IN LORRAINE AND THE VOSGES
NANCY, May 13th, 1915
Beside me, on my writing-table, stands a bunch of peonies, the jolly
round-faced pink peonies of the village garden. They were picked
this afternoon in the garden of a ruined house at Gerbeviller--a
house so calcined and convulsed that, for epithets dire enough to
fit it, one would have to borrow from a Hebrew prophet gloating over
the fall of a city of idolaters.
Since leaving Paris yesterday we have passed through streets and
streets of such murdered houses, through town after town spread out
in its last writhings; and before the black holes that were homes,
along the edge of the chasms that were streets, everywhere we have
seen flowers and vegetables springing up in freshly raked and
watered gardens. My pink peonies were not introduced to point the
stale allegory of unconscious Nature veiling Man's havoc: they are
put on my first page as a symbol of conscious human energy coming
back to replant and rebuild the wilderness...
Last March, in the Argonne, the towns we passed through seemed quite
dead; but yesterday new life was budding everywhere. We were
following another track of the invasion, one of the huge
tiger-scratches that the Beast flung over the land last September,
between Vitry-le-Francois and Bar-le-Duc. Etrepy, Pargny,
Sermaize-les-Bains, Andernay, are the names of this group of
victims: Sermaize a pretty watering-place along wooded slopes, the
others large villages fringed with farms, and all now mere
scrofulous blotches on the soft spring scene. But in many we heard
the sound of hammers, and saw brick-layers and masons at work. Even
in the most mortally stricken there were signs of returning life:
children playing among the stone heaps, and now and then a cautious
older face peering out of a shed propped against the ruins. In one
place an ancient tram-car had been converted into a cafe and
labelled: "Au Restaurant des Ruines"; and everywhere between the
calcined walls the carefully combed gardens aligned their radishes
and lettuce-tops.
From Bar-le-Duc we turned northeast, and as we entered the forest of
Commercy we began to hear again the Voice of the Front. It was the
warmest and stillest of May days, and in the clearing where we
stopped for luncheon the familiar boom broke with a magnified
loudness on the noonday hush. In the intervals between the crashes
there was not a sound but the gnats' hum in the moist sunshine and
the dryad-call of the cuckoo from greener depths. At the end of the
lane a few cavalrymen rode by in shabby blue, their horses' flanks
glinting like ripe chestnuts. They stopped to chat and accept some
cigarettes, and when they had trotted off again the gnat, the cuckoo
and the cannon took up their trio...
The town of Commercy looked so undisturbed that the cannonade
rocking it might have been some unheeded echo of the hills. These
frontier towns inured to the clash of war go about their business
with what one might call stolidity if there were not finer, and
truer, names for it. In Commercy, to be sure, there is little
business to go about just now save that connected with the military
occupation; but the peaceful look of the sunny sleepy streets made
one doubt if the fighting line was really less than five miles away...
Yet the French, with an odd perversion of race-vanity, still
persist in speaking of themselves as a "nervous and impressionable"
people!
This afternoon, on the road to Gerbeviller, we were again in the
track of the September invasion. Over all the slopes now cool with
spring foliage the battle rocked backward and forward during those
burning autumn days; and every mile of the struggle has left its
ghastly traces. The fields are full of wooden crosses which the
ploughshare makes a circuit to avoid; many of the villages have been
partly wrecked, and here and there an isolated ruin marks the
nucleus of a fiercer struggle. But the landscape, in its first sweet
leafiness, is so alive with ploughing and sowing and all the natural
tasks of spring, that the war scars seem like traces of a long-past
woe; and it was not till a bend of the road brought us in sight of
Gerbeviller that we breathed again the choking air of present
horror.
Gerbeviller, stretched out at ease on its slopes above the Meurthe,
must have been a happy place to live in. The streets slanted up
between scattered houses in gardens to the great Louis XIV
chateau above the town and the church that balanced it. So
much one can reconstruct from the first glimpse across the valley;
but when one enters the town all perspective is lost in chaos.
Gerbeviller has taken to herself the title of "the martyr town"; an
honour to which many sister victims might dispute her claim! But as
a sensational image of havoc it seems improbable that any can
surpass her. Her ruins seem to have been simultaneously vomited up
from the depths and hurled down from the skies, as though she had
perished in some monstrous clash of earthquake and tornado; and it
fills one with a cold despair to know that this double destruction
was no accident of nature but a piously planned and methodically
executed human deed. From the opposite heights the poor little
garden-girt town was shelled like a steel fortress; then, when the
Germans entered, a fire was built in every house, and at the
nicely-timed right moment one of the explosive tabloids which the
fearless Teuton carries about for his land-_Lusitanias_ was tossed
on each hearth. It was all so well done that one wonders--almost
apologetically for German thoroughness--that any of the human rats
escaped from their holes; but some did, and were neatly spitted on
lurking bayonets.
One old woman, hearing her son's deathcry, rashly looked out of her
door. A bullet instantly laid her low among her phloxes and lilies;
and there, in her little garden, her dead body was dishonoured. It
seemed singularly appropriate, in such a scene, to read above a
blackened doorway the sign: "Monuments Funebres," and to observe
that the house the doorway once belonged to had formed the angle of
a lane called "La Ruelle des Orphelines."
At one end of the main street of Gerbeviller there once stood a
charming house, of the sober old Lorraine pattern, with low door,
deep roof and ample gables: it was in the garden of this house that
my pink peonies were picked for me by its owner, Mr. Liegeay, a
former Mayor of Gerbeviller, who witnessed all the horrors of the
invasion.
Mr. Liegeay is now living in a neighbour's cellar, his own being
fully occupied by the debris of his charming house. He told us the
story of the three days of the German occupation; how he and his
wife and niece, and the niece's babies, took to their cellar while
the Germans set the house on fire, and how, peering through a door
into the stable-yard, they saw that the soldiers suspected they were
within and were trying to get at them. Luckily the incendiaries had
heaped wood and straw all round the outside of the house, and the
blaze was so hot that they could not reach the door. Between the
arch of the doorway and the door itself was a half-moon opening; and
Mr. Liegeay and his family, during three days and three nights,
broke up all the barrels in the cellar and threw the bits out
through the opening to feed the fire in the yard.
Finally, on the third day, when they began to be afraid that the
ruins of the house would fall in on them, they made a dash for
safety. The house was on the edge of the town, and the women and
children managed to get away into the country; but Mr. Liegeay was
surprised in his garden by a German soldier. He made a rush for the
high wall of the adjoining cemetery, and scrambling over it slipped
down between the wall and a big granite cross. The cross was covered
with the hideous wire and glass wreaths dear to French mourners; and
with these opportune mementoes Mr. Liegeay roofed himself in, lying
wedged in his narrow hiding-place from three in the afternoon till
night, and listening to the voices of the soldiers who were hunting
for him among the grave-stones. Luckily it was their last day at
Gerbeviller, and the German retreat saved his life.
Even in Gerbeviller we saw no worse scene of destruction than the
particular spot in which the ex-mayor stood while he told his story.
He looked about him at the heaps of blackened brick and contorted
iron. "This was my dining-room," he said. "There were some good old
paneling on the walls, and some fine prints that had been a
wedding-present to my grand-father." He led us into another black
pit. "This was our sitting-room: you see what a view we had." He
sighed, and added philosophically: "I suppose we were too well off.
I even had an electric light out there on the terrace, to read my
paper by on summer evenings. Yes, we were too well off..." That
was all.
Meanwhile all the town had been red with horror--flame and shot and
tortures unnameable; and at the other end of the long street, a
woman, a Sister of Charity, had held her own like Soeur Gabrielle at
Clermont-en-Argonne, gathering her flock of old men and children
about her and interposing her short stout figure between them and
the fury of the Germans. We found her in her Hospice, a ruddy,
indomitable woman who related with a quiet indignation more
thrilling than invective the hideous details of the bloody three
days; but that already belongs to the past, and at present she is
much more concerned with the task of clothing and feeding
Gerbeviller. For two thirds of the population have already "come
home"--that is what they call the return to this desert! "You see,"
Soeur Julie explained, "there are the crops to sow, the gardens to
tend. They had to come back. The government is building wooden
shelters for them; and people will surely send us beds and linen."
(Of course they would, one felt as one listened!) "Heavy boots,
too--boots for field-labourers. We want them for women as well as
men--like these." Soeur Julie, smiling, turned up a hob-nailed sole.
"I have directed all the work on our Hospice farm myself. All the
women are working in the fields--we must take the place of the men."
And I seemed to see my pink peonies flowering in the very prints of
her sturdy boots!
