“Fearing, not without reason, for their lives, Mlle. Proces, her mother and her grandmother of seventy-one and her old aunt of eighty-one, tried to cross the trellis which separates their garden from a neighboring property with the help of a ladder. The young girl alone was able to reach the other side and to avoid death by hiding in the cabbages. As for the other women, they were struck down by rifle shots. The village curé collected the brains of the aunt on the ground on which they were strewn and had the bodies carried into Proces’ house. During the following night, the Germans played the piano near the bodies.
“While the carnage raged, the fire rapidly spread and devoured thirty-five houses. An old man of seventy and a child of two months perished in the flames. M. Igier, who was trying to save his cattle, was pursued for 300 meters by soldiers, who fired at him ceaselessly. By a miracle this man had the good fortune not to be wounded, but five bullets went through his clothing.”
This summary merely hints at the atrocities that were perpetrated. And these are the crimes that France and Belgium will remember after indemnities have been paid, after borders have been re-established and after generations shall have passed. The horrors of blazing villages, of violated womanhood, of mutilated childhood, of stark and senseless butcheries, will flash before the minds of French and Belgian men and women when Germany’s name shall be mentioned long after the declaration of peace.
Schrecklichkeit had its day. It took its bloody toll of the fairest and bravest of two gallant nations. It ravaged Poland as well and wreaked its fiendish will on wounded soldiers on the battlefields.
But Schrecklichkeit is dead. Belgium and France have shown that murder and rape and arson cannot destroy liberty nor check the indomitable ambitions of the free peoples of earth.
The lesson to Germany was taught at a terrible cost to humanity, but it was taught in a fashion that nations hereafter who shall dream of emulating the Hun will know in advance that frightfulness serves no end except to feed the lust for destruction that exists only in the most debased and brutish of men.
CHAPTER VII
The First Battle of the Marne
FRANCE and civilization were saved by Joffre and Foch at the first battle of the Marne in August, 1914.
Autocracy was destroyed by Foch at the second battle of the Marne, 1918.
This in a nutshell embraces the dramatic opening and closing episodes of the World War on the soil of France. Bracketed between these two glorious victories were the agonies of martyred France, the deaths and life-long cripplings of millions of men, the up-rooting of arrogant militarism, the liberation of captive nations.