“Je n’avais pas vu! Un lieutenant bavarois est assis, mort, entouré d’ordures, d’excréments humains, dans le tiroir ouvert d’une commode ancienne. Ses culottes sont abaissées sur ses bottes. Sa tête et ses épaules penchées tombent sur la poitrine vers les jambes. Il est dans une posture ignoble, grotesque, malgré la mort.
“‘Nous sommes entrés brusquement dans le village,—me fit S..., sans crier gare. De cette maison on nous tire un coup de feu[feu]. Je monte. C’était un soldat qui nous visait de cette fenêtre. Je l’abats. Je me retourne; et je vois ce cochon de gaillard en train de faire ses insanités dans le tiroir de ce beau meuble, sur les dentelles de famille! Il était si ahuri de me voir qu’il ne s’est même pas levé, restant dans sa position ignoble et relevant sa chemise à deux mains. Je lui ai tiré un coup de revolver. Il s’est abattu sur son fumier....’
“Et je pense à la fiancée allemande, dans ce village de Bavière, qui apprendra la mort de ce lieutenant et se représentera cette mort héroique et chevaleresque ...”
It is not a very pleasant story, as we say in England, but then the seamy side of the war is not pleasant, especially war as it is made in France by some Germans. And the more people in England realize that fact the better for the cause and hopes of us and our Allies.
On the night of the 11th, or rather at two o’clock in the morning of the 12th, the lieutenant assisted at a rather different scene, as dramatic and glorious for all the sons of France as the other was vile and ignoble for all Germans. He was roused from his sleep by an orderly with the news that the General wished to see all the officers at once. With all the others he hurried to the General’s quarters, and there—it was in the police station—the brigadier handed them the famous telegram of General Joffre, announcing that the Germans were retreating, the Battle of the Marne won, Paris freed from the menace of the enemy, and France saved.
There was no more sleep for those men that night. They embraced each other, as Frenchmen do, they cried, as all men may sometimes in hours of great joy after times of exhausting strain and anxiety, they congratulated each other as though each man was the victorious Commander-in-Chief himself, and at four o’clock the order was given “To horse! To Lunéville!” On the Marne the enemy were beaten and in full retreat. From the Grand Couronné they had been driven back to the Seille. Only one thing remained to be done here, on de Castelnau’s right—to hunt them out of Lunéville and chase them back to the frontier without a moment’s delay.
Infantry Attack on Farm of Saint Epvre, on the heights above Lunéville.
From “En Plein Feu.” By kind permission of M. Vermot, Rue Duguay-Trouin, Paris.
The way was across the Meurthe, through the forest of Vitrimont, out past the ruined Faisanderie with its loop-holed crumbling walls, over the shell-pitted slope below it and the shell-pitted dip beyond, and up the slope again and down to the Nancy road to the right of the ruins of the farm of Léomont, ragged and blackened against the sky, always past rows of deserted German trenches, littered with rifles and ammunition and haversacks and empty bottles—especially bottles—and then right-handed along the broad road to the Faubourg of Nancy, the north-west entrance to the town. Till they reached the road not a sign of the enemy. Only near the ruined farm-buildings of St. Epvre on the ridge of Frescati beyond it, covering the retreat, a company of Bavarian Chasseurs, dislodged with some difficulty, for they fought bravely, and then the road to Lunéville, clear at last. They entered it, these dragoons of the advance-guard, at a gallop, galloping over the cobbles and pavements of the streets in an ecstasy of triumph, dashing across the river somehow (for the Germans had blown up the bridges), active little Chasseurs-à-pied running beside them and easily keeping up with their thundering chargers, women scattering flowers on them, waving handkerchiefs from the doors and windows, and cheering and crying, and every one shouting “La France! Vive la France! La France!” up to the wide square in front of the grave old Palace of Stanislas, up to the line of sweating horses of another squadron of dragoons which had galloped into the town just as madly by the shorter road from the south. It was Mulhouse over again, without the Mulhouse mistakes. It was utterly different from the measured entry of the Germans three weeks before, with their massed bands and formal triumph. If the men were a trifle excited they had excuse enough. For that frenzied headlong entry into Lunéville put the finishing touch to the victory of the Grand Couronné, and set the seal on all the sacrifice and all the heroism of those splendid three weeks. That night Lunéville was free and French once more; not a German was left within some miles of it. That night, for the first time for more than a month, our lieutenant of dragoons was able to take a bath and sleep between sheets. And on that night, September 12th, 1914, thousands and thousands of French men and women all over France slept more soundly and more calmly than on any night since the war began because from Paris and Nancy and little Lunéville the abominable menace of German occupation was gone, never to return again.