One morning last summer Sister Julie showed her decorations. Her face was kind, gentle and motherly. Her atmosphere was peace and serenity. She seemed a tower of strength. It must have been easy for dying French boys in those rooms to have identified Sister Julie with Mary the Mother, who saw her son dying on the cross. Later on we met an aged woman of martyred Gerbéviller. She had been nursing in the hospital and had stood behind Sister Julie when she forbade General Clauss to light the firebrands. "What did Sister Julie say?" we asked the old woman. "Oh, sir, I do not know, and yet I do know. She told them that she would ask God to strike them dead. In that moment I was afraid of her. She seemed to me more to be feared than General Clauss and all his wicked army. I can tell you what our good priest says about Sister Julie." "And what is that?" The old woman could not quote the verse accurately, but from what she said we were soon guided to a chapter in the old Bible, and there was the verse that described Sister Julie, with arms uplifted at the door of her hospital and denying access to General Clauss. The verse was this: "And lo! an angel with a flaming sword stood at the gate and kept the garden."
7. The Hidden Dynamite; the Hun's Destruction of Cathedrals
In one group of ruined cellars that was once a splendid French city, there is a beautiful building standing. It is rich with the art and architecture of the sixteenth century. The lines are most graceful and the structure is the fulfillment of Keats' line: "A thing of beauty is a joy forever." Such a building belongs not to the French nation, but to the whole human race. An architect like the man who planned this noble building is born only once in a thousand years. Every visitor to that ruined town asks himself this question: "Why did the Germans allow this building to remain?" An incident of the story of Bapaume throws a flood of light upon the problem.
One year ago, when the Germans were retreating from Bapaume, they looted every house, burned or dynamited every building save the Hôtel de Ville. That city hall the Germans left standing in all its majesty and beauty. In front of the building they placed a placard containing in substance the statement that they left this building as a monument to Germany's love of art and architecture.
Secretly, however, in the cellar of this noble building the Germans buried several tons of dynamite. To this dynamite they attached a seven-day clock. They set the seven-day clock to explode at eleven o'clock one week after the Germans had retreated. These beasts worked out the theory that the largest possible number of British and French officers and public men would be inspecting the building at that hour of the day.
The plot was successful. Their devilish cunning was rewarded and their hate glutted. The clock struck the detonator, the dynamite exploded, blew the building and the visitors into atoms. Standing in the ruined public square, one sees nothing but that great shell pit where the earth opened up its mouth and swallowed a monument builded to beauty and grandeur. This other building, therefore, that stands in the city fifty miles to the south of Bapaume is there for the sole reason that the seven-day clock failed to explode the dynamite—not because of any love of architecture that possessed the Germans. It is there to tell us that some part of the mechanism of death failed to connect.
In analyzing the German mind nothing is more certain than the fact that they lack a fine sense of humour and are often quite devoid of imagination.
As for sculpture, nothing can be more hideous than the statues of the fifteen Prussian kings that do not decorate, but simply vulgarize, the avenue leading towards Magdeburg. The vast broad statue of Hindenburg, to which the Germans come to drive nails and scratch their names in lead pencils, reminds one of the occasional public buildings in this country defaced by thoughtless and vulgar boys. Nor is there anything in the world as ugly as the German sculptor's statue of the present Kaiser out at Potsdam Palace, unless it be the statue of an Indian in front of a tobacco store down in Smithville, Indian Territory, though even this is doubtful. It hardly seems possible that one earth only 7,000 miles in diameter could hold two statues as ugly as that of the Kaiser!
It is this singular lack of imagination and failure to understand the beautiful that explains the systematic destruction by the German army of the glorious cathedrals, the fourteenth century churches, libraries, châteaux and hôtels des villes that were the glory and beauty of France.
"If we cannot have these vineyards and orchards," said the Germans, "Frenchmen shall not have them."