CHAPTER XITHE MARTYRED TOWN
It was certainly a lie with regard to Gerbéviller. That unhappy place was twice bombarded, first by the Germans and afterwards by the French, and at the first time of asking there was also a running fight through its streets. But it was not the shells of the 75’s and the 77’s that left roofless all but about six of its 463 houses. They were burnt by fire deliberately applied by the Bavarian soldiery by means chiefly of sulphur sticks and gunpowder pastilles, little black discs about the size of a florin, which apparently all the German soldiers carried with them. I have specimens of both taken from their cow-skin haversacks. The first time that we saw the town, about ten days after they had been driven out, we drove there with M. Mirman, the Prefect of Meurthe et Moselle, who had paid it his first official visit about a week earlier, and had at once carefully examined all the available evidence as to what had happened on the spot. That is a way M. Mirman has. He is not a collector of second-hand rumours. He deals with facts, and the mass of duly authenticated details about the doings of the Germans in his Department which he is putting together will form a damning indictment against them at the end of the war.
We drove to Gerbéviller by the road which, after crossing the Meurthe at Dombasle, skirts the river and the lower edge of the forest of Vitrimont for some miles and then cuts through the southern part of the battlefield on which for three weeks the defenders of Nancy made their memorable stand. We had therefore many chances of seeing the ruin caused by the battle at Blainville, Mont, and other villages on the way. But in none of them was there anything comparable to the wanton and wholesale destruction at Gerbéviller. In Lorraine they speak of it as Gerbéviller-la-Martyre. That is just what one feels about it. The town is like the dead body of a woman whom some inhuman monster has violated and kicked to death and then thrown into a bonfire.
When we got there some of the ruins were still smoking. We did not go inside what was left of the walls of the church. They were not in a very safe condition. In many places in the fields on the edge of the road just outside the town, and behind some of the tottering fragments of masonry that had once been the walls of houses, were lying the twisted carcases of horses; every here and there there was a horrible smell of burnt and putrefying flesh. There were also some pigs, routing about among the ruins for what they might devour. At first they were the only living things we saw. Everything else was dead, everything was burnt and smashed except the stone figure of the dead Christ on the Cross that stands at the corner where the principal street branches in two directions, fully exposed to the shattering volleys that were poured along it. By some miracle ithad escaped destruction. Neither fire nor shells had touched it. From the church the street winds down the slope past the Christ on the Cross across the bridges that span the three streams into which the Mortagne divides as it flows through the town, then past what was once the private chapel of the family that owns the old chateau on the opposite side of the road, up the hill on the other side of the valley where there are half a dozen houses—at last—with roofs and walls and even windows, from one of which a Red Cross flag is floating, and then on to the wreck of the railway station. Some people have likened the remains of the town to the ruins of Pompeii. There is no need for that. They are the ruins of Gerbéviller. That will be description enough as long as the stones that are left hang together. The ruin is monstrous and unholy, especially in the part of the town on the right bank of the river, where it is, like Jerusalem of old, a city laid on an heap. We climbed at one place over the piles of stones and rubbish that had formed the front walls of one of the houses, and in a sort of ruined vault open to the air, which had been the cellar, saw lying on its back the blackened skeleton of a woman. She was one of several of the inhabitants who were burnt in the cellars in which they took refuge from the German shells and the German brutality. They could hardly be called hiding-places, because in some cases they were shot if they tried to come out of them. Others were shot in the streets like rabbits, as spies, orfranc-tireursor what not. Any pretext or none was good enough. I have seen a photograph which is in the possession of the French Government, taken bya responsible official, of fifteen white-haired old men whose dead bodies were found after the German withdrawal lying in a field near the town. Their hands were bound together, their trousers had been unbuttoned and were clinging round their knees, either as a brutal insult, or else—the irony of it—to prevent them from running away. They were shot in batches of five. The signal for their “execution” was given by the senior officer of the troops which had occupied the town. He sat at a table placed close to the scene of their murder drinking with some other officers. Three times he lifted his glass to his lips, and each time that he did so a volley was fired and five old men fell dead on the ground.
Photograph by Libert-Fernand, Nancy.Gerbeviller—Meurthe et Moselle.
Photograph by Libert-Fernand, Nancy.
Gerbeviller—Meurthe et Moselle.
Gerbeviller—Meurthe et Moselle.
By fire and by bullet probably a hundred and certainly not less than forty people were assassinated and the whole population rendered homeless, because, as the Germans said—the usual lying excuse—some of them had fired on their troops. The truth of what happened is apparently this. When they attacked the town it was defended only by a body of Chasseurs, sixty or seventy strong. These men held out all day against the Bavarian regiments engaged in the attack, that is to say about 4000 men. Till the enemy entered the town in the afternoon the defenders were subjected to a bombardment as well as to the fire of rifle bullets. After they entered it the fight was continued along the street till late in the evening, when the men were driven back to their last stand behind a barrier which they constructed on one of the bridges. From here during the night they escaped—they had fought like heroes and nothing was to be gained by staying any longer—allexcept two or three who had got separated from the rest and had hidden in a cellar. Before morning these others also got away safely, but in order to do so they had first to kill a sentinel who was posted at the fork of the roads, near the stone Cross. When his dead body was discovered by the Germans, who were furious at the resistance they had met with, they decided that he had been killed by one of the inhabitants, and by way of punishment the acts of incendiarism were begun and were continued at intervals till the final general bonfire was lit on the day when they were driven out by the French soldiers.
Through the two bombardments, and the fight in the streets, and the burnings and the executions, the horrible story of human blood-lust and brutality was redeemed by the womanly courage and pity and devotion to duty which was shown by a little band of Sisters of Mercy, who, with the now famous Sœur Julie at their head, nursed the wounded all through those dreadful three weeks, with no thought of their own danger. The cross of the Legion of Honour was pinned on Sœur Julie’s serge robe by the President of the Republic, in front of the house where the Red Cross flag is still floating from the window, and where she and her fellow-Sisters gave such a splendid proof of the faith that was in them. Of the many deeds of heroism which they performed there is one little story which belonged entirely to herself. When the German soldiery were first let loose in the town, sacking and pillaging, they sacked and pillaged amongst other places the church (or perhaps it was the chapel, which is much nearer her house), and tried invain to break open the sanctuary above the altar, by firing bullets at the lock. After they had gone Sœur Julie came to the place and with a bayonet which they had left on the stones wrenched open the door of the sanctuary, for fear that the sacred elements might fall into their sacrilegious hand if they came again. Though no one but a priest had the right to touch the wafers which were scattered on the floor of the sanctuary, she took them and the chalice, pierced by the Bavarian bullets, to her own house, and then, still with the same fear, herself consumed them, as David did the Shewbread, though with a rather higher object. And then, I am told, she felt rather uncomfortable in her mind—till she had made her confession to an ambulancier priest and received absolution for her “sin.”
Gerbéviller differed only in degree from what happened in scores of other towns and villages all over Lorraine and the Woevre and Alsace and the Vosges. It was not an isolated case. At Baccarat, at St. Benoit, at Badonviller, and many other places south of the Meurthe, as at Nomeny, Réméréville and many other places north of it, there were the same burnings, and the same shootings of innocent civilians. At Badonviller, where, besides eleven other victims, the wife of the singularly brave mayor, Monsieur Benoit, was shot in the street before his eyes, much more damage was done by incendiarism than by the fights that went on for the possession of the town. On the French side of the town there are few signs that it has often, since the beginning of the war, been the centre of furious fighting. A few French and German graves, distinguished byképis,or spiked helmets, one or two houses damaged by shells—and that is all. Then, as the road drops down into the town you see on the crest of the opposite ridge the ruins of the church, which, with the cemetery behind it was the part of the town that suffered most from the bombardment. Dome and roof have both been entirely shot away; shattered fragments of the pillars in front of the church and the shapeless remains of the four walls are all that is left, except for one thing—a statue of Joan of Arc, with one arm broken off short at the shoulder, standing erect and serene on its pedestal, surrounded by the piles of stone and mortar and timber and glass that litter the floor of the roofless nave. Outside in the cemetery, at the time of our first visit, coffins stripped of their covering of earth, broken tombstones, and shattered crosses completed the dreary scene of desolation, another proof that the church was the chief target of the German artillery. But of that there is no doubt. In the rest of the town, away from the church, comparatively little damage had been done by the shells, and there is this further curious fact to note, that the bombardment which did the mischief took place while the place was actually occupied by German troops. They were simply ordered to keep out of the range of the fire—which meant away from the actual neighbourhood of the church.
These troops—they were Bavarians—completed the work of destruction by burning the quarter of the town nearest to the German frontier, some thirty houses in all, besides pillaging many others. They also shot twelve of the inhabitants, including a woman and thechild she was holding in her arms, and an old man of seventy-eight, who was sitting peacefully by his window.
These were the chief events of the first occupation, which took place early in August. The second—there have been three in all—began on August 23rd. At eight in the morning the French hurriedly evacuated Badonviller and took up a position at Pexonnes, about two miles to the rear, and the Germans, after a desultory bombardment, which went on all day, marched in at six in the evening. For the next few hours there was furious fighting in and around the town between the Chasseurs Alpins and the Chasseurs d’Afrique on the one side and the Landwehr, the 162nd Regiment of Strassburg, and the regiment of Lieutenant von Forstner (since reported killed), the 99th of Saverne, on the other. During the night a stronger German force approached the town, and as soon as they entered it, began ordering the terrified inhabitants to come out of the cellars in which they had taken refuge, when suddenly they were interrupted by a furious counter-attack of the Chasseurs, and driven out of the town at the point of the bayonet. Once more the natives shut themselves up in the cellars and listened panic-stricken to the noise and confusion of the struggle overhead. One comfort they had in their alarm. All the time, above the din of the fighting, they heard the stirring notes of the French bugles sounding the charge, and all the time the voices of the French soldiers singing, as they charged, the famous Sidi-’Brahim bugle-march:—
“Pan! Pan! L’Arbi!Les chacals sont par ici!Mais plus haut c’est les Turcos!”
“Pan! Pan! L’Arbi!Les chacals sont par ici!Mais plus haut c’est les Turcos!”
“Pan! Pan! L’Arbi!Les chacals sont par ici!Mais plus haut c’est les Turcos!”
“Pan! Pan! L’Arbi!
Les chacals sont par ici!
Mais plus haut c’est les Turcos!”
Little by little the Germans retreated, and the sounds died away in the distance, and then suddenly they began again, as the Chasseurs, still chanting the Sidi-’Brahim, marched back through the town and retired to their position at Pexonnes. Then once more the Germans, and at last the silence of the night.
St. Benoit, near Raon l’Etape, is another of these murdered towns. It has been destroyed, that is to say, burnt by the Germans, about as effectually as Gerbéviller. The church has only its four walls left. The Germans, during their occupation, placed mitrailleuses in the tower, which stands high up and commands the main road. A body of French troops passing along this road, which skirts the village to the north, came under the fire of the mitrailleuses and suffered severely, without being able to see where the attack came from. A second detachment was more fortunate in finding out the position of the machine guns. A battery of 75’s was trained on the church. Shortly afterwards the French retired on Rambervillers, and when the Germans reached St. Benoit they set fire to the village to avenge the death of their comrades who belonged to the same corps. They did not, however, the Mayor told us, kill any of the inhabitants, of whom only 12 out of about 250 were missing.
In the little schoolhouse there are no doors, the blackboards are riddled with bullets, and there is not a pane of glass in the windows. But in this skeleton of a house we found the schoolmaster teaching a class of twelve little boys who had their fathers’ coats and old sacks hung on their shoulders to keep out the cold, and when we camein they stood up like one man and sang a verse of the“Marseillaise.”
A little further on, in the Col de la Chipotte, which both sides called the “Hole of Hell,” we came to the place where for several days was fought the bloodiest battle of all this border warfare. Three or four hundred feet below the road on the left, as it rises to the top of the pass, there is a beautiful valley, with a quick little burn running at the bottom of it with fir trees growing thickly on each side. On the right the ground falls away in a more gradual slope. For some miles along each side of this road there is not a space of ten yards in which there are not the graves of French and German soldiers, marked by crosses made of branches of trees, and here and there by a batteredképi. On the crosses are carved little flat slabs. If you read the rough inscriptions on them—“Thirteen Germans,” or “Seventeen French Soldiers”—you will see that those on the German graves are written sometimes in German (in which case the number of the regiment is given), and sometimes in French, but those of the French in French only. In other words, the enemy buried only their own dead, and only some of them, and it was left to the French to finish the work for both sides, or to finish it partly. For up from the valley and the woods came the sickening smell of still unburied bodies, the last remains of this butchery of a battle.
There was fighting for about twelve or thirteen days round that stretch of valley and mountain road, German attacks from both sides that drove the French back by weight of superior numbers, and later a counter-attackof the French in stronger force which pushed the enemy back over the crest. It was a battle of rifle fire and hand-to-hand fighting with bayonets and knives and rifle-butts and fists, a battle on one side of the road of short breathless bursts and long painful scrambles up and up to the deadly trenches cut on the bare slopes, on the other of slow aimless groping through the low branches of the dripping fir trees, so thickly planted that where they grew neither aeroplanes nor artillery could do their work, a bewildering, nerve-shaking game of blindman’s-buff under a hail of whistling bullets that came from all sides at once, a hideous battue in an impenetrable covert with men for ground-game.
But, after all, it was a fair stand-up fight between gallant soldiers, with no quarter given or asked, in which each side could respect the other, not a shameful massacre of unarmed innocents among the flaming wrecks of their ruined homes, like those which in other parts of the Vosges and Lorraine covered the Bavarian butchers with undying disgrace. Gerbéviller and Nomeny were far more hellish “Holes of Hell” than the Col de la Chipotte.