# War's Dark Frame/The Sinister Invasion

CHAPTER VI
THE SINISTER INVASION
WE started early the next morning, threading a course among the pleasant hills of Lorraine. For brief spaces the idea of war seemed a distasteful imagining. It was necessary to glance for a reminder at the helmet of our military chauffeur. Or we would glimpse in a patch of woods a battery of soixante-quinzes. It was a Sunday, and often the artillerymen would be washing their clothing in a swiftly running brook, or, stretched in the thick grass, would be lost in a book or the rc-reading of a letter from home. We might pass a column of infantry, covered with dust, crowding to the side of the road to make way for our Etat Major automobile. And here and there we met lines of the busses that had disappeared from the Paris streets at the commencement of the war. Covered with netting and painted a dull grey, they carried fresh meat for distribution from point to point behind the lines.
We swerved into Lunéville, whose outskirts saw vicious house-to-house fighting during the ​ first weeks of the war. In a number of streets the buildings were scarred so intricately from rifle and machine gun fire that it seemed incredible a single soldier should have emerged untouched.
Our driver hurried us into the country again. The staff officer, fulfilment of his promise in his eyes, spoke sadly.
“We are entering the devastated district of Lorraine."
And almost immediately we flashed through a village whose simple peasant houses were without roofs or else showed jagged breaches where shells had entered.
"We got as much of the civilian population out of these towns as we could," the officer said;"but it is hard to move Frenchmen who think they have a right to stay, so plenty of them suffered."
As we went on the villages displayed harsher scars. In some only a few walls were left, but we could see rough shelters constructed from the wreckage; and old men and children wandered around with a furtive air, as if in anticipation of another catastrophe.
In the midst of all this destruction we came to a village that was quite untouched.
Why is that?" I asked.
​ " Who can explain the vagaries of the Boches?"
I think we all questioned if the charming hamlet had been spared because one lived there who had been of service to the enemy.
Spies —" the Quaker began.
But what I learned about the vital work of the spies in Europe I shall relate in another chapter. Moreover, the subject was forgotten at that moment, for we left the village and crossed a broad, flat plateau in whose grass innumerable French tricolours waved lazily, like the fronds of a strange and beautiful plant.
We saw beneath the tricolours mounds varying in size from the grave of a single man to a trench tomb of a hundred bodies. There were mounds from which no flags waved. These were decorated with plain black crosses.
"The German dead?” I asked.
The staff officer nodded.
"As far as possible," he said, "we have taken care of their dead as carefully as our own. On that cross you will find a row of numbers. The families of those German soldiers can know where their men are resting."
He pointed to a tiny mound with a small black cross set at an angle above it.
Old men and children wandered around with a furtive air, as if in anticipation of another catastrophe
“You name on that cross. Lieutenant or Captain von So and So."
"In view of those ruined villages," the elderly Quaker said, such charity is admirable. It is very French."
"We are not Boches," the officer laughed.
"In spite of the crimes of the Germans in Lorraine we have no quarrel with the sorrowful families of the dead."
"Both sides fell very fast here? I asked.
"It was a hard battle," he answered. might say the Boches were turned back as they were at the Ourck. It is, as you can see, nearly at the other end of the line. Because these men fell the Kaiser was forbidden to trot into Nancy, and something was repaid of the debt we owe the Boches for Gerbéviller. We are getting very close now. Before long we will see it."
The name had acquired in my mind, and, I think, in the Quaker's, a symbolism of inexpressible wrong. We shrank a little from the fact. The automobile approached the edge of the plateau too quickly for us. There was, however, in our first glimpse of the dead city an unexpected relief.
It snuggled, badly defined because of the pleasant shrubbery, in the centre of a shallow bowl. The charming little river Mortagne wound ​ through fields and patches of woods, and lingered behind the nearest of the half seen walls.
Then we understood it was the lack of definition that had furnished at first that pleasant deception. The wall against the trees, for instance, became the torn and eyeless front of a factory. Behind it there was nothing, and our hearts sank, for of all the fragments of buildings we could see from that point, the factory was distinctly the largest.
It is the approach of Gerbéviller from the plateau that makes its tragedy insupportable. It has been so far permitted to very few to inspect this record of the German invasion, this monument to the Teutonic campaign of terribleness. To those who have driven down like us from the plateau must have come the thought:
"After all the French have exaggerated. It might have been necessary to bombard the garrison defending the place. And the destruction isn't really as shocking as in Nancy."
Then, as the shrubbery has fallen away, exposing the skeleton, every visitor must have cried as we did:
"But this is incredible! This isn't bombardment. It is systematic and wanton destruction."
"There was no garrison here," the officer said. "When the army retreated at the first shock only ​ sixty chasseur-à-pied were left to guard the bridge at the other side of the town. Only a few shells have fallen in Gerbéviller. It is the work of the incendiary, of the man who destroys property as a child knocks down a house of blocks, because it pleases his unconsidered impulse to be cruel—to smash!—to laugh, as he sees things go Smash! Smash! Smash! Sæur Julie, if she will, can tell you better than I, because she was here. She lived through each minute of the dreadful three days, and, since she is a religieuse, what she says will not seem so far beyond belief as the story of what I know only by hearsay. But first you should see the château and its chapel."
We entered Gerbéviller, for a short distance threading streets flanked by walls, like the walls of Sermaize-les-Bains, scarcely two feet high. They were eloquent with the story of their fall. They seemed trying to explain to us that after the conflagration dynamite had been used, that their skeletons had been torn to pieces by stained and vicious hands.
For a long time we saw no one. Then a child appeared, walking at a demure pace, her eyes downcast as she picked a path among the ruins.
We paused in a weed-choked plaza. To the right a wall rose for two thirds of its original height, but through its empty windows showed the ​ trees of a broad and luxuriant park. The rear and most of the side walls had been levelled. There was only left enough to tell us that here had stood one of the most beautiful renaissance châteaus in France.
The officer nodded towards the opposite side of the plaza.
"The chapel," he said.
We gazed with a mounting anger at this jewel which had been shattered with repeated and difficult blows. Through the breaches of the façade gaped out at us a desecrated altar, roofed only by the sky.
"There are no shell holes," the Quaker said. There was a flash of temper across his placid face.
"I am a Quaker, as you know," he went on simply, " but in this place I like to tell you that I have two sons who are Quakers, also, but they are both officers in the British army."
The staff officer smiled, "Perhaps," ” he said, "it is as well you, yourself, are beyond the military age."
It spares my conscience," the Quaker agreed. "What regiments did this?" I asked. Bavarians," the officer answered.
"We had always thought, too, that they were rather kindlier than the Prussians. In the grounds of the château ​ there is a grotto. Piece by piece the mosaics were detached from the ceiling. That is what hurts so in Gerbéviller—the careful, the systematic devastation. It is difficult to understand how men could go to such minute pains to destroy."
We re-entered the automobile and went on through the ghastly streets of Gerbéviller. Before long the car stopped. A heap of stones blocked our way.
"I can go no farther, sir," the soldier chauffeur said.
We alighted, made our way around the rubble, and continued on foot.
"It is worse than Pompeii," the Quaker mused.
"That ancient city is more habitable, would be far simpler to restore."
Ahead was a wooden shack, constructed against a piece of ruined wall.
"The old and the new," the staff officer said, "but that is about all that has been done towards the restoration of the city. It is so hopeless; but some day we will see, for a few of the inhabitants have clung to their homes. After the war something will be done for them.
"The Germans made a more thorough job here than in Louvain," the Quaker commented.
"Nothing could have been much more thorough," the staff man answered. "Where ​ there were originally four hundred and seventy- five dwellings, just twenty emerge from the ruins comparatively intact, and that is due to Seur Julie. They are all clustered about the Hospice of St. Charles, of which she is the superior."
We quickened our pace, for we were anxious to meet and talk with this remarkable woman who had saved the little that is left of the city. We knew General Castelnau, after the defeat and the Aight of the Germans, had mentioned her in army orders. To decorate her with the Cross of the Legion of Honour, we had read at the time, President Poincaré had come himself to Lorraine and to the hospice. In Nancy the night before we had heard her mentioned with a sort of reverence.
At the head of a narrow, sloping street we saw several comparatively complete buildings. We entered one through an archway surmounted by a cross. We were ushered by a sad-faced sister into a parlour whose walls were freshly splashed with plaster. We didn't need to be told that many bullets had torn through them.
Sœur Julie entered. She impressed us as a short and stout woman, rather beyond middle age. From her pleasant and sympathetic face dark eyes snapped. On her habit of a religieuse shone the Cross of the Legion. From time to ​ time as she talked she fingered the modal. She greeted us warmly, but at first she seemed a trifle reluctant to speak of that unbearable occupation of her city by the Germans. As she went on, however, her gestures assumed a rapid and varied intensity. At times horror slumbered in her eyes, at others anger awakened them.
"There wasn't much bombardment," she began, verifying what the staff officer had said.
“The town was little hurt by that. Only sixty chasseur-à-pied held the bridge across the Mortagne. But, alas, they were too magnificent, for the Germans were so angry at their superb stand that they declared the old men of the town must have helped in the defence. They came in at nightfall—Bavarian troops who had fought hard and marched hard. It seemed that they were tired, and their general thought they should have a little relaxation. He issued orders that in Gerbéviller they were to do what they pleased."
She shook with disgust. She pointed from the window.
“They amused themselves. No bombardment could have been so complete. They used explosives, oil, all the inflammable material they could get their hands on. When a house was burning, they clustered about the cellar entrance to welcome the women and old men who had to come from ​ their refuge or roast. The men were bound and made to watch the welcome of their women. One finds it difficult to speak of such horrors. Then many of the men—old fellows, for the youngsters were all at the war—were tied in groups of five, and, while they questioned with eyes like the eyes of an animal one has accused unjustly, they were shot down. During many hours we heard the firing, and we muttered prayers for departing souls, while we worked over the wounded. One girl, rather than face such things, hid in the Mortagne with the water up to her neck. She was there all one day. It killed her, but she was more content to die that way."
We remained silent before the sad conviction of this woman of the church who spoke of what she had seen with her own eyes.
"In the night they came here. Their work of destruction had progressed so far.
I had many desperately wounded men, some German, and a few grey old fellows who had sought refuge at the hospice. The Bavarians came and fired and told us we must leave in order that the hospice might be destroyed like the rest of the town.
Gerbèviller ... this Monument to the Teutonic Campaign of Terribleness
wounded and the dying, and some old men who are incapable of bearing arms, and I have Germans."
"’Point them out to me!'
"And they entered and went to the cots where the wounded Frenchmen lay, and I tried to keep my eyes closed that I might not witness this crime, for they tore the red bandages from the wounds, and the blood flowed again, staining the beds. When I cried out they sneered that it was necessary for them to search for weapons beneath the bandages. Rifles and bayonets beneath bandages! I grasped that officer's arm.
"Do no more evil to these poor little ones. Burn no more. See! I care for your wounded, as I care for our own.'
"I pointed out to him the violent, scarlet sky above Gerbéviller.
"’Save this little corner for sickness and death.'
"And he went. But later when the French returned some of those men came back. We saw our ruddy executioners, our fire-brands, pallid and torn and asking help. So we took them in until the little hospice was like a shambles. The blood! It ran from their resting places on the floor. It ran so thick in the corridor that I arranged a mop as a sort of dam to turn it into ​ the street. But, angry at retreating, those that were unhurt tumbled over the walls of the houses they had burned. That is why we are not like a city that has been bombarded. That is why so many houses are only heaps of bruised stones."
She arose and spread her arms. On her dun uniform of a religieuse the Cross of the Legion glittered.
"Is it any wonder,” she said, "that all the world will forever speak of our beloved dead city as Gerbéviller-la-Martyre?”