“Heramenil le 3 septembre 1914.
“Le Général en chef,
“Von Fasbender.”
In addition to the stringent regulations and threats contained in this and other proclamations of the same kind (the statements in which were unproved and false) the German authorities in command of Lunéville took a further precaution to guard themselves against any kind of reprisal on the part of the French population. Every day six prominent residents of the town had to present themselves before the Governor and remain at his disposal for twenty-four hours as hostages responsible for the orderly behaviour of their fellow-citizens. Their position was not enviable. Exposed, like every one else in Lunéville, to the danger of being killed by the shells of their friends outside the town, they were guarded day and night by sentries with loaded rifles, knowing (because they had been warned) that at any moment they were liable to be shot if one of the inhabitants in a fit of desperation lifted a finger against the sacred body of a German soldier. The fact that they were not shot is proof positive that no acts of the kind were attempted, and that therefore there was no sort of excuse for the burning of the Faubourg d’Einville.
As the occupation continued, as the fortune of the battle between Lunéville and Nancy turned more and more against the Germans, and the French troops and the French shells came nearer and nearer, the Germans in the town day by day became more nervous and irritable and their attitude to the hostages and the rest of the townsfolk more and more harsh and capricious, and it was with something more than a sigh of relief that at last, on September 12th, M. Minier, M. Mequillet, and M. Keller realized that for the town and themselves the time of trial was at an end. M. Keller I only knew slightly; the other two I met often while I was in Lorraine. All three make light of the difficult part which they played when the Germans were in the town and while they were waiting at their posts for their coming. But I know from others that the courage and quiet dignity and practical wisdom with which they stood between their fellow-citizens and the invader were beyond all praise. They were all three fine types of the scores of Frenchmen in official positions all over the occupied provinces who stuck to their posts in the hour of danger. During those three weeks, when it was cut off from the rest of the world, life in Lunéville, under its twofold tribulation of occupation and siege, was not exactly gay for any one. The stern application of martial law, the regulations about open doors and lights, the growing shortness of food, the restrictions on personal liberty, the noise and risks of the bombardment, the glare of the burning houses, the fear for every one of possible death by a bullet fired by some drunken soldier, and, for the women, of something worse than death, and the constant presence of the hated and domineering invader, all combined to keep the inhabitants in a continual state of anxiety and alarm and general wretchedness. But it was on the shoulders of those three men that the burden of it pressed most heavily, and the debt which Lunéville owes them is real and great.
While they were doing their best inside the town to save it for France, or, at all events, to save it from being sacked and burnt, they were in a state of complete ignorance as to what was happening outside it. Rumours, of course, there were, but nothing was certain. They were surrounded on every side, left stranded on a lonely island in a German ocean of invasion. They could only guess vaguely from the nearing or receding sound of the guns and the temper of the German men and officers round them how the battle was going. Yet all the time they kept up their spirits and the spirits of all the French within the reach of their influence. At the worst they never allowed themselves to doubt—think what that meant—that the turn of the tide would come and Lunéville be joined to the mainland of France again. And they were right. Their splendid confidence in their own men and the destinies of France was justified. All the time the rush of the tide was slackening and the hour of their deliverance coming nearer.
The ebb began in earnest on September 8th. On that day the young dragoon officer in whose company we began the great battle, crossed the Mortagne at Mont by a temporary bridge erected by the engineers, and after a brush with half a dozen Uhlans on the Lunéville side of it, rode with his men along the Meurthe to Rehainviller, a village only two miles from the south-west corner of the town, and found that not a German was left in it. That news he sent back by one of his men to the general, and then walked on alone, as the sun was rising, along the wall of the cemetery on the right of the road just beyond the village. “I reached,” he says, “the corner, where I stopped dead. I found myself face to face with a German captain, like me alone and on foot. He was as thunderstruck to see me as I was to meet him. Like me he had his map-case in his hand. He had been examining the country.... We looked at each other, with our eyes wide open. He felt for his revolver. Feverishly I tried to open my case. Both of us knew that this contest of speed would decide our fate, and we looked straight into each other’s eyes. Then I smiled, my revolver came out of its case, the butt tight in my hand. My arm stretched out. Then the officer no longer felt for his weapon: he knew that he was beaten. My revolver flashed. He fell, with one bullet full in his heart. The whole thing only lasted a second. It hurt me to see him lying there; he had large blue eyes, open in death.”
To me that young French dragoon is only a name, or not even that, since he has none, but a type of all the gallant soldiers of France who fought in the gap between those blood-stained rivers. Still more, after that contest of speed, that duel to the death at sunrise by the corner of the cemetery wall, he becomes for me a symbol of France—France facing Germany, both knowing that one or the other must fall, both clutching at their weapons and staring into each others’ faces with wide open eyes. I think we will not leave him now till he in his turn rides in triumph into the streets of Lunéville.
The sound of the shot brought his men running up to him, and also drew the fire of the company of the dead German officer, who were hidden in a ravine a quarter of a mile further on. Luckily for the handful of dragoons, whom presumably they took for the advance-guard of a larger body of men, they did not, however, advance, but retired to the corner of the buildings of a big manufactory, almost in Lunéville itself.
The German position was now on the road just in front of the town, the first houses of which were within easy range of the rifles of the French, who had by this time occupied Rehainviller and were gradually closing in all round. But they still had three days of stiff fighting in front of them before the end was reached, during which they were heavily handicapped, as they had been all through the early part of the war, by the fact that even their 155’s were outranged by a large number of the German pieces, whose average effective range was at that time about six miles, while the French could barely reach four. Supported by these heavier guns from behind Lunéville the enemy advanced again in force to within a mile of Rehainviller, up to a line between Hériménil and the wood of Fréhaut, and it was not till the evening of the 11th that they were finally driven back and that the French were able to look forward with confidence to the prospect of being able to enter Lunéville on the next day.