Our Part in the Great War

by Arthur Gleason

Let us return to the Germans who were applying fire and blood. They led away fifteen men, old men, to a shed at about quarter past ten. Later they made them leave the shed. General Clauss, who was in command of two regiments, was sitting under the oak tree which you will be able to see on your return trip. He was in front of a table charged with champagne, and was drinking, during the time that his soldiers were arranging the poor unhappy old men, getting them ready to be shot. They had bound them in groups of five, and they shot them in three batches. They now lie buried in the same spot.

The General said: "When I have filled my cup and as I raise it to my lips, give them fire and blood."

We said good-by to Sister Julie. I walked down the street to the ruins of the chateau of Lambertye. Sister Julie has told of the empty gasoline cans that were left in the garden of the chateau. They had served their purpose well: I stepped through the litter that was once a beautiful home. But there was one work which flaming oil could not do. I went into the garden, and came to the grotto of the chateau. It is a lovely secret place, hidden behind a grove, and under the shadow of a great rock. It glows red from the fundamental stone of its structure, with jewel-like splinters of many-colored pebbles sunk in the parent stone. Fire, the favorite German instrument for creating a new world, could not mar the stout stone and pebbles of the little place, but such beauty must somehow be obliterated. So the careful soldiers mounted ladders and chipped to pieces some of the ceiling, painfully with hammers. The dent of the hammers is visible throughout the vaulting. The mosaic was too tough even for their patience, and they had to leave it mutilated but not destroyed.

Several times in Gerbéviller we see this infinite capacity for taking pains. The thrusting of the baker into his own oven is a touch that a less thoughtful race could never have devised. When they attacked the tabernacle containing the sacramental vessel of the Roman Catholic church, Sister Julie has told how they placed the eighteen bullets that defiled it in pattern. The honest methodical brain is behind each atrocity, and the mind of the race leaves its mark even on ruins.

Finally, when they shot the fifteen white-haired old men, the murders were done in series, in sets of five, with a regular rhythm. I can produce photographs of the dead bodies of these fifteen old men as they lay grouped on the meadow. We stood under the oak tree where the officer sat as he drank his toasts to death. We looked over to the little spot where the old men were herded together and murdered. Leon Mirman, Prefect of Meurthe-et-Moselle, said to us as we stood there:

"I, myself, came here at the beginning of September, 1914. Fifteen old men were here, lying one upon the other, in groups of five. I saw them, their clothes drooping. One was able to see also by their attitude that two or three had been smoking their pipes just before dying. Others held their packets of tobacco in their hands. I saw these fifteen hostages, fifteen old men, some ten days after they had been killed; the youngest must have been sixty years of age.

"We shall set up here a commemorative monument which will tell to future generations the thing that has taken place here."

For centuries the race has lived on a few episodes, short as the turn of a sunset. The glancing helmet of Hector that frightened one tiny child, the toothless hound of Ulysses that knew the beggar man—always it is the little lonely things that shake us. Vast masses of men and acres of guns blur into unreality. The battle hides itself in thick clouds, swaying in the night. But the cry that rang through Gerbéviller does not die away in our ears. Sister Julie has given episodes of a bitter brevity which the imagination of the race will not shake off. It is impossible to look out on the world with the same eyes after those flashes of a new bravery, a new horror. I find this sudden revelation in the lifting of the cup with the toast that signed the death of the old men. The officer was drinking a sacrament of death by murder. It is as if there in that act under the lonely tree in the pleasant fields of Gerbéviller the new religion of the Germans had perfected its rite.

That rite of the social cup, held aloft in the eyes of comrades, has been a symbol for good will in all the ages. Brotherhood was being proclaimed as the host of the feast looked out on a table of comrades. At last in the fullness of time the rite, always honored, was lifted into the unassailable realm of poetry, when one greater man came who went to his death blithely from the cup that he drank with his friends. There it has remained homely and sacred in the thought of the race.

Suddenly under the oak tree of Gerbéviller the rite has received a fresh meaning. The cup has been torn from the hands of the Nazarene. By one gesture the German officer reversed the course of history. He sat there very lonely, and he drank alone. The cup that he tasted was the death of men.