Fighting France | Page 9

it.
But other houses, which had been spared by shell fire, had not been spared by the Kaiser's soldiery. The Barbarians had placed their claws on them. Everything had been taken out of the houses and scattered to the four winds of heaven. Here is a portrait that has been wrenched from its frame and trampled on. A baby's bathtub has been carried into the garden, and the soldiers have deposited their excrement in it. There are chairs that have been smashed by the kicks of heavy boots and wardrobes that have been disemboweled. Here is a fine old mahogany table that has been carried into the fields for five hundred meters and then broken in two. An old red damask armchair, with wings at the sides, one of those old armchairs in which the grandmothers of France sit by the fire in the evening has been torn in shreds by knife thrusts. Linen is mixed with mud; the white veil some girl wore at her first communion is defiled with excrement.... An old man is wandering among the ruins. He has just come back to the devastated village. He says to me simply:
"I saw them in 1870. They came here, but they didn't do this. They are savages."
A woman was there, too. She had come an hour or so ago with the old man, and she stood on the step of her defiled, despoiled home where the curtains hung in tatters at the windows. She saw me pass by. She wanted to speak to me, but her voice stuck in her throat. There she stood, her arms extended like a great cross. She could only sob:
"Look! Look!"
And she was like a symbol of the whole wretched business.
The men who do such deeds are the men France is fighting.
* * * * *
Vincy-Manoeuvre was another one of the villages. It is situated near the border of the Department of the Oise. It was still in flames when I entered it. On the outskirts of the hamlet there used to be a large factory. Only the iron framework of this factory remained; the ashes had commenced to smoke, giving forth flames from time to time. Here also every house had been destroyed and pillaged. Only the church remained standing, and on the belfry which was silhouetted against the sky, the weather cock seemed to shudder with horror.
Bottles covered the ground everywhere at Vincy-Manoeuvre. There were bottles in the streets, along the highways, in the fields. They marked the road by which the vanquished hordes had retreated. I counted almost two hundred in one trench, where a German battery had been placed. They lay pell-mell, mixed in with unexploded shells. Panic had apparently swept the gunners away. They had not had time to carry off their shells, so they had left them behind. But they had had time to empty the bottles. Absinthe, brandy, rum, champagne, beer, and wine had all been consumed, and the labels lay alongside of each other. Drunken, bloodthirsty brutes, thieving, sickening, nauseous beasts were what had descended upon France and passed through her country. Ruins, ashes and filth were the traces left behind by the German mob.
Some hundreds of yards from the village I noticed a woman lost in the immense beet fields. Apparently she was unharmed. I walked in her direction, thrusting aside with my legs corpses of men and horses, scaling the trenches, making a circuit around the craters made by shells. Suddenly what was my surprise at seeing two German soldiers, accompanied by a farmer, coming along a footpath! They stopped at six paces, gave me a military salute, and pointed to the white brassard of the Red Cross they wore on their arms.
"Where do you come from?" I asked. "What are you doing here?"
"We come from that farm, where we have been for two days caring for two of our wounded. We didn't see any French soldier or officer. We don't know what to do. We want to go to the village down there," they pointed out a hamlet two or three kilometers off, "where we left a doctor and one hundred and fifty-three wounded."
"Very good," I said, "follow me."
Obediently the two orderlies marched behind me to the village they had pointed out. It was situated on the national highway to Soissons. In this place were a hundred and fifty or two hundred Germans, quartered in four or five houses under the guard of a company of Zouaves who had just arrived a half hour previously. The German major, informed of my arrival, stood in front of the main building. He wore gold-rimmed spectacles, his face was the type the Alsatian Hansi loves to show in his books. He spoke very good French and even pretended that he did not want to answer the