Читать книгу Verdun to the Vosges: Impressions of the War on the Fortress Frontier of France - Gerald Campbell - Страница 9

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Our start in Nancy was not encouraging. We reported ourselves first at the Place, the military headquarters of the town, and were ushered by mistake into the room of an officer (we never knew his name), who was not the Military Governor, and was just packing up to go elsewhere. Therefore he said he could do nothing for us himself, though he had had friendly relations with Printing House Square, and he much doubted whether any one would give us leave to stay in the town for more than a night. The only General who possibly might was, according to him, a strong stern man who had a rooted objection to journalistic enterprise, and he earnestly advised us to keep out of his way. So we went off to lunch, in rather low spirits—and sat down at the next table to a third General, who looked particularly human and friendly. He was, the waiter informed us in a whisper, General de la Massellière, the Commandant d’Armes, and in about two minutes M. Lamure had introduced himself and me and explained our business, and we had received a polite invitation to present ourselves and our credentials at the Place at two o’clock. By a quarter-past we had a permis de séjour for one night, next day it was extended to four nights (with the understanding that we must go at once if the enemy resumed their abortive bombardment of the 9th), a day or two afterwards it was prolonged “till further notice,” and eventually we stayed for four months.

Our second visit was to the Préfet, M. Mirman, and our third to the Mayor, M. Simon, and, thanks to the warm welcome which they gave us, we went to bed that first night hoping for the best and feeling that we had already made three very good friends.

Both M. Mirman and M. Simon were appointed to their posts ad hoc on the outbreak of hostilities, and Meurthe et Moselle and Nancy very soon found out that they had got the right men in the right places. M. Mirman had served his time in the ranks of the army as a Chasseur-à-pied, while he was the Député for Reims and still a very young man, and was known in his constituency and Paris as the député soldat. Before the war he was Directeur de l’Assistance Publique in Paris, at the Ministry of the Interior, but resigned that post when fighting began in order to get as near to the front as possible. At Nancy he had his wish even without leaving the Préfecture. During part of August and September it was only five miles from the German lines, and just near enough to the Cathedral, supposing that the bombs of the enemy airmen missed one of their favourite targets by a short hundred yards, to be one of the danger-spots of the town. Madame Mirman came with him to Lorraine, and was followed soon afterwards by her daughters, all under twenty, and her young son. Their presence in Nancy greatly helped M. Mirman in a very important part of his work as Prefect. Apart from the compassionate services which they rendered to the wounded and the refugees, the mere fact of their being there was a constant encouragement to the townspeople in the dark and critical days at the beginning of the war. It meant, presumably, that the Prefect thought that the apparently imminent danger would be averted, or at least that he expected them not to run away from it. As a matter of fact, except the Post Office employés, who bolted in a body (I believe in obedience to orders), surprisingly few of the Nanceïens did run away, either after the Germans had rained shells on the town for an hour at the end of the fierce battle which poured streams of wounded into its hospitals day and night for three weeks, or later on when they had come to look upon Taubes and Aviatiks as a sort of gratuitous cinema show, and had further been roused from their sleep on Christmas Eve by the first Zeppelin that ever dropped bombs on an open town.

Dufey, Nancy, phot.

M. Simon, Mayor of Nancy.

The people of Nancy, like all Lorrainers and all border-races, are by nature a hard-plucked breed. Their fathers and their fathers’ fathers before them for many generations have stood in the great gap of western Europe and fought for their liberty against Huns and Romans and Germans and half a dozen other tribes and nations, till war and all its ghastly consequences have been burnt into their bones. They come, therefore, of a fighting stock, and it was to be expected that they would show a brave front to the enemy. But for all that it was largely owing to the example of M. Mirman and M. Simon (a true Nanceïen, who looks like a fighter all over, and was unanimously chosen by his municipal colleagues as the right man to be Mayor of Nancy in time of war) that the town kept its head and its bonne humeur through the anxious weeks when the enemy was pounding at its gates.

When we arrived there were still gaping holes in the houses that had been struck by the German shells, and every here and there heaps of broken glass and timber and masonry piled up on the pavement. All through the day convoys of prisoners and long columns of marching troops, horse, foot, and guns, and strings of carts and ambulances, carrying provisions, ammunition and wounded men, were constantly passing through the streets. At night, like Belfort, Epinal, Commercy, Toul, and Verdun, the town was in complete darkness, and hardly a soul was stirring. And all day and all night there was the sound of the guns, rumbling and roaring with monotonous regularity. Every few seconds the thunder of them kept breaking out, dull, angry, and continuous, pressing with leaden weight on one’s ears and head, like the banging of a furious wind roaring down a gaping chimney. You heard it as you went to sleep, you heard it whenever you woke up in the night and the first thing in the morning, and you heard it all day long. And after a time you took no notice of it. You heard it less than the rattle of the tramcars, except when it burst into particularly furious claps, and then you turned to your neighbour and said, “Ça tape,” and went on with what you were doing. But in spite of it all—the noise of battle and the sad and stirring sights of the wounded and the soldiers, the shattered roofs, the war proclamations on the walls and the war-pictures and war-accoutrements (even to a suit of chain armour) in the shop windows—it was difficult to believe that the enemy were so close and that actually as well as technically Nancy might at any moment be in a state of siege. For apparently the life of the place, except for the wounded and the number of women who were dressed in black, was very little different from the normal life of an ordinary garrison town. The streets were crowded and lively, the tramcars were running, and motor-cars dashing about in all directions; the shops and cafés were open, and though most people looked thoughtful, no one was gloomy. Every one had his share of the common work to do, and did it cheerfully and unselfishly. Come what might, they would not despair of the Republic. Come what might, they felt that they were going to win, because their cause was just and God would defend the right. Above all, they were a united people. Soldiers and citizens, governors and governed, were all one. At the Préfecture, at the Place, at the Mairie, in the Press, there was only one spirit and only one aim—to sink all differences and jealousies and work shoulder to shoulder for France and for freedom. There was no question of one authority setting himself up against another; the times were too serious. Party feeling was dead—or peradventure it slumbered. State and Church had buried the hatchet. No one talked or thought of politics except to hope and believe that the politicians in Paris would continue to preserve the peace.

All the time we were in Lorraine I never once heard a soldier or a Churchman or a freethinker or an editor or a politician of any complexion say a word about his personal political views. For all I knew from the men themselves they might have had none; except by inference it was impossible to tell what they were. The war and the common danger had wrought a miracle. France had been born again, and the watchwords of Liberté, Egalité, and above all Fraternité, were become lifegiving spiritual facts.

We did not grasp all this the first day we were in Nancy, though we felt it, for it was in the air. But little by little we began to know the people, largely owing to the kind offices of M. Mirman, M. Slingsby, the President of his council, and other members of his staff. The Press we met in a body twice at the Préfecture, once at a dinner given in honour of our own newspaper and England, and once when we were all formally presented to M. Viviani. For each of us the then Prime Minister had a ready and graceful remark. “Le Times,” he said to me, “est toujours si bien renseigné”—possibly, I think, with a little touch of self-consciousness. For no one knew better than he the restrictions under which the Press had suffered, in its quest of information, during the war. The five excellent newspapers which supply the needs of Nancy’s 100,000 inhabitants—L’Est Republicain, l’Eclair de l’Est, l’Etoile de l’Est, l’Impartiale, and the Journal de la Meurthe—have been particularly severely treated. There have been times when their editors have not been allowed to announce even the fact of some local incident (such as the visit of the Zeppelin, which was naturally known at once to every one in the town) till the news had been published in the Paris newspapers and telegraphed back to Nancy. Often they have suffered the mortification of being forbidden to say things which could not possibly have given information to the enemy and would certainly have been of real service to the community. But their loyalty has never wavered. Like the rest of the Lorraine world they have put their country and the need for unity before everything else, and have done excellent service to the State, not only in keeping before their readers the sufferings and necessities of the wounded, the refugees, and other victims of the war in the town, but in holding up to every one a lofty ideal of patience and courage.

More obvious in the streets than the work of the Nancy press, because nothing is more conspicuous than the Red Cross flag, was the work of the Nancy hospitals. In the early days of the war the arrangements for picking up and bringing in the wounded were to a large extent inadequate and primitive. We talked with many French soldiers who, during the great battle in front of Nancy, lay on the field for two, three, and even four days without food or water, suffering from their wounds, before the ambulance men could come to their assistance. That was largely the fault—or the crime—of the Germans, who often lay hid in the woods commanding the scene of a recent fight and fired on every man lying there who stirred a limb as well as on the stretcher-bearers who tried to carry the wounded away. When at last those who were still alive could be got at, large numbers of them had to be carried to the hospitals in clumsy rickety country waggons, the jolting of which, to men in their condition, was almost past endurance. A large proportion of the deaths which took place in the hospitals were due to one or both of these causes—the days and nights of exposure on the battlefield, and the long-drawn-out torture of the slow journey to the rear—and some of the men who survived them both told me that for sheer agony of suffering the second was the harder to bear. Nowadays that has been altered. In the summer of 1915 I saw near Commercy some English motor-ambulances sent to supplement the French Red Cross service at the front, which, for arrangement and comfort and swiftness, were as good as anything to be found. But in the early days there is no question that the provision for the transport of the wounded from the field was painfully deficient.

In Nancy itself full preparations had been made from the beginning. Besides the regular hospitals a large number of supplementary establishments were organized by the Union des Femmes de France, the Commission Municipale des Hospices, the Société des Secours aux Blessés, and other more or less temporary agencies of the Red Cross. The Union des Femmes de France in particular showed praiseworthy forethought. Soon after the fighting began they had twenty or more temporary hospitals in working order in Nancy and the surrounding towns, and also provided a motor convoy for collecting the wounded, which was quickly taken off their hands by the Army Medical Service. All of these hospitals were arranged in buildings temporarily converted from other uses. The most important of them, wonderfully well supplied with everything needed by the wounded, were those administered by M. Lespines, in the Lycée Poincaré, and by General Schneider and his wife and some of their friends from Paris, in a training-school for teachers.

In the two big permanent hospitals, the Military and the Civil, the arrangements, at all events to my nonprofessional eye, appeared to be perfect. The first is probably one of the best equipped hospitals in Europe. There is plenty of cubic space and plenty of air in its long, well-lighted corridors and roomy wards. Storerooms of all kinds, pharmaceutical, bacteriological, and chemical laboratories, radiograph rooms, operating rooms, baths, laundries, kitchens, disinfecting chambers—everything that is necessary for the care and the cure of the wounded and the sick—have their appointed place, and are furnished with the best appliances that surgical and scientific skill can devise. When I visited the hospital the members of the regular military staff who work there in time of peace had gone to the front. Among the men who had taken their places were some of the foremost physicians and surgeons of the city. Some of them belonged to Nancy’s own famous school of medicine, some came from Paris and other headquarters of science in different parts of the country, and all of them, whether they were mobilized or had volunteered their services, had become part of the military organization of the State, and were freely giving for the benefit of the wounded and of generations yet unborn the fruits of their life experience as civilian doctors. In the Civil Hospital, since the war began a civil hospital in name only, another wonderfully well-equipped and well-officered institution, there was everywhere the same spirit of devotion and self-sacrifice for the good of the nation and the same high level of surgical and scientific attainment among the members of the staff.

Of the sisters of mercy and the nurses in all these hospitals, also in very many cases volunteers, it would be difficult to speak too highly. The loving care with which they tend and mother the wounded—“mes garçons” they call them—and the grateful affection with which they are rewarded by their patients, are unspeakably touching. I was never in one of the Nancy hospitals during the trying time—far more exacting for the nurses than any operation—when the men’s wounds are being dressed and the agonized cry of some sufferer will sometimes spread its infecting example from bed to bed through almost a whole ward. But no one who has seen at ordinary times the fortitude and cheerfulness with which the French bear their sufferings and talk of their wounds and of the day when they will be able to get up and go to fight again for their beloved country could ever forget the sight of those rows of quiet beds, so different from the wards in an ordinary hospital. There were no horrible diseases, nothing repulsive or unclean, nothing that is the result of decay and sin. A few hours or days or weeks before these weak and helpless sufferers had been young and strong and vigorous, the physical pick of the manhood of France. Now, when they were not talking or reading or smoking, they lay with closed eyes and uncomplaining wistful faces or looked at one like dumb animals with a marvellous inarticulate patience that seemed to ask what it all meant, and why, when diplomatists differ and nations go to war, it is their poor bodies that have to pay the price.

War and wounds certainly have the effect of putting the human body in its right place and of doing away with all the false shame and prudery with which we are so apt to surround it. When these thousands of men are well and strong again—or as well and strong as they can ever be—it hardly seems possible that they can ever forget the frank purity of their sweet-faced, tender-handed nurses and sisters of mercy, or the lessons of the dignity of the body and of life which they have unconsciously learnt from them.

One day I saw some of the sisters kneeling in the little chapel in the grounds of the Civil Hospital. The choir was singing some kind of a litany, the burden of which was the words “Sauvez la France,” repeated over and over again. It was one of those days when the sound of the guns, from some trick of the wind, as well as from their actual nearness, was more than usually loud, and each time that the three words of the prayer rang out through the open door of the chapel they were followed without a moment’s pause by the booming roar of the heavy shells. And of the two, the cannon that had shattered their limbs or the kneeling women who had soothed and tended them, there was not, I think, much doubt in the minds of the wounded men who were well enough to sit about in the sunny courtyard outside the chapel as to which was the finer force—and the stronger.

THE

FRENCH FRONTIER

FROM

VERDUN TO THE VOSGES.