No. 8
May 17th, 1917.
DEAR MR. ROOSEVELT,—Shall I ever forget that broad wintry plateau of the Ourcq, as it lay, at the opening of March, under its bed of snow, with its ruined villages, its graves scattered over the fields, its utter loneliness, save for the columns of marching soldiers in the roads, and the howling wind that rushed over the fields, the graves, the cemeteries, and whistled through the gaping walls of the poor churches and farms? This high spreading plain, which before the war was one scene of rural plenty and industrious peace, with its farm lands and orchards dropping gently from the forest country of Chantilly, Compiègne, and Ermenonville, down to the Ourcq and the Marne, will be a place of pilgrimage for generations to come. Most of the Battle of the Marne was fought on so vast a scale, over so wide a stretch of country—about 200 miles long, by 50 broad—that for the civilian spectator of the future it will never be possible to realise it as a whole, and very difficult even to realise any section of it, topographically, owing to the complication of the actions involved. But in the Battle of the Ourcq, the distances are comparatively small, the actions comparatively simple and intelligible, while all the circumstances of the particular struggle are so dramatic, and the stakes at issue so vast, that every incident is, as it were, writ large, and the memory absorbs them more easily.
An Englishwoman, too, may be glad it was in this conspicuous section of the battle-field, which will perhaps affect the imagination of posterity more easily than any other, that it fell to the British Army to play its part. To General Joffre the glory of the main strategic conception of the great retreat; to General Gallieni the undying honour of the rapid perception, the quick decision, which flung General Maunoury, with the 6th Army, on Von Kluck’s flank and rear, at the first hint of the German general’s swerve to the southeast; to General Maunoury himself, and his splendid troops, the credit of the battle proper, across the broad harvest fields of the Ourcq plateau. But the advance of the British troops from the south of the Marne, on the heels of Von Kluck, was in truth all-important to the success of Maunoury on the Ourcq. It was the British Expeditionary Force which made the hinge of the battle-line, and if that hinge had not been strong and supple—in all respects equal to its work—the sudden attack of the 6th Army, on the extreme left of the battle-line, and the victory of General Foch in the centre, might not have availed. In other words, had Von Kluck found the weak spot he believed in and struck for, all would have been different. But the weak spot existed only in the German imagination. The British troops whom Von Kluck supposed to be exhausted and demoralised, were in truth nothing of the sort. Rested and in excellent condition, they turned rejoicing upon the enemy, and, in concert with the French 6th Army, decided the German withdrawal. Every one of the six Armies aligned across France, from Paris to the Grand Couronne, had its own glorious task in the defeat of the German plans. But we were then so small a proportion of the whole, with our hundred and twenty thousand men, and we have become since so accustomed to count in millions, that perhaps our part in the “miracle of the Marne” is sometimes in danger of becoming a little blurred in the popular English—and American—conception of the battle. Is not the truth rather that we had a twofold share in it? It was Von Kluck’s miscalculation as to the English strength that tempted him to his eastward march; it was the quality of the British force and leadership, when Sir John French’s opportunity came, that made the mistake a fatal one.
How different the aspect of the Ourcq plateau at the opening of the battle in 1914, from the snowy desolation under which we saw it! Perfect summer weather—the harvest stacks in the fields—a blazing sun by day, and a clear moon by night. For the first encounters of the five days’ fighting, till the rain came down, Nature could not have set a fairer scene. And on the two anniversaries which have since passed, summer has again decked the battle-field. Thousands have gone out to it from Paris, from Meaux, and the whole country-side. The innumerable graves, single or grouped, among the harvest fields and the pastures, have been covered with flowers, and bright, mile after mile, with the twinkling tricolour, as far as the eye could see. At Barcy and Etrépilly, the centres of the fight, priests have blessed the graves, and prayed for the dead.
There has been neither labour nor money indeed as yet wherewith to rebuild the ruined villages and farms, beyond the most necessary repairs. They stand for the most part as the battle left them. And the fields are still alive with innumerable red flags—distinct from the tricolour of the graves—which mark where the plough must avoid an unexploded shell. In a journal of September 1914, a citizen of Senlis describes passing in a motor through the scene of the fight, immediately after the departure of the Germans, when the scavenging and burying parties were still busy.
“How can I describe it? Where to begin? Abandoned farms, on hills of death! The grain-giving earth, empty of human beings. No labourers—no household smoke. The fire of the burning villages has smouldered out, and round the houses, and in the courtyards, lie the debris of their normal life, trampled, dirty and piecemeal, under foot. Poor farms of the Ile-de-France!—dwellings of old time, into whose barns the rich harvests of the fields had been joyously gathered year by year—old tiled roofs, clothed with ancestral moss—plain hospitable rooms where masters and servants met familiarly together:—you are no more than calcined and blackened stones! Not a living animal in the ruined stalls, not an ox, not a horse, not a sheep. One flies from the houses, only to find a scene more horrible in the fields. Corpses everywhere, of men and horses. And everywhere in the fields unexploded shells, which it would be death to touch, which have already made many unsuspecting victims.
“Sometimes, as the motor draws near, a man or a woman emerges from a building, having still on their faces the terror of the hours they have lived through. They scarcely look at us. They are absorbed in their losses, in the struggle to rescue something from the wreck. As soon as they are sure it is not the Germans come back, they turn away, with slow steps, bewildered by what they have suffered.”
The small party in the motor includes a priest, and as it passes near Betz, at the northern end of the battle-field, they see a burying-party of French Territorials at work. The officer in charge beckons to the priest, and the priest goes to speak to him.
“Monsieur l’Abbé, we have just buried here twenty-two French soldiers.” He points to a trench freshly dug, into which the earth has just been shovelled.
“They are Breton soldiers,” the officer explains, “and the men of my burying company are Bretons too. They have just discovered that these dead men we have gathered from the fields were soldiers from a regiment recruited in their own district. And seven of them have recognised among these twenty-two dead, one a son, one a son-in-law, one a brother. Will you come, Monsieur l’Abbé, and say a few words to these poor fellows?”
So the Abbé 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 principal points of the battle-line—St. Soupplêts—Marcilly— Barcy—Etrépilly—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 Etrépilly, 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 Thérouanne, 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 mass, is the outward and visible sign to the French soldier of his country and what he owes her. This passion 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 passion 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 passion 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 sturdy 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 pass 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, passing 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 passionate 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 passion and lust 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 circumstance, 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. Nobody 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 Saturday 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 Presbytère, and the church had become a hospital. The old Curé, the Abbé 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 passed through the same country-side crying “Nach Paris!” and polishing up buttons, 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 Curé has been signalling from the church. We are in a nest of spies!”
So on the evening of the 7th, the old Curé, 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 passed 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 Curé 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 Barthélemy, 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 Barthélemy 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 château, who, after a short interrogation, released them. Of the other sixteen, fifteen were old men, and the sixteenth a child. The Curé 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 Curé 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 passing 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 passing, 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 Curé 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 gratitude 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 Curé has lied—he is a spy—il sera jugé.”
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 Curé 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 passing 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 père 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, Liévin, 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. Liévin understands, and patiently takes out his handkerchief and bandages his own eyes. It takes three balls 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 rapatriés, 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 passed their first night of agony.
What is the moral of this story? I have chosen it to illustrate 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—Restitution—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 Gerbéviller—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.