CHAPTER XV
LUNÉVILLE
One of the immediate and most satisfactory results of the victory in front of Nancy was the hasty withdrawal of the Germans from Lunéville, after an occupation which lasted for just three weeks. For four or five days before the evacuation the Bavarian troops in front of the town had been gradually falling back on the protection of the batteries in and beyond it. Only one of these batteries, I believe, was in Lunéville itself. It was placed, in obedience to the maxim that war and what the Professors call sentimentality are poles asunder, close to one of the hospitals, under the shadow and protection of the Red Cross. During the bombardment one of the French nurses, a girl of eighteen, was unfortunately killed by a chance shell. But the battery was perfectly safe. For naturally, seeing where it was, the French gunners did not choose to fire on it. They could not play the game except as gentlemen, and the other side consequently scored, as has been known to happen in our own country in the kindred game of football, also rather apt to suffer from the disease of “Professoritis.” In any case, when the French got near enough to bring an effective fire to bear upon the town, their bombardment was bound to be half-hearted. They knew that there were German soldiers quartered in the barracks and in many of the houses. But they knew also that a large proportion of its inhabitants were still there and they naturally shrank from the chance of spilling French blood and the certainty of destroying French property, beyond what was absolutely necessary. As a matter of fact, the amount of damage done by shells was surprisingly small. The chief monument to the power of the 75’s was the melancholy wreck of the official residence of M. Minier, the Sous-Préfet, which a couple of shells completely gutted. Not far off, near the station, one or two other houses were about as badly wrecked, but except for a certain kind of destruction which was due, not to French shells, but to German fire-lighters a short-sighted man might have walked through nearly all the streets a day or two after the evacuation without once noticing that there had been a bombardment. Inside some of the houses there was more to be seen. One of the inhabitants, for instance, showed me with quaint pride the mess which a 75 shrapnel shell had made of his comfortable home. It had first drilled a neat little round hole through the wall of his dressing-room, and then burst and sent bullets and jagged fragments of the case flying through the walls into his study and the kitchen and every room on the first floor. Amongst other things, it had riddled his bath-tub like a sieve. Fortunately, he was not in it at the time. He was out on one of the heights west of Lunéville talking to the commander of the very battery which broke up his happy home, and actually saw the shot fired. Like every one else who suffered at all from the bombardment (including M. Minier, who lost practically everything he had), he took it quite cheerfully because the shell which did the mischief and the cause in which it was fired were both French.
But the bombardment, which was mainly cautionary, was not yet. It came at a later stage in the occupation, when there began to be a chance of turning the enemy out. The first Germans entered the town on the evening of August 22nd, after a stiff fight which had lasted all day and resulted in the orderly retreat of the garrison, too few in numbers to hold them back indefinitely, in the direction of Gerbéviller. They marched in slowly, with marked caution, as if, the inhabitants said, they were afraid of a surprise attack. However, there was no further opposition, and on the 23rd, with drums beating and bands playing triumphal music, a much larger body of troops made a parade entry into the town and spread over it like a flock of locusts. Here, as elsewhere, they seem to have had a particularly keen appetite for wine and women’s underclothing and anything in the shape of a clock. They were not all strangers to Lunéville. As commercial travellers, and in other capacities connected with the peaceful pursuit of trade, several of them had been well known to the inhabitants for years before their arrival in the guise of warriors, and, for their own purposes, made good use of their local knowledge. But on the whole, the behaviour of the Germans, considering that they were Germans, was not particularly outrageous. A military governor was appointed and some effort was made to preserve order and even justice. The pillage was not wholesale, the incendiarism only extended to one part of the town, the Faubourg d’Einville, and one or two single buildings in other quarters, including the Jewish synagogue, and the cases of cold-blooded murder of civilians were not very numerous. Lunéville is not an obscure village, and it is not unfair to say that, as a general rule, the larger the place which the fortune of war had placed at the mercy of the German troops, the more careful they were in the way in which they treated it. Still, even in Lunéville, in spite of the restraining influence on their actions of such important witnesses as M. Minier, the Sous-Préfet[Sous-Préfet], M. Mequillet, the local Député, and M. Keller, the Mayor, all of whom behaved in very trying circumstances with great judgment and courage, the German record was pretty bad. Most of the cases of shooting at sight seem to have been due not so much to wanton lust for blood as to the nervous haste of sentinels in the streets who imagined when they heard a window suddenly opened that their own lives were in danger. But the burning of the Faubourg d’Einville, a row of about forty houses which were set on fire two or three at a time for days till the whole street was destroyed, was an unwarrantable and unpardonable crime. For the Military Governor, from the moment of his entry into the town, had taken every precaution to prevent the acts of franctireurism which were usually made the excuse for this kind of outrage. In the first place rules of extraordinary severity were made and published and rigorously enforced as to what the civilian inhabitants must or must not do while the Germans were in the town. One of these affiches is, I think, worth quoting as a historical document:—
“AVIS À LA POPULATION
“Le 25 Aout 1914, des habitants de Lunéville ont fait une attaque par embuscade contre des colonnes et trains allemands. Le même jour, des habitants ont tiré sur des formations sanitaires marquées pas la Croix Rouge. De plus on a tiré sur des blessés allemands et sur l’hôpital militaire contenant une ambulance allemande.
“A cause de ces actes d’hostilité, une contribution de guerre de 650.000 francs est imposée à la commune de Lunéville. Ordre est donné à M. le Maire de verser cette somme en or et en argent jusqu’ à 50.000 francs, le 6 septembre 1914, à 9 heures du matin, entre les mains du représentant de l’autorité allemande. Toute réclamation sera considerée comme nulle et non arrivée. On n’accordera pas de délai.
“Si la commune n’exécute pas ponctuellement l’ordre de payer la somme de 650.000 francs, on saisira tous les biens exigibles.
“En cas de non paiement, des perquisitions domiciliaires auront lieu et tous les habitants seront fouillés. Quiconque aura dissimulé sciemment de l’argent ou essayé de soustraire des biens à la saisie de l’autorité militaire, ou qui cherche a quitter la ville, sera fusillé.
“Le Maire et les otages, pris par l’autorité militaire, seront rendus responsables d’exécuter exactement les ordres sus-indiqés.
“Ordre est donné à M. le Maire de publier tout de suite ces dispositions à la commune.