Gerbéviller the Martyred[1]
In August of 1914, when the German army was broken and compelled to retreat before the French, they passed through many French towns and villages in which they found no soldiers and no weapons, and where no battle, no skirmish and no shot took place. During last July and August we went slowly from one of these ruined towns to another, talking with the broken-hearted women and children, comparing the photographs taken immediately after the German retreat and almost before the mutilated bodies were cold. Slowly we sifted the evidence. On the ground we compared the full official records made at the time, with the statements of wretched survivors who live in cellars, where once stood the beautiful homes, the orchards and vineyards, but where now all is desolation and anguish.
Among the multitude of events described by witnesses who survived the martyrdom of their village are the following: When the noise of the approach of General Clauss' division of twenty thousand soldiers in full retreat was heard, an aged Frenchman stood in his open door. He had retired from business, to spend his last days midst the friends of his childhood and youth. Hearing the noise of the approaching army, the merchant stepped to his open door. As the first automobile swept by, the German officers lifted their revolvers and emptied the lead into the old man's body. He pitched forward down the stone steps, and in his death struggle worked his way to the wrought iron gate, where after the German retreat he was found dead. Before touching the body, official photographers, under the direction of their noble Prefect, took their photographs from different angles. In the garden behind the smoking cellar was found the wife, lying dead upon the grass, her left wrist tied by the clothes-line to the root of an apple tree, the right wrist tied to a clump of gooseberry bushes. She was dead, but not through dagger or pistol. Standing beside their graves we studied the photographs and talked with the families of the fifteen aged men whom General Clauss ordered shot because there were no young or middle-aged men in the village whom he could kill.
Burning of an Ambulance Driver
Most harrowing the testimony given by the mother of a Red Cross ambulance driver. The day before the Germans came, this man had returned from the front, bringing an ambulance filled with wounded soldiers. While the division of twenty thousand Germans were looting the houses, and carrying away every rug, carpet, table, chair, picture, tool, art treasure towards the Rhine, German officers entered the house of Sister Juliet, who was nursing the wounded soldiers. Finding the young Red Cross man there, they immediately shot him. Later while his mother was holding his head in her arms and staunching his wounds, a German officer approached and, seizing her hands, held them behind her back, while one of the privates poured petrol over her son's head. With two fingers this soldier ripped the clothes from the breast of the wounded man and poured oil under his shirt and then set fire to his garments. Referring to his death struggles and the photograph of the charred mass that had once been her son lying on the brick pavement, this mother exclaimed, "If I had only let him bleed to death! If I had only let him bleed to death! Then they could not have made him die twice!"
The Murder of Hereminel
In a little farming village not many miles from Gerbéviller the martyred, stands a battered square belfry, into which the Germans lifted their machine guns, hoping to hold back the pursuit of the French army, thus giving General Clauss time to retreat and "dig in" some miles to the northeast. Tying the ropes to the axle of automobile trucks, the Germans soon lifted their guns into the church tower. They then drove the French women and children into the church and used them as a screen, for no German ever exposes himself to danger if he can possibly find a woman or child behind whom he can hide. One young mother did not immediately obey, because of certain duties in connection with her little child. With two other girls this young wife was stood up against the stone wall of her own little house and shot, for the purpose of teaching French women to obey instantly when German savages command.
When all the women and children were packed into the church, a boy was sent back to tell the French that if they fired upon the guns in the church belfry, they would kill their own families. Two nights later when a storm was raging, the women slipped a little boy through the window, and sent word to the officers of the approaching French army that their wives wished them to open fire on the German guns. In blowing these weapons out of the belfry, the French killed twenty of their own wives and children, who preferred to share death with the men they loved, rather than suffer nameless indignities from German brutes. In a hundred years of history where shall you find a record of soldiers, whether red, black or yellow, save Germans, who were such sneaking, snivelling cowards that they do not dare play the game fairly and like men, but in their chattering terror use women and little children as shields against danger? Of a truth, the "Potsdam gang" has added a new word to the literature of cowardice.
The Frenchman's Love of France