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As every one knows, the Germans breaking into France at Namur and Mons came on with unexampled rapidity from the north and east toward the south and west, circled somewhat to the west as they neared Paris, and then the 5th of September recoiled under the shock of the French offensive. For the better part of a week two millions of men struggled on a thousand different battlefields from Nancy and Verdun on the east to Coulommiers, Meaux, and Amiens on the south and west. This was the great battle of the Marne, which checked the German invasion. The pressure of this human cyclone, in general from northeast to southwest, was more intense in some places than others. One of the bloodiest storm centers lay east and west from the town of Vitry-le-François—from Sermaize-les-Bains on the east to Fère-le-Champenoise, Montmirail, and Esternay on the west. For fifty miles there in the heart of Champagne the path of the cyclone can be traced by the blackened villages, the gutted churches, the countless crosses in the midst of green fields.
One thinks of Champagne as a land of vineyards, but here in the center and south of the fertile province there are few vines, mostly fields of ripening wheat, green alfalfa, or beets—long undulating swales of rich fields, cut by little copses of thick woods and by white poplar-lined highways as everywhere in France. It has peculiarly that smiling and gracious air of la douce France—gently sloping fields and woods and little gray stone villages each with its small church ornamented by the square tower and spire of Champenoise Gothic. And it was here that the blast struck hardest, along the little streams, in the thick copses, up and down the straight roads whose deep ditches lent themselves to entrenchment, and in almost every village and crossroads hamlet.
It is a country of few towns, of many small villages, farm and manor houses. The buildings cluster in the hollows or about the crossroads, and sometimes they escaped the storm because the shells exchanged from hill to hill went quite over their roofs; again, as was the case with Huiron just outside Vitry or with Maurupt near by, they could not escape because they were perched on hills, and they were almost completely razed by the fierce fire that raked them for days. Sometimes they escaped shell and machine gun to be burned to the ground vengefully with incendiary bombs, as at Sermaize-les-Bains, where of nine hundred buildings less than forty were left standing after the Germans retreated. These instances are the saddest of all because so wanton! There was scarcely a single collection of houses in that fifty miles which I traversed which did not bear its ugly scar of fire and shell, scarcely a farmhouse that was not crumbled or peppered with machine-gun bullets. Miles of desolation may be seen in a couple of hours' drive around Vitry-le-François,—Favresse, Blesmes, Écrinnes, Thiéblemont, Maurupt, Vauclerc,—with acre upon acre of ruined buildings, a chimney standing here and there, heaps of twisted iron that once were farm machines, withered trees—and graves, everywhere soldiers' graves.
The churches suffered most, probably because they were used for temporary defense. At Huiron the upper half of the thirteenth-century Gothic church had been shaved off—in the ten-foot deep mass of débris lay the richly carved capitals of the massive pillars. At Écrinnes near by the apse of the exquisite little church had been blown off, leaving the front and spire intact. At Maurupt the whole edifice, which commanded the rolling countryside for miles, was riddled from end to end. Again, I would enter an apparently sound building to find a pile of rubbish in the nave, a gaping hole in the roof. And the same thing was true about Bar-le-Duc to the east and Meaux to the west. It is safe to say that in a fifty-mile wide stretch from Nancy to the English Channel not one village in ten has escaped the scourge.
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I speak of the churches because of their irreplaceable beauty, the human tenderness of their relation with the earth. But even more poignant, perhaps, were the wrecks of little country homes—the stacks of ruined farm machinery, the gutted barns, the burned houses. In many cases not a habitable building was left after the cyclone passed. In one hamlet of thirty houses near Esternay I remember, all but seven had been devastated—by incendiary fire. Indeed, it was clearly distinguishable—the "legitimate" wrack of war, from the deliberate spite of incendiarism. Maurupt was the one case, Sermaize-les-Bains (where there was no fighting) the other. If it had been simple war, shell and machine gun, probably fifty per cent or more of the devastation would have been saved. But the German makes war against an entire country, inanimate as well as animate.
The inhabitants of these ruins had come back in many instances—where else had they to go? Swept up before the blast of the cyclone, they had fled south over the fields and hard white roads, then crept back a few days after the cyclone had passed to find their homes pillaged, burned, their villages blackened scars on the earth. But they stayed there! The English Society of Friends has given some money with which to put up wooden huts, on which old men and Belgian refugees were working when I passed that way. There is a French charity that tries to outfit these new homes in the devastated districts, one of the numberless efforts of the French to put their national house in order. But for all that charity can do, the lot of these villagers is a bitter one: their strong men have gone to the front; old men, women, and children are left to scratch the fields, and exist miserably in the cellars, underneath bits of corrugated iron roof, in tiny wooden huts. But they have planted their potatoes, in the ruins in some cases, and have taken up sturdily the struggle of existence in the wreck of their old homes. The children play among the crumbling walls, the women go barefoot to the public well for water. The fields have been sown and harvested somehow. Until the Germans can kill off the French peasant women, they can never hope to conquer France.
Compared with the burning of homes, the razing of villages, mere pilfering and looting seem commonplace, unreprehensible crimes. Yet the loss of property by plain theft is no inconsiderable item in that bill which France expects to present some day. The old châteaux that were fouled and gutted by the invader, the trainloads of plunder that went back to German cities, the emptied cellars and ransacked houses have fed the fire of disgust and loathing which the French feel for their foe. Yet they should not begrudge the invader the extraordinary quantity of good wine which he consumed on his raid, because the victory of the Marne was doubtless won in part by the aid of the champagne bottle!
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