Woelflin, Nancy, phot.
M. Leon Mirman, Prefect of Meurthe et Moselle.
At this particular moment, however, it was the military, rather than the civil authorities, who were able to help us on our way. By the service de renseignements, or military intelligence department, at Belfort, we were given a special pass to go to Nancy by way of Dijon and Chalindrey (the direct route by Epinal being impossible), and when we got back to Dijon General Brissaud himself viséd our passports for the same destination.
Armed with these double credentials we started from Dijon on what in ordinary times is a journey of six hours, instead of which it took us from three o’clock in the afternoon till half-past eight next morning. The first big check was at Chalindrey, close to Langres, where we had a three hours’ wait during which we saw two interesting little sidelights on the war. In those days all station-restaurants had been taken over for the use of the army, and as we were not allowed to stay on the platform or to sit in the train, we thought at first that we should have to kick our heels till midnight in the station yard. It was a dark and chilly prospect. However, by the help of a friendly private and persistent knocking at a back door, we did at last force our way into the refreshment room, and on the strength of being English were allowed to order some supper. While we were eating it a taciturn sergeant demanded our papers and carried them off into the outer darkness. Then there was a long pause. We waited and waited, each moment getting more and more afraid that they were not going to get us through after all, when the door opened and out of the ewigkeit, nearly two hundred miles from the nearest English troops, two Red Cross Tommies, an Australian and a Lanarkshire miner, walked into the room. They were under the escort, not to say the arrest, of the Station Commandant, who wanted to confront them with us to see if the story they told was true. It was, as a matter of fact, rather lame. They said that after the Battle of the Marne they had lost the rest of their detachment somewhere near Compiègne, and being tired of hospital work were trying to reach the front, in the hope of being allowed to do some fighting. Whether they were deserters or not they certainly had their full share of Scotch and Australian mother-wit, or they could never have got so far without being arrested. Three months later, by some miracle, for they spoke no French and had only their ordinary soldiers’ passes, they turned up in Nancy, still on their own, and were taken to Toul, this time, I believe, under close arrest. As they were the unconscious means of doing us a good turn, I rather hope that they were not impostors, and that they were not too hardly dealt with. Hearing me talking to them, a French officer, Commandant Chesnot of the 360th Regiment of the Reserve, introduced himself as an ardent admirer of England, and invited us to make the rest of the journey in the reserved carriage which he shared with another officer. They were old schoolfellows belonging to the same regiment, who had been knocked over by the same shell three weeks before at Réméréville, and were now returning to duty, still limping from the effect of their wounds. Like every wounded French officer and soldier whom we met, their one idea was to get out of the surgeon’s hands and back again to the front as soon as possible. It was lucky for us that they were so keen.
At Toul, where we had to wait for another three hours, we sat with them in the waiting-room reserved for soldiers, instead of being herded with the civilian crowd next door, and from Champigneul, beyond which no passenger trains had been running for some time, we travelled as their friends in one of the familiar trucks built to accommodate forty men or eight horses, sitting on bundles of sacking filled with the disinfected uniforms of dead soldiers. Since the service had been suspended at the beginning of the war, we were, I believe, the first civilians who made their entry into Nancy by train.
CHAPTER VI
ÉTAT-DE-SIÈGE IN NANCY
Our start in Nancy was not encouraging. We reported ourselves first at the Place, the military headquarters of the town, and were ushered by mistake into the room of an officer (we never knew his name), who was not the Military Governor, and was just packing up to go elsewhere. Therefore he said he could do nothing for us himself, though he had had friendly relations with Printing House Square, and he much doubted whether any one would give us leave to stay in the town for more than a night. The only General who possibly might was, according to him, a strong stern man who had a rooted objection to journalistic enterprise, and he earnestly advised us to keep out of his way. So we went off to lunch, in rather low spirits—and sat down at the next table to a third General, who looked particularly human and friendly. He was, the waiter informed us in a whisper, General de la Massellière, the Commandant d’Armes, and in about two minutes M. Lamure had introduced himself and me and explained our business, and we had received a polite invitation to present ourselves and our credentials at the Place at two o’clock. By a quarter-past we had a permis de séjour for one night, next day it was extended to four nights (with the understanding that we must go at once if the enemy resumed their abortive bombardment of the 9th), a day or two afterwards it was prolonged “till further notice,” and eventually we stayed for four months.
Our second visit was to the Préfet, M. Mirman, and our third to the Mayor, M. Simon, and, thanks to the warm welcome which they gave us, we went to bed that first night hoping for the best and feeling that we had already made three very good friends.
Both M. Mirman and M. Simon were appointed to their posts ad hoc on the outbreak of hostilities, and Meurthe et Moselle and Nancy very soon found out that they had got the right men in the right places. M. Mirman had served his time in the ranks of the army as a Chasseur-à-pied, while he was the Député for Reims and still a very young man, and was known in his constituency and Paris as the député soldat. Before the war he was Directeur de l’Assistance Publique in Paris, at the Ministry of the Interior, but resigned that post when fighting began in order to get as near to the front as possible. At Nancy he had his wish even without leaving the Préfecture. During part of August and September it was only five miles from the German lines, and just near enough to the Cathedral, supposing that the bombs of the enemy airmen missed one of their favourite targets by a short hundred yards, to be one of the danger-spots of the town. Madame Mirman came with him to Lorraine, and was followed soon afterwards by her daughters, all under twenty, and her young son. Their presence in Nancy greatly helped M. Mirman in a very important part of his work as Prefect. Apart from the compassionate services which they rendered to the wounded and the refugees, the mere fact of their being there was a constant encouragement to the townspeople in the dark and critical days at the beginning of the war. It meant, presumably, that the Prefect thought that the apparently imminent danger would be averted, or at least that he expected them not to run away from it. As a matter of fact, except the Post Office employés, who bolted in a body (I believe in obedience to orders), surprisingly few of the Nanceïens did run away, either after the Germans had rained shells on the town for an hour at the end of the fierce battle which poured streams of wounded into its hospitals day and night for three weeks, or later on when they had come to look upon Taubes and Aviatiks as a sort of gratuitous cinema show, and had further been roused from their sleep on Christmas Eve by the first Zeppelin that ever dropped bombs on an open town.
