The Slaughter in Alsace
By John H. Cox of The London Standard.
BASLE, Switzerland, Aug. 19.—I have just returned from an inspection of the scenes of the recent fighting between the French and Germans in the southern districts of Alsace.
Dispatches from Paris and Berlin describe the engagements between the frontier and Mülhausen as insignificant encounters between advance guards. If this be true in a military sense, and the preliminaries of the war produce the terrible effects I have witnessed, the disastrous results of the war itself will exceed human comprehension.
As a Swiss subject I was equipped with identification papers and accompanied by four of my countrymen, all on bicycles.
At the very outset the sight of peasants, men and women, unconcernedly at work in the fields gathering the harvest, struck me as strange and unnatural. The men were either old or well advanced in middle age. Everywhere women, girls, and mere lads were working.
The first sign of war was the demolished villa of a Catholic priest at a village near Ransbach. This priest had lived there for many years, engaged in religious work and literary pursuits. After the outbreak of the war the German authorities jumped at the conclusion that he was an agent of the French Secret Service and that he had been in the habit of sending to Belfort information concerning German military movements and German measures for defense—very often by means of carrier pigeons.
The Alsatians say that these accusations were utterly unjust; but last week a military party raided the priest's house, dragged him from his study, placed him against his own garden wall and shot him summarily as a traitor and spy. The house was searched from top to bottom, and numerous books and papers were removed, after which the building was destroyed by dynamite. The priest was buried without a coffin at the end of his little garden plot, and some of the villagers placed a rough cross on the mound which marked the place of interment.
In the next large village we were told that it had been successively occupied by French and German troops and had been the scene of stiff infantry fighting.
Here we found groups of old men and boys burying dead men and horses, whose bodies were already beginning to be a menace to health. The weather here has been exceptionally hot, and the countryside is bathed in blazing sunshine. Further on were a number of German soldiers beating about in the standing crops on both sides of the road, searching for dead and wounded. They said many of the wounded had crawled in among the wheat to escape being trodden upon by the troops marching along the road, and also to gain relief from the heat.
On the outskirts of another large village we saw a garden bounded by a thick hedge, behind which a company of French infantry had taken their stand against the advancing German troops. Among the crushed flowers there were still lying fragments of French soldiers' equipments, two French caps stained with blood and three torn French tunics, likewise dyed red. The walls of the cottage bore marks of rifle bullets, and the roof was partially burned.
Passing through the villages we saw on all sides terrible signs of the devastation of war—houses burned, uncut grain trodden down and rendered useless, gardens trampled under foot; everywhere ruin and distress.
At a small village locally known as Napoleon's Island we found the railway station demolished and the line of trucks the French had used as a barricade. These trucks had been almost shot to pieces, and many were stained with blood. Outside the station the small restaurant roof had been shot away; the windows were smashed, and much furniture had been destroyed. Nevertheless the proprietor had rearranged his damaged premises as well as possible and was serving customers as if nothing had happened.
Just outside this village there are large common graves in which French and German soldiers lie buried together in their uniforms. Large mounds mark these sites. Here again the villagers have placed roughly hewn crosses.
Not far from Huningen we met an intelligent Alsatian peasant who remembered the war of 1870 and had witnessed some engagements in the last few days. Here is his account of what he saw:
"The bravery on both sides was amazing. The effects of artillery fire are terrific. The shells burst, and where you formerly saw a body of soldiers you see a heap of corpses or a number of figures writhing on the ground, torn and mutilated by the fragments of the shell. Those who are unhurt scatter for the moment, but quickly regain their composure and take up their positions in the fighting line as if nothing had happened. The effects of other weapons are as bad. It seems remarkable that soldiers can see the destruction worked all around them, yet can control their nerves sufficiently to continue fighting.
"I remember the battles of 1870, in five or six of which I fought myself, but they bear no comparison with the battles of 1914. War forty-four years ago was child's play compared with war at the present time."
In several villages the schools and churches and many cottages are filled with wounded Frenchmen and Germans, and everything is being done to relieve their sufferings. In the stress of fighting many wounded soldiers were left from three to ten or twelve hours lying in the fields or on the roads. The ambulance equipment of modern armies appears utterly inadequate, and most of the wounded were picked up by villagers.
A French aeroplane from Belfort reconnoitred the German positions behind Mülhausen. As it passed over the German works at the Isteiner Klotz there ensued a continuous firing of machine guns and rifles. The aeroplane, which had swerved downward to give its two occupants a closer and clearer view of the German position, immediately rose to a much greater altitude and escaped injury. It cruised over the German position for more than an hour, now rising, now falling, always pursued by the bullets of the enemy.
This aerial reconnoissance, part of which was carried out at an altitude as low as 1,000 feet, was undertaken at terrible risk, but in this case the aeroplane escaped all injury and returned in the direction of Belfort, doubtless with all the information it had set out to collect.
[Special Cable to The New York Times.]
BERNE, Aug. 22, (Dispatch to The London Morning Post.)—Gebweiler, in Alsace, twelve miles to the northwest of Mülhausen, was taken by the French at the point of the bayonet on Aug. 20. My correspondent, who has just arrived at Basle from the field of battle, says that eight battalions of the German One Hundred and Fourteenth Regiment, numbering about 10,000 men, engaged the French Army. The French artillery was deadly and caused great ravages among the Germans, few officers escaping.
During the whole night the wounded were being transported to villages in the neighborhood, beyond the reach of artillery. All the buildings of Sierenz were filled with wounded.
Hundreds of horses were stretched on the field of battle. Those of the German artillery were killed, and in consequence the German forces left their artillery, of which about twenty guns are now in the hands of the French.
The object of the German troops was to cut off the retreat of the French and force them toward the Swiss frontier—an object which they failed to achieve.
The wounded received here say that they passed a terrible night in the open, without water or other succor, with the pitiful neighing of wounded horses ringing in their ears.