No. 7
May 10th, 1917.
DEAR MR. ROOSEVELT,—We are then, for a time, to put France, and not the British line, in the forefront of these later letters. For when I went out on this task, as I think you know, I had two objects in mind—intimately connected. The first was to carry on that general story of the British effort, which I began last year under your inspiration, down to the opening of this year’s campaign. And the second was to try and make more people in this country, and more people in America, realise—as acutely and poignantly as I could—what it is we are really fighting for; what is the character of the enemy we are up against; what are the sufferings, outrages, and devastations which have been inflicted on France, in particular, by the wanton cruelty and ambition of Germany; for which she herself must be made to suffer and pay, if civilisation and freedom are to endure.
With this second intention, I was to have combined, by the courtesy of the French Headquarters, a visit to certain central portions of the French line, including Soissons, Reims, and Verdun. But by the time I reached France the great operations that have since marked the Soissons-Reims front were in active preparation; roads and motor-cars were absorbed by the movements of troops and stores; Reims and Verdun were under renewed bombardment; and visits to this section of the French line were entirely held up. The French authorities, understanding that I chiefly wished to see for myself some of the wrecked and ruined villages and towns dealt with in the French official reports, suggested, first Senlis and the battle-fields of the Ourcq, and then Nancy, the ruined villages of Lorraine, and that portion of their eastern frontier line where, simultaneously with the Battle of the Marne, General Castelnau directed from the plateau of Amance and the Grand Couronné that strong defence of Nancy which protected—and still protects—the French right, and has baulked all the German attempts to turn it.
Meanwhile, in the early days of March, the German retreat, south of the Somme and in front of the French line, was not yet verified; and the worst devastation of the war—the most wanton crime, perhaps, that Germany has so far committed—was not yet accomplished. I had left France before it was fully known, and could only realise, by hot sympathy from a distance, the passionate thrill of fury and wild grief which swept through France when the news began to come in from the evacuated districts. British correspondents with the advancing armies of the Allies have seen deeds of barbarism which British eyes and hearts will never forget, and have sent the news of them through the world. The destruction of Coucy and Ham, the ruin and plunder of the villages, the shameless loot everywhere, the hideous ill-treatment of the country folk, the deportation of boys and girls, the massacre of the fruit trees—these things have gone deep into the very soul of France, burning away—except in the minds of a few incorrigible fanatics—whatever foolish “pacificism” was there, and steeling the mind and will of the nation afresh to that victory which can alone bring expiation, punishment, and a peace worth the name. But, everywhere, the ruins with which northern, central, and eastern France are covered, whether they were caused by the ordinary processes of war or not, are equally part of the guilt of Germany. In the country which I saw last year on the Belgian border, from the great phantom of Ypres down to Festubert, the ravage is mainly the ravage of war. Incessant bombardment from the fighting lines has crumbled village after village into dust, or gashed the small historic towns and the stately country houses. There is no deliberate use of torch and petrol, as in the towns farther south and east. Ypres, however, was deliberately shelled into fragments day after day; and Arras is only a degree less carefully ruined. And whatever the military pretext may be, the root question remains—“Why are the Germans in France at all?” What brought them there but their own determination, in the words of the Secret Report of 1913 printed in the French Yellow book, to “strengthen and extend Deutschtum (Germanism) throughout the entire world”? Every injury that poor France in self-defence, or the Allies at her side, are forced to inflict on the villages and towns which express and are interwoven with the history and genius of the French, is really a German crime. There is no forgiveness for what Germany has done—none! She has tried to murder a people; and but for the splendid gifts of that people, she would have achieved her end.
Perhaps the tragedy of what is to be seen and heard at Senlis, on the battle-grounds of the Ourcq, and in the villages of Lorraine, was heightened for me by the beauty of the long drive south from the neighbourhood of G.H.Q.—some hundred and forty miles. It was a cold but clear March day. We had but parted from snow a little while, and we were soon to find it again. But on this day, austerely bright, the land of France unrolled before us its long succession of valley and upland, upland and valley. Here, no trace of the invader; generally speaking no signs of the armies; for our route lay, on an average, some forty miles behind the line. All was peace, solitude even; for the few women, old men, and boys on the land scarcely told in the landscape. But every mile was rich in the signs and suggestion of an old and most human civilisation—farms, villages, towns, the carefully tended woods, the fine roads running their straight unimpeded course over hill and dale, bearing witness to a State sense, of which we possess too little in this country.
We stopped several times on the journey—I remember a puncture, involving a couple of hours’ delay, somewhere north of Beauvais—and found ourselves talking in small hot rooms with peasant families of all ages and stages, from the blind old grandmother, like a brooding Fate in the background, to the last toddling baby. How friendly they were, in their own self-respecting way!—the grave-faced elder women, the young wives, the children. The strength of the family in France seems to me still overwhelming—would we had more of it left in England! The prevailing effect was of women everywhere carrying on—making no parade of it, being indeed accustomed to work, and familiar with every detail of the land; having merely added the tasks of their husbands and sons to their own, and asking no praise for it. The dignity, the essential refinement and intelligence—for all their homely speech—of these solidly built, strong-faced women, in the central districts of France, is still what it was when George Sand drew her Berri peasants, nearly a hundred years ago.
Then darkness fell, and in the darkness we went through an old, old town where are the French General Headquarters. Sentries challenged us to right and left, and sent us forward again with friendly looks. The day had been very long, and presently, as we approached Paris, I fell asleep in my corner, only to be roused with a start by a glare of lights, and more sentries. The barrière of Paris!—shining out into the night.
Two days in Paris followed; every hour crowded with talk, and the vivid impressions of a moment when, from beyond Compiègne and Soissons—some sixty miles from the Boulevards—the French airmen flying over the German lines were now bringing back news every morning and night of fresh withdrawals, fresh villages burning, as the sullen enemy relaxed his hold.
On the third day, a most courteous and able official of the French Foreign Office took us in charge, and we set out for Senlis on a morning chill and wintry indeed, but giving little sign of the storm it held in leash.
To reach Senlis one must cross the military enceinte of Paris. Many visitors from Paris and other parts of France, from England, or from America, have seen by now the wreck of its principal street, and have talked with the Abbé Dourlent, the “Archiprêtre” of the cathedral, whose story often told has lost but little of its first vigour and simplicity, to judge at least by its effect on two of his latest visitors.
We took the great northern road out of Paris, which passes scenes memorable in the war of 1870. On both sides of us, at frequent intervals, across the flat country, were long lines of trenches, and belts of barbed wire, most of them additions to the defences of Paris since the Battle of the Marne. It is well to make assurance doubly sure! But although, as we entered the Forest of Chantilly, the German line was no more than some thirty-odd miles away, and since the Battle of the Aisne, two and a half years ago, it has run, practically, as it still ran in the early days of this last March, the notion of any fresh attack on Paris seemed the merest dream. It was indeed a striking testimony to the power of the modern defensive—this absolute security in which Paris and its neighbourhood has lived and moved all that time, with—up to a few weeks ago—the German batteries no farther off than the suburbs of Soissons. How good to remember, as one writes, all that has happened since I was in Senlis!—and the increased distance that now divides the German hosts from the great prize on which they had set their hearts.
How fiercely they had set their hearts on it, the old Curé of Senlis, who is the chief depository of the story of the town, was to make us feel anew.
One enters Senlis from Paris by the main street, the Rue de la République, which the Germans deliberately and ruthlessly burnt on September 2nd and 3rd, 1914. We moved slowly along it through the blackened ruins of houses large and small, systematically fired by the German pétroleurs, in revenge for a supposed attack by civilians upon the entering German troops. Les civils ont tiré—it is the universal excuse for these deeds of wanton barbarism, and for the hideous cruelties to men, women, and children that have attended them—beginning with that incident which first revealed to a startled world the true character of the men directing the German Army—the burning and sack of Louvain. It is to be hoped that renewed and careful investigation will be made—(much preliminary inquiry has already of course taken place)—after the war into all these cases. My own impression from what I have heard, seen, and read—for what it may be worth—is that the plea is almost invariably false; but that the state of panic and excitement into which the German temperament falls, with extraordinary readiness, under the strain of battle, together with the drunkenness of troops traversing a rich wine-growing country, have often accounted for an honest, but quite mistaken belief in the minds of German soldiers, without excusing at all the deeds to which it led. Of this abnormal excitability, the old Curé of Senlis gave one or two instances which struck me.
We came across him by chance in the cathedral—the beautiful cathedral I have heard Walter Pater describe, in my young Oxford days, as one of the loveliest and gracefullest things in French Gothic. Fortunately, though the slender belfry and the roof were repeatedly struck by shrapnel in the short bombardment of the town, no serious damage was done. We wandered round the church alone, delighting our eyes with the warm golden white of the stone, the height of the grooved arches, the flaming fragments of old glass, when we saw the figure of an old priest come slowly down the aisle, his arms folded. He looked at us rather dreamily and passed. Our guide, Monsieur P., followed and spoke to him. “Monsieur, you are the Abbé Dourlent?”
“I am, sir. What can I do for you?”
Something was said about English ladies, and the Curé courteously turned back. “Will the ladies come into the Presbytère?” We followed him across the small cathedral square to the old house in which he lived, and were shown into a bare dining-room, with a table, some chairs, and a few old religious engravings on the walls. He offered us chairs and sat down himself.
“You would like to hear the story of the German occupation?” He thought a little before beginning, and I was struck with his strong, tired face, the powerful mouth and jaw, and above them, eyes which seemed to have lost the power of smiling, though I guessed them to be naturally full of a pleasant shrewdness, of what the French call malice, which is not the English “malice.” He was rather difficult to follow here and there, but from his spoken words and from a written account he placed in my hands, I put together the following story:
“It was August 30th, 1914, when the British General Staff arrived in Senlis. That same evening, they left it for Dammartin. All day, and the next two days, French and English troops passed through the town. What was happening? Would there be no fighting in defence of Paris—only thirty miles away? Wednesday, September 2nd—that was the day the guns began, our guns and theirs, to the north of Senlis. But, in the course of that day, we knew finally there would be no battle between us and Paris. The French troops were going—the English were going. They left us—marching eastward. Our hearts were very sore as we saw them go.
“Two o’clock on Wednesday—the first shell struck the cathedral. I had just been to the top of the belfry to see, if I could, from what direction the enemy was coming. The bombardment lasted an hour and a half. At four o’clock they entered. If you had seen them!”
The old Curé raised himself on his seat, trying to imitate the insolent bearing of the German cavalry as they led the way through the old town which they imagined would be the last stage on their way to Paris.
“They came in, shouting ‘Paris—Nach Paris!’ maddened with excitement. They were all singing—they were like men beside themselves.”
“What did they sing, Monsieur le Curé?—Deutschland über alles’?”
“Oh, no, madame, not at all. They sang hymns. It was an extraordinary sight. They seemed possessed. They were certain that in a few hours they would be in Paris. They passed through the town, and then, just south of the town, they stopped. Our people show the place. It was the nearest they ever got to Paris.
“Presently, an officer, with an escort, a general apparently, rode through the town, pulled up at the Hôtel de Ville, and asked for the Maire—angrily, like a man in a passion. But the Maire—M. Odent—was there, waiting, on the steps of the Hôtel de Ville.
“Monsieur Odent was my friend—he gave me his confidence. He had resisted his nomination as Mayor as long as he could, and accepted it only as an imperative duty. He was an employer, whom his workmen loved. One of them used to say—‘When one gets into M. Odent’s employ, one lives and dies there.’ Just before the invasion, he took his family away. Then he came back, with the presentiment of disaster. He said to me—‘I persuaded my wife to go. It was hard. We are much attached to each other—but now I am free, ready for all that may come.’
“Well, the German general said to him roughly:
“‘Is your town quiet? Can we circulate safely?’
“M. Odent said, ‘Yes. There is no quieter town in France than Senlis.’
“‘Are there still any soldiers here?’
“M. Odent had seen the French troops defiling through the town all the morning. The bombardment had made it impossible to go about the streets. As far as he knew there were none left. He answered, ‘No.’
“He was taken off, practically under arrest, to the Hôtel, and told to order a dinner for thirty, with ice and champagne. Then his secretary joined him and proposed that the adjoints, or Mayor’s assistants, should be sent for.
“‘No,’ said M. Odent, ‘one victim is enough.’ You see he foresaw everything. We all knew what had happened in Belgium and the Ardennes.
“The German officer questioned him again.
“‘Why have your people gone?—why are these houses, these shops, shut? There must be lights everywhere—all through the night!’
“Suddenly—shots!—in the Rue de la République. In a few seconds there was a furious fusillade, accompanied by the rattle of machine guns. The officer sprang up.
“‘So this is your quiet town, Monsieur le Maire! I arrest you, and you shall answer with your life for the lives of my soldiers.’
“Two men with revolvers were set to guard him. The officer himself presently took him outside the town, and left him under guard, at the little village of Poteau, at the edge of a wood.”
What had happened? Unluckily for Senlis and M. Odent, some of the French rear-guard—infantry stragglers, and a small party of Senegalese troops—were still in the southern quarter of the town when the Germans entered. They opened fire from a barrack near the Paris entrance and a sharp engagement followed which lasted several hours, with casualties on both sides. The Germans got the better, and were then free to wreak their fury on the town.
They broke into the houses, plundered the wine shops, first of all, and took fifty hostages, of whom twenty-six perished. And at half-past five, while the fighting was still going on, the punitive burning of the town began, by a cyclist section told off for the work and furnished with every means for doing it effectively. These men, according to an eyewitness, did their work with wild shouts—“cris sauvages.”
A hundred and seventeen houses were soon burning fiercely. On that hot September evening, the air was like a furnace. Before long the streets were full of blazing débris. Two persons who had hidden themselves in their cellars died of suffocation; yet to appear in the streets was to risk death at the hands of some drunk or maddened soldier.
At the opening of the French attack, a German officer rushed to the hospital, which was full of wounded, in search of francs-tireurs. Arrived there, he saw an old man, a chronic patient of the hospital and half idiotic, standing on the steps of the building. He blew the old man’s brains out. He then forced his way into the hospital, pointing his revolver at the French wounded, who thought their last hour had come. He himself was wounded, and at last appeared to yield to the remonstrances of the Sister in charge, and allowed his wound to be dressed. But in the middle of the dressing, he broke away without his tunic, and helmetless, in a state of mad excitement, and presently reappeared with a file of soldiers. Placing them in the street opposite the rooms occupied by the French wounded, he ordered them to fire a volley. No one was hurt, though several beds were struck. Then the women’s wards were searched. Two sick men, éclopés without visible wounds, were dragged out of their beds and would have been bayoneted then and there but for the entreaties of the nurses, who ultimately released them.
An awful night followed in the still burning or smouldering town. Meanwhile, at nine o’clock in the evening a party of German officers betook themselves to the hamlet of Poteau—a village north of Senlis—where M. Odent had been kept under guard since the afternoon. Six other hostages were produced, and they were all marched off to a field near Chamant at the edge of a wood. Here the Maire was called up and interrogated. His companion, eight or nine metres away, too far to hear what was said, watched the scene. As I think of it, I seem to see in the southern sky the glare of burning Senlis; above it, and spread over the stubble fields in which the party stood, a peaceful moonlight. In his written account, the Curé specially mentions the brightness of the harvest moon.
Presently the Maire came back to the six, and said to one, Benoit Decreys, “Adieu, my poor Benoit, we shall not see each other again —they are going to shoot me.” He took his crucifix, his purse containing a sum of money, and some papers, out of his pocket, and asked that they should be given to his family. Then pressing the hands held out to him, he said good-bye to them all, and went back with a firm step to the group of officers. Two soldiers were called up, and the Maire was placed at ten paces’ distance. The soldiers fired, and M. Odent fell without a sound. He was hastily buried under barely a foot of earth, and his six companions were left on the spot through the night expecting the same fate, till the morning, when they were released. Five other hostages, “gathered haphazard in the streets,” were shot the same night in the neighbourhood of Chamant.
Meanwhile the Curé, knowing nothing of what was happening to the Maire, had been thinking for his parishioners and his church. When the bombardment began he gathered together about a hundred and twenty of them, who had apparently no cellars to take refuge in, and after sheltering them in the Presbytère for a time, he sent them with one of his vicaires out of the town. Then—to continue his narrative:
“I went to the southern portal of the cathedral, and stood there trembling at every burst of shrapnel that struck the belfry and the roof, and running out into the open, at each pause, to be sure that the church was still there. When the firing ceased, I went back to the Presbytère.
“Presently, furious sounds of blows from the place. I went out. I saw some enemy cyclists, armed with fragments of stone, breaking in one of the cathedral doors, another, with a hatchet, attacking the belfry door. At the sight of me, they rushed at me with their revolvers, demanding that I should take them to the top of the belfry. ‘You have a machine gun there!’ ‘Nothing of the sort, monsieur. See for yourselves.’ I unlocked the door, and just as I put my foot on the first step, the fusillade in the town began. The soldiers started. ‘You are our prisoner!’ cried their chief, turning to me, as though to seize me.
“‘I know it. You have me in your hands.’ I went up before them, as quickly as my age allowed. They searched everywhere, and, of course, found nothing. They ran down and disappeared.”
But that was not the end of the Abbé’s trouble. He was presently sent for to the German Headquarters, at the Hotel du Grand Cerf, where the table spread for thirty people, by the order of M. Odent, was still waiting for its guests. The conversation here between the Curé and the officer of high rank who spoke to him is worth repeating. From the tenor of it, the presumption is that the officer was a Catholic—probably a Bavarian.
“I asked leave to go back to the Presbytère.
“‘Better stay here, Monsieur le Curé. You will be safer. The burning is going on. To-morrow, your town will be only a heap of ruins.’
“‘What is our crime?’
“‘Listen to that fusillade. Your inhabitants are attacking us, as they did at Louvain. Louvain has ceased to exist! We will make of Senlis another Louvain, so that Paris and France may know how we treat those who may imitate you. We have found small shot (chevrotines) in the body of one of our officers.’
“‘Already?’—I thought. How had there been any time for the post-mortem? But I was too crushed to speak.
“‘And also from your belfry we have been fired on!’
“At that I recovered myself.
“‘Sir—what may have passed in the streets, I cannot say. But as to the cathedral I formally deny your charge. Since war broke out, I have always had the keys of the belfry. I did not even give them to your soldiers, who made me take them there. Do you wish me to swear it?’
“The officer looked at me.
“‘No need. You are a Catholic priest. I see you are sincere.’
“I bowed.”
A scene that throws much light! A false charge—an excited reference to Louvain—monstrous threat—the temper, that is, of panic, which is the mother of cruelty. At that very moment, the German troops in the Rue de la Republique were driving parties of French civilians in front of them, as a protection from the Senegalese troops who were still firing from houses near the Paris exit from the town. Four or five of these poor people were killed by French bullets; a child of five forced along, with her mother, was shot in the thigh. Altogether some twenty or thirty civilians seem to have been killed.
Next day more houses were burnt. Then, for a time, the quiet of desolation. All the normal population were gone, or in the cellars. But twenty miles away to the southeast, great things were preparing. The German occupation of Senlis began, as we have seen, on a Wednesday, September 2nd. On Saturday the 5th, as we all know, the first shots were fired in that Battle of the Ourcq which was the western section of the Battle of the Marne. By that Saturday, already, writes the Abbé Dourlent:
“There was something changed in the attitude of the enemy. What had become of the brutal arrogance, the insolent cruelty of the first days? For three days and nights, the German troops, an army of 300,000 men, defiled through our streets. It was not the road to Paris, now, that they asked for—it was the way to Nanteuil, Ermenonville, the direction of the Marne. On the faces of the officers, one seemed to read disappointment and anxiety. Close to us, on the east, the guns were speaking, every day more fiercely. What was happening?”
All that the Curé knows is that in a house belonging to persons of his acquaintance, where some officers of the rear-guard left behind in Senlis are billeted, two of the young officers have been in tears—it is supposed, because of bad news. Another day, an armoured car rushes into Senlis from Paris; the men in it exchange some shots with the German soldiers in the principal place, and make off again, calling out, “Courage! Deliverance is coming!”
Then, on the 9th, just a week from the German entry, there is another fusillade in the streets. “It is the Zouaves, knocking at the doors, dragging out the conquerors of yesterday, now a humbled remnant, with their hands in the air.”
And the Curé goes on to compare Senlis to the sand which the Creator showed to the sea. “Thus far shalt thou go, and no farther.” “The grain of sand is Senlis, still red with the flames which have devoured her, and with the blood of her victims. To these barbarians she cries—‘You want Paris?—you want France? Halt! No road through here!’”
This combination of the Curé’s written and spoken account is as close to the facts as I can make it. His narrative as he gave it to me, of what he had seen and felt, was essentially simple, and, to judge from the French official reports, with which I have compared it, essentially true. There are some discrepancies in detail, but nothing that matters. The murder of M. Odent, of the other hostages, of the civilians placed in front of the German troops, and of four or five other victims; the burning out by torch and explosive of half a flourishing town, because of a discreditable mistake, the fruit of panic and passion,—these crimes are indelibly marked on the record of Germany. She has done worse elsewhere. All the same, this too she will never efface. Let us imagine such things happening at Guildford, or Hatfield, or St. Albans!
We parted with M. le Curé just in time to meet a pleasant party of war correspondents at the very inn, the Hôtel du Cerf, which had been the German Headquarters during the occupation. The correspondents were on their way between the French Headquarters and the nearest points of the French line, Soissons or Compiègne, from whose neighbourhood every day the Germans were slowly falling back, and where the great attacks of the month of April were in active preparation. Then, after luncheon, we sallied out into the darkening afternoon, through the Forest of Ermenonville, and up to the great plateau, stretching north towards Soissons, southwards towards Meaux, and eastwards towards the Ourcq, where Maunoury’s Sixth Army, striking from Paris and the west, and the English Army, striking from the south—aided by all the gallant French line from Château Thierry to the Grand Couronné—dealt that staggering blow against the German right which flung back the German host, and, weary as the way has been since, weary as it may still be, in truth, decided the war.
But the clouds hang lower as we emerge on the high bare plain. A few flakes—then, in a twinkling, a whirling snow-storm through which we can hardly see our way. But we fight through it, and along the roads every one of which is famous in the history of the battle. At our northernmost point we are about thirty miles from Soissons and the line. Columns of French infantry on the march, guns, ammunition, stores, field kitchens, pass us perpetually; the motor moves at a foot’s pace, and we catch the young faces of the soldiers through the white thickened air. And our most animated and animating companion, Monsieur P——, with his wonderful knowledge of the battle, hails every landmark, identifies every farm and wood, even in what has become, in less than an hour, a white wilderness. But it is of one village only, of these many whose names are henceforth known to history, that I wish to speak—the village of Vareddes. In my next letter I propose to tell the ghastly story of the hostages of Vareddes.