Another day that we spent with M. Mirman almost directly after our arrival in Nancy was rather more mouvementé. It was a week after the Germans had finally been driven back from Amance and Champenoux, and the news had been brought in that Nomeny, a town between St. Généviève and the frontier, had just been evacuated by the enemy. So M. Mirman was going to visit it, and he offered to take us with him. Before we started we lunched at the Préfecture with a fairly large party which included, besides M. Mirman and his eldest daughter, M. Abeille, his sécrétaire général (who has since been killed fighting for France), M. Mage, the Sous-Préfet of Toul, M. Guiran Scevola and M. Royer, two well-known French artists, painters in ordinary to the Ministry of War, temporarily attached as artillery privates to the Toul garrison, M. Dominique Bonnaud, the Parisian chansonnier, attached to the staff of the Préfecture, M. Jean Rogier, of the Petit Parisien, the only special correspondent of a London or Paris newspaper besides ourselves who stayed more than a few days in Nancy, and M. Puech, a big ironmaster of Frouard, five miles down the Moselle, who for the first part of the war acted as M. Mirman’s chauffeur, and went with him through some rather exciting scenes during his prefectorial visits. After lunch—it is a pleasant way the French have—there were a few speeches, one of which fell to the lot of the English correspondent of The Times, and was delivered haltingly and slowly in Public School French. As events proved afterwards, it was fortunate for us that there were speeches and that one of them took some time, for if we had started ten minutes sooner we should probably not have come back—at all events for some months.
We set off at half-past one, M. Rogier and I in the Préfet’s car, an open one, with him and M. Puech, the rest in a larger and slower Limousine behind. At that time there were a large number of troops in and round Nancy—most of them the men who had fought in the Battle of the Grand Couronné—and for the first five or six miles we were constantly passing them, in the town and the villages and along the roads, marching, driving long processions of hooded country-carts, hauling down a captive balloon, lighting fires against the walls of the houses, cooking their meals, grooming their horses, furbishing up their arms and accoutrements, foraging, laughing, singing, shaving, washing, tailoring, eating, drinking, smoking, and chatting as busily and light-heartedly as if the enemy were a hundred miles away instead of only a little way beyond the horizon on the frontier.
After we had gone some way along the Château-Salins road we turned northwards, leaving Amance on the right, and began to get away from the many soldiers who were off duty to the smaller number who were fighting. The road we were now on ran parallel to the frontier at about three miles from it. On our left was the range of hills which stretches northwards to Ste. Généviève and Pont-à-Mousson, on our right an almost flat plain sloping down to the frontier and the Seille. By the side of the road a battery of 75’s was banging away into the distance, and in one or two places clouds of white smoke were rising up from burning villages. We stopped to speak to the gunner commandant, who looked rather suspiciously at a car-ful of civils. But there is no mistaking the silver lace on the képi of a Préfet, and eventually he said that as far as he knew there was no reason why we should not go on to Nomeny, though he advised us not to dawdle for the next few miles, as we were rather close to the frontier and the enemy. M. Puech, who can drive as well and as fast as any one I know, consequently let her rip, and we covered the next seven or eight miles in almost as few minutes. Batteries on the hills on our left were firing over our heads at the enemy positions across the Seille, and once or twice we passed trenches manned by companies of fantassins, but the return fire did not come our way, and some minutes later we passed into a quieter region, by contrast curiously still and peaceful. As we drove up to a small village about a mile from Nomeny, the day, which had been beautifully sunny, suddenly clouded over, the sky in front of us became inky black, and the German horizon looked darker and more threatening than I ever saw it. In the village, not very badly damaged considering its position, we saw not a soul except one old woman who was standing at her door looking out with dazed eyes, but quickly turned in and disappeared as we dashed past. That might have warned us. We ought to have been struck by the death-like emptiness of the village street. But we were thinking of other things, of the pace we were going at, the gathering storm, of what Nomeny would be like, and especially of the slower car behind, and why we had not seen it for so long. I was just looking round for it again when suddenly the car slowed and stopped dead. Then “Cachez-vous,” said M. Puech quietly, and though it did not feel very glorious, we did, without losing very much time. As I crouched down on the seat (the Préfet was in front with M. Puech) I looked ahead and on the brow of the slight slope up which we had been running, not more than a full iron shot from where we were, saw four grey figures in spiked helmets, with levelled rifles pointing straight at us, kneeling by the side of the road. It was a tight place, and it was lucky for us all that we had M. Puech to drive. Instead of trying to turn the car, as he might have done, on a convenient bit of level ground by the side of the road, he made up his mind what to do, and did it, in the same second, jamming his lever into the reverse speed directly we stopped, and the car began moving steadily backwards, though not quite as fast as we should have liked. He was sitting bolt upright in front of me, with one hand on the steering-wheel and the other on the back of his seat, looking away from the Germans along the road behind us. As soon as they saw that we were not coming on they began to fire. Still perfectly cool and French, he backed down the slope of the hill, which was as straight as a two-foot rule, counting the shots out loud as we went: “One, two, three, four....” They made a flick just like the crack of a small hunting-crop. “Another thousand yards and we’re all right ... five, six—that touched us” (it had grazed the right front lamp and glanced on to the trumpet) “seven ...” and so on up to “nine, ten ... eleven,” and with that we reached a side lane into which, with the same quick decision, he backed the car to turn her. And then, just when it seemed as if we had got off safely, things began to go wrong. The engine stopped dead, and the off-wheels stuck in the ditch. So out we jumped. M. Puech to the front to start the engine if he could, M. Mirman and M. Rogier and I to push behind—our very hardest, but without the slightest effect, M. Puech grinding away just as hard and just as vainly at the engine crank—and then suddenly the engine started, and we flung ourselves into the car, this time with our backs to the foe but our heads erect, and in a moment were flying back to the village as fast as our excellent M. Puech could push her along.
Nomeny.
By permission of M. Martin, Secrétaire Général, the Prefecture, Nancy.
In the village street we found M. Lamure and the others and the second car, standing in the middle of a group of excited villagers. When they had come along, a minute or two behind us, the whole population, instead of only our old woman, rushed out and barred the road in front of them, and when they had pulled up told them they could not possibly go on as sixty Uhlans had just left the village, only ten minutes before our car went through. While they were talking to them, wondering what to do, the shots fired at us, or rather at M. Puech, began to sing into the village, but over their heads, chipping the plaister off the upper walls. And that, no doubt, was the explanation of our escape. The Germans had been firing from the village, most probably at a long range, before we came into it, and when they retired towards Nomeny the four men whom they had left on the road as a rearguard had forgotten to lower their sights, till one of them saw what he was doing, corrected his mistake, and fired the shot which hit the lamp of the car.
I expect when our four friends got back to the other fifty-six, or at all events when they learnt that they had missed bagging a Prefect of France, they had a poorish time of it. But that was not our affair. Thanks to the courage and nerve of M. Puech we had got safely out of a rather awkward fix, for at the best, if they had crippled our chauffeur or the car, we should have paid a prolonged visit to Germany. And thanks to the speeches at lunch, including, I am proud to think, the one in Public School French, we had escaped by ten minutes running our head into a much larger nest of hornets in the village.
So we decided to put off our visit to Nomeny till another day. We had had enough of Germans for the present. Also we thought it more prudent to go home by a different road, at the back of the hills where the French batteries were stationed, round by Ste. Généviève and up the valley of the Moselle, especially as, before M. Lamure and the other party reached the village, when their car was panting after ours, one particular shell had fallen rather too near them to be pleasant, and there was no urgent need to repeat the experience.
When we got back to Nancy, after getting stuck in the middle of a large field flooded by the Moselle, from which the car had to be dragged out by a passing team of artillery horses, M. Mirman wrote for me a petit mot on one of his cards. It was dated Nancy, Dimanche 20 Septembre, 1914, and ran as follows:—
“Léon Mirman, Préfet de Meurthe et Moselle, s’excuse très humblement de n’avoir pu montrer à M. Richard Campbell”—he always would call me Richard—“la pauvre ville de Nomeny, assassinée par les Allemands, et qui garde les traces des meutres commis sur des civils et de l’incendie systématiquement et scientifiquement organisée comme il en verra un exemple demain à Gerbéviller—et il lui remet cette carte en souvenir très amicale d’une promenade ... un peu mouvementée où le ‘feu’ et l’eau n’ont pu altérer leur commune bonne humeur.