VIII
MIRMAN AND "MES ENFANTS"
When I went across to France there was one man whom I wished to meet. It was the Prefect of the Meurthe-et-Moselle. I wanted to meet him because he is in charge of the region where German frightfulness reached its climax. Leon Mirman has maintained a high morale in that section of France which has suffered most, and which has cause for despair. Here it was that the Germans found nothing that is human alien to their hate. When they encountered a nun, a priest, or a church, they reacted to the sacred thing and to the religious person with desecration, violation and murder. But that was only because there were many Roman Catholics in the district. They had no race or religious prejudice. When they came to Lunéville there was a synagogue and a rabbi. They burned the synagogue and killed the rabbi. As the sun falling round a helpless thing, their hate embraced all grades of weakness in Lorraine. In Nomeny they distinguished themselves by a fury against women. In some of the villages they specialized in pillage. Others they burned with zeal. Badonviller, Nonhigny, Parux, Crevic, Nomeny, Gerbéviller—the list of the villages of Meurthe-et-Moselle is a tale of the shame of Germany and of the suffering of France.
But not of suffering only. At no place is France stronger than at this point of greatest strain. The district is dotted with great names of the humble—names unknown before the war, and now to be known for as long as France is France. Here Sister Julie held back the German Army and saved her wounded from the bayonet. Here the staunch Mayor of Lunéville and his good wife stayed with their people through the German occupation.
Leon Mirman is the Prefect of all this region. He was Director of Public Charities in Paris, but when war broke out he asked to be sent to the post of danger. So he was sent to the city of Nancy to rule the Department of Meurthe-et-Moselle. The Prefect of a Department in France is the same as the Governor of a State in America. But his office in peace is as nothing compared to his power in time of war. He can suspend a Mayor and remove an entire population from one village to another. The morale of France for that section is dependent on the reaction he makes to danger and stress.
The answer of the ravaged region to the murder and the burning is a steadiness of courage, a busy and sane life of normal activity. Beautiful Nancy still lifts her gates of gold in the Place of Stanislaus. The lovely light of France falls softly on the white stone front of the municipal buildings, and from their interior comes a throbbing energy that spreads through the hurt district. The Prefect's houses for refugees are admirably conducted. School "keeps" for the children of Pont-à-Mousson on a quiet country road, while their mothers still live in cellars in the bombarded town, busy with the sewing which has made their home famous. They are embroidering table cloths and napkins, and Americans are buying their work. They are not allowed any longer to be happy, but they can go on creating beauty. None of their trouble need escape into the clean white linen and the delicate needle-work, and the Bridge of Pont-à-Mousson embosses the centerpiece as proudly as if the town had not been pounded by heavy shells for two years.
But the parents were agreed on one thing: it was no place for children. So these and other hundreds of little ones have been brought together. The Prefect means that these children, some of whom have seen their homes burned, their mothers hunted by armed men, shall have the evil memory wiped out. He is working that they shall have a better chance than if the long peace had continued. The simple homely things are going on, as if the big guns could not reach in.
I attended the classes of domestic science, where little girls plan menus for the family meal. Overhead, the aeroplanes spot the sky. Three times in my days in the district they came and "laid their eggs," in the phrase of the soldiers. Sometimes a mother is killed, sometimes a sister, but the peaceful work goes on. The blackboard is scribbled over with chalk. Piping voices repeat their lesson. I saw the tiny boys at school. I saw the older boys working at trades. Some of them were busy at carpentry, remaking the material for their own village, bureaus, tables and chairs. We talked with boys and girls from Nomeny, where the slaughter fell on women with peculiar severity. These children had seen the Germans come in. Wherever I went I met children who had seen the hand grenades thrown, their homes burning. I visited many hundreds of these children at school. They are orderly and busy. It will take more than fire and murder from unjust men to spoil life for the new generation of France. For that insolence has released a good will in a greater race than the race that sought to offend these little ones.
And the same care has been put on the older refugees. I saw the barracks of the famous Twentieth Army Corps—the Iron Divisions—and of the Eighth Artillery used for this welfare work. Mirman has taken these poor herds of refugees and restored their community life in the new temporary quarters. Here they have a hospital, a church and a cinema. He is turning the evil purpose of the Germans into an instrument for lifting his people higher than if they had known only happiness. Beyond the great power and authority of his office he is loved. The Prefect is a good man, simple and high-minded.
He has given me the statement that follows for the American people. Let us remember in reading it that it comes from the highest official in France in charge of the region where systematic atrocity was practiced in an all-inclusive way. On this chance section of the world's great area, a supreme and undeserved suffering fell. Monsieur Mirman makes here the first official statement of the war on the subject of reprisals. There is something touching in his desire for our understanding. France hoped we would see her agony with the eyes she once turned toward us. She still hopes on, and sends this message of her representative:
"I wish you to understand in what spirit we began the war in France, and especially in this district. It was our intention to follow the rules of what you call in English 'Fair Play.' We wished to carry on the war as we had carried on other wars, to our risk and peril, with all the loyalties of fighting men. But from the start we have been faced with men whom we are unable to consider as soldiers, who have conducted themselves in a section of our Department as veritable outlaws. You are not going, unfortunately, to Nomeny, which is a town of this Department where the Germans have committed the worst of their atrocities. At least you will go to Gerbéviller, where they burned the houses, one by one, and put to death old men, women and children.
"Mention is often made of these two townships where the inhabitants suffered the most severely from the invasion of the enemy, but in many other townships, a long list, the Germans acted in the same way. They burned the streets, they killed men, women and children without cause. Always they gave the pretext, to excuse themselves, that the civilian population had fired on them. On that point, I bring you my personal testimony: I say to you on my honor that this German allegation is absolutely false.
"At my request I was appointed the Prefect of Meurthe-et-Moselle on August 9, 1914. In all the townships of this Department, on my arrival, I requested in the most urgent terms that the inhabitants should not give way to restlessness, and should not resort to a single act which I called an unruly act, by themselves taking direct part in the war. I made those requests in perfect agreement with all the population, approved by the most ardent patriots. I held inquiries, frequent and detailed, to find out if my instructions had been respected. Not once have I been able to establish the fact that a civilian fired on the Germans.
"If isolated instances of that sort did take place, they could not be admitted as justifying the total of systematic crimes committed by the Germans, but I have not been able to lay hold of a single instance.
"I will cite two incidents which will mark out for you, in a clear-cut way, what I believe to be "the French method."
"At the beginning of the war a German aviator threw bombs on a town near Nancy. The Mayor, revolted, went to the town-hall, where the arms had been deposited, and took a hunting rifle and fired at the aviator. It is clear that the German aviator was committing a crime contrary to all the laws of war, but I held that the Mayor of that town, by himself firing in that way on a criminal, was disobeying the laws of his country. I proceeded to disciplinary measures against the Mayor: I suspended him from office for many weeks.
"Another incident: In the first days of August, 1914, the Germans entering Badonviller, exasperated perhaps by the resistance which our soldiers of the rear-guard gave them, or simply wishing to leave a token of their Kultur, and to terrorize the population, burned part of the village, and fired on the inhabitants as if they were rabbits.
"I arrived the next day. The French troops had reentered Badonviller and had taken some German soldiers prisoner. The prisoners were being led to the town-hall. The fires had not yet been put out, and the women whom the Germans had murdered were still unburied.
"The Mayor had seen the terrible spectacle. He had seen his young wife murdered at his doorstep in front of her little children. He himself had suffered violence. But he had stuck to his post, and had continued to carry on the affairs of his town. While the prisoners were being led along the inhabitants of Badonviller, who had seen these crimes, recognized the prisoners and surrounded them, threatening them and crying out against them. The Mayor threw himself resolutely between the prisoners and his people. This Mayor, who had had his own flesh and blood murdered and his heart torn, declared with emphasis that those prisoners, no matter what crimes they had committed, were protected by the law, and that it was not permitted to any civilian to touch a hair of their head.
"Because he had called to order some of his people whose anger was natural enough, because he had respected the law under trying conditions, I asked that this Mayor should be decorated, and the French Government decreed for him the cross of the Legion of Honor. He was rewarded in this way, not for having carried out criminal violence according to the German method, but on the contrary for preventing, by coolness and force of will, reprisals made against enemy prisoners.
"By these examples, and I could cite many others, you will be able to estimate the ideas with which the French began the war.
"The French in more than one instance have run against, not armies, but veritable bands organized for crime. I say 'organized,' and that is the significant fact. In a war when individual accidental excesses are committed, tragic situations, to be sure, arise, but we ought not to conclude that we have found ourselves face to face with a general organization of cruelty and destruction.
"In the townships of which I am speaking, it is by the order of the heads that the crimes have been committed. They are not the crimes of individuals: there has been a genuine organization of murder. It is that which will be thrown into the light by the testimony which you will gather—notably at Gerbéviller.
"Then I call your attention to what the city of Nancy has suffered in violation of the laws of humanity since the beginning of the war.
"From the beginning of August, 1914, Nancy has been empty of troops, the numerous barracks have been converted into hospitals; some were used as asylums for our refugees. Nothing remained at Nancy, nothing has come since then. You won't find at the present time a single cannon, a single depot of ammunition, no fortification, no military work. For a garrison there are some dozens of old territorials, barely sufficient in number to keep order.
"On the Fourth of September an enemy aviator threw bombs on the square where the Cathedral stands, killing a little girl and an old man.
"A few days later, knowing that they were not going to be able to enter Nancy, furious at the thought that they would soon be forced to retire and that they must give up their cherished dreams, in the night of the ninth and tenth of September, those unfortunate men advanced two pieces of artillery under cover of a storm, bombarded our peaceful city, and ripped to pieces houses in various quarters of the town, murdering women and children.
"A military point to that bombardment? I challenge any one to state it. Act of cruelty, simply, an act of outlawry.
"Ever since then acts against Nancy are multiplied. The list is long of victims stricken in Nancy by the bombs of Zeppelins, of aeroplanes, and by the shells of the 380, shot for now many months by a long-range gun. All the victims are civilians, mostly women and children. I repeat to you that the city of Nancy is empty of soldiers.
"And what I say of Nancy is true of the other towns, particularly at Lunéville, where a bomb falling in the full market killed 45 persons, of whom 40 were women.
"Adding childishness to violence, with a craving for the histrionic, obsessed by the desire to strike the imagination (or let us say more simply having the souls of 'cabotins'), these outlaws have conceived the bombardment of Nancy by a 380 cannon on the first of January—New Year's, the day of gifts—and on the first of July. In that New Year bombardment they so arranged it that the first shell fell on Nancy at the last stroke of midnight. I will show the little furnished house which that shell crushed, killing six persons, of whom four were women.
"For a long while we were content to suffer those crimes, protesting in the name of law. We did not wish to defend ourselves. We shrink from the thought of reprisals. But public opinion ended by forcing the hand of the Government. Unanimously the nation has demanded that, each time an undefended French town is bombarded by the Germans by aeroplane, Zeppelin or cannon, a reply shall be made to that violation of the laws of war and of the rights of humanity by the bombardment of a German town.
"I wish to say to you, and I beg you to make it known to your noble nation: it is not with serenity that we see our French soldiers do that work. It is with profound sadness that we resign ourselves to those reprisals. Those methods of defense are imposed upon us. Since all considerations of humanity are to-day alien to the German soul, we are reduced for the protection of our wives and our children to the policy of reprisals and to the assassination in our turn of the children and the women in Germany. The Germans have vociferously rejoiced in the crimes committed by their soldiers; they have made an illumination for the day of the Lusitania crime; they have delighted in the thought that on the first of January the children of Nancy received, as New Year's presents, shells from a 380 cannon. The acts of reprisal to which we are forced do not rejoice us in the least; they sadden us. We speak of them with soberness. And we have here reason for hating Kultur all the more. We French hate the Germans less for the crimes which they have committed on us than for the acts of violence contrary to the laws of war which they have forced us to commit in our turn, and for the reprisals on their children and their women.
"I thank you for having come here. You will look about you, you will ask questions, you will easily see the truth. That truth you will make known to your great and free nation. We shall await with confidence the judgment of its conscience."