Towards the Goal Part 8

So the Abbe goes to the new-made grave, reads the _De Profundis_, says a prayer, gives the benediction, and then speaks. Tears are on the strong, rugged faces of the bare-headed Bretons, as they gather round him. A group, some little distance off, which is writing the names of the dead on a white cross, pauses, catches what is going on, and kneels too, with bent heads....

It is good to linger on that little scene of human sympathy and religious faith. It does something to protect the mind from the horror of much that has happened here.

In spite of the storm, our indefatigable guide carried us through all the princ.i.p.al points of the battle-line--St. Soupplets--Marcilly-- Barcy--Etrepilly--Acy-en-Multien; villages from which one by one, by keen, hard fighting, the French attack, coming eastwards from Dammartin to Paris, dislodged the troops of Von Kluck; while to our right lay Trocy, and Vareddes, a village on the Ourcq, between which points ran the strongest artillery positions of the enemy. At Barcy, we stopped a few minutes, to go and look at the ruined church, with its fallen bell, and its graveyard packed with wreaths and crosses, bound with the tricolour. At Etrepilly, with the snow beating in our faces, and the wind howling round us, we read the inscription on the national monument raised to those fallen in the battle, and looking eastwards to the spot where Trocy lay under thick curtains of storm, we tried to imagine the magnificent charge of the Zouaves, of the 62nd Reserve Division, under Commandant Henri D'Urbal, who, with many a comrade, lies buried in the cemetery of Barcy.

Five days the battle swayed backwards and forwards across this scene, especially following the lines of the little streams flowing eastwards to the Ourcq, the Therouanne, the Gergogne, the Grivette. "From village to village," says Colonel Buchan, "amid the smoke of burning haystacks and farmsteads, the French bayonet attack was pressed home."

"Terrible days of life-and-death fighting! [writes a Meaux resident, Madame Koussel-Lepine] battles of Chambry, Barcy, Puisieux, Acy-en-Multien, the 6th, 7th, and 8th of September--fierce days to which the graves among the crops bear witness. Four hundred volunteers sent to attack a farm, from which only seven come back! Ambuscades, barricades in the streets, loopholes cut in the cemetery walls, trenches hastily dug and filled with dead, night fighting, often hand to hand, surprises, the sudden flash of bayonets, a rain of iron, a rain of fire, mills and houses burning like torches--fields red with the dead and with the flaming corn fruit of the fields, and flower of the race!--the sacrifice consummated, the cup drunk to the lees."

Moving and eloquent words! They gain for me a double significance as I look back from them to the little scene we saw at Barcy under the snow--a halt of some French infantry, in front of the ruined church. The "_salut an drapeau_" was going on, that simple, daily rite which, like a secular ma.s.s, is the outward and visible sign to the French soldier of his country and what he owes her. This pa.s.sion of French patriotism--what a marvellous force, what a regenerating force it has shown itself in this war! It springs, too, from the heart of a race which has the Latin gift of expression. Listen to this last entry in the journal of Captain Robert Dubarle, the evening before his death in action:

"This attack to-morrow, besides the inevitable emotion it rouses in one's thoughts, stirs in me a kind of joyous impatience, and the pride of doing my duty--which is to fight gladly, and die victorious. To the last breath of our lives, to the last child of our mothers, to the last stone of our dwellings, all is thine, my country! Make no hurry. Choose thine own time for striking. If thou needest months, we will fight for months; if thou needest years, we will fight for years--the children of to-day shall be the soldiers of to-morrow.

"Already, perhaps, my last hour is hastening towards me. Accept the gift I make thee of my strength, my hopes, my joys and my sorrows, of all my being, filled with the pa.s.sion of thee. Pardon thy children their errors of past days. Cover them with thy glory--put them to sleep in thy flag.

Rise, victorious and renewed, upon their graves. Let our holocaust save thee--_Patrie, Patrie_!"

An utterance which for tragic sincerity and pa.s.sion may well compare with the letter of an English officer I printed at the end of _England's Effort_.

On they go, into the snow and the mist, the small st.u.r.dy soldiers, bound northwards for those great and victorious attacks on the Craonne plateau, and the Chemin des Dames, which were to follow so close on our own British victory on the Vimy Ridge. They pa.s.s the two ladies in the motor car, looking at us with friendly, laughing eyes, and disappear into the storm.

Then we move on to the northern edge of the battle-field, and at Rosoy we turn south towards Meaux, pa.s.sing Vareddes to our left. The weather clears a little, and from the high ground we are able to see Meaux to the west, lying beside its great river, than which our children's children will greet no more famous name. The Marne winds, steely grey, through the white landscape, and we run down to it quickly. Soon we are making our way on foot through the dripping streets of Meaux to the old bridge, which the British broke down--one of three--on their retreat--so soon to end! Then, a few minutes in the lovely cathedral--its beauty was a great surprise to me!--a greeting to the tomb of Bossuet--ah! what a _Discours_ he would have written on the Battle of the Marne!--and a rapid journey of some twenty-five miles back to Paris.

But there is still a story left to tell--the story of Vareddes.

"Vareddes"--says a local historian of the battle--"is now a very quiet place. There is no movement in the streets and little life in the houses, where some of the injuries of war have been repaired." But there is no spot in the wide battle-field where there burns a more pa.s.sionate hatred of a barbarous enemy. "Push open this window, enter this house, talk with any person whatever whom you may happen to meet, and they will tell you of the torture of old men, carried off as hostages and murdered in cold blood, or of the agonies of fear deliberately inflicted on old and frail women, through a whole night."

The story of Vareddes is indeed nearly incredible. That English, or French, or Italian troops could have been guilty of this particular crime is beyond imagination. Individual deeds of pa.s.sion and l.u.s.t are possible, indeed, in all armies, though the degree to which they have prevailed in the German army is, by the judgment of the civilised world outside Germany, unprecedented in modern history. But the instances of long-drawn-out, cold-blooded, unrelenting cruelty, of which the German conduct of the war is full, fill one after a while with a shuddering sense of something wholly vile, and wholly unsuspected, which Europe has been sheltering, unawares, in its midst. The horror has now thrown off the trappings and disguise of modern civilisation, and we see it and recoil. We feel that we are terribly right in speaking of the Germans as barbarians; that, for all their science and their organisation, they have nothing really in common with the Graeco-Latin and Christian civilisation on which this old Europe is based. We have thought of them, in former days,--how strange to look back upon it!--as brothers and co-workers in the human cause. But the men who have made and are sustaining this war, together with the men, civil and military, who have breathed its present spirit into the German Army, are really moral outlaws, acknowledging no authority but their own arrogant and cruel wills, impervious to the moral ideals and restraints that govern other nations, and betraying again and again, under the test of circ.u.mstance, the traits of the savage and the brute.

And as one says these things, one could almost laugh at them!--so strong is still the memory of what one used to feel towards the poetic, the thinking, the artistic Germany of the past. But that Germany was a mere blind, hiding the real Germany.

Listen, at least, to what this old village of the Ile-de-France knows of Germany.

With the early days of September 1914, there was a lamentable exodus from all this district. Long lines of fugitives making for safety and the south, carts filled with household stuff and carrying the women and children, herds of cattle and sheep, crowded the roads. The Germans were coming, and the terror of Belgium and the Ardennes had spread to these French peasants of the centre. On September 1st, the post-mistress of Vareddes received orders to leave the village, after destroying the telephone and telegraphic connections. The news came late, but panic spread like wildfire. All the night, Vareddes was packing and going. Of 800 inhabitants only a hundred remained, thirty of them old men.

One of the emigrants did not get far from home. He was a man of seventy, Louis Denet by name. He left Vareddes with his wife, in a farm-cart, driving a cow with them. They went a day's journey, and put up for a few days at the farm of a friend named Roger. On Sunday the 6th, in the morning, four Germans arrived at the farm. They went away and came back again in the afternoon. They called all the inmates of the farm out into the yard. Denet and Roger appeared. "You were three men this morning, now you are only two!" said one of the Germans. And immediately they took the two old men a little distance away, and shot them both, within half a mile of the farm. The body of Roger was found by his wife the day after; that of Denet was not discovered for some time. n.o.body has any idea to this day why those men were shot. It is worth while to try and realise the scene--the terror-stricken old men dragged away by their murderers--the wives left behind, no doubt under a guard--the sound of the distant shots--the broken hearts of the widow and the orphan.

But that was a mere prelude.

On Friday, September 4th, a large detachment of Von Kluck's army invaded Vareddes, coming from Barcy, which lies to the west. It was no doubt moving towards the Marne on that flank march which was Von Kluck's undoing. The troops left the village on Sat.u.r.day the 5th, but only to make a hurried return that same evening. Von Kluck was already aware of his danger, and was rapidly recalling troops to meet the advance of Maunoury. Meanwhile the French Sixth Army was pressing on from the west, and from the 6th to the 9th there was fierce fighting in and round Vareddes. There were German batteries behind the Presbytere, and the church had become a hospital. The old Cure, the Abbe Fossin, at the age of seventy-eight, spent himself in devoted service to the wounded Germans who filled it. There were other dressing stations near by. The Mairie, and the school, were full of wounded, of whom there were probably some hundreds in the village. Only 135 dead were buried in the neighbourhood; the Germans carried off the others in great lorries filled with corpses.

By Monday the 7th, although they were still to hold the village till the 9th, the Germans knew they were beaten. The rage of the great defeat, of the incredible disappointment, was on them. Only a week before, they had pa.s.sed through the same country-side crying "Nach Paris!" and polishing up b.u.t.tons, belts, rifles, accoutrements generally, so as to enter the French capital in _grande tenue._ For whatever might have been the real plans of the German General Staff, the rank and file, as they came south from Creil and Nanteuil, believed themselves only a few hours from the Boulevards, from the city of pleasure and spoil.

What had happened? The common cry of men so sharply foiled went up.

"Nous sommes trahis!" The German troops in Vareddes, foreseeing immediate withdrawal, and surrounded by their own dead and dying, must somehow avenge themselves, on some one. "Hostages! The village has played us false! The Cure has been signalling from the church. We are in a nest of spies!"

So on the evening of the 7th, the old Cure, who had spent his day in the church, doing what he could for the wounded, and was worn out, had just gone to bed when there was loud knocking at his door. He was dragged out of bed, and told that he was charged with making signals to the French Army from his church tower, and so causing the defeat of the Germans.

He pointed out that he was physically incapable of climbing the tower, that any wounded German of whom the church was full could have seen him doing it, had the absurd charge been true. He reminded them that he had spent his whole time in nursing their men. No use! He is struck, hustled, spat upon, and dragged off to the Mairie. There he pa.s.sed the night sitting on a hamper, and in the morning some one remembers to have seen him there, his rosary in his hand.

In one of the local accounts there is a touching photograph, taken, of course, before the war, of the Cure among the boys of the village. A mild reserved face, with something of the child in it; the face of a man who had had a gentle experience of life, and might surely hope for a gentle death.

Altogether some fourteen hostages, all but two over sixty years of age, and several over seventy, were taken during the evening and night. They ask why. The answer is, "The Germans have been betrayed!" One man is arrested because he had said to a German who was boasting that the German Army would be in Paris in two days--"All right!--but you're not there yet!" Another, because he had been seen going backwards and forwards to a wood, in which it appeared he had hidden two horses whom he had been trying to feed. One old man of seventy-nine could only walk to the yard in which the others were gathered by the help of his wife's arm. When they arrived there a soldier separated them so roughly that the wife fell.

Imagine the horror of the September night!--the terror of the women who, in the general exodus of the young and strong, had stayed behind with their husbands, the old men who could not be persuaded to leave the farms and fields in which they had spent their lives. "What harm can they do to us--old people?" No doubt that had been the instinctive feeling among those who had remained to face the invasion.

But the Germans were not content without wreaking the instinct--which is the savage instinct--to break and crush and ill-treat something which has thwarted you, on the women of Vareddes also. They gathered them out of the farmyard to which they had come, in the hopes of being allowed to stay with the men, and shut them up in a room of the farm. And there, with fixed bayonets, the soldiers amused themselves with terrifying these trembling creatures during a great part of the night. They made them all kneel down, facing a file of soldiers, and the women thought their last hour had come. One was seventy-seven years old, three sixty-seven, the two others just under sixty. The eldest, Madame Barthelemy, said to the others--"We are going to die. Make your 'contrition' if you can." (The Town Librarian of Meaux, from whose account I take these facts, heard these details from the lips of poor Madame Barthelemy herself.) The cruel scene shapes itself as we think of it--the half-lit room--the row of kneeling and weeping women, the grinning soldiers, bayonet in hand, and the old men waiting in the yard outside.

But with the morning, the French mitrailleuses are heard. The soldiers disappear.

The poor old women are free; they are able to leave their prison.

But their husbands are gone--carried off as hostages by the Germans.

There were nineteen hostages in all. Three of them were taken off in a north-westerly direction, and found some German officers quartered in a chateau, who, after a short interrogation, released them. Of the other sixteen, fifteen were old men, and the sixteenth a child. The Cure is with them, and finds great difficulty, owing to his age, the exhaustion of the night, and lack of food, in keeping up with the column. It was now Thursday the 10th, the day following that on which, as is generally believed, the Kaiser signed the order for the general retreat of the German armies in France. But the hostages are told that the French Army has been repulsed, and the Germans will be in Paris directly.

At last the poor Cure could walk no farther. He gave his watch to a companion. "Give it to my family when you can. I am sure they mean to shoot me." Then he dropped exhausted. The Germans hailed a pa.s.sing vehicle, and made him and another old man, who had fallen out, follow in it. Presently they arrive at Lizy-sur-Ourcq, through which thousands of German troops are now pa.s.sing, bound not for Paris, but for Soissons and the Aisne, and in the blackest of tempers. Here, after twenty-four more hours of suffering and starvation, the Cure is brought before a court-martial of German officers sitting in a barn. He is once more charged with signalling from the church to the French Army. He again denies the charge, and reminds his judges of what he had done for the German wounded, to whose grat.i.tude he appeals. Then four German soldiers give some sort of evidence, founded either on malice or mistake. There are no witnesses for the defence, no further inquiry. The president of the court-martial says, in bad French, to the other hostages who stand by: "The Cure has lied--he is a spy--_il sera juge_."

What did he mean--and what happened afterwards? The French witnesses of the scene who survived understood the officer's words to mean that the Cure would be shot. With tears, they bade him farewell, as he sat crouched in a corner of the barn guarded by two German soldiers. He was never seen again by French eyes; and the probability is that he was shot immediately after the scene in the barn.

Then the miserable march of the other old men began again. They are dragged along in the wake of the retreating Germans. The day is very hot, the roads are crowded with troops and lorries. They are hustled and hurried, and their feeble strength is rapidly exhausted. The older ones beg that they may be left to die; the younger help them as much as they can. When anyone falls out, he is kicked and beaten till he gets up again. And all the time the pa.s.sing troops mock and insult them. At last, near Coulombs, after a march of two hours and a half, a man of seventy-three, called Jourdaine, falls. His guards rush upon him, with blows and kicks. In vain. He has no strength to rise, and his murderers finish him with a ball in the head and one in the side, and bury him hastily in a field a few metres off.

The weary march goes on all day. When it ends, another old man--seventy-nine years old--"le pere Milliardet"--can do no more. The next morning he staggered to his feet at the order to move, but fell almost immediately. Then a soldier with the utmost coolness sent his bayonet through the heart of the helpless creature. Another falls on the road a little farther north--then another--and another. All are killed, as they lie.

The poor Maire, Lievin, struggles on as long as he can. Two other prisoners support him on either side. But he has a weak heart--his face is purple--he can hardly breathe. Again and again he falls, only to be brutally pulled up, the Germans shouting with laughter at the old man's misery. (This comes from the testimony of the survivors.) Then he, too, falls for the last time. Two soldiers take him into the cemetery of Chouy. Lievin understands, and patiently takes out his handkerchief and bandages his own eyes. It takes three b.a.l.l.s to kill him.

Another hostage, a little farther on, who had also fallen was beaten to death before the eyes of the others.

The following day, after having suffered every kind of insult and privation, the wretched remnant of the civilian prisoners reached Soissons, and were dispatched to Germany, bound for the concentration camp at Erfurt.

Eight of them, poor souls! reached Germany, where two of them died. At last, in January 1915, four of them were returned to France through Switzerland. They reached Schaffhausen with a number of other _rapatries,_ in early February, to find there the boundless pity with which the Swiss know so well how to surround the frail and tortured sufferers of this war. In a few weeks more, they were again at home, among the old farms and woods of the Ile-de-France. "They are now in peace," says the Meaux Librarian--"among those who love them, and whose affection tries, day by day, to soften for them the cruel memory of their Calvary and their exile."

A monument to the memory of the murdered hostages is to be erected in the village market-place, and a _plaque_ has been let into the wall of the farm where the old men and the women pa.s.sed their first night of agony.

What is the moral of this story? I have chosen it to ill.u.s.trate again the historic words which should be, I think--and we know that what is in our hearts is in your hearts also!--the special watchword of the Allies and of America, in these present days, when the German strength _may_ collapse at any moment, and the problems of peace negotiations _may_ be upon us before we know.

_Reparation_--_Rest.i.tution_--_Guarantees_!

The story of Vareddes, like that of Senlis, is not among the vilest--by a long, long way--of those which have steeped the name of Germany in eternal infamy during this war. The tale of Gerbeviller--which I shall take for my third instance--as I heard it from the lips of eye-witnesses, plunges us in deeper depths of horror; and the pages of the Bryce report are full of incidents beside which that of Vareddes looks almost colourless.

All the same, let us insist again that no Army of the Allies, or of America, or of any British Dominion, would have been capable of the treatment given by the soldiers of Germany to the hostages of Vareddes.

It brings out into sharp relief that quality, or "mentality," to use the fashionable word, which Germany shares with Austria--witness the Austrian doings in Serbia--and with Turkey--witness Turkey's doings in Armenia--but not with any other civilised nation. It is the quality of, or the tendency to, deliberate and pitiless cruelty; a quality which makes of the man or nation who shows it a particularly terrible kind of animal force; and the more terrible, the more educated. Unless we can put it down and stamp it out, as it has become embodied in a European nation, European freedom and peace, American freedom and peace, have no future.

But now, let me carry you to Lorraine!--to the scenes of that short but glorious campaign of September 1914, by which, while the Battle of the Marne was being fought, General Castelnau was protecting the right of the French armies; and to the devastated villages where American kindness is already at work, rebuilding the destroyed, and comforting the broken-hearted.