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 rehef 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 civihsed nation.
It is the quality of, or the tendency to, de-
liberate and pitiless cruelty ; a quality which



No. 8] TO LORRAINE 179

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, Euro-
pean 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 Castel-
nau was protecting the right of the French
armies ; and to the devastated villages where
American kindness is already at work, rebuild-
ing the destroyed, and comforting the broken-
hearted.



No. 9

May 24tk, 1917.

Dear Me. Roosevelt, — To any citizen of
a country allied with France in the present
struggle, above all to any English man or
woman who is provided with at least some
general knowledge of the Battle of the Marne,
the journey across France from Paris to Nancy
can never fail to be one of poignant interest.
Up to a point beyond Chalons, the " Ligne de
TEst '' follows in general the course of the
great river, and therefore the hue of the
battle. You pass La Fertee-sous-Jouarre,
where the Third Corps of General French's
army crossed the river ; Charly-sur-Marne,
where a portion of the First Corps found an
unexpectedly easy crossing, owing, it is said,
to the hopeless drunkenness of the enemy
rear-guard charged with defending the bridge ;
and Chateau Thierry, famous in the older
history of France, where the right of the
First Corps crossed after sharp fighting, and,
in the course of " a gigantic man-hunt " in

180



No. 9] EPERNAY— CHALONS 181

and around tlie town, took a large number of
German prisoners, before, by nightfall, coming
into touch with the left of the French Fifth
Army under Franchet d'Espercy. At Dornans
you are only a few miles north of the Marshes
of St. Gond, where General Foch, after some
perilous moments, won his brilhant victory
over General Biilow and the German Second
Army, including a corps of the Prussian
Guards ; while at Chalons I look up from a
record I am reading of the experiences of the
Diocese during the war, written by the Bishop,
to watch for the distant cathedral, and recall
the scene of the night of September 9th,
when the German Headquarters Staff in that
town, " flown with insolence and wine," after
what is described as " an excellent dinner and
much riotous drinking," were roused about
midnight by a sudden noise in the Hotel,
and shouts of " The French are here ! " ''In
fifteen minutes," writes an officer of the Staff
of General Langle de Gary, " the Hotel was
empty."

At Epernay and Chalons those French
officers who were bound for the fighting fine in
Champagne, east and west of Reims, left the
train ; and somewhere beyond fepernay I fol-



182 SNOW [No. 9

lowed in thought the flight of an aeroplane
which seemed to be heading northwards across
the ridges which bound the river valley —
northwards for Reims, and that tragic ghost
which the crime of Germany has set moving
through history for ever, never to be laid or
silenced — Joan of Arc's Cathedral. Then, at
last, we are done with the Marne. We pass
Bar-le-Duc, on one of her tributaries, the
Ornain ; after which the splendid Meuse
flashes into sight, running north on its vic-
torious way to Verdun ; then the Moselle,
with Toul and its beautiful church on the
right ; and finally the Meurthe, on which
stands Nancy. A glorious sisterhood of
rivers ! The more one realises what they have
meant to the history of France, the more one
understands that strong instinct of the early
Greeks, which gave every river its god, and
made of the Simois and the Xanthus person-
ages almost as real as Achilles himself.

But alas ! the whole great spectacle, here
as on the Ourcq, was sorely muffled and
blurred by the snow, which lay thick over the
whole length and breadth of France, effacing
the landscape in one monotonous whiteness. If
I remember rightly, however, it had ceased to



No. 9] NANCY 183

fall, and twenty-four hours after we reached
Nancy, it had disappeared. It lasted just
long enough to let us see the fairy-like Place
Stanislas raise its beautiful gilded gates and
white palaces between the snow and the moon-
light — a sight not soon forgotten.

We were welcomed at Nancy by the Prefet
of the Department, Monsieur Leon Mirman, to
whom an old friend had written from Paris,
and by the courteous French officer, Capitaine
de B., who was to take us in charge, for the
French Army, during our stay. M. Mirman
and his active and public-spirited wife have
done a great work at Nancy, and in the deso-
lated country round it. From the ruined
villages of the border, the poor refn^ies have
been gathered into the old capital of Lorraine,
and what seemed to me a remarkably efficient
and intelligent philanthropy has been dealing
with their needs and those of their children.
Nor is this all. M. Mirman is an old Radical
and of course a Government official, sent down
some years ago from Paris. Lorraine is
ardently Catholic, as we all know, and her old
CathoHc families are not the natural friends
of the Republican regime. But President
Poincare's happy phrase, Vunion sacree — de-



184 THE FRENCH PEOPLE [No. 9

scribing the fusion of all parties, classes, and
creeds in the war service of France, has nowhere
found a stronger echo than in Lorraine. The
Prefet is on the friendHest of terms with the
Cathohc population, rich and poor ; and they,
on their side, think and speak warmly of a
man who is clearly doing his patriotic best for
all alike.

Our j&rst day's journeyings were to show
us something of the quahties of this Cathohc
world of Lorraine. A charming and dis-
tinguished Frenchwoman who accompanied
us counted, no doubt, for much in the warmth
of the kindness shown us. And yet I like to
beheve— indeed I am sure — that there was
more than this in it. There was the thrilhng
sense of a friendship between our two nations,
a friendship new and far-reaching, cemented
by the war, but looking beyond it, which
seemed to me to make the background of it
all. Long as I have loved and admired the
French, I have often — like many others of
their Enghsh friends and admirers — felt and
fretted against the kind of barrier that seemed
to exist between their intimate Ufe and ours.
It was as though, at bottom, and in the end,
something cold and critical in the French



No. 9] U UNION SAC REE 185

temperament, combined with ignorance and
prejudice on our own part, prevented a real
contact between the two nationahties. In
Lorraine, at any rate, and for the first time,
I felt this " something '' gone. Let us only
carry forward intelligently, after the war, the
process of friendship born from the stress
and anguish of this time — for there is an art
and skill in friendship, just as there is an art
and skiU in love — and new horizons will open
for both nations. The mutual respect, the
daily intercourse, and the common glory of
our two armies fighting amid the fields and
woods of France — soon to welcome a third
army, your own, to their great fellowship ! —
are the foundations to-day of all the rest;
and next come the efforts that have been made
by British and Americans to help the French
in remaking and rebuilding their desolated
land, efforts that bless him that gives and
him that takes, but especially him that gives ;
of which I shall have more to say in the course
of this letter. But a common victory, and
a common ardour in rebuilding the waste
places, and binding up the broken-hearted :
even they will not be enough, unless, beyond
the war, all three nations, nay, all the Alhes,



186 FRANCE AND ENGLAND [No. 9

do not set themselves to a systematic inter-
penetration of life and thought, morally,
socially, commercially. As far as France and
England are concerned, Enghsh people must
go more to France ; French people must come
more to England. Relations of hospitahty,
of correspondence, of wide mutual acquain-
tance, must not be left to mere chance ; they
must be furthered by the mind of both nations.
Our Enghsh children must go for part of their
education to France ; and French children
must be systematically wooed over here.
Above all the difficulty of language must be
tackled as it has never been yet, so that it
may be a real disadvantage and disgrace for
the boy or girl of either country who has had
a secondary education not to be able to
speak, in some fashion, the language of the
other. As for the working classes, and the
country populations of both countries, what
they have seen of each other, as brothers in
arms during the war, may well prove of more
lasting importance than anything else.

• • • • •

But I am wandering a little from Nancy,
and the story of our long Sunday.

The snow had disappeared, and there were



No. 9] NANCY 187

voices of spring in the wind. A Frencli Army
motor arrived early, with another French

officer, the Capitaine de G , who proved to

be a most interesting and stimulating guide.
With him I drove slowly through the beauti-
ful town, looking at the ruined houses, which
are fairly frequent in its streets. For Nancy
has had its bombardments, and there is one
gun of long range in particular, surnamed by
the town — " la grosse Bertha,'^ which has
done, and still does, at intervals, damage of
the kind the German loves. Bombs, too,
have been dropped by aeroplanes both here
and at Luneville, in streets crowded with non-
combatants, with the natural result. It has
been in reprisal for this and similar deeds else-
where, and in the hope of stopping them, that
the French have raided German towns across
the frontier. But the spirit of Nancy remains
quite undaunted. The children of its schools,
drilled to run down to the cellars at the first
alarm as our children are drilled to empty a
school on a warning of a Zeppelin raid, are
the gayest and most spirited creatures, as I
saw them at their games and action songs ;
unless indeed it be the children of the refugies,
in whose faces sometimes one seems to see the



188 HILL OF LEOMONT [No. 9

reflection of scenes that no child ought to have
witnessed and not even a child can forget.
For these children come from the frontier
villages, ravaged by the German advance,
and still, some of them, in German occupation.
And the orgy of murder, cruelty, and arson
which broke out at Nomeny, Badonviller, and
Gerbeviller, during the campaign of 1914,
has scarcely been surpassed elsewhere — even
in Belgium. Here again, as at Vareddes, the
hideous deeds done were largely owing to
the rage of defeat. The Germans, mainly
Bavarians, on the frontier, had set their hearts
on Nancy, as the troops of Von Kluck had set
their hearts on Paris ; and General Castelnau,
commanding the Second Army, denied them
Nancy, as Maunoury's Sixth Army denied
Paris to Von Kluck.

But more of this presently. We started
first of all for a famous point in the fighting of
1914, the farm and hill of Leomont. By this
time the day had brightened into a cold sun-
Ught, and as we sped south from Nancy on
the Luneville road, through the old town of
St. Nicholas du Port, with its remarkable
church, and past the great salt works at Dom-
basle, all the country-side was clear to view.



No. 9] THE GRAND COURONNE 189

Good fortune indeed ! — as I soon discovered
when, after climbing a steep hill to the east
of the road, we found ourselves in full view of
the fighting Hues and a wide section of the
frontier, with the Forest of Parroy, which is
still partly German, stretching its dark length
southward on the right, while to the north ran
the famous heights of the Grand Couronne;
— name of good omen! — which suggests so
happily the historical importance of the ridge
which protects Nancy and covers the French
right. Then, turning westward, one looked over
the valley of the Meurthe, with its various
tributaries, the Mortagne in particular, on
which stands Gerbeviller ; and away to the
Moselle and the Meuse. But the panoramic
view was really made to live and speak for
me by the able man at my side. With French
precision and French logic, he began with the
geography of the country, its rivers and hills
and plateaux, and its natural capacities for
defence against the German enemy ; handhng
the view as though it had been a great map,
and pointing out, as he went, the disposition
of the French frontier armies, and the use
made of this feature and that by the French
generals in command.



190 THE LORRAINE CAMPAIGN [No. 9

This Lorraine Campaign, at the opening of
the war, is very little realised outside France.
It lasted some three weeks. It was preceded
by the calamitous French reverse at Morhange,
where, on August 20th , portions of the 15th and
16th Corps of the Second Army, young troops
drawn from south-western France — who in
subsequent actions fought with great bravery
— broke in rout before a tremendous German
attack. The defeat almost gave the Germans
Nancy. But General Castelnau and General
Foch, between them, retrieved the disaster.
They fell back on Nancy and the hue of the
jMortagne, while the Germans, advancing farther
south, occupied Luneville (August 22nd) and
burnt CTerbeviller. On the 23rd, 24th, and
25th there was fierce fighting on and near this

hill on which we stood. Capitaine de G

with the 2nd Battalion of Chausseurs, under
General Dubail, had been in the thick of the
struggle, and he described to me the action
on the slopes beneath us, and how% through
his glasses, he had watched the enemy on the
neighbouring hill forcing parties of French
civilians to bury the German dead and dig Ger-
man trenches, under the fire of their own people.

The hill of Leomont, and the many graves



No. 9] TAUBES 191

upon it, were quiet enough as we stood talldng
there. The old farm was in ruins ; and in the
fields stretching up the hill there were the
remains of trenches. All around and below
us spread the beautiful Lorraine country,
with its rivers and forests ; and to the south-
east one could just see the blue mass of Mont
Donon, and the first spurs of the Vosges,

" Can you show me exactly where the French
line runs 1 " I asked my companion. Ke
pointed to a patch of wood some six milesaway.
" There is a French battahon there. And you
see that other patch of wood a little farther
east? There is a German battahon there. Ah!"

Suddenly he broke off, and the younger
officer with us, Capitaine de B , came run-
ning up, pointing overhead. I craned my neck
to look into the spring blue above us, and there
—7,000 to 8,000 feet high, according to the
officers — were three Boche aeroplanes pursued
by two French machines. In and out a hght
band of white cloud, the fighters in the air
chased each other, shrapnel bursting all round
them like tufts of white wool. They were
so high that they looked mere white specks.
Yet we could follow their action perfectly —
how the Germans climbed, before running for



192 VITRIMONT [No. 9

home, and how the French pursued ! It was
breathless while it lasted ! But we did not
see the end. The three Taubes were clearly
driven back ; and in a few seconds they and
the Frenchmen had disappeared in distance
and cloud towards the fighting-Hne. The
following day, at a point farther to the north,
a w^ell-known French airman w^as brought
down and killed, in just such a fight.

Beyond Leomont we diverged westward
from the main road, and found ourselves
suddenly in one of those utterly ruined villages
w^hich now bestrew the soil of Northern, Central,
and Eastern France ; of that France which
has been pre-eminently for centuries, in spite
of revolutions, the pious and watchful guardian
of what the labour of dead generations has
bequeathed to their sons. Vitrimont, however,
was destroyed in fair fight during the campaign
of 1914. Bombardment had made wreck of
the sohd houses, built of the warm red stone
of the country. It had destroyed the church,
and torn up the grave-yard ; and when its
exiled inhabitants returned to it by degrees,
even French courage and French thrift quailed
before the task of reconstruction. But pre-
sently there arrived a quiet American lady,



No. 9] VITRIMONT 193

wlio began to make friends with tlie people
of Vitrimont, to find out what they wanted,
and to consult with all those on the spot who
could help to bring the visions in her mind
to pass, — with the Prefet, with the officials,
local and governmental, of the neighbouring
towns, with the Catholic women of the richer
Lorraine families, gentle, charitable, devout,
who quickly perceived her quality, and set
themselves to co-operate with her. It was
the American lady's intention— simply — to re-
build Vitrimont. And she is steadily accom-
phshing it, with the help of generous money
subsidies coming, month by month, from one
rich American woman — a woman of San Fran-
cisco — across the Atlantic. How one envies
that American woman !

The sight of Miss Polk at work lives indeed,
a warm memory, in one's heart. She has
established herself in two tiny rooms in a
peasant's cottage, which have been made just
habitable for her. A few touches of bright
colour, a picture or two, a book or two, some
flowers, with furniture of the simplest — amid
these surroundings on the outskirts of the
ruined village, with one of its capable, kindly
faced women to run the menage, Miss Polk lives
14



194 A RESTORED CHURCH [No. 9

and works, realising bit by bit the plans of the
new Vitrimont, which have been drawn for her
by the architect of the department, and follow-
ing loyally old Lorraine traditions. The church
has been already restored and reopened. The
first mass within its thronged walls was —
so the spectators say — a moving sight.
" That sad ivord — Joy " — Landor's pregnant
phrase comes back to one, as expressing the
bitter-sweet of all glad things in this country-
side, which has seen — so short a time ago —
death and murder and outrage at their worst.
The gratitude of the villagers to their friend
and helper has taken various forms. The
most public mark of it, so far, has been Miss
Polk's formal admission to the burgess rights
of Vitrimont, which is one of the old com-
munes of France. And the village insists that
she shall claim her rights ! When the time
came for dividing the communal wood in the
neighbouring forest, her fellow citizens arrived
to take her with them and show her how to
obtain her share. As to the affection and
confidence with which she is regarded, it was
enough to walk with her through the village,
to judge of its reality.

But it makes one happy to think that it is



No. 9] SOCIETY OF FRIENDS 195

not only Americans who have done this sort of
work in France. Look, for instance, at the work
of the Society of Friends in the department
of the Marne, — on that fragment of the battle-
field which extends from Bar-le-Duc to Vitry
St. Francois. " Go and ask," wrote a French
writer in 1915, " for the village of Huiron, or
that of Glannes, or that other, with its name
to shudder at, splashed with blood and
powder — Sermaize. Inquire for the Enghsh
Quakers. Books, perhaps, have taught you
to think of them as people with long black
coats and long faces. Where are they ? Here
are only a band of workmen, smooth-faced —
not like our country folk. They laugh and
sing while they make the shavings fly under
the plane and the saw. They are building
wooden houses, and roofing them with tiles.
Around them are poor people whose features
are stiff and grey like those of the dead. These
are the women, the old men, the children,
the weaklings of our sweet France, who have
lived for months in damp caves and dens,
till they look like Lazarus rising from the
tomb. But life is beginning to come back to
their eyes and their Ups. The hands they
stretch out to you tremble with j oy . To-night



198 GERBEVILLER [No. 9

tliey will sleep in a house, in their house.
And inside there will be beds and tables and
chairs, and things to cook with. ... As they
go in and look, they embrace each other,
sobbing.'"

By June 1915, 150 " Friends " had rebuilt
more than 400 houses, and rehoused more
than seven hundred persons. They had pro-
vided ploughs and other agricultural gear,
seeds for the harvest fields and for the gardens,
poultry for the farmyards. And from that day
to this, the adorable work has gone on. " By
this shall all men hiow that ye are My disci'ples,
if ye love one another.'*

• • « • «

It is difficult to tear oneself away from themes
like this, when the story one has still to tell
is the story of Gerbeviller. At Vitrimont the
great dream of Christianity — the City of God
on earth — seems still reasonable.

At Heremenil, and GerbeviUer, w^e are
within sight and hearing of deeds that befoul
the human name, and make one despair of a
world in which they can happen.

At luncheon in a charming house of old
Lorraine, with an intellectual and spiritual
atmosphere that reminded me of a book that



No. 9] SCEUR JULIE 197

was one of the abiding joys of my younger
days — the Recit d'une Soeur — we heard from
the lips of some of those present an account of
the arrival at Luneville of the fugitives from
Gerbeviller, after the entry of the Bavarians
into the town. Women and children and old
men, literally mad with terror, had escaped
from the burning town, and found their way
over the thirteen kilometres that separate
Gerbeviller from Luneville. No intelUgible
account could be got from them ; they had
seen things that shatter the nerves and brain
of the weak and old ; they were scarcely
human in their extremity of fear. And when,
an hour later, we ourselves reached Gerbeviller,
the terror which had inspired that frenzied
flight became, as we listened to Soeur Juhe,
a tangible presence haunting the ruined
town.

Gerbeviller and Soeur Julie are great names
in France to-day. Gerbeviller, with Nomeny,
Badonviller, and Sermaize, stand in France
for what is most famous in German infamy ;
Soeur Julie, the " chere soeur " of so many
narratives, for that form of courage and whole-
hearted devotion which is specially dear to
the French, because it has in it a touch of



198 MORTAGNE [No. 9

panacJie, of audacity ! It is not too meek ;
it gets its own back when it can, and likes
to punish the sinner as well as to forgive
him. Sister Julie of the Order of St. Charles
of Nancy, Madame Rigard, in civil parlance,
had been for years when the war broke out
the head of a modest cottage hospital in the
small country town of Gerbeviller. The town
was prosperous and pretty ; its gardens ran
down to the Mortagne flowing at its feet, and
it owned a country house in a park, full of
treasures new and old — tapestries, pictures,
books — as Lorraine likes to have such things
about her.

But unfortunately, it occupied one of the
central points of the fighting in the campaign
of Lorraine, after the defeat of General Castel-
nau's Army at Morhange on August 20th,
1914. The exultant and victorious Germans
pushed on rapidly after that action. Lune-
ville was occupied, and the fighting spread to
the districts south and west of that town.
The campaign, however, lasted only three
weeks, and was determined by the decisive
French victory of September 8th on the
Grand Couronne. By September 12th Nancy
was safe ; Luneville and Gerbeviller had



No. 9] AN INEXPIABLE CRIME 199

been retaken ; and the German line liad
been driven back to where we saw it from
the hill of Leomont. But in that three
weeks a hell of cruelty, in addition to all
the normal sufferings of war, had been let
loose on the villages of Lorraine ; on Nomeny
to the north of Nancy, on Badonviller, Bac-
carat, and Gerbeviller to the south. The
Bavarian troops, whose record is among the
worst in the war, got terribly out of hand,
especially when the tide turned against them ;
and if there is one criminal who, if he is still