It happened to be my fortune to visit within a fortnight two women, natives of Conflans-Jarny, both repatriées and neither aware that the other was in the town. Indeed, I think they were unacquainted. Yet each told me identically the same story. One was the wife of a railway employee, the other of rather better position and a woman of much refinement of mind. Both came to Bar early in 1917, and both were profoundly moved as they told their tale.
"We did not know the Germans were coming," they said. "People thought they would pass over on the other side of the hill." And so, in spite of heavy anxiety, Conflans went about its usual affairs one brilliant August day. There were only a few troops in the town—even the military authorities do not seem to have suspected danger; but the sun had not travelled far across the cloudless sky when down from the hill a woman, half distraught, half dead with fear came flying.
"The Germans!" she gasped, and looking up Conflans saw a wide tongue of flame leaping upwards—the woman's farmhouse burning—and wave upon wave of grey-coated men surging like a wind-driven sea down every road, down the hill-side. The soldiers seized their rifles, their hasty preparations were soon made, they poured volley after volley into the oncoming mass, they fought till every cartridge was expended and their comrades lay thick on the ground. Then the Germans, who outnumbered them ten, twenty, fifty to one, clubbed their rifles and the massacre began. There was no quarter given that day. "They beat them to death, Mademoiselle, and we—ah, God! we their wives, their sisters, their mothers looked on and saw it done." Conflans lay defenceless under the pitiless sun. Some twenty-seven civilians, including the priest, were promptly butchered in the streets, and one young mother, whose baby, torn from her arms, was tossed upon a bayonet, was compelled to dig a hole in her garden, compelled to put the little lacerated body in a box, compelled to bury it and fill in the grave. Other things happened, too, of which neither woman cared to speak.
And so Conflans-Jarny passed into German hands.
As time wore on Russian prisoners were encamped there. They worked in the fields, in the mines and in the hospitals.
"Ah, les pauvres gens! Figurez-vous, Mademoiselle, in the winter when snow was on the ground, when there was a wind—oh, but a wind of ice! they used to march past our street clad only in their cotton suits. Some had not even a shirt. They were dying of cold, but they were so strong they could not die. They were blue and pinched. They shook as if they had an ague. Sometimes, but not often, we were able to give them a little hot coffee; they were so grateful, they tried to thank us.... (Tears were pouring down Madame Cholley's face as she spoke.) I worked in the hospital because I had no money with which to buy food—they gave me two sous an hour—and I used to see les pauvres Russes grubbing in the dust-bins and manure heaps looking for scraps; they would gnaw filth, rotten vegetable stumps, offal, tearing it with their teeth like dogs. Once as they marched I saw one step into a field to pick up a carrot that lay on the ground. The guard shot him dead. And those that worked in the mines—ah, God only knows what they suffered. They lived underground, one did not know, but strange stories reached us. So many disappeared, they say they were killed down there and buried in the mine."
Then silence fell on the little room, silence broken only by the sound of Madame's quiet weeping.
Presently she told me that the allowance of food was one pound of coffee a month, coffee made chiefly from acorns, four tins of condensed milk at nineteen sous a tin, for three people, and one pound of fat per head per month. Haricot beans were not rationed, and bread she must have had, too, but I omitted to make a note of the amount. There was no paraffin, so in the winter she tried to make candles out of thread and oil, but the latter was dear and scarce. Meat "had not been seen in the commune for a year."
"Oh yes, the Germans are starving."
This was the text from which every repatrié tried to draw comfort, and it may be inferred that there was shortage in the villages. Once I even heard of shortage in a hospital, my informant being a young man, manager of a big branch store in the Northern Meuse, who had been married just three months before war was declared. He was wounded in August 1914 and taken to Germany, where one leg was amputated, the other, also badly injured, being operated on at least twice. Yet in December 1916 it was not healed. He was well treated on the whole, he told me, but his food was wretched. Coffee and bread in the morning, thin soup and vegetables at midday, coffee and bread at night.