The small notice was from General Gallieni, the new Governor of Paris.
It had, in its brevity, the beauty of an ancient inscription:
"I have been ordered to defend Paris. I shall obey this command until the end."
That same Sunday, the thirtieth of August, was the first day the Taubes came over Paris. By chance I was guarding one of the city"s gates. I saw the airplane coming from a distance. I had not the least doubt about it for it had the silhouette of a bird of prey that rendered the German planes so easily recognizable at that time. For that matter, no one was deceived by it, and from all the batteries, forts and other positions a violent fusillade greeted it. There was firing from the streets, windows, courts and roofs. I followed it through my field gla.s.s, and for a moment I thought it had been hit, for it paused in its flight. But this was an optical illusion.... The plane simply flew higher, having without doubt heard the sound of the fusillade and the bullets having perhaps whistled too close to the pilot"s ears. When he was almost over my post, a light white cloud appeared under its wings and, in the ten ensuing seconds, there followed a terrible series of sounds, for a bomb had just fallen and exploded very near at hand. But so entrancing was it to observe the flight of this pirate who, in spite of everything, continued in his audacious course, that I gazed at the heavens, trying to determine whether or not I saw once more the little white cloud, the precursor of the machine of death.
And everyone who was near me--workmen, pa.s.sers-by, women, children--stayed there too, their feet firmly on the ground, their glances lost in the limitless sky. No one ran away; no one hid; no one sought refuge behind a door or in a cellar. It"s a characteristic of airplane bombs that they frighten no one, even when they kill. The machine you see does not frighten you; only the machine you can"t see upsets your nerves.
However that may be, the curiosity of Paris was insatiable. Even in the tragic hours we were living through at that time, this curiosity remained as eager, ardent and amused as ever. Every afternoon, at the stroke of four, crowds collected in the squares and avenues. The motive was to see the Taubes! Since one Taube had flown over the city, no one doubted that a second one would come the next day. A girl"s boarding school obtained a free afternoon to enjoy the spectacle. The midinettes were allowed to leave their work. At Montmartre, where the steps of the b.u.t.te gave a better chance of scanning the horizon, places were in great demand.
There was a crowd along the fortifications to see the works for the defense on which, by General Gallieni"s order, men were working.
Thousands of spectators of both s.e.xes, but especially of women, were examining the bases that were being put in for the guns, the openings they were making to serve as loopholes, the joists they were putting across the gates, and the paving stones with which the entrances were being barricaded. This crowd did not want to believe in the proximity of the enemy. Or, if it believed it, it didn"t want to admit that there was danger. Or, if it admitted that there was danger, it wanted to share in it. Above everything it wanted to see; it wanted to see!
The last night in August I had a hard time freeing the approaches of the gate I was guarding. There were only women, but there were thousands of them and neither prayer nor argument could persuade them to make up their minds to go home.
"Nothing will happen," I told them. "Look here now, be reasonable and go home to bed."
"But we want to see...."
"What do you want to see?"
"Want to see what kind of a reception the Prussians will get if they come."
Aside from this the mob was remarkably easy to get on with. A strict order had forbidden that anyone be permitted to enter or leave Paris until sunrise. As a result the capital found itself cut off from the suburbs, and lots of little working girls, who came in for the day from Clichy or Levallois-Perret, couldn"t get back to their homes in the evening. They had to camp out under the stars.
"It"s very amusing," they said, "here we are just like soldiers."
I even heard one of them say:
"What a pity there isn"t always war."
That same night, about eleven o"clock, a heavy sound was heard coming from the direction of the city. Some urchins shouted:
"It"s the soldiers. It"s the soldiers."
An entire Algerian division was, as a matter of fact, detraining and hurrying to fight before Paris. Behind it followed a long line of taxi-cabs, the famous line of taxi-cabs requisitioned by General Gallieni to carry munitions to the battle field of the Ourcq. They made an incomparable spectacle, that magnificent summer night, in the bright moonlight, the long column of Algerian cavalry, with their shining burnouses, on fiery little horses. Applause burst forth from the mob and reached the soldiers. The women threw kisses at them, but they overwhelmed my men and me with reproaches:
"See," they shrieked at us, "if we had minded you and gone home, we wouldn"t have seen them."
Paris, which didn"t know about the Battle of Charleroi, knew about the Battle of the Marne. Paris knew about the Battle of the Marne not only on account of the troops who marched through its streets, but because it heard the big guns roar for three days, without stopping, towards the north.
What has not already been written and said about the Battle of the Marne, a conflict which will remain legendary in history? What will not be said and written on that subject in the future?... Some writers will see in it a miracle, others a strategic action engineered by a genius, others a chance stroke of destiny. The truth of the matter is more simple and appealing than any of these explanations and, although the whole truth is not yet known about the fight at the Marne, enough is known to make clear the two or three chief reasons why victory came to France and defeat to Germany, safety to civilization and a repulse to barbarism.
To be sure there was a great deal of strategy in it; and the stroke that was conceived in the master brain of Joffre and carried out by Generals Gallieni and Maunoury--a stroke which consisted in forming a new army on the extreme right of the German hordes to come and hurl itself sharply against these hordes--was a brave and bold maneuver which prepared the way for victory.
But this maneuver would not in itself have sufficed to win the victory if Maunoury had not attacked with an irresistible elan on the extreme left, upsetting the German plan of battle; if Franchet d"Esperey had not supported Maunoury"s attack vigorously and succeeded in breaking the German left; if, especially, Foch, at the center, had not performed unheard of miracles in breaking down the enemy"s resistance and not allowing his own lines to be broken; if, farther on, de Langle de Cary and Sarrail had not held off the Princes of Bavaria and Prussia before Vitry; if, on the right, de Castelnau had not held until the end the Grand Couronne at Nancy. The first truth is that they were all--Joffre, Gallieni, Maunoury, Franchet d"Esperey, Foch, de Langle de Cary, Sarrail, Castelnau, Dubail, to mention them in the order of the battle line from left to right--absolutely incomparable.
As an eye-witness said, "each man was on his own," each man gave the very best there was in his brain, his skill, his mind, his soul, his heart. The battle would have been lost if a single one of them had failed once during the entire seven days it raged. Opposed to the Huns was a chain forged of the finest steel, every link in which met the test for equal and unparalleled resistance. Therein lay the miracle of the Marne!
And the second great truth is that behind these generals, who all showed themselves without equal, were armies which, without exception, had kept intact their fighting spirit, that is, their faith in themselves, in their leaders, in the destiny of their country, in the beauty of the cause for which they fought.... Enough can never be said of the elemental importance that lies in the morale of the fighting men on the battle field. It is lamentable to hear far distant strategists reduce the conflict of two peoples to a problem in tactics or a list of ordnance statistics. It is enough to make angels weep when spectators, at a safe distance, speak of succoring a beaten people by sending them food stuffs, sh.e.l.ls 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 Compiegne. "Tomorrow we will burn Bar-le-Duc, Poincare"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.
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 b.r.e.a.s.t.s 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 att.i.tudes. 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 pa.s.sed. 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 sh.e.l.ls, and the sh.e.l.l which burst in the interior of the house had destroyed everything. That, of course, was war, and there was nothing to say about it.
But other houses, which had been spared by sh.e.l.l 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 pa.s.s 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 c.o.c.k 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 sh.e.l.ls.
Panic had apparently swept the gunners away. They had not had time to carry off their sh.e.l.ls, 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 pa.s.sed 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 sh.e.l.ls. 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 bra.s.sard 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 questions I asked him in his own language.