Towards the Goal Part 10

Then she dropped her voice, and said between her teeth--"Think how hard that was for a Lorrainer!"

So two German officers went to the ward where the nineteen Frenchmen lay, all helpless cases, and a scene followed very like that in the hospital at Senlis. One drew his revolver and covered the beds, the other walked round, poniard in hand, throwing back the bedclothes to look for arms. But they found nothing--"_only blood_! For we had had neither time enough nor dressings enough to treat the wounds properly that night."

A frightful moment!--the cowering patients--the officers in a state of almost frenzied excitement, searching bed after bed. At the last bed, occupied by a badly wounded and quite helpless youth, the officer carrying the dagger brought the blade of it so near to the boy's throat that Soeur Julie rushed forward, and placed her two hands in front of the poor bare neck. The officer dropped both arms to his side, she said, "as if he had been shot," and stood staring at her, quivering all over.

But from that moment she had conquered them.

For the German wounded, Soeur Julie declared she had done her best, and the officer in charge of them afterwards wrote her a letter of thanks.

Then her mouth twisted a little. "But I wasn't--well, I didn't _spoil_ them! (_Je n'etais pas trop tendre_); I didn't give them our best wine!"

And one officer whose wounds she dressed, a Prussian colonel who never deigned to speak to a Bavarian captain near him, was obliged to accept a good many home truths from her. He was convinced that she would poison his leg unless he put on the dressings himself. But he allowed her to bandage him afterwards. During this operation--which she hinted she had performed in a rather Spartan fashion!--"he whimpered all the time," and she was able to give him a good deal of her mind on the war and the behaviour of his troops. He and the others, she said, were always talking about their Kaiser; "one might have thought they saw him sitting on the clouds."

In two or three days the French returned victorious, to find the burnt and outraged village. The Germans were forced, in their turn, to leave some badly wounded men behind, and the French _poilus_ in their mingled wrath and exultation could not resist, some of them, abusing the German wounded through the windows of the hospital. But then, with a keen dramatic instinct, Soeur Julie drew a striking picture of the contrast between the behaviour of the French officer going down to the bas.e.m.e.nt to visit the wounded German officers there, and that of the German officers on a similar errand. She conveyed with perfect success the cold civility of the Frenchman, beginning with a few scathing words about the treatment of the town, and then proceeding to an investigation of the personal effects of the Boche officers.

"Your papers, gentlemen? Ah! those are private letters--you may retain them. Your purses?"--he looks at them--"I hand them back to you. Your note-books? _Ah! ca--c'est mon affaire!_ (that's my business). I wish you good morning."

Soeur Julie spoke emphatically of the drunkenness of the Germans. They discovered a store of "Mirabelle," a strong liqueur, in the town, and had soon exhausted it, with apparently the worst results.

Well!--the March afternoon ran on, and we could have sat there listening till dusk. But our French officers were growing a little impatient, and one of them gently drew "the dear sister," as every one calls her, towards the end of her tale. Then with regret one left the plain parlour, the little hospital which had played so big a part, and the brave elderly nun, in whom one seemed to see again some of those qualities which, springing from the very soil of Lorraine, and in the heart of a woman, had once, long years ago, saved France.

How much there would be still to say about the charm and the kindness of Lorraine, if only this letter were not already too long! But after the tragedy of Gerbeviller I must at any rate find room for the victory of Amance.

Alas!--the morning was dull and misty when we left Nancy for Amance and the Grand Couronne; so that when we stood at last on the famous ridge immediately north of the town which saw, on September 8th, 1914, the wrecking of the final German attempt on Nancy, there was not much visible except the dim lines of forest and river in the plain below. Our view ought to have ranged as far, almost, as Metz to the north and the Vosges to the south. But at any rate there, at our feet, lay the Forest of Champenoux, which was the scene of the three frantic attempts of the Germans debouching from it on September 8th to capture the hill of Amance, and the plateau on which we stood. Again and again the 75's on the hill mowed down the advancing hordes and the heavy guns behind completed their work. The Germans broke and fled, never to return. Nancy was saved, the right of the six French Armies advancing across France, at that very moment, on the heels of the retreating Germans, in the Battle of the Marne, was protected thereby from a flank attack which might have altered all the fortunes of the war, and the course of history; and General Castelnau had written his name on the memory of Europe.

_But_--the Kaiser was not there! Even Colonel Buchan in his admirable history of the war, and Major Whitton in his recent book on the campaign of the Marne, repeat the current legend. I can only bear witness that the two French staff officers who walked with us along the Grand Couronne--one of whom had been in the battle of September 8th--were positive that the Kaiser was not in the neighbourhood at the time, and that there was no truth at all in the famous story which describes him as watching the battle from the edge of the Forest of Champenoux, and riding off ahead of his defeated troops, instead of making, as he had reckoned, a triumphant entry into Nancy. Well, it is a pity the G.o.ds did not order it so!--"to be a tale for those that should come after."

One more incident before we leave Lorraine! On our way up to the high village of Amance, we had pa.s.sed some three or four hundred French soldiers at work. They looked with wide eyes of astonishment at the two ladies in the military car. When we reached the village, Prince R----, the young staff officer from a neighbouring Headquarters who was to meet us there, had not arrived, and we spent some time in a cottage, chatting with the women who lived in it. Then--apparently--while we were on the ridge word reached the men working below, from the village, that we were English. And on the drive down we found them gathered, three or four hundred, beside the road, and as we pa.s.sed them they cheered us heartily, seeing in us, for the moment, the British alliance!

So that we left the Grand Couronne with wet eyes, and hearts all pa.s.sionate sympathy towards Lorraine and her people.

No. 10

_June 1st_, 1917.

DEAR MR. ROOSEVELT,--In looking back over my two preceding letters, I realise how inadequately they express the hundredth part of that vast and insoluble debt of a guilty Germany to an injured France, the realisation of which became--for me--in Lorraine, on the Ourcq, and in Artois, a burning and overmastering thing, from which I was rarely or never free. And since I returned to England on March 16th, the conduct of the German troops, under the express orders of the German Higher Command, in the French districts evacuated since February by Hindenburg's retreating forces, has only sharpened and deepened the judgment of civilised men, with regard to the fighting German and all his ways, which has been formed long since, beyond alteration or recall.

Think of it! It cries to heaven. Think of Reims and Arras, of Verdun and Ypres, think of the hundreds of towns and villages, the thousands of individual houses and farms, that lie ruined on the old soil of France; think of the sufferings of the helpless and the old, the hideous loss of life, of stored-up wealth, of natural and artistic beauty; and then let us ask ourselves again the old, old question--why has this happened? And let us go back again to the root facts, from which, whenever he or she considers them afresh--and they should be constantly considered afresh--every citizen of the Allied nations can only draw fresh courage to endure. The long and pa.s.sionate preparation for war in Germany; the half-mad literature of a glorified "force" headed by the Bernhardis and Treitschkes, and repeated by a thousand smaller folk, before the war; the far more illuminating manifestoes of the intellectuals since the war; Germany's refusal of a conference, as proposed and pressed by Great Britain, in the week before August 4th, France's acceptance of it; Germany's refusal to respect the Belgian neutrality to which she had signed her name, France's immediate consent; the provisions of mercy and of humanity signed by Germany in the Hague Convention trampled, almost with a sneer, under foot; the jubilation over the _Lusitania_, and the arrogant defence of all that has been most cruel and most criminal in the war, as necessary to Germany's interests, and therefore moral, therefore justified; let none--none!--of these things rest forgotten in our minds until peace is here, and justice done!

The German armies are capable of "_no undisciplined cruelty_," said the 93 Professors, without seeing how d.a.m.ning was the phrase. No!--theirs was a cruelty by order, meditated, organised, and deliberate. The stories of Senlis, of Vareddes, of Gerbeviller which I have specially chosen, as free from that element of s.e.xual horror which repels many sensitive people from even trying to realise what has happened in this war, are evidences--one must insist again--of a national mind and quality, with which civilised Europe and civilised America can make no truce. And what folly lies behind the wickedness! Let me recall to American readers some of the phrases in the report of your former Minister in Belgium--Mr. Brand Whitlock--on the Belgian deportations, the "slave hunts" that Germany has carried out in Belgium and "which have torn from nearly every humble home in the land, a husband, father, son, or brother."

These proceedings [says Mr. Whitlock] place in relief the German capacity for blundering almost as sharply as the German capacity for cruelty. They have destroyed for generations any hope whatever of friendly relations between themselves and the Belgian people. For these things were done not, as with the early atrocities, in the heat of pa.s.sion and the first l.u.s.t of war, but by one of those deeds that make one despair of the future of the human race--a deed coldly planned, studiously matured, and deliberately and systematically executed, a deed so cruel that German soldiers are said to have wept in its execution, and so monstrous that even German officers are now said to be ashamed.

But the average German neither weeps nor blames. He is generally amazed, when he is not amused, by the state of feeling which such proceedings excite. And if he is an "intellectual," a professor, he will exhaust himself in ingenious and utterly callous defences of all that Germany has done or may do. An astonishing race--the German professors! The year before the war there was an historical congress in London. There was a hospitality committee, and my husband and I were asked to entertain some of the learned men. I remember one in particular--an old man with white hair, who with his wife and daughter joined the party after dinner. His name was Professor Otto von Gierke of the University of Berlin. I gathered from his conversation that he and his family had been very kindly entertained in London. His manner was somewhat harsh and over-bearing, but his white hair and spectacles gave him a venerable aspect, and it was clear that he and his wife and daughter belonged to a cultivated and intelligent _milieu_. But who among his English hosts could possibly have imagined the thoughts and ideas in that grey head? I find a speech of his in a most illuminating book by a Danish professor on German Chauvinist literature. [_Hurrah and Hallelujah!_ By J. P.

Bang, D.D., Professor of Theology at the University of Copenhagen, translated by Jessie Brochner.] The speech was published in a collection called _German Speeches in Hard Times_, which contains names once so distinguished as those of Von Wilamovitz and Harnack.

Professor von Gierke's effusion begins with the usual German falsehoods as to the origin of the war, and then continues--"But now that we Germans are plunged in war, we will have it in _all its grandeur and violence_! Neither fear nor _pity_ shall stay our arm before it has completely brought our enemies to the ground." They shall be reduced to such a condition that they shall never again dare even to snarl at Germany. Then German Kultur will show its full loveliness and strength, enlightening "the understanding of the foreign races absorbed and incorporated into the Empire, and making them see that only from German kultur can they derive those treasures which they need for their own particular life."

At the moment when these lines were written--for the book was published early in the war--the orgy of murder and l.u.s.t and hideous brutality which had swept through Belgium in the first three weeks of the war was beginning to be known in England; the traces of it were still fresh in town after town and village after village of that tortured land; while the testimony of its victims was just beginning to be sifted by the experts of the Bryce Commission.

The hostages of Vareddes, the helpless victims of Nomeny, of Gerbeviller, of Sermaize, of Sommeilles, and a score of other places in France were scarcely cold in their graves. But the old white-haired professor stands there, unashamed, unctuously offering the kultur of his criminal nation to an expectant world! "And when the victory is won," he says complacently--"the whole world will stand open to us, our war expenses will be paid by the vanquished, the black-white-and-red flag will wave over all seas; our countrymen will hold highly respected posts in all parts of the world, and we shall maintain and extend our colonies."

_G.o.d, forbid!_ So says the whole English-speaking race, you on your side of the sea, and we on ours.

But the feeling of abhorrence which is not, at such a moment as this, sternly and incessantly translated into deeds is of no account! So let me return to a last survey of the War. On my home journey from Nancy, I pa.s.sed through Paris, and was again welcomed at G.H.Q. on my way to Boulogne. In Paris, the breathless news of the Germans' quickening retreat on the Somme and the Aisne was varied one morning by the welcome tidings of the capture of Bagdad; and at the house of one of the most distinguished of European publicists, M. Joseph Reinach, of the _Figaro_, I met, on our pa.s.sage through, the lively, vigorous man, with his look of Irish vivacity and force--M. Painleve--who only a few days later was to succeed General Lyautey as French Minister for War. At our own headquarters, I found opinion as quietly confident as before. We were on the point of entering Bapaume; the "pushing up" was going extraordinarily well, owing to the excellence of the staff-work, and the energy and efficiency of all the auxiliary services--the Engineers, and the Labour Battalions, all the makers of roads and railways, the builders of huts, and levellers of sh.e.l.l-broken ground. And the vital importance of the long struggle on the Somme was becoming every day more evident. Only about Russia, both in Paris and at G.H.Q., was there a kind of silence which meant great anxiety. Lord Milner and General Castelnau had returned from Petrograd. In Paris, at any rate, it was not believed that they brought good news. All the huge efforts of the Allies to supply Russia with money, munitions, and transport, were they to go for nothing, owing to some sinister and thwarting influence which seemed to be strangling the national life?

Then a few days after my return home, the great explosion came, and when the first tumult and dust of it cleared away, there, indeed, was a strangely altered Europe! From France, Great Britain, and America went up a great cry of sympathy, of congratulation. The Tsardom was gone!--the "dark forces" had been overthrown; the political exiles were free; and Freedom seemed to stand there on the Russian soil shading her bewildered eyes against the sun of victory, amazed at her own deed.

But ten weeks have pa.s.sed since then, and it would be useless to disguise that the outburst of warm and sincere rejoicing that greeted the overthrow of the Russian autocracy has pa.s.sed once more into anxiety. Is Russia going to count any more in this great struggle for a liberated Europe, or will the forces of revolution devour each other, till in the course of time the fated "saviour of society" appears, and old tyrannies come back? General s.m.u.ts, himself the hero of a national struggle which has ended happily for both sides and the world, has been giving admirable expression here to the thoughts of many hearts. First of all to the emotion with which all lovers of liberty have seen the all but bloodless fall of the old tyranny. "It might have taken another fifty years or a century of tragedy and suffering to have brought it about! But the enormous strain of this war has done it, and the Russian people stand free in their own house." Now, what will they do with their freedom? Ten weeks have pa.s.sed, and the Russian armies are still disorganised, the Russian future uncertain. Meanwhile Germany has been able to throw against the Allies in France, and Austria has been able to throw against Italy on the Isonzo, forces which they think they need no longer against Russia, and the pace of victory has thereby been slackened. But General s.m.u.ts makes his eloquent appeal to the Russia which once held and broke Napoleon:

"Liberty is like young wine--it mounts to your head sometimes, and liberty, as a force in the world, requires organisation and discipline.... There must be organisation, and there must be discipline.

The Russian people are learning to-day the greatest lesson of life--that to be free you must work very hard and struggle very hard. They have the sensation of freedom, now that their bonds and shackles are gone, and no doubt they feel the joy, the intoxication, of their new experience; but they are living in a world which is not governed by formulas, however cleverly devised, but in a world of brute force, and unless that is smashed, even liberty itself will suffer and cannot live."

Will the newly-freed forget those that are still suffering and bound?

Will Russia forget Belgium?--and forget Serbia?

"Serbia was the reason why we went to war. She was going to be crushed under the Austrian heel, and Russia said this shall not be allowed.

Serbia has in that way become the occasion probably of the greatest movement for freedom the world has ever seen. Are we going to forget Serbia? No! We must stand by those martyr peoples who have stood by the great forces of the world. If the great democracies of the world become tired, if they become faint, if they halt by the way, if they leave those little ones in the lurch, then they shall pay for it in wars more horrible than human mind can foresee. I am sure we shall stand by those little ones. They have gone under, but we have not gone under. England and America, France and Russia, have not gone under, and we shall see them through, and shame on us if ever the least thought enters our minds of not seeing them through."

n.o.ble and sincere words! One can but hope that the echoes of them may reach the ear and heart of Russia.

But if towards Russia the sky that seemed to have cleared so suddenly is at present clouded and obscure--"westward, look, the land is bright!"

A fortnight after the abdication of the Tsar, Congress met in Washington, and President Wilson's speech announcing war between Germany and America had rung through the world. All that you, sir, the constant friend and champion of the Allies, and still more of their cause, and all that those who feel with you in the States have hoped for so long, is now to be fulfilled. It may take some time for your country, across those thousand miles of sea, to _realise_ the war, to feel it in every nerve, as we do. But in these seven weeks--how much you have done, as well as said! You have welcomed the British mission in a way to warm our British hearts; you have shown the French mission how pa.s.sionately America feels for France. You have sent us American destroyers, which have already played their part in a substantial reduction of the submarine losses. You have lent the Allies 150 millions sterling. You have pa.s.sed a Bill which will ultimately give you an army of two million men. You are raising such troops as will immediately increase the number of Americans in France to 100,000--equalling five German divisions. You are sending us ten thousand doctors to England and France, and hundreds of them have already arrived. You have doubled the personnel of your Navy, and increased your Regular Army by nearly 180,000 men. You are constructing 3,500 aeroplanes, and training 6,000 airmen. And you are now talking of 100,000 aeroplanes! Not bad, for seven weeks!

For the Allies also those seven weeks have been full of achievement. On Easter Monday, April 9th, the Battle of Arras began, with the brilliant capture by the Canadians of that very Vimy Ridge I had seen on March 2nd, from the plateau of Notre Dame de Lorette, lying in the middle distance under the spring sunshine. That exposed hill-side--those batteries through which I had walked--those crowded roads, and travelling guns, those marching troops and piled ammunition dumps!--how the recollection of them gave accent and fire to the picture of the battle as the telegrams from the front built it up day by day before one's eyes! Week by week, afterwards, with a mastery in artillery and in aviation that nothing could withstand, the British Army pushed on through April. After the first great attack which gave us the Vimy Ridge and brought our line close to Lens in the north, and to the neighbourhood of Bullecourt in the south, the 23rd of April saw the second British advance, which gave us Gravrelle and Guemappe, and made further breaches in the Hindenburg line. On April 16th the French made their magnificent attack in Champagne, with 10,000 prisoners on the first day (increased to 31,000 by May 24th)--followed by the capture of the immensely important positions of Moronvillers and Craonne.

Altogether the Allies in little more than a month took 50,000 prisoners, and large numbers of guns. General Allenby, for instance, captured 150 guns, General Home 64, while General Byng formed three "Pan-Germanic groups" out of his. We recovered many square miles of the robbed territory of France--40 villages one day, 100 villages another; while the condition in which the Germans had left both the recovered territory and its inhabitants has steeled once more the determination of the nations at war with Germany to put an end to "this particular form of ill-doing on the part of an uncivilised race."

During May there has been no such striking advance on either the French or British fronts, though Roeux and Bullecourt, both very important points, from their bearing on the Drocourt-Queant line, behind which lie Douai and Cambrai, have been captured by the British, and the French have continuously bettered their line and defied the most desperate counter-attacks. But May has been specially Italy's month! The Italian offensive on the Isonzo, and the Carso, beginning on May 14th, in ten days achieved more than any onlooker had dared to hope. In the section between Tolmino and Gorizia where the Isonzo runs in a fine gorge, the western bank belonging to Italy, and the eastern to Austria, all the important heights on the eastern bank across the river, except one that may fall to them any day, have been carried by the superb fighting of the Italians, amongst whom Dante's fellow citizens, the Florentine regiment, and regiments drawn from the rich Tuscan hills have specially distinguished themselves. While on the Carso, that rock-wilderness which stretches between Gorizia and Trieste, where fighting, especially in hot weather, supplies a supreme test of human endurance, the Italians have pushed on and on, from point to point, till now they are within ten miles of Trieste. British artillery is with the Italian Army, and British guns have been sh.e.l.ling military quarters and stores in the outskirts of Trieste, while British monitors are co-operating at sea.

The end is not yet, for the Austrians will fight to their last man for Trieste; and owing to the Russian situation the Austrians have been able to draw reinforcements from Galicia, which have seriously stiffened the task of Italy. But the omens are all good, and the Italian nation is more solidly behind its army than ever before.

So that in spite of the apparent lull in the Allied offensive on the French front, during the later weeks of May, all has really been going well. The only result of the furious German attempts to recover the ground lost in April has been to exhaust the strength of the attackers; and the Allied cause is steadily profited thereby. Our own troops have never been more sure of final victory. Let me quote a soldier's plain and graphic letter, recently published:

"This break-away from trench war gives us a much better time. We know now that we are the top dogs, and that we are keeping the Germans on the move. And they're busy wondering all the time; they don't know where the next whack is coming from. Mind you, I'm far from saying that we can get them out of the Hindenburg line without a lot of fighting yet, but it is only a question of time. It's a different sensation going over the top now from what it was in the early days. You see, we used to know that our guns were not nearly so many as the Germans', and that we hadn't the stuff to put over. Now we just climb out of a trench and walk behind a curtain of fire. It makes a difference. It seems to me we are steadily beating the Boche at his own game. He used to be strong in the matter of guns, but that's been taken from him. He used gas--do you remember the way the Canadians got the first lot? Well, now our gas sh.e.l.ls are a bit too strong for him, and so are our flame sh.e.l.ls. I bet he wishes now that he hadn't thought of his flame-throwers! ... Then there's another thing, and that's the way our chaps keep improving. The Fritzes are not so good as they used to be. You get up against a bunch now and again that fight well, but we begin to see more of the 'Kamerad' business.

It's as much up to the people at home to see this thing through as it is to the men out here. We need the guns and sh.e.l.ls to blow the Germans out of the strong places that they've had years to build and dig, and the folks at home can leave the rest to us. We can do the job all right if they back us up and don't get tired. I think we've shown them that too.

You'll get all that from the papers, but maybe it comes better from a soldier. You can take it from me that it's true. I've seen the beginning, and I've been in places where things were pretty desperate for us, and I've seen _the start of the finish_. The difference is marvellous. I've only had an army education, and it might strike you that I'm not able to judge. I'm a soldier though, and I look at it as a soldier. I say, give us the stuff, keep on giving us the tools and the men to use them, and--it may be soon or it may be long--we'll beat the Boche to his knees."

The truth seems to be that the Germans are outmatched, first and foremost, in aircraft and in guns. You will remember the quiet certainty of our young Flight-Commander on March 1st--"When the next big offensive comes, we shall down them, just as we did on the Somme." The prophecy has been made good, abundantly good!--at the cost of many a precious life. The air observation on our side has been far better and more daring than that on the German side; and the work of our artillery has been proportionately more accurate and more effective.

As to guns and ammunition, "the number of heavy sh.e.l.ls fired in the first week of the present offensive"--says an official account--"was nearly twice as great as it was in the first week of the Somme offensive, and in the second week it was 6-1/2 times as great as it was in the second week of the Somme offensive. As a result of this great artillery fire, which had never been exceeded in the whole course of the war, a great saving of British life has been effected." And no praise can be too high for our gunners. In a field where, two years ago, Germany had the undisputed predominance, we have now beaten her alike in the supply of guns and in the daring and efficiency of our gunners.

Nevertheless, let there be no foolish underestimate of the still formidable strength of the Germans. The British and French missions will have brought to your Government all available information on this point.

There can be no doubt that a "wonderful" effort, as one of our Ministers calls it, has been made by Germany during the past winter. She has mobilised all her people for the war as she has never done yet. She has increased her munitions and put fresh divisions in the field. The estimates of her present fighting strength given by our military writers and correspondents do not differ very much.