So it was in Rheims and Arras and other towns which were not spared in spite of the glories of an architecture which can never be rebuilt in beauty. Only a few days before writing these lines, I stood on the edge of the greatest battlefield in France and from an observation post perched like an eyrie in a tree above the valley, looked across to the cathedral of Rheims, that shrine of history, where the bones of kings lie, and where every stone speaks of saints and heroes and a thousand years of worship. The German shells were still falling about it, and its great walls stood grim and battered in a wrack of smoke. For nine months the city of Rheims has suffered the wounds of war. Shrapnel and air-bombs, incendiary shells and monstrous marmites had fallen within its boundaries week by week; sometimes only one or two on an idle day, sometimes in a raging storm of fire, but always killing a few more people, always shattering another house or two, always spoiling another bit of sculptured beauty. Nevertheless, there were thousands of citizens, women as well as men, who would not leave their city. They lived in cellars, into which they had dragged their beds and stores, and when the shell fire slackened they emerged, came out into the light of day, looked around at the new damage, and went about their daily business until cleared underground again by another storm of death. There were two old ladies with an elderly daughter who used to sit at table in the salle-à-manger of a hotel in Paris a week or two ago. I saw them arrive one day, and watched the placid faces of these stately old dames in black silk with little lace caps on their white hair. It was hardly possible to believe that for three months they had lived in a cellar at Rheims, listening through the day and night to the cannonading of the city, and to the rushing of the shells above their own house.
Yet I think that even in a cellar those old women of France preserved their dignity, and in spite of dirty hands (for water was very scarce) ate their meagre rations with a stately grace.
14
More miserable and less armed with courage were the people of France who lived in cities held by the enemy and secure from shell- fire—in Lille, and St. Quentin, and other towns of the North, where the Germans paraded in their pointed casques. For the most part in these great centres of population the enemy behaved well. Order was maintained among the soldiers with ruthless severity by German officers in high command. There were none of the wild and obscene acts which disgraced the German army in its first advance to and its retreat from the Marne. No torch bearers and tablet scatterers were let loose in the streets. On the contrary any German soldier misbehaving himself by looting, raping, or drunken beastliness found a quick death against a white wall. But to the French citizens it was a daily agony to see those crowds of hostile troops in their streets and houses, to listen to their German speech, to obey the orders of generals who had fought their way through Northern France across the bodies of French soldiers, smashing, burning, killing along the bloody track of war. These citizens of the captured soil of France knew bitterness of invasion more poignantly than those who hid in cellars under shell-fire. Their bodies were unwounded, but their spirits bled in agony. By official placards posted on the walls they read of German victories and French defeats. In the restaurants and cafés, and in their own houses, they had to serve men who were engaged in slaughtering their kinsfolk. It was difficult to be patient with those swaggering young officers who gave the glad eye to girls whose sweethearts lay dead somewhere between the French and German trenches.
From a lady who had been seven months in St. Quentin, I heard the story of how invasion came suddenly and took possession of the people. The arrival of the German troops was an utter surprise to the population, who had had no previous warning. Most of the French infantry had left the town, and there remained only a few detachments, and some English and Scottish soldiers who had lost their way in the great retreat, or who were lying wounded in the hospitals. The enemy came into the town at 4 P.M. on August 28, having completely surrounded it, so that they entered from every direction. The civil population, panic-stricken, remained for the most part in their houses, staring through their windows at the columns of dusty, sun-baked men who came down the streets. Some of the British soldiers, caught in this trap, decided to fight to the death, which they knew was inevitable. Several English and Scottish soldiers fired at the Germans as they advanced into the chief square and were instantly shot. One man, a tall young soldier, stationed himself at the corner of the Place du Huit Octobre, and with extraordinary coolness and rapidity fired shot after shot, so that several German soldiers were killed or wounded. The enemy brought up a machine gun and used it against this one man who tried to stop an army. He fell riddled with bullets, and was blown to pieces as he lay.
On the whole the Germans behaved well at St. Quentin. Their rule was stern but just, and although the civil population had been put on rations of black bread, they got enough and it was not, after all, so bad. As one of the most important bases of the German army in France, the town was continually filled with troops of every regiment, who stayed a little while and then passed on. Meanwhile the permanent troops in occupation of the town settled down and made themselves thoroughly at home. They established many of their own shops—bakeries, tailoring establishments, and groceries; and in consequence of the lack of discipline and decency which prevailed in some of the cafés and restaurants, these places were conducted by German officers, who acted as censors of morals and professors of propriety.
Astounding as it seems, there were Frenchwomen in St. Quentin who sold themselves for German money and gave their kisses for a price to men who had ravaged France and killed the sons of France. Such outrageous scenes took place, that the German order to close some of the cafés was hailed as a boon by the decent citizens, who saw the women expelled by order of the German commandant with enormous thankfulness.
It is strange that the Huns, as they are called, should have been so strict in moral discipline. Many of them were not so austere in the villages when they let their passions loose and behaved like drunken demons or satyrs with flaming torches. There is a riddle in the psychology of all these contrasts between the iron discipline and perfect organization by which all outrage was repressed in the large towns occupied for any length of time by German troops, and the lawlessness and rapine of the same race in villages through which they passed hurriedly, giving themselves just time enough to wreak a cruel ferocity upon unoffending people. Riddle as it is, it holds perhaps the key to the mystery of the German character and to their ideal of war. Whenever there was time to establish discipline, the men were well behaved, and did not dare to disobey the orders of their chiefs. It was only when special orders for "frightfulness" had been issued, or when officers in subordinate command let their men get out of hand, or led the way to devilry by their own viciousness of action, that the rank and file of the enemy's army committed its brutalities.
Even now, after all that I have seen in the ruined villages in France, I cannot bring myself to believe that the German race is distinguished from all other peoples in Europe by the mark of the beast, or that 'they are the exclusive possession of the devil. The prisoners I have spoken to, the blue-eyed Saxons and plump Bavarians with whom I travelled for awhile after the battle of Neuve Chapelle, seemed to me uncommonly like the yokels of our own Somersetshire and Devonshire. Their officers were polite and well-bred men in whom I saw no sign of fiendish lusts and cruelties. In normal moods they are a good-natured people, with a little touch of Teuton grossness perhaps, which makes them swill overmuch beer, and with an arrogance towards their womenfolk which is not tolerable to Englishmen, unless they have revolted from the older courtesies of English life because the Suffragettes have challenged their authority.
It was in abnormal moods that they committed their atrocities, for in the hot sun of the first September of the war their blood was overheated, and in the first intoxication of their march through France, drunk with the thrill of butcher's work as well as with French wine, brought back suddenly to the primitive lusts of nature by the spirit of war, which strips men naked of all refinements and decent veils, they became for a time savages, with no other restraint than that of Red Indians on the warpath. They belonged to an Army of Invasion, marching through hostile territory, and the soul of war robbed the individual of his own separate soul and put a spell of madness on him, so that his eyes were bloodshot and his senses inflamed with lust. In the Peninsular War young Englishmen from decent villages in quiet countrysides, with pious mothers praying for them at home in grey old churches, and with pretty sisters engaged in hero-worship, were bewitched by the same spell of wizardry and did foul and frightful things which afterwards made them dream of nights and wake in a cold sweat of shame and horror. There are many young Germans who will wake out of such dreams when they get back to Dusseldorf and Bingen-am-Rhein, searching back in their hearts to find a denial of the deeds which have become incredible after their awakening from the nightmare. For a little while they had been caught up in the soul of war and their heroism had been spoilt by obscenity, and their ideals debased by bestial acts. They will have only one excuse to their recaptured souls: "It was War." It is the excuse which man has made through all the ages of his history for the bloody thing which, in all those ages, has made him a liar to his faith and a traitor to the gentle gods.