living, will deserve and, I hope, get an im-
partial trial some day before an international
tribunal, it will be the Bavarian General,
General Clauss.
Here is the first-hand testimony of M.
Mimian, the Prefet of the Department. At
Gerbeviller, he writes, the ruin and slaughter
of the town and its inhabitants had nothing
to do with legitimate war :
" We are here in presence of an inexpiable
crime. The crime was signed. Such signa-
tures are soon rubbed out. I saw that of the
murderer — and I bear my testimony.
" The bandits who were at work here were
assassins : I have seen the bodies of their
200 MASSACRE OF GERBEVILLER [No. 9
victims, and taken tlie evidence on the spot.
They shot down the inhabitants hke rabbits,
kilhng them haphazard in the streets, on their
doorsteps, ahnost at arm's length. Of these
victims it is still dijB&cult to ascertain the exact
nmnber ; it will be more than fifty. Most
of the victims had been buried when I first
entered the town ; here and there, however,
in a garden, at the entrance to a cellar the
corpses of women still awaited burial. In a
field just outside the town, I saw on the
ground, their hands tied, some with their eyes
bandaged — fifteen old men — murdered. They
were in three groups of five. The men of each
group had evidently clung to each other before
death. The clenched hand of one of them
still held an old pipe. They were all old men
— with white hair. Some days had elapsed
since their murder ; but their aspect in
death was still venerable ; their quiet closed
eyes seemed to appeal to heaven. A staff
officer of the Second Army who was with me
photographed the scene ; with other pieces
de conviction ; the photograph is in the hands
of the Governmental Commission charged with
investigating the crimes of the Germans during
this war.'*
The Bavarian soldiers in Gerbeviller were
not only murderers — they were incendiaries,
No. 9] "LES CIVILS ONT TIRE" 201
even more deliberate and thorougli-going tlian
the soldiers of Von Kluck's army at Senlis.
With the exception of a few houses beyond
the hospital, spared at the entreaty of Soeur
Juhe, and on her promise to nurse the German
wounded, the whole town was dehberately
burnt out, house by house, the bare walls
left standing, the rest destroyed. And as,
after the fire, the place was twice taken and
retaken under bombardment, its present
condition may be imagined. It was during
the burning that some of the worst murders
and outrages took place. For there is a
maddening force in triumphant cruelty, which
is deadher than that of wine ; under it men
become demons, and all that is human perishes.
The excuse, of course, was here as at Senlis
— " les civils ont tire ! "' There is not the
slightest evidence in support of the charge.
As at Senhs, there was a French rear-guard
of 57 Chasseurs — left behind to delay the Ger-
man advance as long as possible. They were
told to hold their ground for five hours ; they
held it for eleven, fighting with reckless
bravery, and firing from a street below the
hospital. The Germans, taken by surprise,
lost a good many men before, at small loss
202 SCEUR JULIE [No. 9
to themselves, tlie Chasseurs retreated. In
their rage at the unexpected check, and feel-
ing, no doubt, already that the whole cam-
paign was going against them, the Germans
avenged themselves on the town and its help-
less inhabitants.
Our half-hour in Soeur Julie's parlour was
a wonderful experience ! Imagine a portly
woman of sixty, with a shrewd humorous face,
talking with French vivacity, and with many
homely turns of phrase drawn straight from
that life of the soil and the peasants amid
which she worked ; a woman named in one
of General Castelnau's Orders of the Day and
entitled to wear the Legion of Honour ; a
woman, too, who has seen horror face to face
as few women, even in war, have seen it, yet
still simple, racy, full of irony, and full of
heart, talking as a mother might talk of her
" grands blesses " ! but always with humorous
asides, and an utter absence of pose or pre-
tence ; flashing now into scorn and now into
tenderness, as she described the conduct of
the German officers who searched her hospital
for arms, or the helplessness of the wounded
men whom she protected. I will try and put
down tiome of her talk. It threw much
No. 9] S(EUR JULIE 203
light for me on the psychology of two
nations.
"During the fighting, we had always about
300 of our wounded {nos chers blesses) in this
hospital. As fast as we sent them off, others
came in. All our stores were soon exhausted.
I was thankful we had some good wine in the
cellars — about 200 bottles. You understand,
Madame, that when we go to nurse our people
in their farms, they don't pay us, but they
like to give us something — very often it is a
bottle of old wine, and we put it in the cellar,
when it comes in handy often for our invahds.
Ah ! I was glad of it for our blesses ! I said
to my Sisters — ' Give it them ! and not by
thimblefuls— give them enough ! ' Ah, poor
things ! — it made some of them sleep. It was
all we had. One day, I passed a soldier who
was lying back in his bed with a sigh of satis-
faction. 'Ah, ma Sceur, ca resusciterait un
7nort ! ' (That would bring a dead man to
life !) So I stopped to ask what they had just
given him. And it was a large glass of
Lachr5niia Christi !
"But then came the day when the Com-
mandant, the French Conmiandant, you
understand, came to me and said — ' Sister, I
have sad news for you. I am going. I am
taking away the wounded — and all my stores.
Those are my orders.'
204 SCEUR JULIE [No. 9
" ' But, mon Commandant, you'll leave me
some of your stores for the grands blesses,
whom you leave behind — whom you can't
move ? What ! — you must take it all away ?
Ah, 9a — non ! I don't want any extras — I
won't take your chloroform — I won't take
your bistouris — I won't take your electric
things — but — hand over the iodine ! {en avant
Viode !) hand over the cotton-wool ! — hand
over the gauze ! Come, my Sisters ! ' I can
tell you I plundered him ! — and my Sisters
came with their aprons, and the linen-baskets
— we carried away all we could."
Then she described the evacuation of the
French wounded at night — 300 of them — all
but the 19 worst cases left behind. There
were no ambulances, no proper preparation of
any kind.
"Oh! it was a confusion! — an ugly busi-
ness ! " (ce n'etait pas rose !). The Sisters tore
down and split up the shutters, the doors, to
serve as stretchers ; they tore sheets into long
strips and tied " our poor children " on to
the shutters, and hoisted them into country
carts of every sort and description. " Quick 1
— Quick ! " She gave us a wonderful sense
of the despairing haste in which the night
retreat had to be effected. All night their
No. 9] THE GERMANS COME 205
work went on. The wounded never made a
sound — " they let us do what we would with-
out a word. And as for us, my Sisters bound
these big fellows {ces gros et grarids messieurs)
on to the improvised stretchers, like a mother
who fastens her child in its cot. Ah ! Jesus !
the poverty and the misery of that time ! "
By the early morning all the Frenchwounded
were gone except the nineteen helpless cases,
and all the French soldiers had cleared out of
the village except the 57 Chasseurs, whose
orders were to hold the place as long as they
could, to cover the retreat of the rest.
Then, when the Chasseurs finally withdrew,
the Bavarian troops rushed up the town in a
state of furious excitement, burning it syste-
matically as they advanced, and treating the
inhabitants as M. Mirman ' has described.
Soon Soeur Julie knew that they were coming
up the hill towards the hospital. I will quote
the very language — homely. Biblical, direct
— in which she described her feelings. " Mes
reins flottaient comme ca — ils allaieyit tomber
a mes talons. Instantanement, pas une goutte
de salive dans la hoiiche ! " Or — to translate
it in the weaker EngHsh idiom — " My heart
206 GERMAN WOUNDED [No. 9
went down into my heels — all in a moment,
my mouth was dry as a bone ! "
The German officers drew up, and asked for
the Superior of the hospital. She went out
to meet them. Here she tried to imitate the
extraordinary arrogance of the German
manner.
" They told me they would have to burn the
hospital, as they were informed men had
been shooting from it at their troops.
" I replied that if anyone had been shooting,
it was the French Chasseurs, who were
posted in a street close by, and had every
right to shoot ! "
At last they agreed to let the hospital alone,
and burn no more houses, if she would take
in the German wounded. So presently the
wards of the little hospital were full again to
overflowing. But while the German wounded
were coming in the German officers insisted
on searching the nineteen French wounded
for arms.
" I had to make way for them — I had to say,
* Entrez, Messieurs ! ' "
Then she dropped her voice, and said be-
tween her teeth — " Think how hard that was
for a Lorrainer ! "
No. 9] BARBARITIES IN HOSPITAL 207
So two German officers went to the ward
where the nineteen Frenchmen lay, all help-
less cases, and a scene followed very like
that in the hospital at SenUs. One drew his
revolver and covered the beds, the other
walked round, poniard in hand, throwing
back the bedclothes to look for arms. But
they found nothing — "oiily blood! For we
had had neither time enough nor dressings
enough to treat the wounds properly that
night.''
A frightful moment ! — the cowering patients
— the officers in a state of almost frenzied
excitement, searching bed after bed. At the
last bed, occupied by a badly wounded and
quite helpless youth, the officer carrying the
dagger brought the blade of it so near to the
boy's throat that Soeur Juhe rushed forward,
and placed her two hands in front of the poor
bare neck. The officer dropped both arms
to his side, she said, " as if he had been shot,'*
and stood staring at her, quivering all over.
But from that moment she had conquered
them.
For the German wounded, Soeur Juhe de-
clared she had done her best, and the officer
in charge of them afterwards wrote her a
208 SOEUR JULIE AND GERMANS [No. 9
letter of thanks. Then her mouth twisted a
Httle. " But I wasn't — well, I didn't s'poil
them ! {Je n'eiais pas trof tendre) ; I didn't
give them our best wine ! " And one officer
whose wounds she dressed, a Prussian colonel
who never deigned to speak to a Bavarian
captain near him, was obliged to accept a good
many home truths from her. He was con-
vinced that she would poison his leg unless he
put oil the dressings himself. But he allowed
her to bandage him afterwards. During this
operation — which she hinted she had per-
formed in a rather Spartan fashion ! — " he
whimpered all the time," and she was able
to give him a good deal of her mind on the
war and the behaviour of his troops. He and
the others, she said, were always talking
about their Kaiser ; " one might have thought
they saw him sitting on the clouds."
In two or three days the French returned
victorious, to find the burnt and outraged
village. The Germans were forced, in their
turn, to leave some badly wounded men behind,
and the French poilus in their mingled wrath
and exultation could not resist, some of them,
abusing the German wounded through the
windows of the hospital. But then, with a
No. 9] THE FRENCH RETURN 209
keen dramatic instinct, Soeur Julie drew a
striking picture of tke contrast between tlie
behaviour of the French officer going down
to the basement to visit the wounded Ger-
man officers there, and that of the German
officers on a similar errand. She conveyed
with perfect success the cold civility of the
Frenchman, beginning with a few scathing
words about the treatment of the town, and
then proceeding to an investigation of the
personal effects of the Boche officers.
" Your papers, gentlemen ? Ah ! those
are private letters — you may retain them.
Your purses ? " — he looks at them — " I hand
them back to you. Your note-books ? Ah !
ca — cest mon affaire ! (that's my business).
I wish you good morning.''
Soeur Julie spoke emphatically of the
drunkenness of the Germans. They dis-
covered a store of " Mirabelle," a strong
hqueur, in the town, and had soon exhausted
it, with apparently the worst results.
Well ! — the March afternoon ran on, and
we could have sat there hstening till dusk.
But our French officers were growing a httle
impatient, and one of them gently drew " the
dear sister," as every one calls her, towards
15
210 GERMANS AT NANCY [No. 9
the end of her tale. Then with regret one
left the plain parlour, the little hospital which
had played so big a part, and the brave elderly
nun, in whom one seemed to see again some
of those qualities which, springing from the
very soil of Lorraine, and in the heart of
a woman, had once, long years ago, saved
France.
• • • • •
How much there would be still to say about
the charm and the kindness of Lorraine, if
only this letter were not already too long !
But After the tragedy of Gerbeviller I must at
any rate find room for the victory of Amance.
Alas ! — the morning was dull and misty
when we left Nancy for Amance and the
Grand Couronne ; so that when we stood at
last on the famous ridge immediately north of
the town which saw, on September 8th, 1914,
the wrecking of the final German attempt on
Nancy, there was not much visible except the
dim lines of forest and river in the plain below.
Our view ought to have ranged as far, almost,
as Metz to the north and the Vosges to the
south. But at any rate there, at our feet,
lay the Forest of Champenoux, which was the
scene of the three frantic attempts of the
No. 9] NANCY SAVED 211
Germans debouching from it on September 8th
to capture the hill of Amance, and the plateau
on which we stood. Again and again the 75's
on the hill mowed down the advancing hordes
and the heavy guns behind completed their
work. The Germans broke and fled, never
to return. Nancy was saved, the right of the
six French Armies advancing across France,
at that very moment, on the heels of the re-
treating Germans, in the Battle of the Marne,
was protected thereby from a flank attack
which might have altered all the fortunes of
the war, and the course of history ; and
General Castelnau had written his name on
the memory of Europe.
But — the Kaiser was not there ! Even
Colonel Buchan in his admirable history of the
war, and Major Whitton in his recent book on
the campaign of the Marne, repeat the current
legend. I can only bear witness that the two
French staf! officers who walked with us along
the Grand Couronne — one of whom had been
in the battle of September 8th — were positive
that the Kaiser was not in the neighbourhood
at the time, and that there was no truth at all
in the famous story which describes him as
watching the battle from the edge of the
212 A WARM WELCOME [No. 9
Forest of Champenoux, and riding oi! ahead
of his defeated troops, instead of making, as
he had reckoned, a triumphant entry into
Nancy. W^ell, it is a pity the gods did not
order it so ! — " to be a tale for those that
should come after/'
One more incident before we leave Lorraine !
On our way up to the high village of Amance,
we had passed some three or four hundred
French soldiers at work. They looked with
wide eyes of astonishment at the two ladies
in the mihtary car. When we reached the
village, Prince R , the young staff officer
from a neighbouring Headquarters who was
to meet us there, had not arrived, and we
spent some time in a cottage, chatting with
the women who lived in it. Then — appar-
ently — while we were on the ridge word
reached the men working below, from the
village, that we were English. And on the
drive down we found them gathered, three
or four hundred, beside the road, and as we
passed them they cheered us heartily, seeing
in us, for the moment, the British aUiance !
So that we left the Grand Couronne with
wet eyes, and hearts all passionate sympathy
towards Lorraine and her people.
No. 10
June 1st, 1917.
Dear Mr. Roosevelt, — In looking back
over my two preceding letters, I realise liow
inadequately they express the hundredth part
of that vast and insoluble debt of a guilty
Germany to an injured France, the reahsa-
tion of which became — for me — in Lorraine,
on the Ourcq, and in Artois, a burning and
overmastering thing, from which I was rarely
or never free. And since I returned to
England on March 16th, the conduct of the
German troops, under the express orders of
the German Higher Command, in the French
districts evacuated since February by Hinden-
burg's retreating forces, has only sharpened
and deepened the judgment of civilised men,
with regard to the fighting German and all
his ways, which has been formed long since,
beyond alteration or recall.
Think of it ! It cries to heaven. Think
of Reims and Arras, of Verdun and Ypres,
213
214 DOCTRINE OF FORCE [No. 10
think of tlie hundreds of towns and villages,
the thousands of individual houses and farms,
that lie ruined on the old soil of France ;
think of the sufferings of the helpless and
the old, the hideous loss of life, of stored-up
wealth, of natural and artistic beauty ; and
then let us ask ourselves again the old, old
question — why has this happened ? And let
us go back again to the root facts, from which,
whenever he or she considers them afresh
—and they should be constantly considered
afresh^ — every citizen of the Alhed nations
can only draw fresh courage to endure. The
long and passionate preparation for war in
Germany ; the half-mad hterature of a glorified
"force'' headed by the Bernhardis and
Treitschkes, and repeated by a thousand
smaller folk, before the war ; the far more
illuminating manifestoes of the intellectuals
since the war ; Germany's refusal of a con-
ference, as proposed and pressed by Great
Britain, in the week before August 4th,
France's acceptance of it ; Germany's refusal
to respect the Belgian neutrahty to which
she had signed her name, France's immediate
consent ; the provisions of mercy and of
humanity signed by Germany in the Hague
No. 10] DISCIPLINED CRUELTY 215
Convention trampled, almost with a sneer,
under foot ; the jubilation over the Lusitania,
and the arrogant defence of all that has been
most cruel and most criminal in the war, as
necessary to Germany's interests, and there-
fore moral, therefore justified ; let none —
none ! — of these things rest forgotten in our
minds until peace is here, and justice done !
The German armies are capable of " wo
undisciplined cruelty," said the 93 Pro-
fessors, without seeing how damning was
the phrase. No ! — theirs was a cruelty by
order, meditated, organised, and deliberate.
The stories of Senlis, of Vareddes, of Ger-
beviller which I have specially chosen, as
free from that element of sexual horror which
repels many sensitive people from even trying
to realise what has happened in this war,
are evidences — one must insist again — of a
national mind and quality, with which civihsed
Europe and civilised America can make no
truce. And what folly Hes behind the wicked-
ness ! Let me recall to American readers
some of the phrases in the report of your formeT
Minister in Belgium— Mr. Brand Whitlock —
on the Belgian deportations, the ' ' slave hunts' '
that Germany has carried out in Belgium and
216 GERMAN PROFESSORS [No. 10
"which have torn from nearly every humble
home in the land, a husband, father, son, or
brother/'
These proceedings [says Mr. Whitlock]
place in rehef the German capacity for
blundering almost as sharply as the German
capacity for cruelty. They have destroyed
for generations any hope whatever of friendly
relations between themselves and the Belgian
people. For these things were done not, as
with the early atrocities, in the heat of passion
and the first lust of war, but by one of those
deeds that make one despair of the future of
the human race — a deed coldly planned,
studiously matured, and dehberately and
systematically executed, a deed so cruel that
German soldiers are said to have wept in its
execution, and so monstrous that even Ger-
man officers are now said to be ashamed.
But the average German neither weeps nor
blames. He is generally amazed, when he is
not amused, by the state of feehng which
such proceedings excite. And if he is an
" intellectual,'" a professor, he will exhaust
himself in ingenious and utterly callous
defences of all that Germany has done or
may do. An astonishing race — the German
No. 10] PROFESSOR VON GIERKE 217
professors! The year before the war there
was an historical congress in London. There
was a hospitahty committee, and my hus-
band and I were asked to entertain some of
the learned men. I remember one in parti-
cular — an old man with white hair, who with
his wife and daughter joined the party after
dinner. His name was Professor Otto von
Gierke of the University of Berhn. I gathered
from his conversation that he and his family
had been very kindly entertained in London.
His manner was somewhat harsh and over-
bearing, but his white hair and spectacles
gave him a venerable aspect, and it was
clear that he and his wife and daughter be-
longed to a cultivated and intelhgent milieu.
But who among his Enghsh hosts could
possibly have imagined the thoughts and
ideas in that grey head ? I find a speech of
his in a most illuminating book by a Danish
professor on German Chauvinist Hterature.^
The speech was pubhshed in a collection
called German Sfeeclies in Hard Times,
which contains names once so distinguished
as those of Von Wilamovitz and Harnack.
1 Hurrah and Hallelujah I By J. P. Bang, D.D., Professor
of Theology at the University of Copenhagen, translated by
Jessie Brochner.
218 AN ORGY OF CRIME [No. 10
Professor von Gierke's effusion begins with the
usual German falsehoods as to the origin of
the war, and then continues — " But now
that w^e Germans are plunged in war, we will
have it in all its grmideur and violence !
Neither fear nor fity shall stay our arm before
it has completely brought our enemies to
the ground/' They shall be reduced to such
a condition that they shall never again dare
even to snarl at Germany. Then German
Kulturwill showits full loveHness and strength,
enhghtening " the understanding of the foreign
races absorbed and incorporated into the
Empire, and making them see that only from
German kultur can they derive those treasures
which they need for their own particular hfe.''
At the moment when these hues were
written — for the book was pubhshed early in
the war — the orgy of murder and lust and
hideous brutality which had swept through
Belgium in the first three weeks! of the war
was beginning to be known in England ; the
traces of it were still fresh in town after
town and village after village of that tortured
land ; while the testimony of its victims was
just beginning to be sifted by the experts of
the Bryce Commission.
No. 10] RETURN HOME 219
The hostages of Vareddes, the helpless
victims of Nomeny, of Gerbeviller, of Sermaize,
of Sommeilles, and a score of other places in
France were scarcely cold in their graves.
But the old white-haired professor stands
there, unashamed, unctuously offering the
kultur of his criminal nation to an expectant
world ! " And when the victory is won,''
he says complacently — " the whole world
will stand open to us, our war expenses will
be paid by the vanquished, the black-white-
and-red flag will wave over all seas ; our
countrymen will hold highly respected posts
in all parts of the world, and we shall maintain
and extend our colonies.'*
God forbid ! So says the whole EngHsh-
speaking race, you on your side of the sea,
and we on ours.
But the feehng of abhorrence which is not,
at such a moment as this, sternly and in-
cessantly translated into deeds is of no ac-
count ! So let me return to a last survey of
the War. On my home journey from Nancy,
I passed through Paris, and was again wel-
comed at G.H.Q. on my way to Boulogne.
In Paris, the breathless news of the Germans'
quickening retreat on the Somme and the
220 RUSSIA [No. 10
Aisne was varied one morning by the welcome
tidings of the capture of Bagdad ; and at