October, 1914.
To gaze upon her, our legendary and wonderful basilica of France, to bid her a last farewell before she should crumble away to her inevitable downfall, I had ordered adétourof two hours in my service motor car at the end of some special duty from which I was returning.
The October morning was misty and cold. The hillsides of Champagne were deserted that day, and their vineyards with dark brown leaves, wet with rain, seemed to be wrapped completely in a kind of shining fleece. We had also passed through a forest, keeping our eyes open and our weapons ready in case of a meeting with Uhlan marauders.
At last, far away in the fog, uplifting all its great height above a sprinkling of reddish squares, doubtless the roofs of houses, we saw the form of a mighty church. This was evidently the basilica.
At the entrance to Rheims there are defences of all kinds: stone barriers, trenches,chevaux de frise, sentinels with crossed bayonets. To gain admission it is not sufficient to be in uniform and military accoutrements; explanations have to be made and the countersign given.
In the great city where I am a stranger, I have to ask my way to the cathedral, for it is no longer in sight. Its lofty grey silhouette, which, viewed from afar, dominated everything so imposingly, as a castle of giants would dominate the houses of dwarfs, now seems to have crouched down to hide itself.
"To get to the cathedral," people reply, "you must first turn to the right overthere, and then to the left, and then to the right, etc."
And my motor car plunges into the crowded streets. There are many soldiers, regiments on the march, motor-ambulances in single file, but there are many ordinary footfarers, too, unconcerned as if nothing were happening, and there are even many well-dressed women, with prayer-books in their hands, in honour of Sunday.
At a street-crossing there is a gathering of people in front of a house whose walls bear signs of recent damage, the reason being that a shell has just fallen there. It is just one of their little brutal jests, so to speak; we understand the situation, look you; it is a simple pastime, just a matter of killing a few persons, on a Sunday morning for choice, because there are more people in the streets on Sunday mornings. But it seems, indeed, as if this townhad reconciled itself to its lot, to live its life watched by the remorseless binoculars, under the fire of savages lurking on the neighbouring hillside. The wayfarers stop for a moment to look at the walls and the marks made by the shell-bursts, and then they quietly continue their Sunday walk. This time, we are told, it is women and little girls who lie weltering in their blood, victims of that amiable peasantry. We hear about it, and then think no more of the matter, as if it were of the smallest importance in times such as these.
This quarter of the town is now deserted. Houses are closed; a silence as of mourning prevails. And at the far end of a street appear the tall grey gates, the lofty pointed arches with their marvellous carvings and the soaring towers. There is no sound; there is not a living soul in the square where the phantom basilica still stands in majesty, where the wind blows cold and the sky is dark.
The basilica of Rheims still keeps its place as if by miracle, but so riddled and rent it is, that it seems ready to collapse at the slightest shock. It gives the impression of a huge mummy, still erect and majestic, but which the least touch would turn into ashes. The ground is strewn with its precious fragments. It has been hastily enclosed with a hoarding of white wood, and within its bounds lies, in little heaps, its consecrated dust, fragments of stucco, shivered panes of glass, heads of angels, clasped hands of saints, male and female. The calcined stone-work of the tower on the left, from top to bottom, has assumed a strange colour like that of baked flesh, and the saints, still standing upright in rank on the cornices, have been decorticated, as it were, by fire. They have no longer either faces or fingers, yet, still retaining their human form, they resemble corpses ranged in rows, their contours butfaintly defined under a kind of reddish shroud.
We make a circuit of the square without meeting anyone, and the hoarding which isolates the fragile, still wonderful phantom is everywhere firmly closed.
As for the old palace attached to the basilica, the episcopal palace where the kings of France were wont to repose on the day of their coronation, it is nothing more than a ruin, without windows or roof, blackened all over by tongues of flame.
What a peerless jewel was this church, more beautiful even thanNotre-Dame de Paris, more open to the light, more ethereal, more soaringly uplifted with its columns like long reeds, astonishingly fragile considering the weight they bear, a miracle of the religious art of France, a masterpiece which the faith of our ancestors had wakened into being in all its mystic purity before the sensual ponderousnessof that which we have agreed to call the Renaissance had come to us from Italy, materialising and spoiling all. Oh, how gross, how cowardly, how imbecile was the brutality of those who fired those volleys of scrap-iron with full force against tracery of such delicacy, that had stayed aloft in the air for centuries in confidence, no battles, no invasions, no tempests ever daring to assail its beauty.
That great, closed house yonder in the square must be the archbishop's palace. I venture to ring at the door and request the privilege of entering the church.
"His Eminence," I am told, "is at Mass, but would soon return, if I would wait."
And while I am waiting, the priest, who acts as my host, tells me the history of the burning of the episcopal palace.
"First of all they sprinkled the roofs with I know not what diabolical preparation;then, when they threw their incendiary bombs, the woodwork burnt like straw, and everywhere you saw jets of green flame which burned with a noise like that of fireworks."
Indeed the barbarians had long prepared with studied foresight this deed of sacrilege, in spite of their idiotically absurd pretexts and their shameless denials. That which they had desired to destroy here was the very heart of ancient France, impelled as much by some superstitious fancy as by their own brutal instincts, and upon this task they bent their whole energy, while in the rest of the town nothing else, or almost nothing, suffered damage.
"Could no attempt be made," I ask, "to replace the burnt roof of the basilica, to cover over as soon as possible these arches, which will not otherwise withstand the ravages of next winter?"
"Undoubtedly," he replies, "there is arisk that at the first falls of snow, the first showers of rain, all this will crumble to ruins, more especially as the calcined stones have lost their power of resistance. But we cannot even attempt to preserve them a little, for the Germans do not let us out of their sight. It is the cathedral, always the cathedral, that they watch through their field-glasses, and as soon as a single person appears in the bell turret of a tower the rain of shells begins again. No, there is nothing to be done. It must be left to the grace of God."
On his return, His Eminence graciously provides me with a guide, who has the keys of the hoarding, and at last I penetrate into the ruins of the basilica, into the nave, which, being stripped bare, appears the loftier and vaster for it.
It is cold there and sad enough for tears. It is perhaps this unexpected chill, a chill far more piercing than that of the worldwithout, which at first grips you and disconcerts you. Instead of the somewhat heavy perfume that generally hangs about old basilicas, smoke of so much incense burned there, emanations of so many biers blessed by the priests, of so many generations who have hastened there to wrestle and pray—instead of this, there is a damp, icy wind which whistles through crevices in the walls, through broken windows and gaps in the vaults. Towards those vaults up yonder, pierced here and there by shrapnel, the eyes are raised, immediately, instinctively, to gaze at them. The sight is led up towards them, as it were, by all those columns that jut out, shooting aloft in sheaves, for their support. They have flying curves, these vaults, of exquisite grace, so designed, it seems, that they may not hinder prayers in their upward flight, nor force back to earth a gaze that aims at heaven. One never grows tired of bendingthe head backwards to gaze at them, those sacred vaults hastening to destruction. And then high up, too, quite high up, throughout the whole length of the nave, is the long succession of those almost ethereal pointed arches which support the vaults and arches, alike, yet not rigidly uniform, and so harmonious, despite their elaborate carving, that they give rest to the eye that follows them upwards in their soaring perspective. These vast ceilings of stone are so airy in appearance, and moreover so distant, that they do not oppress or confine the spirit. Indeed they seem freed from all heaviness, almost insubstantial.
Moreover, it is wiser to move on under that roof with head turned upward and not to watch too closely where the feet may fall, for that pavement, reverberating rather sadly, has been sullied and blackened by charred human flesh. It is knownthat on the day of the conflagration the church was full of wounded Germans lying on straw mattresses, which caught fire, and a scene of horror ensued, worthy of a vision of Dante; all these beings, their green wounds scorched by the flames, dragged themselves along screaming, on red stumps, trying to win through doors too narrow. Renowned, too, is the heroism of those stretcher-bearers, priests and nuns, who risked their lives in the midst of falling bombs in their attempt to save these unhappy wretches, whom their own German brothers had not even thought to spare. Yet they did not succeed in saving all; some remained and were burnt to death in the nave, leaving unseemly clots of blood on the sacred flagstones, where formerly processions of kings and queens had slowly trailed their ermine mantles to the sound of great organs and plain-song.
"Look," said my guide, showing me awide hole in one of the aisles, "this is the work of a shell which they hurled at us yesterday evening. And now come and see the miracle."
And he leads me into the choir where the statue of Joan of Arc, preserved it may be said by some special Providence, still stands unharmed, with its eyes of gentle ecstasy.
The most irreparable disaster is the ruin of those great glass windows, which the mysterious artists of the thirteenth century had piously wrought in meditation and dreams, assembling together in hundreds, saints, male and female, with translucent draperies and luminous aureoles. There again German scrap-iron has crashed through in great senseless volleys, shattering everything. Irreplaceable masterpieces are scattered on the flagstones in fragments that can never be reassembled—golds, reds and blues, of which the secrethas been lost. Vanished are the transparent rainbow colours, perished those saintly personages, in the pretty simplicity of their attitudes, with their small, pale, ecstatic faces; a thousand precious fragments of that glasswork, which in the course of centuries has acquired an iridescence something in the manner of opals, lie on the ground, where indeed they still shine like gems.
To-day there is silence in the basilica, as well as in the deserted square around it; a deathlike silence within these walls, which for so long had vibrated to the voice of organs and the old ritual chants of France. The cold wind alone makes a kind of music this Sunday morning, and at times when it blows harder there is a tinkling like the fall of very light pearls. It is the falling of the little that still remained in place of the beautiful glass windows of the thirteenth century, crumbling away entirely, beyond recovery.
A whole splendid cycle of our history which seemed to live in the sanctuary, with a life almost tangible, though essentially spiritual, has suddenly been plunged into the abyss of things gone by, of which even the memory will soon pass away. The great barbarism has swept through this place, the modern barbarism from beyond the Rhine, a thousand times worse than the barbarism of old times, because it is doltishly, outrageously self-satisfied, and consequently fundamental, incurable, and final—destined, if it be not crushed, to overwhelm the world in a sinister night of eclipse.
In truth it is strange how that statue of Joan of Arc in the choir has remained standing calm, intact, immaculate, without even the smallest scratch upon her gown.
December, 1914.
At first they were sent to Paris, those dear sailors of ours, so that the duty of policing the city, of maintaining order, enforcing silence and good behaviour might be entrusted to them—and I could not help smiling; it seemed so incongruous, this entirely new part which someone had thought fit to make them play. For truth to tell, between ourselves, correct behaviour in the streets of towns has never been the especial boast of our excellent young friends. Nevertheless by dint of making up their minds to it and assuming an air of seriousness, they had acquitted themselves almost with honour up to themoment when they were freed from that insufferable constraint and were sent outside the city to guard the posts in the entrenched camp. That was already a little better, a little more after their own hearts. At last came a day of rejoicing and glorious intoxication, when they were told that they were all going into the firing-line.
If they had had a flag that day, like their comrades of the land-forces, I will not assert that they would have marched away with more enthusiasm and gaiety, for that would have been impossible, but assuredly they would have marched more proudly, mustered around that sublime bauble, whose place nothing can ever take, whatever may be said or done. Sailors, more perhaps than other men, cherish this devotion to the flag, fostered in them by the touching ceremonial observed on our ships, where to the sound of the bugle the flag is unfurled each morning and furled eachevening, while officers and crew bare their heads in silence, in reverent salute.
Yes, they would have been well pleased, our Naval Brigade, to have had a flag wherewith to march into the firing-line, but their officers said to them:
"You will certainly be given one in the end, as soon as you have won it yonder."
And they went away singing, all with the same ardour of heroes; all, I say, not only those who still uphold the admirable traditions of our Navy of old, but even the new recruits, who were already a little corrupted—no more than superficially, however—by disgusting, anti-military claptrap, but who had suddenly recovered their senses and were exalted at the sound of the German guns. All were united, resolute, disciplined, sobered, and dreaming of having a flag on their return.
They were sent in haste to Ghent to cover the retreat of the Belgian Army,but on the way they were stopped at Dixmude, where the barbarians with pink skins like boiled pig were established in ten times their number, and where at all costs a stand was to be made to prevent the abominable onrush from spreading farther.
They had been told:
"The part assigned to you is one of danger and gravity; we have need of your courage. In order to save the whole of our left wing you must sacrifice yourselves until reinforcements arrive.Try to hold out at least four days."
And they held out twenty-six mortal days. They held out almost alone, for reinforcements, owing to unforeseen difficulties, were insufficient and long in coming. And of the six thousand that marched away, there are to-day not more than three thousand survivors.
They had the bare necessities of life andhardly those. When they left Paris, where the weather was warm and summery, they did not anticipate such bitter cold. Most of them wore nothing over their chests except the regulation jumper of cotton, striped with blue, and light trousers, with nothing underneath, on their legs, and over all that, it is true, infantry great-coats to which they were unaccustomed and which hampered their movements. For provisions they had nothing but some tins ofconfiture de singe.[1]Naturally no one was prepared for what was practically isolation for twenty-six long days. In the same circumstances ordinary troops, even though their peers in courage, could never have been equal to the occasion. But they had that faculty of fighting through, common to seafaring men, which is acquired in the course of arduous voyages, in the colonies, among the islands, and thanksto which a true sailor can face any emergency—a special way with them, after all so natural and moreover so merry withal, so tempered with ingratiating tact that it offends nobody.
Well, then, they had fought through; for after those three or four epic weeks, in which day and night they had battled like devils, in fire and water, the survivors were found well-nourished, almost, and with hardly a cold among them.
The only reproach, which I heard addressed to them by their officers, who had the honour to command them in the midst of the furnace, was that they could not reconcile themselves to the practice of crawling. Crawling is a mode of progression introduced into modern warfare by German cunning, and it is well known that our soldiers have to be prepared for it by a long course of training. Now there had not been time to accustom these mento the practice, and when it came to an attack they set out indeed as ordered, dragging themselves along on all fours, but, promptly carried away by their zeal, they stood up to get into their stride, and too many of them were mown down by shrapnel.
One of them told me yesterday, in the words I now quote, how his company having been ordered to transfer themselves to another part of the battle front—but without letting themselves be seen, walking along, bent double, at the bottom of a long interminable trench—were really unable to obey the order literally.
"The trench was already half full of our poor dead comrades. And you will understand, sir, that in places where there were too many of them, it would have hurt us to walk on them; we could not do it. We came out of the ditch, and ran as fast as our legs would carry us along the slopeof the parapet, and the Boches who saw us made haste to kill us. But," he continued, "except for trifling acts of disobedience such as that, I assure you, sir, that we behaved very well. Thus I remember some officers commanding sharp-shooters and some officers of light infantry, who had witnessed the Battles of the Marne and the Aisne. Well, when they came sometimes to chat with our officers, we used to hear them say, 'Our soldiers they were brave fellows enough, to be sure! But to see your sailors fighting is an absolute eye-opener all the same.'"
And that town of Dixmude, where they contrived to hold out for twenty-six days, became by degrees something like an ante-room of hell. There were rain, snow, floods, churning up black mud in the bottom of the trenches; blood splashing up everywhere; roofs falling in, crushing wounded in confused heaps or dead bodiesin all stages of decomposition; cries and death rattles unceasing, mingling with the continual crash of thunder close at hand. There was fighting in every street, in every house, through broken windows, behind fragments of walls—such close hand-to-hand fighting that sometimes men were locked together trying to strangle one another. And often at night, when already men could no longer tell where to strike home, there were bewildering acts of treachery committed by Germans, who would suddenly begin to shout in French:
"Cease fire, you fools! It is our men who are there and you are firing on your own comrades."
And men lost their heads entirely, as in a nightmare, from which they could neither rouse themselves nor escape.
At last came the day when the town was taken. The Germans suddenly brought up terrific reinforcements ofheavy artillery, and heavy shells fell all round like hail—those enormous shells, the devil's own, which make holes six to eight yards wide by four yards deep. They came at the rate of fifty or sixty a minute, and in the craters they made there was at once a jumbled mass of masonry, furniture, carpets, corpses, a chaos of nameless horror. To continue there became truly a task beyond human endurance; it would have meant a massacre to the very last man, moreover without serving any useful purpose, for the abandonment of that mass of ruins, of that charnel-house, which was all that remained of the poor little Flemish town, was no longer a matter of importance. It had resisted just the necessary length of time. The essential point was that the Germans had been prevented from crossing over to the other bank of the Yser, at a time when, nevertheless, all the chances had seemed in their favour; theessential point was this especially, that they would never at any time cross over, now that reinforcements had arrived to hold them up in the south, and now that the floods were encroaching everywhere, barring the way in the north. On this side the barbarians' thrust was definitely countered. And it was our Naval Brigade, who almost by themselves, unwavering in the face of overwhelming numbers, had there supported our left wing, though losinghalfof their effective and eighty per cent. of their officers.
Then they said to themselves, those who were left of them:
"Our flag—we shall get it this time."
Besides, officers in high command, touched and amazed at so much bravery, had promised it to them, and so had the head of the French Government himself, one day when he came to congratulate them.
But alas! they have not yet received it, and perhaps it will never be theirs, unless those officers in high command, to whom I have referred, who have partly pledged their word, intervene while there is yet time, before all these deeds of heroism have fallen into oblivion.
For God's sake give them their flag, our Naval Brigade! And even before sending it to them it would be well, methinks, to decorate it with the Cross.
P.S.—Last week the Naval Brigade were mentioned at the head of the Army Orders of the day,for having given proof of the greatest energy and complete devotion to duty in the defence of a strategic position of great importance.
[1]Military slang term for tins of preserved meat.
[1]Military slang term for tins of preserved meat.
November, 1914.
After the lapse of so many years, and in the midst of those moods of rage and anguish or of splendid exaltation which characterise the present hour, I had quite forgotten the existence of a certain enchanted isle, very far away, on the other side of the earth, in the midst of the great Southern Ocean, rearing among the warm clouds of those regions its mountains, carpeted with ferns and flowers. In our October climate, already cold, here in this district of Paris, bare of leaves and in autumn colouring, where I have lived for a month, whence you have but to withdraw a little way to the north in order tohear the cannon crashing incessantly like a storm, and where each day countless graves are prepared for the burial of the most precious and cherished sons of France—here the name of Tahiti seems to me the designation of some visionary Eden. I can no longer bring myself to believe that my sojourn in former days in that far-away island was an actual fact. It is with an effort that I recall to my memory that sea, bordered with beaches of pure white coral, the palm trees with arching fronds, and the Maoris living in a perpetual dream, a childlike race with no thought beyond singing and garlanding themselves with flowers.
Tahiti, the island of which I had thought no more, has just been abruptly recalled to my mind by an article in a newspaper, in which it is stated that the Germans have passed that way, pillaging everything. And the commander of the two cruisers,who, without running any risk to themselves, be it understood, committed this dastardly outrage on a poor little open town lying there all unsuspecting, cannot claim to have had any order issued to them from their horrible Emperor—no, indeed, since they were at the other end of the world. All by themselves they had found this thing to do, and of their own accord they did it, from sheer Teutonic savagery.
Yesterday in one of the forts of Paris garrisoned by our sailors, I met an old naval petty officer who, in former days, had on two or three occasions sailed under my orders. He seems to me to have found the name most appropriate to the Prussians and one that deserves to stick to them.
"Well you see, Commander," he said to me, "you and I have often visited together all kinds of savages whom I should have thought the biggest brutes of all, savageswith black skins, with yellow skins, or with red skins, but I now see clearly that there is another sort still—those other dirty savages with pink skins like boiled pig, who are much the worst of all."
And so Tahiti the Delectable, where blood had never before been shed, a little Eden, harmless and confiding, set in the midst of mighty oceans—Tahiti has just suffered the visitation of savages with pink skins like boiled pig. So without profit, as without excuse, simply for the sport of the thing, for the pure German pleasure of wreaking as much evil as possible, never mind upon whom, never mind where, these savages, indeed "that worst kind of all," amused themselves by making a heap of ruins in that Bay of Papeete with its eternal calm, under trees ever green, among roses ever in flower.
It is true this happened in the Antipodes, and it is so trifling, so very triflinga matter, compared with the smoking charnel-houses which in Belgium and France were landmarks in the track of the accursed army. But nevertheless it is especially deserving of being brought up again as a still more peculiarly futile and fatuous act of ferocity.
December, 1914.
His name was Max Barthou. He was one of those dearly loved only sons whose death shatters two or three lives at least, and already we had too nearly forgotten all the skill and courage on his father's part to which we owed the Three Years' Service Bill, without which all France to-day would be prostrate under the heel of the Monster.
To be sure he, young Max, had done no more than all those thousands of others who have given their lives so gloriously. It is not, then, on that account that I have chosen to speak of him in a special manner. No; one of my chief reasons, no doubt, is that his parents are very dearfriends of mine. But it is also for the sake of the boy himself, for whom I had a great affection; moreover, I take a melancholy pleasure in mentioning what a charming little fellow he was. In the first place he had contrived to remain a child, like boys of my own generation long ago, and this is very rare among young Parisians of to-day, most of whom, although this sort of thing is now being brought under control, are at eighteen insufferable little wiseacres. To remain a child! How much that implies, not freshness alone, but modesty, discernment, good sense, and clear judgment! Although he was very learned, almost beyond his years, he had contrived to remain simple, natural, devoted to hearth and home, which he seldom left for more than a few hours in the day, when he went to attend his lectures.
During my flying visits to Paris, when I chanced to be dining with his parentson special days as their only guest, I used to talk to him in spite of the charming shyness he displayed, and each time I appreciated still more deeply his gentle, profound young soul. I can still see him after dinner in the familiar drawing-room, where he would linger with us for a moment before going away to finish his studies. On those occasions, unconventional though it may have been, he would lean against his mother's knee so as to be closer to her, or even lie on the rug at her feet, still playing the part of a coaxing child, teasing the while—oh, very gently, to be sure—an old Siamese cat which had been the companion of his earliest years and now growled at everyone except him. Good God, it was only yesterday! It was only last spring that this little hero, who has just fallen a victim to German shrapnel, would tumble about on the floor, playing with his friend, the old growling cat.
But what a transformation in those three months! It is scarcely a week since I met in a lobby at General Headquarters a smart and resolute blue hussar, who, after having saluted correctly, stood looking at me, not venturing to address me, but surprised that I did not speak to him. Ah! to be sure, it was young Max, whom, at first sight, I had not recognised in his new kit—a young Max of eighteen, greatly changed by the magic wand of war, for he had suddenly grown into a man, and his eyes now shone with a sobered joy. At last he had obtained his heart's desire; to-morrow he was to set out for Alsace for the firing-line.
"So you have got what you wanted, my young friend," I said to him. "Are you pleased?"
"Oh yes, I am pleased."
That, to be sure, was clear from his appearance, and I bade him good-bye witha smile, wishing him the luck to win that splendid medal, that most splendid of all medals, which is fastened with a yellow ribbon bordered with green. I had indeed no foreboding that I had just shaken his hand for the last time.
What insinuating perseverance he had brought to bear in order that he might get to the Front, for his father, though to be sure he would have made no attempt to keep him back, had a horror of doing anything to force on his destiny, and only yielded step by step, glad of heart, yet at the same time in agony at seeing his boy's splendid spirit developing so rapidly.
First of all he had to let him volunteer; then when the boy was chafing with impatience in thedépôtswhere our sons are trained for the firing-line he had to obtain permission for him to leave before his turn. The commander-in-chief, who hadwelcomed him with pleasure, had wished to keep him by his side, but he protested, gently but firmly, on the occasion of a visit his father paid to the general headquarters.
"I feel too much sheltered here, which is absurd considering the name I bear. Ought I not, on the contrary, to set an example?"
And with a sudden return to that childlike gaiety which he had had the exquisite grace to preserve, hidden under his soldier's uniform, he added with the smile of old days:
"Besides, papa, as the son of the Three Years' Service Bill, it is up to me to do at least three times as much of it as anyone else."
His father, need I say, understood—understood with all his heart—understood so well that, divided between pride and distress, he asked immediately that the boy might be sent to Alsace.
And he had scarcely arrived yonder—at Thann, on the day of a bombardment—when a senseless volley of Germany shrapnel, whence it came none knew, without any military usefulness, and simply for the pleasure of doing harm, shattered him like a thing of no account. He had no time to do "thrice as much as anyone else," alas no! In less than a minute that young life, so precious, so tenderly cherished, was extinguished for ever.
Four others, companions of his dream of glory, fell at his side, killed by the same shell, and the next day they were all committed to the care of that earth of Alsace which had once more become French.
And in his honour, poor little blue hussar, the people of Thann, who since yesterday were German no longer, desired of their own accord to make some special demonstration, because he was the son of the Three Years' Service Bill. TheseAlsatians, released from bondage, had the fancy to adorn his coffin with gilding, simple but charming, as if for a little prince in a fairy-tale, and they carried him in their arms, him alone, while his companions were borne along behind him on a cart.
After the service in the old church the whole assembly, at least three thousand in number, were warned that it would be exceedingly dangerous to go any farther. As the cemetery was in an exposed position, spied upon by German binoculars, the long procession ran a great risk of attracting the barbarians' shrapnel fire, for it was unlikely that they would miss such an excellent opportunity of taking life. But no one was afraid, no one stayed behind, and the little hussar was escorted by them all to the very end.
And there are thousands and thousands of our sons mown down in this manner—sonsfrom villages or castles, who were all the hope of, all that made life worth living for, mothers, fathers, grandfathers, and grandmothers. Night and day for eighteen years, twenty years, they had been surrounded with every care, brooded over with all tenderness. Anxious eyes had watched unremittingly their physical and moral growth. For some of them, of humbler families, heavy sacrifices had necessarily to be made and privations endured so that their health might be assured and their minds have scope to expand, to gain knowledge of the world, to be enriched with beautiful impressions. And then, suddenly, there they are, these dear boys, prepared for life with such painstaking love; there they are, beloved young heroes, with shattered breast or brains blown out—by order of that damnable Jack-pudding who rules in Berlin.
Oh, execrations and curses upon themonster of ferocity and trickery who has unchained all this woe! May his life be greatly prolonged so that he may at least have time to suffer greatly; and afterwards may he still live on and remain fully conscious and lucid of intellect in the hour when he shall cross the threshold of eternity, where upon that door, which will never again be opened, may be read, flaming in the darkness, that sentence of utmost horror, "All hope abandon, ye who enter here."
"In anticipation of death I make this confession, that I despise the German nation on account of its infinite stupidity, and that I blush to belong to it."Schopenhauer."The character of the Germans presents a terrible blend of ferocity and trickery. They are a people of born liars. One must see this to believe it."Velleius Paterculus,In the year 10 of the Christian era.
"In anticipation of death I make this confession, that I despise the German nation on account of its infinite stupidity, and that I blush to belong to it."
Schopenhauer.
"The character of the Germans presents a terrible blend of ferocity and trickery. They are a people of born liars. One must see this to believe it."
Velleius Paterculus,In the year 10 of the Christian era.
March, 1915.
Ruins in a mournful light which is anxious, seemingly, to fade away into a premature darkness. Vast ruins, ruins of such delicacy! Here is a deployment ofthose exquisite, slender colonnades and those archways of mysterious charm, which at first sight conjure up for the mind the Middle Ages and Gothic Art in its fair but transient blossoming. But in general, surviving specimens of that Art were only to be found in isolated examples, in the form of some old church or old cloister, surrounded by things of modern growth, whereas at Ypres, there is anensemble; first a cathedral with additions of complicated supplementary buildings, that might be called palaces, whose long façades with their clock-towers present to the eye their succession of windows with pointed arches. As an architectural group it is almost unique in the world, actually a whole quarter of a town, built in little columns, little arches and archaic stone tracery.
The sky is low, gloomy, tormented, as in dreams. The actual night has not yetbegun to fall, but the thick clouds of northern winters cast upon the earth this kind of yellowish obscurity. Round about the lofty ruins, the open spaces are full of soldiers standing still, or slowly making their rounds, all with a certain air of seriousness, as if remembering or expecting some event, of which everyone is aware, but which no one discusses. There are also women poorly dressed, with anxious faces, and little children, but the humble population of civilians is merged in a crowd of rough uniforms, almost all of them faded and coated with earth, obviously returned after prolonged engagements. The yellow khaki uniforms of the English and the almost black uniform of the Belgians mingle with the "horizon" blue of great-coats worn by our French soldiers, who are in a majority; all these different shades blend into an almost neutral colour scheme, and two or three red burnousesof Arab chiefs strike a vivid note, unexpected, disconcerting, in that crowd, coloured like the misty winter evening.
Here are ruins indeed, but on closer inspection, inexplicable ruins, for their collapse seems to date from yesterday, and the crevices and gaps are unnaturally white among the greyish tints of the façades or towers, and here and there, through broken windows, on the interior walls is visible the glittering of gilding. Indeed it is not time that has wrought these ravages—time had spared these wonders—nor yet until our own days, even in the midst of the most terrible upheavals and most ruthless conquest, had men ever attempted to destroy them. No one had dared the deed until the coming of those savages, who are still there, close at hand, crouching in their holes of muddy earth, perfecting each day their idiotic work, and multiplying their volleys of scrap-iron,wreaking their vengeance on these sacred objects whenever they are seized again by an access of rage in consequence of a new repulse.
Near the mutilated cathedral, that palace of a hundred windows, which in the main still stands, is the famous Cloth Hall, built when Flanders was at the height of her glory, a building vulgarised in all its aspects by reproductions, ever since the vindictiveness of the barbarians rendered it still more famous. One November night, it will be remembered, it blazed with sinister magnificence, side by side with the church and the precious buildings surrounding it, illuminating with a red light all the open country. The Germans had brought up in its honour the best that they could muster of incendiary material; their benzine bombs consumed the Hall and then all that it contained; all the treasures that had been preserved there for centuries,its state-rooms, its wainscoting, its pictures, its books, all burned like straw. Now that it is bereft of its lofty roof it has acquired something rather Venetian and surprising in its appearance, with its long façades pierced with uninterrupted rows of floreated pointed arches. In the midst of its irremediable disorder, it is strange and charming. The symmetrical turrets, slender as minarets, set in the angles of the walls, have hitherto escaped those insensate bombs and rise up more boldly than ever, whereas the woodwork of the pointed roofs no longer soars with them up into the air. But the belfry in the centre, which ever since the Middle Ages has kept watch over the plains, is to-day hatefully disfigured, its summit clean cut off, shattered, cleft from top to bottom. It is scarcely in a condition to offer further resistance; a few more shells, and it will collapse in one mass. On one of its sides,very high up, still hangs the monumental dial of a ruined clock, of which the hands point persistently to twenty-five minutes past four—doubtless the tragic moment at which this giant among Flemish belfries received its death blow.
Around the great square of Ypres, where these glories of past ages had so long been preserved for us intact, several houses, the majority of them of ancient Flemish architecture, have been eviscerated in like manner, without object, without excuse, their interior visible from outside through great, gaping holes. But this the barbarians did not do on purpose; it was merely that they happened to be too near, these houses, too closely adjacent to the targets they had chosen, the cathedral and the old palace. It is known that everywhere here, as at Louvain, at Arras, at Soissons, at Rheims, their greatest delight is to direct their fire at public buildings, ruining againand again all that is famous for beauty, art or memories. So then, except for its historic square, the town of Ypres has not suffered very greatly. Ah, but wait! I was forgetting the hospital yonder, which likewise served them for target; for the matter of that the Germans have notoriously a preference for bombarding places of refuge, shelters for wounded and sick, ambulances, first-aid stations and Red Cross wagons.
These acts of destruction, transforming into a rubbish heap that tranquil country of Belgium, which was above everything an incomparable museum, all are agreed to stigmatise as a base, ignoble crime. But it is more than that, it is a masterpiece of the crassest stupidity—the stupidity that Schopenhauer himself could not forbear to publish in the frank outburst evoked by his last moments; for after all it amounts to signing and initialling theignominy of Germany for the edification of neutrals and of generations to come. The bodies of men tortured and hanged, of women and children shot or mutilated, will soon moulder away completely in their poor, nameless graves, and then the world will remember them no more. But these imperishable ruins, these innumerable ruins of museums or churches, what overwhelming and damning evidence they are, and how everlasting!
After having done all this it is perhaps still more foolish to deny it, to deny it in the very face of such incontrovertible evidence, to deny it with an effrontery that leaves us Frenchmen aghast, or even to invent pretexts at whose childish imbecility we can only shrug our shoulders. "A people of born liars," said the Latin writer. Yes, and a people who will never eradicate their original vices, a people who, moreover, actually dared, despite the mostirrefutable written documents, to deny the premeditation of their crimes and the treachery of their attack. What absurd childishness they reveal in their impostures! And who can be the simpletons whom they hope to deceive?
The light is still fading upon the desolate ruins of Ypres, but how slowly to-day! That is because even at noon the light was scarcely stronger on this dull day of March; only at this hour a certain atmosphere, indefinite and sad, broods upon the distant landscape, indicating the approach of night.
They look instinctively at the ruins, these thousands of soldiers, taking their evening walk in such melancholy surroundings, but generally they remain at a distance, leaving the ruins to their magnificent isolation. However, here are three of them, Frenchmen, probably newcomers, who approach the ruins hesitatingly. Theyadvance until they stand under the little arches of the tottering cathedral with a sober air, as if they were visiting tombs. After contemplating them at first in silence, one of them suddenly ejaculates a term of abuse (to whom it is addressed may be easily imagined!), doubtless the most insulting he can find in the French language, a word that I had not expected, which first makes me smile and then, the next moment, impresses me on the contrary as a valuable discovery.
"Oh those hooligans!"
Here the intonation is missing, for I am unable to reproduce it, but in truth the compliment, pronounced as he pronounced it, seems to me something new, worth adding to all the other epithets applied to Germans, which are always pitched in too low a key and moreover too refined; and he continues to repeat, indignant little soldier that he is, stamping with rage:
"Oh those hooligans among hooligans!"
At last the fall of night is upon us, the true night, which will put an end here to all signs of life. The crowd of soldiers gradually melts away along streets already dark, which, for obvious reasons, will not be lighted. In the distance the sound of the bugle summons them to their evening soup in houses or barracks, where they will fall asleep with no sense of security, certain of being awakened at any moment by shells, or by those great monsters that explode with a crash like thunder. Poor, brave children of France, wrapped in their bluish overcoats, none can foresee at what hour death will be hurled at them, from afar, blindly, through the misty darkness—for the most playful fancy presides over this bombardment; now it is an endless rain of fire, now only a single shell which comes and kills at haphazard. And patiently awaiting the rest of the great dramalie the ruins, enveloped in silence. Here and there a little timid light appears in some house still inhabited, where the windows are pasted over with paper to enable them to resist the shock of explosions close at hand, and where the air-holes of the cellars of refuge are protected by sandbags. Who would believe it? Stubborn people, people too old or too poor to flee, have remained at Ypres, and others even are beginning to return, with a kind of fatalistic resignation.
The cathedral and the great belfry project only their silhouettes against the sky, and these seem to have been congealed, gesturing with broken arms. As the night enfolds the world more completely in its thick mists, memory conjures up the mournful surroundings in which Ypres is now lost, deep plains unpeopled and soon plunged in darkness, roads broken up, impassable for fugitives, fields blotted out ormantled with snow, a network of trenches where our soldiers, alas! are suffering cold and discomfort, and so near, hardly a cannon-shot away, those other ditches, more grim, more sordid, where men of ineradicable savagery are watching, always ready to spring out in solid masses, uttering Red Indian war whoops, or to crawl sneakingly along to squirt liquid fire upon our soldiers.
But how the twilight has lengthened in these last few days! Without looking at the clock it is evident that the hour is late, and the mere fact of still being able to see conveys in spite of all a vague presage of April; it seems that the nightmare of winter is coming to an end, that the sun will reappear, the sun of deliverance, that softer breezes, as if nothing unusual were happening in the world, will bring back flowers and songs of birds to all these scenes of desolation, among all these thousandsof graves of youth. There is yet another sign of spring, three or four little girls, who rush out into the deserted square in wild spirits, quite little girls, not more than six years old; they have escaped, fleet of foot, from the cellar in which they sleep, and they take hands and try to dance a round, as on an evening in May, to the tune of an old Flemish song. But another child, a big girl of ten, a person in authority, comes along and reduces them to silence, scolding them as if they had done something naughty, and drives them back to the underground dwellings, where, after they have said their prayers, lowly mothers will put them to bed.
Unspeakably sad seemed that childish round, tentatively danced there in solitude at the fall of a cold March night, in a square dominated by a phantom belfry, in a martyred city, in the midst of gloomy,inundated plains, all in darkness, and all beset with ambushes and mourning.
Since this chapter was written the bombardment has continued, and Ypres is now no more than a shapeless mass of calcined stones.