Mme. F.L. Cyon had some rather important experiences at Lille at the time of the German attack and during the German occupation. She is a woman of singularly cool mentality, and her evidence may be compared with that of Dr. Ella Scarlett-Synge in a widely distant war area.

Mme. Cyon has very kindly placed her notes of her experiences at my disposal. As the notes record also a point of view as to war in general, it has seemed more fitting to print them as an appendix. No statement of this kind is unbiased, for the pacifist has his own bias. Yet I am quite certain that everything set down by Mme. Cyon has been set down in complete sincerity and with unusual absence of mental distortion. The record is that made by a quiet worker amidst circumstances where few people remained sane.

THE MENTAL HAVOC WROUGHT BY THE WAR.

By FranÇoise Lafitte Cyon.

During the months of September, October, November, and December, 1914, I undertook a journey in Northern France; going first to Lille, thence to Maubeuge, and returning to England via Brussels, Malines, Antwerp, and Holland.

I was at Lille on October 13, 1914, when the Germans took the town. During the first three months of my stay in France I was engaged in nursing work at the military hospital 105 at Lille. In the early part of December I travelled as well as I could, sometimes tramping and sometimes making use of peasants’ carts and local tramways, until I eventually reached Holland.

It is not, however, my intention to speak much of my adventures or of the war itself, but rather to depict, to the best of my ability, the effect which the dreadful events of our doings have had on the minds of the men and women I have met with over there; be they French, Belgian, or German. This article will be an attempt to give a series of short studies in psychology, rather than a dramatic account of a perilous journey.I wish my readers to bear in mind at the outset that after October 13 I was in German territory, where, from that date onwards, I met with two kinds of people. On the one hand, the oppressors or Germans; on the other hand, the oppressed, namely, the French, Belgian, and a few English.

For a psychological study to be of value, such a distinction is useful to begin with, for one seldom finds the same frame of mind in the victor and the vanquished, in the oppressor and the oppressed.

Whilst endeavouring to give facts, I must distinguish between three types of people whom I met during my journey. First, civilians, French and Belgian; secondly, the hospital staff, doctors and nurses, mostly French, with the exception of two German doctors; thirdly, the military, officers and men, French and German, with a few British. I am obliged to make this division in order to make myself clear, as the events of the war do not seem to affect the people of these three divisions in the same way.

In what follows I shall for the most part depict types.

I met first with the civilian population. When I reached Lille, I found life there much as usual, excepting that all appeared very quiet. But a few days after my arrival Lille began to show an extraordinary and sad animation. The town, which had already given shelter to many refugees from Valenciennes and villages thereabouts, was suddenly crowded by the exodus of the inhabitants of Orchies; the latter town, it was reported, had been completely burnt to the ground by the Germans, only thirty houses having been left standing.

Life in Lille became horrible. In the streets one met long processions of miserable creatures, looking haggard and exhausted. Here was a woman with three tiny children, two of them in a dilapidated perambulator, the other she carried in her arms. She looked grey with the dust of the road: I followed her. She was going to the office of some local paper, whence these poor refugees were directed where to go to find food and shelter. Waiting at the door of the office were such numbers of these worn-out human beings that many of them, too tired to stand any longer, were sitting on the pavement whilst the children were eating pieces of bread.

One morning I followed the crowd going to get bread at the town hall. I saw a little boy of four standing at his mother’s side while she talked with another woman. The mother’s basket had been put down on the pavement and a round loaf of bread was partly coming out of it. The little mite kneeled down on the ground and, going at it with all his might, he began to eat off the loaf in a way which told a long, sad tale.

But what one met with amongst one’s friends was often more horrible than the sights in the streets. The tale of the destruction of Orchies had been believed almost everywhere before any explanation had been forthcoming, and in these days hatred began to rear its head when people talked of the Germans.

“If they had burned Orchies,” said one of my acquaintances, “it is because we are too tolerant with them. To brutes we must speak only the language of brutes. We treat their prisoners like guests; let us put them all against the wall and shoot them and their wounded, too.”

When I replied that we should have little right to complain of German atrocities if we did what they are reported to do, I was looked at as too soft and as if I were a woman without patriotic feeling. My friend told me this as politely as his temper allowed.

I left him and went into the street to try to find some distraction from his hatred. I chanced to meet a woman of Orchies and inquired what had happened there. I give her tale as told to me, though I have not been able to verify it.

“The Germans,” said she, “behaved quite well the first time they came into our town. They were kind to the children and even gave them sweets and toys, but on their second visit they found that some of their wounded had had their ears cut off and they ordered that Orchies should be set on fire.”

“It was monstrous,” she added, “but I know that an African soldier was found with a necklace of sixty ears, which he had certainly taken somewhere. This, too, was monstrous. I do not excuse the Germans for their crime—I have lost everything myself—but if we allow their wounded to be mutilated at such times, what can we expect? Who can say which side is the more barbarous? I must tell you that the officer ordered to set fire to Orchies was also told to arrest the mayor and some other men and to have them shot. However, he gave them timely warning to evacuate Orchies and to make good their escape, so no one was hurt.”

How far this story was true I never knew, but the effect of it on my fellow creatures I had seen too well, and I went away bearing on my heart the words of the woman of Orchies: “Who can say which side is the more barbarous?”

On October 7 we heard that the Germans were outside the city and in many quarters fear was added to the anguish already overburdening the hearts of so many. Yet one woman, hearing the Germans were near, exclaimed, “Say what you like, these men are just like our French men. War is war; you cannot expect it to be anything but cruel and barbarous. The Germans are no enemies of mine.”

Her words made a bad impression on the listeners, and it was well that the kind-hearted soul had three brothers in the French Army or she would have been regarded with much suspicion.An old lady of my acquaintance almost lost her head with fright. “How dare they,” she said, speaking of the French, “let the Germans take Lille?”

“What then,” said I, “of Rheims?”

“Yes, Rheims, I know it was horrible! But Lille, the most beautiful town of the North, it is a crime to make it suffer.”

Whilst discussing with me the doings of the French Army the old lady had often argued that Rheims and Arras had had to suffer because this was necessary to the success of the French operations. Recalling her own words, I asked: “But what could you say if for the good of the common cause Lille must suffer as did Rheims and Arras?”

But in her terror, forgetful of what she had said previously, she only exclaimed: “Lille! It is a crime. What shall we do? How shall we live?”

And I could see fear in her eyes, fear for her belongings as well as for her life, fear which made her forget for a moment the “good cause of this war” as she had often put it to me, fear which made her heart give out a note of real selfishness.

So far as I can remember it was on October 8 that all the gates of the city were closed, and that there was fighting on the Grand Boulevard, the great wide thoroughfare which connects Lille with its sister-cities of Roubaix and Tourcoing. There was also fighting near one of the gates.

On the following day, on returning from my work in Hospital 105, the people with whom I was living told me of the terrible spectacle they had witnessed when they had gone to get news of some relations living near the gate where the fight had taken place. One woman said:

“The fight was on the bridge, which was covered in the evening with the dead bodies of Germans, amongst them two wounded men whom the Germans had left behind. By the bridge there is an inn, and we have been told that five men, civilians, who were there, killed the two ‘Boches’ by strangling them. This makes two less of them!”

I looked at her in horror, thinking that fright had turned her brain. I could find no words to reply. I turned to go to my own room, when she added:

“In any case, the ‘Boches’ won’t know of it for the bodies are buried under a heap of stones.”

I left her with the words of the woman of Orchies echoing through my brain: “Who can tell which side is the more barbarous?”

Some of these people I had known before the war to be peaceful, quiet citizens; they now appeared to me to have suddenly turned into devils. Fear and danger had made them crazy with hatred. Everywhere one went it was the same. If I tried to escape it, and took refuge in the street, I seemed to feel hatred rising from the very ground.

Amongst the fugitives one saw, many had run away before even seeing a German helmet, but all were full of atrocious tales, all were mad with hatred and revenge.

Not until the actual shelling of the town began did I fully realise the havoc that fear and hatred can work! To feel helpless while shells go whirling over one’s head at the rate of sixty a minute, while houses are burning on either side of one, is a horrible experience. To have to bear all these horrors without being able to put a stop to them, is maddening. At such moments one feels like a mouse caught in a trap. One would have to be more than human not to feel terror.

We all felt this at Lille, the great majority were so panic-stricken that they made for the gates, quite oblivious of the fact that the gates were closed and that fighting was going on there.

It is usually in these moments of supreme fear that the lurking hatred in the soul takes full possession of it, distorting the imagination, bringing back the most atavistic moral ideas, giving birth to falsehoods of every description, and widening the gulf of misunderstanding which seems to part the nations.

I have always known that hatred is the offspring of war. I am well aware that ever since the beginning of the present crisis the newspapers and the warmongers have been daily adding fuel to the fire of hatred for fear that if the fire died out the war would do the same. But over there, at Lille, I felt that hatred had fallen on the hearts of many people like a fatal malediction with which they are to be cursed all their life long and which they will transmit to their descendants.

These people whom fear has driven, like cattle, from their burning houses, who have suddenly been left without a roof over their heads or food to eat, are not likely easily to give up their hatred when this passion of war is a thing of the past. Deep in their hearts will be written the word “revenge” even though France does not lose a second Alsace-Lorraine.

This same overpowering feeling of hatred I found amongst most of the staff of the hospital where I was working, and I was able to note at first hand the effect it had in the dealings of the nursing staff with the German wounded.

After October 13, 1914, the Germans took control of all the hospitals at Lille, and soon they were crowded with German wounded, while, little by little, as soon as they were able to travel, the French and British were evacuated and taken to Germany as prisoners of war.

At Hospital 105 the French staff were asked if they would agree to remain under the German authorities, and most of the doctors and nurses elected to remain at their post. The hospital was controlled by the “SociÉtÉ des femmes de France,” who financed it and managed the entire establishment. Many of these women were society ladies and, with the exception of two or three, most incompetent. Before the German occupation their activities had mostly been of a showy character. They were all dainty, smart, and useless, and so they remained under German rule—those, at least, who did not run away. They avoided nursing Germans with great skill, and overcrowded the French and English wards. They were very diplomatic in their dealings with the enemy, as silly and pitiful in their hatred of the German and their cautious dealings with him as they were in their other activities. Their hatred was of the emptyheaded kind, but all the more dangerous for being based on frivolity of heart and crass ignorance.

Side by side with them were a few intellectual women, professors and teachers. Most of them followed in the wake of their sisters and behaved in a similar manner. One of them, a woman I had known before, had spent many years of her life in Germany and had taught the German language for nearly twenty years. Before the war she had often told me how lovable she had found the German people, what good friends she had in Germany and how she always enjoyed a holiday there, so that when some of my German patients asked me for books, I thought she would be the very person to whom to apply for some.

To my astonishment she flew into a passion when she heard my request.

“Want books, do they? They will soon ask for chickens and lobsters.”

Walking into my ward, she exclaimed haughtily: “So you are asking for books! As you set fire to everything, there are no books left for you!”

Very little of the nursing was done by these women, however, who, instead of being a real help for the most part, put spokes in the wheels of the more useful helpers. The hardships of overwork, of long hours, of day and night duties in succession, fell all the more heavily on the shoulders of a few willing women, the other part of the female element proving so unreliable.

These women, whose devotion never flagged, comprised three trained nurses and nine or ten women clerks or teachers, of quite another type to those mentioned above. It is true they were not all free from hatred, but, if I may so express it, theirs was almost a hopeful hatred compared with the blind stupidity of those others.

Amongst the three professional nurses I remember a tall, handsome girl of 22 or thereabouts. Hers was an ardent soul, one of those souls which keep young in spite of advancing years. Whatever task this girl sets herself to do she will carry it through with skill and earnestness. Whichever cause she champions she will do so in no light spirit, and it was thus that she hated the Germans with the strongest hatred and yet nursed them with utter devotion, for she was as earnest a nurse as she was keen a patriot. There was almost a kind of healthiness about her hatred, based as it was on deep-rooted feelings, knowing no caution and no fear. One might hope more for her who, fearless of consequences, could wave the French flag and shout “Vive la France” when French prisoners were led away, than for all the fine ladies whose little souls were filled with great fear and ignorant hatred.

I remember also a small, fair nurse, silent for the most part, but up at all times of the night as well as working hard all day. She sometimes opened her heart to me and I found there, as deep-rooted as her colleague’s hatred, a great and sincere love for all men and women, an unflinching hope that in the long run “brotherhood” will be the watchword of all humanity.

Amongst these hard-working women many were of this silent type, going about with sealed lips, but with treasures of unconscious kindliness and love hidden in their hearts, known only to God.

My daily intercourse with the men on our hospital staff was on the whole never sufficiently intimate to allow me to speak here of their mental attitude towards “the enemy.” The French doctors I never saw except when I was on duty, and I had little or no opportunity of speaking with them, being only an assistant nurse, but I recollect one little incident connected with Professor L——, a man of acknowledged skill in France. At the time of which I speak, I had been transferred to a German ward, and one day, finding myself short of boiled water for the men to drink, I went to the chemist to ask for some. There I met Professor L——, who said:

“So you want boiled water for your friends the Germans? What would you say if I were to put in it a few microbes of cholera morbus?”

“I would hardly believe it of you!”

“Of course, you would not, for I am told that you are surprisingly good to these Germans. But believe me, if it were not for the fear of spreading the disease far and wide, this would be the best thing to do.”

I have, however, no means of ascertaining that this incident is typical of the attitude of the average Frenchman on the male staff towards the Germans. As a matter of fact, they had very little to do with the German wounded, as these were left entirely in the hands of the German doctors, aided by the French nurses.

After my transfer to the German wards, where we were very short of nurses, I soon found myself in sole charge of from 16 to 26 wounded, a burden which I felt rather too heavy for me, as I had had but little experience in nursing previous to the war. But it was during this time, when my duties involved greater responsibility, that I came into closer contact with doctors, but they were German doctors, of course.

I remember one of them, a small man, somewhat round, whom we had nicknamed “pupuce” (little flea). Pupuce always appeared to me to be kindness itself: intent on his work, good to his men and fair to his helpers. His position as head of a hospital where most of the men were French, was not an easy one. He was disliked by the majority of the nurses, mostly those who had not been willing to work under him; yet I never saw him manifest anything but the greatest tolerance and courtesy towards all.

But where one felt the smallest amount of hatred existing on either side was amongst the men who had fought and been wounded.

Being left so much alone with my German patients I got to know them well. I never had to complain of my “Boches.” They were so much like our own men; yes, so much like them! They were grateful for what was done for them just in the same way. They showed me photographs of their dear ones and told me stories of them which made my heart beat ever so quickly.

But some of them were very funny. They ate, ate, so that one marvelled. They showed me plainly that I was to heap potatoes and other food on their plates. It was never too thick or too much for them. These men were of the peasant type, heavy in features and in general appearance. I found but few like them amongst our French men. They seemed to feel kindly towards me. Some of them used to pat me on the back heavily and call me: “Goode Petite Madam.” But their kindness was cow-like, so to speak, and reminded me of the animals when they have been well fed.

But, of course, all were not like that. I remember many handsome and intelligent faces of men who seemed to have been born for better things than butchery. Here was a young man, a student of science, as gentle as a woman. He seemed to be the soul of all his comrades, so great was his influence for good over them. Day and night he was ready to help and to go to the assistance of his fellows, so far as his own wounds would allow him to do so.

There were many of this type, and many others who seemed like children, and who could hardly be expected to realise how they got into such a scrape. One, a young mechanic, a lad with a bright rosy face, discovered that I was a Socialist, and, with finger on lip, he told me that he also was one. He whispered the great names of JaurÉs, Keir Hardie, and Liebknecht; I could read in his eyes the hope these names roused in him, but I could also see that he was scarcely old enough to know his own mind, and that he might be brutally killed ere he had lived long enough to strengthen his hopes and to see his goal clearly through the maze of his youthful dreams.

There were types on the French side corresponding more or less closely to these.

It is true that the French peasant drinks wine in the place of beer, eats less than the German, is lighter in build and in wits, but apart from these superficial differences there is much similarity. Under an outside show of brains, both are often of dull and shallow intelligence. The German cracks heavy jokes and the French cynical ones: it is difficult to choose between them as both show little culture and an inherent commonplaceness of mind.

Men of greater sensibility, of refined culture, I have found on either side, and be they French or German, I have nearly always found their behaviour correspond to that which I have here tried to delineate.

Most of these men had seen many ghastly things, the horrors of which often remained impressed in their eyes for days and days after their arrival in hospital. It is often said that the trade of war, the heavy slaughter in which they have participated, is bound to brutalise them. I readily believe this to be so in the case of the most vulgar types on either side, though, even on these, the brutalising and demoralising effect of the war seems less to be feared than amongst their corresponding types among the civilians.

It is amongst the soldiers and officers of the fighting ranks that I have found the greater readiness to fraternise with the enemy, to acknowledge the good points of the other side.

The men in my ward one day having sent coffee to their French comrades, the latter replied by sending cigarettes, and soon both sides were conversing together. The men who have stood face to face in the fight, who have seen their enemies falling as bravely as they themselves have done, have little hatred left in their hearts; but those who have suffered all the horrors of war and who have not found either in work, or even in participation in the war itself, a means to cool their overheated feelings, are those who constitute the real danger for the future work of the pacifists, as, after all, the brutalising effect of war is not due so much to the use of physical force as to the hatred which such physical force, bent on destruction, brings in its wake.

What I say here of the men does not, however, apply to the professional officers. Amongst the Germans these are mostly of the aristocracy. Their haughty, scarred faces were always repellent to me. Luckily I was not told off to nurse them. They had a special room of their own.

Once only, at lunch time, when their usual nurse was away at her lunch, one of them beckoned to me as I was passing their door. Thinking that he wanted something, I went up to him, but he received me by putting out his tongue and taking a “sight” at me, to the amusement of all his friends. This young scamp was no other than Lieutenant von W——, the son of General von W——. We all knew that he was a cad and Pupuce himself seemed to find him rather a handful.

I met very few French officers during my stay at Lille, but my knowledge of the professional military man in time of peace, leads me to believe that the type I have described, is far from uncommon in France. He is the embodiment of militarism anywhere, and neither in Germany nor elsewhere will these men’s brutal instincts be checked through war, or even through defeat.

After leaving Lille, and during my subsequent journey through Northern France and Belgium, I had the opportunity to note the dealings of the Germans with the population of these invaded lands.

After the numerous accounts of monstrous atrocities which were perpetrated over there, I hardly dare to mention here that personally I did not meet with any of these. I do not mean to imply by this that atrocities have not happened, but simply that it has been my good fortune not to come across any.

At Lille itself, the Germans behaved decently when once in occupation. Posters were put on the walls of the town inviting the population to keep quiet. It is true that a few days later fresh bills appeared, worded in very peremptory fashion, warning the inhabitants to keep away from the bridges, railways, and so forth, under penalty of death for disobedience. However, to my knowledge, no disturbances occurred. There, as elsewhere, the Germans tried to reorganise ordinary life as quickly as possible; they helped to put out fires and to restore quiet and order amongst the civilians.

At Maubeuge I met with a similar state of affairs, though I came to this town to find that my father, one of the citizens, had only the day before come out of prison, where the Germans had kept him for 28 days; on a false charge of trying to incite the inhabitants of Maubeuge against the Germans, he and two other men had been arrested. According to their own account the three of them were given a very fair trial and were acquitted. My father did not in any way complain of the treatment he had met with.

I must admit, however, that the three prisoners did not all speak of their adventure in the same spirit. My father, always quiet and cool-headed by nature, resolved to make the best of a bad job, and having obtained paper and ink, wrote about half of a book whilst in prison. He found the food wholesome, though not always plentiful, and asked my mother after his release, to make him a pea soup like that he had had in his cell. The other two, however, one a mere lad, the other an old-maidish man of 50, complained bitterly of the food and other things. While narrating his part of the story the middle-aged man turned to me exclaiming: “Why, your father, no one would believe that he is a good bit over 60. He took it all so quietly, just as if he were still a young man!”

I could not but infer from this that in times of such great crisis and passion a man over there in the invaded parts is often treated by “the enemy” according to the way in which he himself behaves towards the so-called “enemy.” Coolness of head and courtesy on the one side more often than not met with the same qualities on the other side.

I suspect it was this, that, after the trial of the three, caused the President of the Court to apologise to my father, who had proved himself a man, but not to think of doing so to the two other prisoners, who had been more sheepish than human.

On the average, the relations between the Germans and the inhabitants, from stories I have heard and facts I have witnessed, might roughly be summed up in the following statement:

Arrogance, temper, haughtiness on the one side, provoke arrogance, temper and haughtiness on the other; while quietness and coolness of one party inspire the other with the same quietness and moderation. Provided we bear in mind that it takes less to provoke the victor than to provoke the vanquished, that it is more easy for the former to indulge in his temper without fear of consequences. I do not think that the atrocities perpetrated by the Germans in Belgium, the true ones as they came to my knowledge, and not the false ones which have been spread by the Press, have proved in any way that the Germans have passed the bounds of all that has been known in previous wars, and have deserved to be banned and thrust outside the pale of humanity.

In this article I have endeavoured to give a fair account of my journey and to relate facts I have witnessed as they have impressed themselves upon my mind. I have done so not to pass judgment upon some of my fellow-creatures at such times of overheated passions, but merely in order to present to Socialists and Pacifists the enormity of their task after the war, such as I have felt it over there.

It is in the hearts of the people that we shall have to work, to bring to them seeds of love and fraternal goodwill in the place of the weeds of hatred and ignorance which years of war and horrors will have left in the souls of many. Everywhere, but mostly in the countries which have been devastated by the war, be it in France, Belgium, Serbia, Poland or East Prussia and Galicia, it is in the hearts of the majority of the civilian population that we shall meet with the hardest task, but we must work so that our faith be so great as really to move mountains.