“And your wife, what of her?”
“I don’t know, I have neither seen nor heard from her from that day to this.”
Again, in the hospital at Pont de Veyle, a young man on a neighboring cot told me, “Yes, I am from the invaded country. My name is La Chaise. Before the war, my father was Inspector General of railroads for the Department of the North, with headquarters at Lille. When the Germans advanced he was taken prisoner. I ran away, joined the French Army, and my mother and sister were left at our home. A German Colonel billeted himself in the house. He liked my sister,—she was very beautiful. This is her photograph, and these are tresses of her hair when she was twelve and eighteen year of age. This is her last letter to me. One night the Colonel tried to violate my sister. She screamed, my mother ran in, shot him twice with a revolver and killed him. The sentry entered, took my mother and sister to prison; and, next morning they were lined up against a wall and shot.”
One night at Madame’s,—the bake-shop across the road from the hospital at La Croix aux Mines, with Leary, an Irishman, Simpson, a New Zealander, and an Englishman who was in charge of the Lloyds Ambulance service, we listened to Madame.
“Yes, the Germans descended on us from the hilltops like a swarm of locusts, ate and drank up everything in sight, hunted us women out of our houses into the road and told us it was our last chance for liberty. We ran and the Germans followed. We did not know we were being used as a screen, that we were sheltering the Boche behind. The French would not shoot at us but they got the Germans just the same, from the flank. I shall never forget our selfishness. All we thought about was getting to our French friends, and we were covering the advance of our enemies! If we had known, we’d have died first.”
The Englishman, who had been in the retreat from Mons, drawled out,—“Yes, you Americans think the Germans are not bad people. I used to think so, too, but when I listened to the Belgians telling how some little girls were treated, though I felt they were telling the truth, it was too horrible to believe. So three of us Red Cross men went out one night,—where they told us the girls were buried. We dug them up; and, let me tell you, no person on earth will ever make me associate with a German again.”
At Nestle, they carried away 164 women. The official German explanation was that they should work in Germany, while the cynical officers said they would use them as orderlies. On August 29, 1914, when the Germans entered the city, a mother of seven children was violated by three soldiers. Later, she was knocked down and again assaulted, by an officer. Five inhabitants were lined up against a wall to be shot, when a French counter-attack liberated them.
In the spring of 1917, at Vraignes, in the invaded district, the Germans told the people they were to be evacuated. After the inhabitants had gathered their personal belongings, they were driven into the courtyard, stripped and robbed of their possessions. Twenty-four young women were carried away from this town of 253 population.
At Le Bouage, a suburb of Chauny, before the Germans retreated, the French refugees were lined up a distance of two kilometers on the Chauny-Noyon road and kept there, in a pouring rain, four hours. Even the invalids were carried out on stretchers. German officers passed along the line and picked out thirty-one young girls and women, one an invalid girl, thirteen years of age, and carried them away with the retreating army. Of the remainder within two weeks after fifty persons succumbed from the exposure.
On February 18th, at Noyon, when the Germans were compelled to retreat, in addition to burning, wrecking and looting, they carried away by force fifty young girls between fourteen and twenty-one years of age. They looted the American Relief store, dynamited the building, then turned the canal water into the basement.