"I see you, little Marie. You were lying upon the grass. I see your two little hands tied by ropes to the two peach trees in your mother's garden. I see the little wisp of black hair stretched out under your head. I see your little body lying dead. With this hand of mine upon that little board, above your grave, I wrote the words, 'Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord.'
"And yonder in the clouds I see the Son of Man coming in His glory with His angels. I see the Kaiser falling upon Gerbéviller. I see Clauss falling upon our aged Mayor. But I also see God arising to fall upon the Germans. Berlin, with Babylon the Great, is fallen. It has become a nest of unclean things. There serpents dwell. Woe unto them that offend against my little ones. For, lo, a millstone is hanged about their necks and they shall be drowned in the sea with Satan."
The excitement was too much for the priest. That very night he died. Henceforth he will be numbered among the martyrs of Gerbéviller.
7. The Return of the Refugees
The return of the refugees to Belgium and France holds the essence of a thousand tragedies. From the days of Homer down to those of Longfellow, with his story of Evangeline, literature has recounted the sad lot of lovers torn from one another's arms and all the rest of their lives going every whither in search of the beloved one, only to find the lost and loved when it was too late.
But nothing in literature is so tragic as the events now going on from week to week in the towns on the frontier of Switzerland.
When the Germans raped Belgium and northern France they sent back to the rear trenches the young women and the girls, and now, from time to time, those girls, all broken in health, are released by the Germans, who send them back to their parents or husbands.
Multitudes of these girls have died of abuse and cruelty, but others, broken in body and spirit, are returning for an interval that is brief and heart-breaking before the end comes.
Three weeks ago an old friend returned from his Red Cross work in France. By invitation of a Government official he visited a town on the frontier through which the refugees released by Germany were returning to France.
It seemed that during the month of September, 1914, the Germans had carried away a number of girls and young women in a village northeast of Lunéville. When the French officials finished their inquiry as to the poor, broken creatures returning to France they found a French woman, clothed in rags, emaciated and sick unto death. In her arms she held a little babe a few weeks old. Its tiny wrists were scarcely larger than lead pencils. The child moaned incessantly. The mother was too thin and weak to do more than answer the simple questions as to her name, age, parents, and husband.