The Bavarian soldiers in Gerbéviller were not only murderers—they were incendiaries, even more deliberate and thorough-going than the soldiers of Von Kluck's army at Senlis. With the exception of a few houses beyond the hospital, spared at the entreaty of Soeur Julie, and on her promise to nurse the German wounded, the whole town was deliberately burnt out, house by house, the bare walls left standing, the rest destroyed. And as, after the fire, the place was twice taken and retaken under bombardment, its present condition may be imagined. It was during the burning that some of the worst murders and outrages took place. For there is a maddening force in triumphant cruelty, which is deadlier than that of wine; under it men become demons, and all that is human perishes.
The excuse, of course, was here as at Senlis—"les civils ont tiré!" There is not the slightest evidence in support of the charge. As at Senlis, there was a French rear-guard of 57 Chasseurs—left behind to delay the German advance as long as possible. They were told to hold their ground for five hours; they held it for eleven, fighting with reckless bravery, and firing from a street below the hospital. The Germans, taken by surprise, lost a good many men before, at small loss to themselves, the Chasseurs retreated. In their rage at the unexpected check, and feeling, no doubt, already that the whole campaign was going against them, the Germans avenged themselves on the town and its helpless inhabitants.
Our half-hour in Soeur Julie's parlour was a wonderful experience! Imagine a portly woman of sixty, with a shrewd humorous face, talking with French vivacity, and with many homely turns of phrase drawn straight from that life of the soil and the peasants amid which she worked; a woman named in one of General Castelnau's Orders of the Day and entitled to wear the Legion of Honour; a woman, too, who has seen horror face to face as few women, even in war, have seen it, yet still simple, racy, full of irony, and full of heart, talking as a mother might talk of her "grands blessés"! but always with humorous asides, and an utter absence of pose or pretence; flashing now into scorn and now into tenderness, as she described the conduct of the German officers who searched her hospital for arms, or the helplessness of the wounded men whom she protected. I will try and put down some of her talk. It threw much light for me on the psychology of two nations.
"During the fighting, we had always about 300 of our wounded (nos chers blessés) in this hospital. As fast as we sent them off, others came in. All our stores were soon exhausted. I was thankful we had some good wine in the cellars—about 200 bottles. You understand, Madame, that when we go to nurse our people in their farms, they don't pay us, but they like to give us something—very often it is a bottle of old wine, and we put it in the cellar, when it comes in handy often for our invalids. Ah! I was glad of it for our blessés! I said to my Sisters—'Give it them! and not by thimblefuls—give them enough!' Ah, poor things!—it made some of them sleep. It was all we had. One day, I passed a soldier who was lying back in his bed with a sigh of satisfaction. 'Ah, ma Soeur, ça resusciterait un mort!' (That would bring a dead man to life!) So I stopped to ask what they had just given him. And it was a large glass of Lachryma Christi!
"But then came the day when the Commandant, the French Commandant, you understand, came to me and said—'Sister, I have sad news for you. I am going. I am taking away the wounded—and all my stores. Those are my orders.'
"'But, mon Commandant, you'll leave me some of your stores for the grands blessés, whom you leave behind—whom you can't move? What!—you must take it all away? Ah, ça—non! I don't want any extras—I won't take your chloroform—I won't take your bistouris—I won't take your electric things—but—hand over the iodine! (en avant l'iode!) hand over the cotton-wool!—hand over the gauze! Come, my Sisters!' I can tell you I plundered him!—and my Sisters came with their aprons, and the linen-baskets—we carried away all we could."
Then she described the evacuation of the French wounded at night—300 of them—all but the 19 worst cases left behind. There were no ambulances, no proper preparation of any kind.
"Oh! it was a confusion!—an ugly business!" (ce n'etait pas rose!). The Sisters tore down and split up the shutters, the doors, to serve as stretchers; they tore sheets into long strips and tied "our poor children" on to the shutters, and hoisted them into country carts of every sort and description. "Quick!—Quick!" She gave us a wonderful sense of the despairing haste in which the night retreat had to be effected. All night their work went on. The wounded never made a sound—"they let us do what we would without a word. And as for us, my Sisters bound these big fellows (ces gros et grands messieurs) on to the improvised stretchers, like a mother who fastens her child in its cot. Ah! Jésus! the poverty and the misery of that time!"
By the early morning all the French wounded were gone except the nineteen helpless cases, and all the French soldiers had cleared out of the village except the 57 Chasseurs, whose orders were to hold the place as long as they could, to cover the retreat of the rest.
Then, when the Chasseurs finally withdrew, the Bavarian troops rushed up the town in a state of furious excitement, burning it systematically as they advanced, and treating the inhabitants as M. Mirman has described. Soon Soeur Julie knew that they were coming up the hill towards the hospital. I will quote the very language—homely, Biblical, direct—in which she described her feelings. "Mes reins flottaient comme ça—ils allaient tomber à mes talons. Instantanément, pas une goutte de salive dans la bouche!" Or—to translate it in the weaker English idiom—"My heart went down into my heels—all in a moment, my mouth was dry as a bone!"