They then came along the side of the farm where there was a little door. Three entered there, the other three came around by the big door. We were ready for supper, sitting around a table. We heard blows on blows of the bayonets before the doors, with cries and exclamations in German. They came into the place where we were sitting to eat, and placed themselves facing us, with nothing to say. They took all that they wanted from the table. Five of them left, going by a way in front of the farm. The sixth stayed there, ruminating and thinking. I believed that he was meditating to himself a crime, but I thought to myself, 'They wouldn't kill a man as they would kill a rabbit.' "We went into the kitchen. The man was always there. I closed the door. Two men of my farm were eating in the kitchen. Now, from the kitchen leading into the stable there was a door. The little Michel went out by this door. He did not see the German who was there. The soldier fired at him. "How long did he remain there thinking before he accomplished his crime?" we asked. "Plenty long, a good quarter of an hour. He was a Bavarian, big and strong." I find that strange racial brooding and melancholy in the diary of a sub-officer of the Landwehr. On September 3, 1914, he writes: "It is well enough that Germany has the advantage everywhere up to the present; I am not able to conquer a singular impression, a presentiment that, in spite of all that, the end will be bad." In his case it is accompanied by horror at the wrong-doing of his comrades, a noble pity for wasted France. But in others, that brooding turned to sudden cruelty. Any act, however savage, is a relief from that dark inner burden. Madame Dauger of Gondrecourt-Aix (Meuse) said to me: "On the night of Christmas, 1914, with fixed bayonets they came to get us to dance with them—the dances were entirely unseemly. Ten persons were forced out to dance. We danced from five in the evening till half past six." "Were they soldiers or officers?" "Only officers; and when they were sufficiently It was Christmas night—the time to dance. So they chose partners, by the compulsion of the bayonet, with the women of an invaded and outraged race. The same rich, childlike sentiment floods their eyes with tears at thought of the mother at home. Cruel, sentimental, melancholy, methodical, they are a race that needs wise leadership. And they have not received that. They have been led by men who do not believe in them. Every evil trait has been played upon, to the betrayal of the simple rather primitive personality, which in other hands would have gone gently all its days. But the homely goodness has been stultified, and we have a race, of our own stock, behaving like savages under the cool guidance of its masters. The next piece of testimony was given me by a woman who was within a few days of giving birth to a child by a German father. I withhold her name and the name of her village. "I was maltreated by them, Monsieur. They abused me. Last year in the month of October, 1915, they arrived. I was learning how to take care of the cattle, to help my father, who already had enough with what the Germans required him to do outside in the fields. My father had not returned; I was entirely alone. I was in the bottom of the "Have you told your parents or any one?" "No. Never to a person, Monsieur. I am too much ashamed. But I always think of it. My eldest child is eleven years old, the next seven years, the third six years, and the last I have had since the war. The one I wait for now, of course, I do not count on bringing up." Monsieur Mirman, the Prefect, replied: "Since you must have him, you will tell me at the time, so that I may take action and give you assistance." Through the courtesy of Mrs. Charles Prince, I spent an afternoon with a French nurse, Marie Louise Vincent, of Launois, in the Ardenne. The Germans came. She was on the road, one hundred yards away, when she saw this: "I saw an old French beggar, whom everybody knew, hobbling down the road. He passed through our village every week. He was called "PÈre NoËl" (Father Christmas) because of his big beard. He was seventy-five years old. It was the 29th of August, about 8 o'clock in the morning. Officers ordered "That day the soldiers burned the first four houses of our village. They made a big blaze, and if the wind had turned the whole village would have burned. "The commander came to our hospital. He patted me on the cheek and said he had a big daughter at home like me, and she was in Red Cross work like me." "He said he was very thirsty. I gave him three glasses of water. I had good wine in the cellar, but not for him. He talked with the doctor and me. He asked for the Burgomaster. We said he had gone away. He asked for those next in authority to the Burgomaster. We said they had gone away. "'Why? Why?' asked the commander. 'The Belgians have told you we are barbarians, that is why. We have done things a little regrettable, but we were forced to it by the Belgians. The colonel whose place I took was killed by a little girl, fourteen years old. She fired at him point-blank. We shot the girl and burned the village.' "Then the French doctor with me asked the commander "'Why, that—that's nothing,' said the commander. ('Ce n'est rien. C'est tout petit peu.') "A sous-officer came in to our hospital. He showed us a bottle of Bordeaux which he had taken from the cellar of one of our houses. He said: "'I know it is good wine. I sold it myself to the woman a couple of months ago. I thought she wouldn't have had time to drink it all up.' "'You know France?' asked the doctor. "'I know it better than many Frenchmen,' replied the officer. 'For eight years I have been a wine agent in the Marne district.' "'At Rheims?' "'At Rheims.' "'For the house of Pommery?' "'No, no. Not that house.' "After the fighting of August 27 and 28, some of the peasants began to come back to their homes. Near us at the little village of Thin-le-Moutier a few returned. Nine old men and boys came back on the morning of the 29th. The Germans put them against a wall and shot them. I saw traces of blood on the wall and bullet marks. The youngest boy was too frightened to stand quietly against the wall. He struggled. So they tied him to a signpost. I "A few days later a poor woman came along the road, asking every one she met if anybody had seen her boys. They were among the nine that had been shot. "A sous-officer, a Jew named Goldstein, a second lieutenant, came to our hospital. While our French doctor was held downstairs Lieutenant Goldstein took out the medical notes about the cases from the pocket of the doctor's military coat. I protested. I said that it was not permitted by international law. "'What do you make of the convention of Geneva?' I asked him. "'Ah, I laugh at it" he answered. "He was a professor of philosophy at Darmstadt." With all the methodical work of murder and destruction the figure of the officer in command is always in the foreground. The CurÉ of GerbÉviller said to me: "They ordered me to go on my knees before the major. As I did not go down on the ground, an officer, who was there, quickly gave me a blow with the bayonet in the groin. "'Your parishioners are the traitors, the assassins; they have fired on our soldiers with rifles; they are going to get fire, all of your people,' the major said to me. "I replied, No, that was not possible, that at GerbÉviller there were only old men, women, and children. "'No, I have seen them; the civilians have fired. Without doubt, it is not you who have fired, but it is you who have organized the resistance; it is you who have excited the patriotism of your parishioners, above all, among your young men. Why have you taught your young men the use of arms?' "Without giving me time to respond, they led me away. They took me to the middle of the street in front of my house, with five of my poor old ones. A soldier was going to find a tent cord and tie us all together. They did not permit me to go into my house. They brought out afterwards before me five other of my parishioners, as well as three little chasseurs À pied that they were going to make prisoners. We waited there an hour. I saw passing a "At that moment a captain on horseback arrived in front of us, reined up his horse in excitement, pulled his foot out of the stirrup and kicked our chasseurs in the groin. One of my people who was with me cried out: 'Oh, the pigs....'" The Great German Staff believe these things are buried deep in burned cottages and village graves. They believe an early peace will wipe out the memory of that insolence. They have forgotten the thousands of eye-witnesses, of whom I have met some dozens, and of whom I am one. They cannot kill us who live to tell what we have seen them do. They cannot destroy a thousand diaries of German soldiers that tell the abominations they committed. This record will become a part of history. They thought to wipe out their cruelty in success. But the names of their victims are known, and the circumstance of their death. Not in China alone have they made their face a horror for a thousand years, but wherever there is respect for weakness and pity for little children. XTHE EVIDENCE I have told in these chapters of the peasants of Northern France, and I have given their life in war in their own words. I want to tell here how this material was gathered, because the power of its appeal rests on the recognition of its accuracy. A small part of the testimony I followed in long hand as it was spoken. The rest, three-quarters of the total testimony, was taken down in short-hand by one or the other of two stenographers. I have used about one-fifth of the collected material. My companions were the well-known American writers, Will Irwin and Herbert Corey. Other companions have been Lieutenant Louis Madelin, the distinguished historian, whose work on the French Revolution was crowned by the French Academy; Lieutenant Jules Basdevant, Professor of International Law at the University of Grenoble; Lieutenant Monod, once of Columbia University, and always a friend of our country; Captain Callet, Professor of Geography at Saint-Cyr, now of the Etat In the civil world the corroborating witnesses are equally authoritative. I was accompanied, for much of the territory visited, by Leon Mirman, Prefect of the Department of Meurthe-et-Moselle. It is no easy job to penetrate the war zone, wander through villages at leisure, and establish relations of confidence with the peasants. The whole experience would have been impossible but for the help of Émile Hovelaque. This distinguished essayist, Director of Public Education, went with us to all the villages. The success of the visit was due to him. He understands American public opinion more accurately than any other man whom I have met abroad. His human sympathy wins the peasants. A woman brought me her burned granddaughter, five years old. A mother brought me the cap of her fourteen-year-old son, and the rope with which the Germans had hanged him. A woman told The pain it cost them to tell these things I shall not forget. There was one decent married woman, within a few weeks of the birth of her child by a German father, who had been outraged by German soldiers. She had never before told her story, because of the shame of it. She had not told her parents nor her sister. I cannot forget that she told it to me. I cannot rest easily till her suffering and the suffering of the others with whom I have been living for two years means something to my people at home. I have kept all personal feeling out of my record. It would have been unforgivable if, in rendering the ruin of Lorraine, I had given way to anger. But this I have not done. I have only added many days of detailed work on evidence that was already conclusive. But this coolness of reporting does not mean that I think these details of cruelty should leave us detached spectators. Let us remember these peasants when the Allies advance to the Rhine. Let us remember them when Belgium is indemnified, when Alsace and Lorraine are cut loose, when the German military power is crushed, when the individual officers who ordered Certain German officers must be executed. General Clauss must be executed. He has left a trail of blood. The officers in command of the 17th and the 60th Bavarian Regiments, who slaughtered the women, the children and the old men of GerbÉviller, must be executed. The officers of the 2nd and 4th Regiments of Bavarian Infantry, who murdered fifty men, women and children of Nomeny, in a cold, methodical hate, with a peculiar care for the women, must be executed. In the closing passages of Browning's "Ring and the Book," the aged prelate, about to go before his maker, is confronted with the task of giving judgment. Count Guido, intelligent and powerful, had murdered Pompilia and her parents. He did it by the aid of four assassins. Pope Innocent, eighty-six years old, is called on to decide whether the five guilty men shall be killed for their evil doings. Friends urge him to be merciful. The aged Pope replies: How it trips Silvery o'er the tongue. "Remit the death! So he orders that Count Guido and his henchmen be killed on the morrow. "Enough, for I may die this very night XISISTER JULIE This is the story of Sister Julie. The Germans entered her village of GerbÉviller, where she was head of the poor-house and hospital. As they came southward through the place they burned every house on every street, 475 houses. In a day they wiped out seven centuries of humble village history. In her little street they burned Numbers 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, and 12, but they did not burn Number 14, the house where Sister Julie lived. There they stopped, for she stopped them. And the twenty houses beyond her hospital still stand, because that August day there was a great woman in that little village. They killed men, women and children throughout the village, but they did not kill the thirteen French wounded soldiers whom she was nursing, nor the five Roman Catholic sisters whom she directed as Mother Superior. Outside of a half dozen generals, she is perhaps the most famous character whom the war has revealed, and one of the greatest personages whom France has produced: even France in her long history. The last days of GerbÉviller live in her story. I write her account word for word as she gives it. Her recital is touched with humor in spite of the horror that lay heaped around her. She raises the poignard of the German Colonel: you see it held over her head ready to strike. By pantomime she creates the old paralytic men, the hobbling women, the man who went "fou." The first woman of France: the peasant Sister Julie, wearing the ribbon of the Legion of Honor. She held up the German Army and saved the wounded French in her hospital. Because she remained through the days of fire and blood, and succored his troops, General Castelnau cited her in an Order of the Day. The Legion of Honor has placed its scarlet ribbon on the black of her religious dress. The great of France—the President and the Premier, senators and poets—have come to see her where she still lives on in the ruins of the little village. AmÉlie Rigard, whose religious name is Sister Julie, is a peasant woman, sixty-two years old, belonging to the Order of Saint Charles of Nancy. She is of the solid peasant type, with square chin and wide brown eyes. Everything about her is compact, deep-centered, close-growing; the fingers are stubby, the arms held closely to the body, and when the gesture comes it is a strong pushing out from the frame, as if pushing away a weight. Whenever she puts out power, she seems to be delivering a straight blow with the full weight of the body. Here follows the account in her own words, of the last days of GerbÉviller. The phrase that speaks through all her recital is "feu et sang," "fire and blood." The Germans said on entering that they would give "fire and blood" to the village. The reason was this: A handful of French chasseurs, about sixty in number, had held up the German SISTER JULIE'S STORY The Germans reached the LunÉville road at the entrance of GerbÉviller at 10 minutes after seven in the morning. They saw the barricades, for our troops had built a barricade, and they said to a woman, Madame BarthÉlemy: "Madame, remove the barricades." As she waited undecided for a few seconds, they said: "You refuse. Then fire and blood." They then began to set fire to all the houses and they shot six men. They threw a man into an oven, a baker, Joseph Jacques, a fine fellow of fifty years of age, married, with children. It was necessary to eat, even at GerbÉviller, and it was necessary to work out a way to make bread. The former baker had been mobilized, and his good old papa was infirm and unable to work. So Monsieur Jacques was busy at this time with the baking. They killed him when they came. It was about eight o'clock in the For a long time I did not believe it, but I have had a confirmation since. You will see how by what follows. When there was an attack in Champagne, a youth of GerbÉviller, Florentin, whose father was the gardener at the chateau, found himself in front of certain Germans who wished to give themselves up as prisoners. He looked at them, and said: "You are not 'Comrades' ('Kamerade' is the word the German calls out when he surrenders). You know what you did at GerbÉviller. So don't call yourselves 'Comrades.'" A German said to him, "It was I who flung the man into the oven. I was ordered to do it, or else I should have been 'kaput.'" (This is slang for a "dead one"). A search was then made, and in the oven was found the thigh bone of the unfortunate baker. I have seen many other things. I have seen a man, BarthÉlemy of Chanteheux. I have seen that man spread out spitted on the ground by a bayonet. Here is what they have done. It was half-past six in the evening. I heard their fifes. Our little chasseurs had retreated. The Germans had made fire and blood all the day long. I saw them and watched them well in this street. I was at the door. Yes, there were six of us at this door. They put fire to the houses, house by house, shouting as they In one of the burning houses a woman was living in her room on the first floor. Two Germans came to our house and said: "My sister, come quick and look for a woman who is in the fire." The woman was Madame Zinius. It is our sisters who went there at their risk and peril. The Germans had their destruction organized. In all the well-to-do houses they began by plundering. They did not burn these as they passed. A few minutes later we saw five or six vehicles draw up, the "Guimbardes," vans, for plundering and carrying away the linen and the clothing. Women came with these vans, young women, well dressed, rich enough. They were not "bad." [When the Germans captured a town, their organization of loot was sometimes carried out by women, who brought up motor lorries, which the soldiers filled with the plunder from the larger houses, and which the women then drove away. Sometimes these women were dressed as Red Cross nurses. I can continue the proof by other witnesses elsewhere than in GerbÉviller. The organization of murder, arson and pillage is participated in by German men and women.] Monsieur Martin had at his place many sewing-machines, I have told you that they threw persons into the fire. Monsieur Pottier was forced back into the fire. His wife moaned and called for help. "Help me get my husband out of the fire," she cried. "Go die with him," they answered her, and she, too, was pushed into the flames. "They" kept coming on, playing the fife. We awaited them at the door. Only thirteen wounded French soldiers had stayed with us. They had been scattered through the different rooms. But we put them up in one room in order to simplify the service and give them a bit of "coddling." We saw four officers on horseback approach. They dismounted in front of our town-hall, twenty meters away. They entered the building, and there they put everything upside down. They tumbled out all the waste paper, the entire office desk, determined to find the records. They remounted and rode up in front of our house. They sat there looking at us for a moment. They had the manner guttural and hard, which is the German way. They began speaking German. When they showed signs of listening to my reply, I said to them: "Speak French. That is the least courtesy you "You have French soldiers hidden in your house with their arms," said one of them. And he tramped hither and thither like a madman, and he sputtered and clattered. (Et il se promenait de long en large comme un fou, et il bavait et degoisait.) I answered: "We have no French soldiers here———" The German: "You have French soldiers." "Yes, we have French soldiers, but they are wounded. They have no arms." One of them, mighty, with a truculent air, pulled out his sword. "They have their arms," he shouted, and he brandished his sword. "They won't hurt you. Enter," I said. A Lorraine to say to a German "Enter," that means mischief. (Un Lorraine dire À un Allemand "Entrez": Que cela fait mal!) Two of the officers dismounted. Each of them hid a dagger somewhere in his breast. That thought that they could harm my poor little wounded men made me turn my look a few seconds on the action. And as they took out their revolvers at the same time, I did not see where they had hidden the daggers. The finger on the trigger, they nodded their head for me to go on in front of them. I went in front and led the way into this room where there was nothing but four walls, and no furniture except the thirteen beds of my wounded. I entered by this door, not knowing in the least what they wanted to do. Imagine this room with the first bed here, and then the second here, et cetera, et cetera. I went automatically to the first and, more involuntarily still, placed my hand on the bed of wounded Number One, a dragoon wounded by a horse. See, now, what took place: the imposing one of them walked in with his dagger in his left hand (son poignard, la gauche); the other man with his revolver was there, ready. With his dagger in his left hand, the first man stripped the bed for its full length, lifting the sheet, the coverlet and the bedclothes. He looked down in a manner evil, malevolent, ill-natured (mÉchante, malveillante, mauvaise). No response from the wounded men. He did not say anything when he had seen what he wished to see. He stepped up to the head of the wounded man. I made a half turn toward him. I was separated from him by our wounded man who was between the two of us. He said to my poor unfortunate, with a harsh gesture: "You and your men, you make our wounded suffer on the battlefield. You cut off their ears. You put out their eyes. You make them suffer." Still no response. (Pas rÉponse encore.) When I saw the state of mind he was in, I went round at once on the left side of the wounded, and I said: "This is a wounded man, and this place is the Red Cross. Here we do well for all and ill for none, and if you mean well, do not hurt us. Leave us in peace as you do everywhere else. We will nurse your wounded and nurse them well." He had turned around to watch the smoke of the fires which was pouring into the room through that opening, and he stood there several seconds with set face. My little wounded men hardly ventured to breathe. Seeing that calm, that brooding which did not bode anything good, I exerted myself to repeat once more: "If you mean well, do not hurt us. We will nurse your wounded." And, at last, to help him come out of his speechlessness: "See, there, everything is on fire over there." He answered me: "We are not barbarians. No, we are not barbarians. And if the civilians had not fired on us "Those were not civilians. Those were soldiers." "Civilians," he said. "No. No. No. Soldiers." "Civilians," he repeated; "I know well what I am saying. I saw them." He made a gesture to show me that men had fired, while he cried in my ears with all his might "Civilians." He went in front of me, and stripped the second bed. I feared that he might speak to my wounded, and I thought I should do well if I placed myself at the head of each of the beds as he uncovered them. I stepped between the two beds, and I feared what would come of it all. In this way I made the round of the room with them, standing at each of the thirteen points, always placing myself at the pillow of each wounded man, while "they" advanced bed by bed, and cautiously. I did not know how they had arranged their weapons, but it seemed to me that they always had their finger placed on the trigger. The second man with his revolver held his gun a little low. I followed them, shutting the door, when they went to the Infirmary of the old men. They did not say anything and they did not promise that they A third time I asked them: "It is clearly understood that we shall nurse your wounded, and that you will not burn this house." "They" start to leave, and go toward the door, walking slowly. When the chief was just leaving, I said again to him: "It is clearly understood that you will not harm us nor burn our house." "No, no." I looked to see if he gave the order to any of his soldiers. I didn't see that, but I noticed one of our sisters who was drawing a wheelbarrow with an old man in it, who weighed at least seventy-five kilos and who was paralyzed. "Where are you going?" I asked her. "Over there; the soldiers tell me that they are coming to set fire to the hospital," she replied. "One of our old men cried out to me, 'My sister, do not make us stay here. Let us go and die in peace, since they are killing everybody here. We would rather leave and die of hunger in the fields.' So I said, 'Come along, then.'" For the moment I am all alone in this room with my thirteen wounded men. I said to myself, "My I stood a few seconds in the doorway and then went in to see our little soldiers. "My poor children, I ask your forgiveness for bringing in such a visitation, but I assure you that I thought my last quarter hour had come. I thought they were going to kill us all." "My sister, stay with us," they said; "stay with us." "I will bear the impossible, my children, to save your life." I remained there a few minutes, and then two German soldiers presented themselves with fixed bayonets. I stepped down the two stairs; see what an escort was there for me! "Why is this house shut up? There are French in it, lying hidden with their arms." "The owner has been mobilized, and so has gone away. His wife and children have gone away." They kept on insisting: "The French. Hidden. In there." They indicated the place with a gesture. I thought to myself, What is happening? What will they do? Here are the men who will set fire to the house. "Why will you set fire to this house?" I asked. "Your chiefs don't wish it. They have promised me I said again to them: "It is wicked to set fire here, because we shall nurse your wounded." While this was going on, our sisters upstairs were not able to subdue the poor father PrÉvost. He is an old man of eighty-eight years, partly paralyzed in leg and arm. I was at the doorway. I heard him call out: "They shoved me into the fire. They have gone away and left me. I am going to fall out of the window." I climbed to the fourth floor of the house where he was, to try to attract him away, but he did not wish to come. He was foolish. I knew that he was fond of white sugar. I went up to him and showed him the sugar. I took his jacket and put his snowboots on him, so that he could get away more quickly. You know those boots which fasten by means of two or three buckles, very primitive, and which are so speedily put on. At last I led him to the edge of the doorway here. The Germans saw him and said: "It is a lunatic asylum, don't you see?" so they said to each other. "They want to kill the sisters. There is no need of going into that house. It is a lunatic asylum." That is the reason, I believe, why they didn't come into the house during the night. They entered the chapel of the hospital. While I was with the Germans, some of their like had come to our Infirmary to say: "You must leave here because we are going to set fire." They then said to the old people: "We have orders to burn the Infirmary." Among the number we had the poor mother AndrÉ, Monsieur PortÉ, who walked hobbling like this; Monsieur Georget, who is hung on only one wire, and Monsieur Leroy, who isn't hung on any (qui ne tenait qu'À un fil, Monsieur Leroy qui ne tenait plus non plus). [Sister Julie limped across the room. She bent her back double. She went feeble. In swift pantomime she revealed each infirmity of the aged people. She created the picture of a flock of sick and crippled sheep driven before wolves.] At four o'clock they were led away to MarÉville. Those of whom I tell you died in the course of the year. Death came likewise to seven others who would not have died but for that. The next morning we had German wounded. No one to care for them. What to do? I said to a wounded Lieutenant-Colonel: "You have given us many wounded to tend. Where are your majors?" See what he answered me. "They have abandoned us." That evening this Lieutenant-Colonel said to me in a rough voice: "Some bread, my sister." "You haven't any bread?" I said. "You have burned our bakery and killed our baker in it. You have burned our butcher shop with our butcher in it. And now you have no bread and no meat. Eat potatoes as we have to." He was hit in the calf of the leg, but the leg bone was not touched, nor the femur; it was not a severe wound. He unrolled his bandage and showed me his treatment, assuming an air of pain. "Aie! Aie!" he cried. Ah! "They" are more soft (douillets) than our poor little French. I began to dress his leg. "It is terrible, my sister, this war. Terrible for you and for us also. If the French were the least bit intelligent, they would ask for peace at once. Belgium is ours. In three days we shall be at Paris." The bandage tightened on his wound. "Ah," he said. I replied to him: "It is your Kaiser who is the cause of all this." "Oh, no. Not the Kaiser. The Kaiser. Oh, the The bandage went round once more. "Ah," he said. "It is then his son, the Crown Prince, who is responsible?" I continued. "Not at all. Not at all; it is France." "France is peace-loving," I replied. "It is Serbia, because the Austrian Archduke was killed by a Serbian." The 29th or 30th of the month shells fell occasionally over our roof. My famous wounded German was frightened. "My sister, I must be carried to the cellar at once." "There's no danger. The French never fire on the Red Cross," I said to him. "I am a poor wounded man. So carry me to the cellar." I gave in. I carried him to the cellar, and he stayed there some days. XIISISTER JULIE—CONTINUED During the days of fire and blood Sister Julie was acting mayor of GerbÉviller. It was no light job, for she had to steer an invading army away from her hospital of wounded men, and she was the source of courage for the village of peasants, who were being hunted and tortured. Many months have passed, and nothing is left of those days but crumbled stone and village graves and an everlasting memory. But she is still the soul of GerbÉviller. Pilgrims come to her from the provinces of France, and give her money for her poor and sick. The village still has need of her. I saw her with the woman whose aged mother was shot before her eyes, and with the mother whose little boy was murdered. She went on with her story: SISTER JULIE'S STORY As soon as the Germans came they began their work by taking hostages, the same number as that "See the flock of sheep. They are taking you away to be shot." And he pointed out to them with his fingers the place of their torment. In the morning four or five officers arrived to hear testimony from some of the men. It was Leonard, the grocer, who told me that four persons were questioned. "Stand there," They said to them. "Which is the one who lives next door to the hospital?" an officer asked. Leonard stepped forward. "Is it not true that the Lady Superior of the Hospital organized her people for the purpose of firing on our wounded with rifles?" Leonard replied: "I am sure that it is not so. And even if she were to order it, they would not obey." "Do you know what you are in danger of in telling lies? We have seen the bullets come from the hospital. We are sure. Go write your deposition." "I can't do it," answered Leonard. He was forced to write his deposition. When he had finished it, he presented it to the chief. "Sign it, and follow me. I am sure that I saw They also said to him that our chasseurs had fired on them from the chateau of Madame de Lambertye, and they themselves went to get a statement at the spot to see if it was possible to hit a man from the chateau and kill him. I had seen the turrets of the chateau of Lambertye burning about half-past nine in the morning and all the upper part. That was by incendiary bombs. The day after the fires we saw empty cans, about sixty of them, the kind used for motor-car gasoline, lying about in the garden of the chateau. Besides all that, there are still the bodily indignities which must not be passed over in silence. The twenty-fourth and twenty-fifth, "they" used fire and blood. The following days "they" amused themselves by teasing everybody. The poor Monsieur Jacob, who makes lemonade, was struck and thrown to the ground. Then they spit in his face, and threatened to shoot him, without any reason. They were drunk with the wine of GerbÉviller, if one is to judge from their helmets, which had lost their lightning conductors. The sacred images of the church were not respected. It was the evening of the twenty-ninth. A soldier-priest, Monsieur the AbbÉ Bernard, went to see a tiny bit of what was taking place. "Do you know, my sister, what has been done to the ciborium (sacred vessel for the sacrament)?" I went with him. We came to the church. We entered with difficulty. A bell blocked us from passing, and shells had broken down the vaulting in many places. We went on our way, but always with difficulty. We saw the crucifix which had the feet broken by blow on blow from the butt-end of rifles. We still went on, and saw the pipes of the organ lying on the ground. We came in front of the tabernacle (the box which holds the sacred vessels). There we counted eighteen bullet holes which had perforated the door around the lock. The displacement of air produced by the bursting of the bullet had forced the screws to jump out. "They" had not thought that this little dwelling-place was a strongbox and that it had flat bolts, both vertical and horizontal. We were now agitated to see if anything else had taken place in the tabernacle. Monsieur, the AbbÉ Bernard, took a hammer, and as gently as he could he succeeded in making a little opening just large enough for one to see that there was something else inside. With the barrel of an unloaded gun, he then made a full opening. The ciborium, the sacred vessel, was uncovered and had been projected against the bottom. The cover, fallen to one side, had a number of bullet marks, as the ciborium itself had. The bullets in penetrating the front of the tabernacle had made everywhere little holes, and these holes were in a shape nearly symmetrical around the lock. At the rear there were many much larger holes. Monsieur, the AbbÉ, took those sacred things and the cover of the altar and carried them to the chapel. The 17th and the 60th Bavarian Regiments were the ones that did this work. One-third at least of these men were protestant, and among them were many returned convicts. One of our sisters saw a book of a German officer who was nursed here, and noticed that he was from Bitsch. (Bitsch is a Roman Catholic town in Lorraine which long belonged to France, and which held out against the Germans almost to the end of the Franco-Prussian War). "How is this?" she asked. "You are from Bitsch, and yet it is you who dare to do the things that you have done." "We are under orders," he answered. "The further we go into France, the worse we shall do. It is commanded. Otherwise we shall be killed ourselves." Let us return to the Germans who were applying fire and blood. They led away fifteen men, old men, to a shed at about quarter past ten. Later they made them leave the shed. General Clauss, who The General said: "When I have filled my cup and as I raise it to my lips, give them fire and blood." We said good-by to Sister Julie. I walked down the street to the ruins of the chateau of Lambertye. Sister Julie has told of the empty gasoline cans that were left in the garden of the chateau. They had served their purpose well: I stepped through the litter that was once a beautiful home. But there was one work which flaming oil could not do. I went into the garden, and came to the grotto of the chateau. It is a lovely secret place, hidden behind a grove, and under the shadow of a great rock. It glows red from the fundamental stone of its structure, with jewel-like splinters of many-colored pebbles sunk in the parent stone. Fire, the favorite German instrument for creating a new world, could not mar the stout stone and pebbles of the little place, but such beauty must somehow be obliterated. So Several times in GerbÉviller we see this infinite capacity for taking pains. The thrusting of the baker into his own oven is a touch that a less thoughtful race could never have devised. When they attacked the tabernacle containing the sacramental vessel of the Roman Catholic church, Sister Julie has told how they placed the eighteen bullets that defiled it in pattern. The honest methodical brain is behind each atrocity, and the mind of the race leaves its mark even on ruins. Finally, when they shot the fifteen white-haired old men, the murders were done in series, in sets of five, with a regular rhythm. I can produce photographs of the dead bodies of these fifteen old men as they lay grouped on the meadow. We stood under the oak tree where the officer sat as he drank his toasts to death. We looked over to the little spot where the old men were herded together and murdered. Leon Mirman, Prefect of Meurthe-et-Moselle, said to us as we stood there: "I, myself, came here at the beginning of September, 1914. Fifteen old men were here, lying one "We shall set up here a commemorative monument which will tell to future generations the thing that has taken place here." For centuries the race has lived on a few episodes, short as the turn of a sunset. The glancing helmet of Hector that frightened one tiny child, the toothless hound of Ulysses that knew the beggar man—always it is the little lonely things that shake us. Vast masses of men and acres of guns blur into unreality. The battle hides itself in thick clouds, swaying in the night. But the cry that rang through GerbÉviller does not die away in our ears. Sister Julie has given episodes of a bitter brevity which the imagination of the race will not shake off. It is impossible to look out on the world with the same eyes after those flashes of a new bravery, a new horror. I find this sudden revelation in the lifting of the cup with the toast that signed the death of the old men. The officer was drinking a sacrament of death by murder. It is as if there in that act under That rite of the social cup, held aloft in the eyes of comrades, has been a symbol for good will in all the ages. Brotherhood was being proclaimed as the host of the feast looked out on a table of comrades. At last in the fullness of time the rite, always honored, was lifted into the unassailable realm of poetry, when one greater man came who went to his death blithely from the cup that he drank with his friends. There it has remained homely and sacred in the thought of the race. Suddenly under the oak tree of GerbÉviller the rite has received a fresh meaning. The cup has been torn from the hands of the Nazarene. By one gesture the German officer reversed the course of history. He sat there very lonely, and he drank alone. The cup that he tasted was the death of men. It is no longer the lifting of all to a common fellowship. It no longer means "I who stand here am prepared to die for you": pledge of a union stronger even than death. It is suddenly made the symbol of a greater gospel: "I drink to your death. I drink alone." ADDENDUMIn the month of November, 1915, the "American Hostels for Refugees" were founded by Mrs. Wharton and a group of American friends in Paris to provide lodgings and a restaurant for the Belgians and French streaming in from burning villages and bombarded towns. These people were destitute, starving, helpless and in need of immediate aid. The work developed into an organization which cares permanently for over 4,000 refugees, chiefly French from the invaded regions. A system of household visiting has been organized, and not even temporary assistance is now given to any refugee whose case has not been previously investigated. The refugees on arrival are carefully registered and visited. Assistance is either in the form of money toward paying rent, of clothing, medical care, tickets for groceries and coal, tickets for one of the restaurants of the Hostels, or lodgings in one of the Model Lodging Houses. Over 6,000 refugees have been provided with employment. There are six centers for the work. One house has a restaurant where 500 meals a day are served Such is the work of the "American Hostels for Refugees." The present cost of maintaining all the Mrs. Wharton has also established "American Convalescent Homes for Refugees." Many refugees come broken in health, with chronic bronchitis and incipient tuberculosis and even severer maladies. Seventy-one beds are provided. There is also a house where 30 children, suffering from tuberculosis of the bone and of the glands are being cared for. Four thousand dollars a month should be provided at once for this work. At the request of the Belgian Government Mrs. Wharton has founded the "Children of Flanders Rescue Committee." The bombardment of Furnes, Ypres, Poperinghe and the villages along the Yser drove the inhabitants south. The Belgian Government asked Mrs. Wharton if she could receive 60 children at 48 hours' notice. The answer was "yes," and a home established. Soon after, the Belgian Government asked Mrs. Wharton to receive five or six hundred children. Houses were at once established, and these houses are under the management of the Flemish Sisters who brought the children from the cellars of village-homes, from lonely farmhouses, in two cases from the arms of the father, killed by a fragment of shell. Lace-schools, sewing and dress-making classes, agriculture and gardening are carried on. Seven hundred and thirty-five children One of the most important charities in which Mrs. Wharton, Mrs. Edward Tuck, and Judge Walter Berry are interested, is that for "French Tuberculous War Victims," in direct connection with the Health Department of the French Ministry of War. Nearly 100,000 tuberculous soldiers have already been sent back from the French front. They must be shown how to get well and receive the chance to get well. One hospital is already in operation, and three large sanatoria are nearing completion, with 100 beds each. The object is not only to cure the sufferers, but to teach them a trade enabling them to earn their living in the country. Tuberculous soldiers are coming daily to the offices of this charity in ever-increasing numbers asking to be taken in. The answer will depend on American generosity. A group of Americans, headed by Mrs. Robert Woods Bliss, whose husband is First Secretary of the American Embassy in Paris, have instituted and carried on a "Distributing Service" in France. The name of the organization is "Service de Distribution AmÉricaine." It was established on its present basis in December, 1914, and grew out of personal work done by Mrs. Bliss since the beginning of the war. The purpose has been to supply hospitals throughout
The Director of the organization is Russell Greeley, the secretary of Geoffrey Dodge. The service has a garage outside the gates of Paris with ten cars and a lorry. All the staff, except the stenographers and packers, are volunteers. This work for the French is connected with the American Distributing Service for the Serbians, which was begun by sending the late Charles R. Cross, Jr., to Serbia as a member of the American Sanitary Commission headed by Dr. R. P. Strong, in the spring of 1915. Mr. Cross made an investigation of the situation in Serbia at that time from the point of view of the American Distributing Service. In January, 1916, Mrs. Charles Henry Hawes of the Greek Red Cross, wife of Professor Hawes of Dartmouth College, Hanover, being on her way to Italy and Greece for the purpose of conveying relief into Albania through Janina, offered her services to the Distributing Service for the convoying and distribution of supplies. Mrs. Hawes's offer was accepted and she was furnished with a small Meanwhile the French Army Medical Service had created the "Mission de Coordination de Secours aux ArmÉes d'Orient" for the purpose of distributing relief supplies to the Serbian and other Allied armies in the Balkans. A member of the Distributing Service was appointed a member of the Mission, and a fund of 100,000 francs placed at the disposal of the Distributing Service which thenceforward coÖperated actively in the work of the Mission. Urgent representations of the need of help in Corfou having been made early in February to the Mission by the French Army Medical Service, Mrs. Hawes, representing the Distributing Service and the Mission jointly, was sent to Corfou where she established a soup kitchen and did other valuable relief work at Vido. She was later joined at Corfou by Countess de Reinach-Foussemagne, InfirmiÈre DÉlÉguÉe of the Mission. Through these two agents the Distributing Service sent to Corfou and distributed 197 cases of foodstuffs, clothing, and various When the crisis at Corfou was at an end the field depot of the Mission was moved to Solonica. There the Service distributed to Serbians various shipments of relief and hospital supplies: A total of 454 cases. The Distributing Service now has ready and is preparing to send forward for the Serbian Army a laundry outfit, a disinfecting outfit and a complete field surgical outfit (portable house for operating room equipment and radiograph plant). A shipment is also going forward for Monastir where the field depot of the Mission was established on November 22nd, of 5,000 francs' worth of foodstuffs and other urgently needed materials, and a larger quantity is being accumulated to be sent forward without delay. In addition, the Distributing Service has sent about 2,000 kilos of hospital supplies to the Serbs in the Lazaret of Frioul, off Marseille, and a similar quantity of material to the hospitals at Sidi-Abdallah (Tunis), and elsewhere in Tunisia and Algeria, given over to the treatment of Serbians. Mrs. Bliss and her friends have also conducted a work for "frontier children," dating from August, 1914, which has cared for French, Belgian and Alsatian children to the number of 1,500. |
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