"My sister, I must be carried to the cellar at once."
"There's no danger. The French never fire on the Red Cross," I said to him.
"I am a poor wounded man. So carry me to the cellar."
I gave in. I carried him to the cellar, and he stayed there some days.
XII
SISTER JULIE – CONTINUED
During the days of fire and blood Sister Julie was acting mayor of Gerbéviller. It was no light job, for she had to steer an invading army away from her hospital of wounded men, and she was the source of courage for the village of peasants, who were being hunted and tortured. Many months have passed, and nothing is left of those days but crumbled stone and village graves and an everlasting memory. But she is still the soul of Gerbéviller. Pilgrims come to her from the provinces of France, and give her money for her poor and sick. The village still has need of her. I saw her with the woman whose aged mother was shot before her eyes, and with the mother whose little boy was murdered.
She went on with her story:
SISTER JULIE'S STORY
As soon as the Germans came they began their work by taking hostages, the same number as that of the municipal councilors. They led them all away to the end of town by the bridge, on the road which leads to Rambervillers. A German passed, and when he saw them he shouted out:
"See the flock of sheep. They are taking you away to be shot." And he pointed out to them with his fingers the place of their torment.
In the morning four or five officers arrived to hear testimony from some of the men. It was Leonard, the grocer, who told me that four persons were questioned.
"Stand there," They said to them.
"Which is the one who lives next door to the hospital?" an officer asked.
Leonard stepped forward.
"Is it not true that the Lady Superior of the Hospital organized her people for the purpose of firing on our wounded with rifles?"
Leonard replied:
"I am sure that it is not so. And even if she were to order it, they would not obey."
"Do you know what you are in danger of in telling lies? We have seen the bullets come from the hospital. We are sure. Go write your deposition."
"I can't do it," answered Leonard.
He was forced to write his deposition. When he had finished it, he presented it to the chief.
"Sign it, and follow me. I am sure that I saw bullets come from that part of the street. Certainly men were there who fired on our chiefs."
They also said to him that our chasseurs had fired on them from the chateau of Madame de Lambertye, and they themselves went to get a statement at the spot to see if it was possible to hit a man from the chateau and kill him.
I had seen the turrets of the chateau of Lambertye burning about half-past nine in the morning and all the upper part. That was by incendiary bombs. The day after the fires we saw empty cans, about sixty of them, the kind used for motor-car gasoline, lying about in the garden of the chateau.
Besides all that, there are still the bodily indignities which must not be passed over in silence. The twenty-fourth and twenty-fifth, "they" used fire and blood. The following days "they" amused themselves by teasing everybody. The poor Monsieur Jacob, who makes lemonade, was struck and thrown to the ground. Then they spit in his face, and threatened to shoot him, without any reason.
They were drunk with the wine of Gerbéviller, if one is to judge from their helmets, which had lost their lightning conductors.
The sacred images of the church were not respected. It was the evening of the twenty-ninth. A soldier-priest, Monsieur the Abbé Bernard, went to see a tiny bit of what was taking place.
"Do you know, my sister, what has been done to the ciborium (sacred vessel for the sacrament)?"
I went with him. We came to the church. We entered with difficulty. A bell blocked us from passing, and shells had broken down the vaulting in many places. We went on our way, but always with difficulty. We saw the crucifix which had the feet broken by blow on blow from the butt-end of rifles. We still went on, and saw the pipes of the organ lying on the ground. We came in front of the tabernacle (the box which holds the sacred vessels). There we counted eighteen bullet holes which had perforated the door around the lock. The displacement of air produced by the bursting of the bullet had forced the screws to jump out. "They" had not thought that this little dwelling-place was a strongbox and that it had flat bolts, both vertical and horizontal. We were now agitated to see if anything else had taken place in the tabernacle.
Monsieur, the Abbé Bernard, took a hammer, and as gently as he could he succeeded in making a little opening just large enough for one to see that there was something else inside. With the barrel of an unloaded gun, he then made a full opening. The ciborium, the sacred vessel, was uncovered and had been projected against the bottom. The cover, fallen to one side, had a number of bullet marks, as the ciborium itself had.
The bullets in penetrating the front of the tabernacle had made everywhere little holes, and these holes were in a shape nearly symmetrical around the lock. At the rear there were many much larger holes.
Monsieur, the Abbé, took those sacred things and the cover of the altar and carried them to the chapel.
The 17th and the 60th Bavarian Regiments were the ones that did this work. One-third at least of these men were protestant, and among them were many returned convicts.
One of our sisters saw a book of a German officer who was nursed here, and noticed that he was from Bitsch.
(Bitsch is a Roman Catholic town in Lorraine which long belonged to France, and which held out against the Germans almost to the end of the Franco-Prussian War).
"How is this?" she asked. "You are from Bitsch, and yet it is you who dare to do the things that you have done."
"We are under orders," he answered. "The further we go into France, the worse we shall do. It is commanded. Otherwise we shall be killed ourselves."
Let us return to the Germans who were applying fire and blood. They led away fifteen men, old men, to a shed at about quarter past ten. Later they made them leave the shed. General Clauss, who was in command of two regiments, was sitting under the oak tree which you will be able to see on your return trip. He was in front of a table charged with champagne, and was drinking, during the time that his soldiers were arranging the poor unhappy old men, getting them ready to be shot. They had bound them in groups of five, and they shot them in three batches. They now lie buried in the same spot.
The General said: "When I have filled my cup and as I raise it to my lips, give them fire and blood."
We said good-by to Sister Julie. I walked down the street to the ruins of the chateau of Lambertye. Sister Julie has told of the empty gasoline cans that were left in the garden of the chateau. They had served their purpose well: I stepped through the litter that was once a beautiful home. But there was one work which flaming oil could not do. I went into the garden, and came to the grotto of the chateau. It is a lovely secret place, hidden behind a grove, and under the shadow of a great rock. It glows red from the fundamental stone of its structure, with jewel-like splinters of many-colored pebbles sunk in the parent stone. Fire, the favorite German instrument for creating a new world, could not mar the stout stone and pebbles of the little place, but such beauty must somehow be obliterated. So the careful soldiers mounted ladders and chipped to pieces some of the ceiling, painfully with hammers. The dent of the hammers is visible throughout the vaulting. The mosaic was too tough even for their patience, and they had to leave it mutilated but not destroyed.
Several times in Gerbéviller we see this infinite capacity for taking pains. The thrusting of the baker into his own oven is a touch that a less thoughtful race could never have devised. When they attacked the tabernacle containing the sacramental vessel of the Roman Catholic church, Sister Julie has told how they placed the eighteen bullets that defiled it in pattern. The honest methodical brain is behind each atrocity, and the mind of the race leaves its mark even on ruins.
Finally, when they shot the fifteen white-haired old men, the murders were done in series, in sets of five, with a regular rhythm. I can produce photographs of the dead bodies of these fifteen old men as they lay grouped on the meadow. We stood under the oak tree where the officer sat as he drank his toasts to death. We looked over to the little spot where the old men were herded together and murdered. Leon Mirman, Prefect of Meurthe-et-Moselle, said to us as we stood there:
"I, myself, came here at the beginning of September, 1914. Fifteen old men were here, lying one upon the other, in groups of five. I saw them, their clothes drooping. One was able to see also by their attitude that two or three had been smoking their pipes just before dying. Others held their packets of tobacco in their hands. I saw these fifteen hostages, fifteen old men, some ten days after they had been killed; the youngest must have been sixty years of age.
"We shall set up here a commemorative monument which will tell to future generations the thing that has taken place here."
For centuries the race has lived on a few episodes, short as the turn of a sunset. The glancing helmet of Hector that frightened one tiny child, the toothless hound of Ulysses that knew the beggar man – always it is the little lonely things that shake us. Vast masses of men and acres of guns blur into unreality. The battle hides itself in thick clouds, swaying in the night. But the cry that rang through Gerbéviller does not die away in our ears. Sister Julie has given episodes of a bitter brevity which the imagination of the race will not shake off. It is impossible to look out on the world with the same eyes after those flashes of a new bravery, a new horror. I find this sudden revelation in the lifting of the cup with the toast that signed the death of the old men. The officer was drinking a sacrament of death by murder. It is as if there in that act under the lonely tree in the pleasant fields of Gerbéviller the new religion of the Germans had perfected its rite.
That rite of the social cup, held aloft in the eyes of comrades, has been a symbol for good will in all the ages. Brotherhood was being proclaimed as the host of the feast looked out on a table of comrades. At last in the fullness of time the rite, always honored, was lifted into the unassailable realm of poetry, when one greater man came who went to his death blithely from the cup that he drank with his friends. There it has remained homely and sacred in the thought of the race.
Suddenly under the oak tree of Gerbéviller the rite has received a fresh meaning. The cup has been torn from the hands of the Nazarene. By one gesture the German officer reversed the course of history. He sat there very lonely, and he drank alone. The cup that he tasted was the death of men.
It is no longer the lifting of all to a common fellowship. It no longer means "I who stand here am prepared to die for you": pledge of a union stronger even than death. It is suddenly made the symbol of a greater gospel: "I drink to your death. I drink alone."
ADDENDUM
In the month of November, 1915, the "American Hostels for Refugees" were founded by Mrs. Wharton and a group of American friends in Paris to provide lodgings and a restaurant for the Belgians and French streaming in from burning villages and bombarded towns. These people were destitute, starving, helpless and in need of immediate aid. The work developed into an organization which cares permanently for over 4,000 refugees, chiefly French from the invaded regions. A system of household visiting has been organized, and not even temporary assistance is now given to any refugee whose case has not been previously investigated. The refugees on arrival are carefully registered and visited. Assistance is either in the form of money toward paying rent, of clothing, medical care, tickets for groceries and coal, tickets for one of the restaurants of the Hostels, or lodgings in one of the Model Lodging Houses. Over 6,000 refugees have been provided with employment.
There are six centers for the work. One house has a restaurant where 500 meals a day are served at a charge of 10 centimes a meal, and an "Ouvroir" where about 50 women are employed under a dressmaker, with a day-nursery, an infant-school, a library and recreation room. Another center is a Rest-house for women and children requiring rest and careful feeding. Young mothers are received here after the birth of their children, and children whose mothers are in hospital. Sixty meals a day are served here with a special diet for invalids. Another center contains a clothing depot, which has distributed nearly 100,000 garments, including suits of strong working clothes for the men placed in factories; layettes, and boots. In the same building are Dispensary and Consultation rooms. Twenty to thirty patients are cared for daily at the Dispensary. Another house contains the Grocery Depot, and another the office for coal-tickets. An apartment house, and two other houses have been made into lodging houses. The apartment lets out rooms at rents varying from 8 to 15 francs a month. One of the houses contains free furnished lodgings for very poor women with large families of young children. These three houses have met the need of cheap sanitary lodgings in place of damp, dirty rooms at high rents, where sick and well were herded together, often in one filthy bed.
Such is the work of the "American Hostels for Refugees." The present cost of maintaining all the branches of this well-organized charity is about five thousand dollars a month.
Mrs. Wharton has also established "American Convalescent Homes for Refugees." Many refugees come broken in health, with chronic bronchitis and incipient tuberculosis and even severer maladies. Seventy-one beds are provided. There is also a house where 30 children, suffering from tuberculosis of the bone and of the glands are being cared for. Four thousand dollars a month should be provided at once for this work.
At the request of the Belgian Government Mrs. Wharton has founded the "Children of Flanders Rescue Committee." The bombardment of Furnes, Ypres, Poperinghe and the villages along the Yser drove the inhabitants south. The Belgian Government asked Mrs. Wharton if she could receive 60 children at 48 hours' notice. The answer was "yes," and a home established. Soon after, the Belgian Government asked Mrs. Wharton to receive five or six hundred children. Houses were at once established, and these houses are under the management of the Flemish Sisters who brought the children from the cellars of village-homes, from lonely farmhouses, in two cases from the arms of the father, killed by a fragment of shell. Lace-schools, sewing and dress-making classes, agriculture and gardening are carried on. Seven hundred and thirty-five children are cared for. The monthly expense is 8,000 francs.
One of the most important charities in which Mrs. Wharton, Mrs. Edward Tuck, and Judge Walter Berry are interested, is that for "French Tuberculous War Victims," in direct connection with the Health Department of the French Ministry of War. Nearly 100,000 tuberculous soldiers have already been sent back from the French front. They must be shown how to get well and receive the chance to get well. One hospital is already in operation, and three large sanatoria are nearing completion, with 100 beds each. The object is not only to cure the sufferers, but to teach them a trade enabling them to earn their living in the country. Tuberculous soldiers are coming daily to the offices of this charity in ever-increasing numbers asking to be taken in. The answer will depend on American generosity.
A group of Americans, headed by Mrs. Robert Woods Bliss, whose husband is First Secretary of the American Embassy in Paris, have instituted and carried on a "Distributing Service" in France. The name of the organization is "Service de Distribution Américaine." It was established on its present basis in December, 1914, and grew out of personal work done by Mrs. Bliss since the beginning of the war. The purpose has been to supply hospitals throughout France with whatever they need. By the end of 1916, the results were these:
The Director of the organization is Russell Greeley, the secretary of Geoffrey Dodge. The service has a garage outside the gates of Paris with ten cars and a lorry. All the staff, except the stenographers and packers, are volunteers.
This work for the French is connected with the American Distributing Service for the Serbians, which was begun by sending the late Charles R. Cross, Jr., to Serbia as a member of the American Sanitary Commission headed by Dr. R. P. Strong, in the spring of 1915. Mr. Cross made an investigation of the situation in Serbia at that time from the point of view of the American Distributing Service.
In January, 1916, Mrs. Charles Henry Hawes of the Greek Red Cross, wife of Professor Hawes of Dartmouth College, Hanover, being on her way to Italy and Greece for the purpose of conveying relief into Albania through Janina, offered her services to the Distributing Service for the convoying and distribution of supplies. Mrs. Hawes's offer was accepted and she was furnished with a small fund for the purpose of supplies. Events forestalled her, but she succeeded in landing and distributing to the last Serbians leaving San Giovanni di Medua, a thousand rations. At the same time she took an active part in relief work at Brindisi, and distributed about a thousand dollars' worth of supplies to the Serb refugees passing through that port.
Meanwhile the French Army Medical Service had created the "Mission de Coordination de Secours aux Armées d'Orient" for the purpose of distributing relief supplies to the Serbian and other Allied armies in the Balkans. A member of the Distributing Service was appointed a member of the Mission, and a fund of 100,000 francs placed at the disposal of the Distributing Service which thenceforward coöperated actively in the work of the Mission. Urgent representations of the need of help in Corfou having been made early in February to the Mission by the French Army Medical Service, Mrs. Hawes, representing the Distributing Service and the Mission jointly, was sent to Corfou where she established a soup kitchen and did other valuable relief work at Vido. She was later joined at Corfou by Countess de Reinach-Foussemagne, Infirmière Déléguée of the Mission. Through these two agents the Distributing Service sent to Corfou and distributed 197 cases of foodstuffs, clothing, and various articles needed, 5 cases of medicines and 40 tins of paraffine. The Service disbursed for similar purposes through Mrs. Hawes and Countess de Reinach, fifteen thousand francs in cash. It was also instrumental in erecting a monument at Vido to the Serbs who died there.
When the crisis at Corfou was at an end the field depot of the Mission was moved to Solonica. There the Service distributed to Serbians various shipments of relief and hospital supplies: A total of 454 cases.
The Distributing Service now has ready and is preparing to send forward for the Serbian Army a laundry outfit, a disinfecting outfit and a complete field surgical outfit (portable house for operating room equipment and radiograph plant). A shipment is also going forward for Monastir where the field depot of the Mission was established on November 22nd, of 5,000 francs' worth of foodstuffs and other urgently needed materials, and a larger quantity is being accumulated to be sent forward without delay.
In addition, the Distributing Service has sent about 2,000 kilos of hospital supplies to the Serbs in the Lazaret of Frioul, off Marseille, and a similar quantity of material to the hospitals at Sidi-Abdallah (Tunis), and elsewhere in Tunisia and Algeria, given over to the treatment of Serbians.
Mrs. Bliss and her friends have also conducted a work for "frontier children," dating from August, 1914, which has cared for French, Belgian and Alsatian children to the number of 1,500.