Fighting France Part 8

I believe in G.o.d, in France and in Victory. I believe in beauty and youth and life. May G.o.d guard me to the end. But, Lord, if my blood is useful for victory, may Thy will be done.

Finally, here is a priest, Father Gilbert de Gironde, second lieutenant in the 81st infantry, who was killed on the seventh of December, 1914, at Ypres, writing his last letter.... For of the twenty-five thousand priests who went off at the beginning of the mobilization, three hundred were called military chaplains, the rest were officers, stretcher-bearers, or common soldiers--and note the 4,000 citations in the army orders which the "Journal Officiel" has published, which report the acts of courage and of bravery done by these priests on the battle field:

To die young. To die a priest. To die as a soldier in the attack, marching to the a.s.sault in full sacerdotal garb, perhaps in the act of granting an absolution; to shed my blood for the Church, for France, for her Allies, for all those who carry in their hearts the same ideal I do, and for the others also, that they may know the joy of belief ...

how beautiful that is, how beautiful that is!

Catholics, Protestants, Jews, priests, ministers and rabbis, that is what they write. It is a belittling, a profanation, that, in spite of myself, I have separated and differentiated among them. For down there, in the b.l.o.o.d.y mud of the trenches, they are one body which lives together and dies together.

There was a little Breton who, on the Battle field of the Marne, was shot in the chest. The death agony at once set in, and in his agony he asked for a crucifix. No priest happened to be on the spot, there was only a Jewish rabbi. The rabbi ran to get the crucifix, he brought it to the lips of the dying man, and he, in his turn, was killed!...

In a little barrack in the hollow of one of the depressions at Verdun lived together a priest, a minister and a rabbi. We often saw the place. On the evening after a frightful battle, they were all three in the charnel house where the dead bodies are brought. They were surrounded by stretcher-bearers, who said to them:

"We do not dare throw earth on the bodies of our comrades without a prayer being said over them."

The Catholic priest asked to what faith they belonged.

"We do not know. How can we find out? But can't you arrange among yourselves?"

"Well, we shall bless them one after the other."

And there in the bleeding night was seen the incomparable sight of the three men side by side, the Catholic, the Protestant and the Jew, reciting the last prayer and disappearing....

M. Maurice Barres, the celebrated French writer, from whose magnificent book, "The Spiritual Families of France," I have borrowed a great number of the letters I have quoted, has pointed out that all French churches are fighting in this hour, forming one great church.

Yes, every church and every saint is fighting! These saints belong to all beliefs, some of them to no belief. But one religion has united and solidified them all--the religion of their country, the religion of Liberty, the religion of civilization. All speak the same prayer, all have the same faith in their hearts, all fall martyrs in the same cause.

The old walls which, in times of peace, separated parties and men, have crumbled into dust at the same time when the German sh.e.l.ls crumbled into dust the little village churches. An infinite cathedral, a cathedral that is invisible and great has risen on high.

It is the cathedral of the faith of France, in which all faiths commune in the same hope--a cathedral which time and suffering and death itself shall not destroy.

III

FRANCE SUFFERING BUT NOT BLED WHITE

Listen to the man in the street when he speaks--that man in the street who reflects public opinion whether it is just or unjust, genuine or sophisticated. Listen to him when he speaks and you will hear him say:

"Yes, we know. France has a well tempered spirit. But the blood is gone out of her body. France would like to fight on, to fight to the bitter end, but France is suffering. France is worn out. France is bled white."

France is suffering ... that is true. In the cataclysm that she did not wish for, that she did not start, that she did not prepare, she has lost more than a million men. And what men they were! The Ecole Normale, which is the preparatory school for the French university, lost seventy per cent of its pupils. That means that three-quarters of the thinkers, the literary men, the scientists, the philosophers, the professors of the France of tomorrow have been wiped out. They were the flower of her youth, the elite of her intelligence. Add to that seven departments, roughly 20,000 square kilometers in area, which have been invaded, devastated, ruined and pillaged. In these seven departments all the machinery, all the raw materials, all the merchandise, all the furniture even to the door-k.n.o.bs and the boards in the floors have been taken away. These departments were among the richest and most prosperous of those on which France prided herself most industrially.

Add to that the cultivation that has been destroyed, the soil that has been made untillable, the trees that have been cut down, the roads that have been torn up and the bridges that have been destroyed. All the misery, all the mourning, all the sickness: a million wounded and injured men who have been lost as living forces by a nation which did not have too many inhabitants. Add the hundred thousand prisoners Germany sends back to us who have been made tuberculous, paralytics, nervous wrecks or lunatics because they have been physically maltreated. Yes, France is suffering.

But it is not true that she is worn out. It is not true that she is bled white. The horrible hope Germany had formed of emptying France of her strength, of leaving her, fighting for breath and conquered, beaten to the earth for centuries to come, has not been realized.

France always stands upright, her arm is still strong, her muscles vigorous and her blood rich.

To destroy the lie that France is bled white, we must let figures, facts, statistics and definite proofs speak. The public shall judge for itself....

A nation that is worn out and bled white has no army to defend itself.

France not only still has an army, but she has an army that is numerically and materially stronger than it was at the war's beginning. In 1914, at the Marne, France had an army of 1,500,000 men; today, after four years of war, France has on her battle front, in the war zone, an army of 2,750,000 men.

But the value of fighting men today lies only in the artillery they have to support them behind the lines. It lies in the sh.e.l.ls the artillery is able to fire, in all that material that makes up the sinews of war of the present day. Here we find the most extraordinary and marvelous effort that history records. France, invaded, occupied, weakened; France that had no munitions industry prior to 1914--or a small munitions industry at best--that France has built up a war industry that is doubtless the best in the world, which is equal to the German war industry and on which the Allies can draw in the common cause.

Listen to these figures and keep them in your heads. They are vouched for by M. Millerand, who was minister of war during the first year of hostilities:

The Battle of the Marne emptied our storehouses.

On the seventeenth of September, 1914, the minister of war, who had then been scarcely three weeks in office, was informed that munitions threatened to fail our artillery, and that it was necessary without delay to bring to the front 100,000 sh.e.l.ls per day instead of 13,500 for the .75 guns. This was merely a beginning. Three days later, on the twentieth of September, the minister a.s.sembled at Bordeaux the representatives of the munitions industry and divided them up into regional groups. At the head of each one he made one establishment or one individual the responsible person. In the face of difficulties which could not be conceived unless they had been overcome, with establishments diminished in personnel as well as in raw material, inexperienced for the most part in the complex and delicate operations which were expected of them, the manufacture of sh.e.l.ls for the .75's mounted from 147,000 which it had been in the month of August, 1914, to 1,970,000 in the month of January, 1915, and then to 3,396,000 during the month of July, 1915.

222 .75 guns per month have been constructed since the month of May, 1915. 227 were constructed in the month of July, 407 in the month of January, 1916. For this construction, as for all the others, once a start was made, there was no stopping it.

All orders for heavy guns had been countermanded at the beginning of August, 1914. They were resumed in the month of September, 1914. Seventy-five per cent of the orders for heavy guns, on which we got along until April, 1917, had been given out between September, 1914, and the thirty-first of October, 1915. In the first seven months of the war, from September, 1914, to April, 1915, there were constructed three hundred and sixty pieces of heavy artillery. On August first, 1914, we had only sixty-eight batteries. A year later, to the day, on the first of August, 1915, we had two hundred and seventy-two batteries of heavy artillery.

Now consider these figures, given out by M. Andre Tardieu, High Commissioner of the French Republic at Was.h.i.+ngton, in a letter to the Hon. Newton D. Baker, Secretary of War:

In the matter of heavy artillery, in August, 1914, we had only three hundred guns distributed among the various regiments. In June, 1917, we had six thousand heavy guns, all of them modern. During our spring offensive in 1917, we had roughly one heavy gun for every twenty-six meters of front. If we had brought together all our heavy artillery and all our trench artillery, we would have had one gun for every eight meters in the battle sector.

In August, 1914, we were making twelve thousand sh.e.l.ls for the .75's per day, now we are making two hundred and fifty thousand sh.e.l.ls for the .75's and one hundred thousand sh.e.l.ls for the heavy guns per day.

If you wish to consider the weight of the sh.e.l.ls which fell on the German trenches during our last offensives, you will find the following figures for each linear meter:

Field artillery 407 kilos Trench artillery 203 kilos Heavy artillery 704 kilos High Power artillery 12 kilos ---- Total 1442 kilos

And these are the figures for the monthly expenditure in munitions for the .75's alone:

July, 1916 6,400,000 sh.e.l.ls September, 1916 7,000,000 sh.e.l.ls October, 1916 5,500,000 sh.e.l.ls

During the last offensive the total expenditure amounted to twelve million projectiles of all calibers.

This incomparable war industry has permitted us not only to fight, to defend ourselves and to attack the enemy, but also to supply our friends, our Allies, with the munitions necessary to fight. Up to January, 1918, these are the amounts of munitions France was able to hand over to the nations fighting at her side in Europe:

1,350,000 rifles 800,000,000 cartridges 16,000,000 automatic rifles 10,000 mitrailleuses 2,500 heavy guns 4,750 airplanes

And to France has come the honor of making the light artillery for the American Army--amounting to several hundred guns per month.

A nation that is worn out and bled white has an empty treasury and is no longer able to obtain taxes from its ruined citizens. Let us consider what France had done in a financial way in this war.

From the first of August, 1914, to the first of January, 1918, the French Parliament voted war credits amounting to twenty billions of dollars. Of this enormous fund only two billions have been borrowed from outside sources; all the remainder has been subscribed or paid for by taxation or by loans in France herself. More than a billion dollars has been loaned to her Allies by France.

In 1917 France had the heaviest budget in all her history. The single item of taxes was raised to six billion francs ($1,200,000), and these taxes were paid to the penny, although ten million Frenchmen were mobilized in the Army, in the factories, and on the farms, or were untaxable in the occupied regions.

In 1915, 1916 and 1917 France raised three great national loans. That of 1915 amounted to exactly 13,307,811,579 francs, 40 centimes, of which 6,017 millions were paid in hard cash. That of October, 1916, amounted in round numbers to ten billions francs, of which more than five billions were paid in hard cash. That of December, 1917, amounted to 10,629,000,000 francs, of which 5,254 millions were paid in cash.

Thus, in spite of the war, her invaded territories, and her mobilized citizens, France has in three years raised three national loans of almost seventeen billions francs in hard cash. That is three times the amount of the war indemnity she paid Prussia in 1871.