Fighting France | Page 8

food stuffs, shells and men. Above all, beyond all, is that immaterial, incalculable, invaluable force which is the sole true mistress of warfare--moral force--fighting spirit!
The Frenchmen in the Battle of the Marne kept their fighting spirit intact. I remember asking many of the officers attached to the forces which, after the Battle of Charleroi, retreated under a broiling sun, along roads burning with heat, through a suffocating dust, how they felt at this disheartening time. All of them answered, "We did not know where we were going or what we were doing, but we did know one thing--that we would beat them!" One writer, Pierre Laserre, described this retreat in the words, "Their bodies were retreating, but not their souls!" This is proven by the arrival on the fifth of September of Joffre's immortal order, "The hour has come to hold our positions at any cost, and to fight rather than retreat.... No longer must we look at the enemy over our shoulders; the time has come to employ all our efforts in attacking and defeating him."... That evening, when they heard their leader's appeal, the hearts of the men bounded in response. The next morning, at dawn, their bodies leaped up and hurled themselves on the enemy. Therein lay the miracle of the Marne!
Finally, at the very hour when the fighting spirit of the French Army had never been higher, the fighting spirit of the German Army had never been lower. It was low because the physical strength of the Germans was low, worn out, and broken by the shameful orgies, the disgraceful drinking which had reduced these men to the level of swine. It was low because the German fighting men had been led to believe that they would have to fight no longer, that the great effort was ended, that there was no French Army to put a stop to their pillaging and burning. "Tomorrow we enter Paris, we are going to the Moulin Rouge," von Kluck's soldiers said in their jargon to the inhabitants of Compiègne. "Tomorrow we will burn Bar-le-Duc, Poincaré's home town," the Crown Prince's soldiers said. What sort of resistance could such men oppose to Joffre's soldiers? Their spirit, granting that they had ever had any, was broken beforehand. And that is another thing that will explain the outcome of the Battle of the Marne.
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What Paris knew very quickly, very completely and very surely were the details of frightful looting and of the first atrocities perpetrated by the Germans, who demonstrated a premeditated intention to destroy, defile and wipe out everything in their path. And Paris was doubtless the first city in France to comprehend the significance of this war, which is a war of civilization against barbarism, a sacred war in which the forces of humanity raise a rampart of human breasts against the violent reappearance of primitive savagery.
Those of us who had a hand in some part of the Battle of the Marne were not slow to comprehend who the enemy was we were fighting and why we had to fight him to the death.
Among the many things that will be always engraved on the tablets of my memory, the deepest is of the time when I was on guard at the field of battle on the Ourcq, north of Meaux, on the extremity of the battle line of the Marne. Field of battle I have just written. No, it was not a field of battle but a field of carnage. I have forgotten the corpses I met in the roads or in the fields with their grinning faces and their distorted attitudes. But I shall never forget the ruin that was everywhere, the abominable manner in which the fields had been laid waste, the sacrilegious pillage of homes. That bore the trade mark of German "Kultur." That trade mark will be enough to dishonor a nation for centuries.
I see again those humble villages situated along the road to Meaux, Penchard, Marcilly, Chambry, Etrepilly, where a barbarian horde had passed. Since there were no inhabitants remaining--men whose throats could be cut, women who could be violated, or babies to shoot down--the horde had vented its rage on the furniture and the poor little familiar objects in which each one of us puts a bit of his soul.
I arrived in Etrepilly at the same time as a detachment of Zouaves. While they piously buried their companions who had fallen in forcing their way into the village, I wandered alone among the ruins. There had been a hundred houses there, and not a single one was untouched. Some had been hit by shells, and the shell which burst in the interior of the house had destroyed everything. That, of course, was war, and there was nothing to say about