My Year of the War: Including an Account of Experiences with the Troops in France and the Record of a Visit to the Grand Fleet Which is Here Given for the First Time in its Complete FormPalmer, Frederick
History
My Year of the War: Including an Account of Experiences with the Troops in France and the Record of a Visit to the Grand Fleet Which is Here Given for the First Time in its Complete Form
Palmer, Frederick
World War, 1914-1918 -- Personal narratives
"They will make a great ado over you when you go."
"I must stay in Gerbéviller. If I stayed during the fighting and when the
Germans were here, why should I leave now? Gerbéviller is my
home. There is much to do here and there will be more to do when
the people who were driven away return."
These nuns saw their townspeople stood up against a wall and shot;
they saw their townspeople killed by shells. The cornucopia of war's
horrors was emptied at their door. And women of a provincial town,
who had led peaceful, cloistered lives, they did not blench or falter in
the presence of ghastliness which only men are supposed to have
the stoicism to witness.
What feature of the nightmare had held most vividly in Sister Julie's
mind? It is hard to say; but the one which she dwelt on was about the
boy and the cow. The invaders, when they came in, ordered that no
inhabitant leave his house, on pain of death. A boy of ten took his
cow to pasture in the morning as usual. He did not see anything
wrong in that. The cow ought to go to pasture. And he was shot, for
he broke a military regulation. He might have been a spy using the
cow as a blind. War does not bother to discriminate. It kills.
Sister Julie can enjoy a joke, particularly on the Germans, and her
cheerful smile and genuine laugh are a lesson to all people who draw
long faces in time of trouble and weep over spilt milk. A buoyant
temperament and unshaken faith carried her through her ordeal.
Though her hair is white, youth's optimism and confidence in the
future and the joy of victory for France overshadowed the present.
The town and church would be rebuilt; children would play in the
streets again; there was a lot of the Lord's work to do yet.
In every word and thought she is French--French in her liveliness of
spirit and quickness of comprehension; wholly French there on the
borderland of Germany. If we only went to the outskirts of the town,
she reminded us, we could see how the soldiers of her beloved
France fought and why she was happy to have remained in
Gerbéviller to welcome them back.
In sight of that intact brewery and that wreck of a church is a gentle
slope of open field, cut by a road. Along the crest were many mounds
as thick as the graves of a cemetery, and by the side of the road was
a temporary monument above a big mound, surrounded by a sanded
walk and a fence. The dead had been thickest at this point, and here
they had been laid in a vast grave. The surviving comrades had
made that monument; and, in memory of what the dead had fought
for, the living said that they were not yet ready to quit fighting.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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