THE BATTLEFIELDS OF THE OURCQ.

BY EDMUND GOSSE, C.B.

In the midst of the delicious Ile de France there lies an open piece of country roughly bounded by three rivers—the Marne, the Ourcq, and the Nonette. It is a high plateau, with rolling hills and winding valleys, fertile and smiling. It forms the northern extremity of the famous district of Brie, richly productive, the kitchen-garden of Paris, which lies to the west of it—surprisingly, alarmingly near. This is the battlefield of the Marne, or more exactly of the Ourcq, and was the scene, in September 1914, of what will probably be looked upon in history as one of the most portentous, and most obscurely enthralling, of the combats of the world. At the courteous invitation of the French Government, and under the charge of a distinguished staff-officer, Captain Gabriel Puaux, I paid a visit to these battlefields towards the end of last September. It was a pilgrimage wholly objective and sentimental, for I have no pretensions of any kind to a knowledge of the arts of war. I can but give a visual impression of what the scenes looked like two years after the stupendous event.

We proceeded in a War Office car almost directly east from the gates of Paris, along the great high road towards Strasburg. We reached in some seventeen miles the point, at Claye-Souilly, which marks the extreme advance of the German armies. Their outposts came within sight of the village of Claye, where they found the French awaiting them, but they did not cross the bridge over the Ourcq canal. It overwhelms the imagination to realise, on the spot, how close the Germans were to the zone of Paris on this 5th of September 1914. Civilisation, as observed by the angels in Mr. Hardy’s drama, might well then seem to hang by a single thread over the abyss. At this moment, as Mr. Belloc says, ‘at the maximum of its developed energy, at the highest degree of its momentum,’ the horrible German machine was first checked and then put out of gear by the splendid genius of the French Higher Command. We were eager to see the places where France earned for herself this endless meed of glory.

Soon after passing Claye we left the high road, and turned north into a labyrinth of byways. The weather was superb; it was one of those blue days of late September, which are apt to collect to themselves all the best beauty of the year in France. From dawn to sunset not a cloud rose in the sky; there reigned a soft continual radiance in which the colour of every object took peculiar intensity. The first hamlet we reached, Charny, brought us to the only disappointment of our day; for we failed, after much inquiry, to find the place of death, or even of burial, of the poet Charles Péguy, who has been the intellectual mascot of this war to France. His gallant death opened the battle of the Marne. Under the shelter of a slope, he and his men fought until they were driven into the open. The officer who led them, and his lieutenant, were soon killed; Péguy then had no sooner taken the command than a ball struck him full in the forehead. His death marked the moment of transition between France in danger and France redeemed. We endeavoured to follow his track, and we drove through Villeroy, where there is little or nothing left to see. The rustic calm of these grey hamlets is unbroken, and at first all that tells us of the tragedy is the appearance from this point onwards of the flags which mark where the French soldiers lie.

The dominant feature of these rural battlefields, as we saw them in the full upland sunshine on that long splendid September day, was the scattered profusion of little tricolor flags. A long blue horizon, broken by golden haystacks against the sky, gave a general tone of greyness to the earth, which, green with oats, livid with beetroot, brown with parched lucerne, rolled beneath that vast expanse. In the midst of this harmony of tender hues there stood out sharply the hard red, white, and blue of the little flags, planted now solitary and now in clusters, without arrangement or system—the bright flags flapping and fluttering in the wind as far as the eye could reach, like charming indigenous flowers, like brilliant ixias on some pale South African veldt; and each marking the spot where a hero fell. At first, a stick with a képi on the top of it, or even a cravat or a medal, had to serve for a provisional mark, but now the little splendid flag seems to be a permanent memorial. It leaps from a corner of the beetroot field, from a slope of the harvest, from the turn of an apple-orchard, from the edge of the road, and in its singleness and in its multitude alike, it marks this district of the Brie a holy land for ever.

But this is to anticipate a little. We passed north through Iverny, where there was a great deal of fighting, and then eastwards, skirting Montyon, where the Germans, pressed hard in their retreat, threw nine hundred bombs into a duckpond. It was only in the neighbourhood of the graceful hill of Montyon that the flags began to be noticed. In Montyon we observed the first ruined cottage; but it is at Barcy, the next hamlet to the north-east, that the vestiges of war begin to be numerous. Barcy was the centre of the enemy’s line on September 6, and this village has not made much effort to recover from its heavy devastation. These little communes of the Ile de France possess nothing of the architectural charm which gives so exquisite and tender a beauty to many a village of Southern England, but most of them have a single feature, the church. In the case of Barcy, the broad village street forms an avenue closed, at its northern end, by the graceful parish church, with its short pointed spire. This building is violently injured by the bombardment, and looks as though some monster had bitten large pieces out of it; while no attempt has yet been made to restore it.

Other buildings at Barcy have been patched or mended. It is probable that this work of restoration has been delayed by the uncertainty which has prevailed as to the part which the State was prepared to take in this rehabilitation. Only ten days after my visit the French Government, for the first time, assumed the full responsibility for the rebuilding of private property destroyed in the war, and now, therefore, so soon as labour is forthcoming, the work may be expected to go merrily forward. What is involved is so enormous that the imagination fails to follow the course which it must take. Up to the present time it has been left to private enterprise, and as regards these villages of the Marne and Ourcq, except where the owner has been in a hurry to resume his normal life, the bombarded villages have been left in a deplorable disarray.

On the open down above Barcy, and quite close to the road, a peasant was loading a hay-cart with the help of two sullen-looking men in rough white clothes. These were German prisoners, and we were moved by curiosity to stop and talk to the peasant. He, from his half-built rick, replied with stolidity to our questions. ‘He had no complaints to make of the prisoners,’ he said; ‘that one’, indicating a burly captive, ‘really works quite well.’ ‘Had they learned to speak French?’ we asked. ‘Oh no!’ ‘How, then, did the work get on?’ ‘Ah,’ said the master, ‘we show them what they have to do, and they point at what they want.’ During this, and more, conversation the prisoners pursued their slow labour, not glancing at us or taking more notice than cattle would. Strange it seemed, and almost inhuman, that these Germans should have lived two years in this sequestered French village and that neither on the one side nor on the other should there have been the smallest approximation of language. The peasant ‘had no complaints to make,’ and that was the sum of their relations.

It was beyond Barcy that the bright flags began to be abundant. The eye had no longer any need to seek for them; the garden of death was now lavish of its bouquets of flowers. They were difficult to distinguish among the beetroot, easy among the oats, insistent on the grey expanse of stubble. Soon after leaving Barcy, at the corner where the road turns abruptly south, there is a great cluster of them, and, always at a little distance off, the plain black crosses which mark the spots where Germans are buried. Presently we paused to examine the great monument raised to the memory of officers and men who fell in the battle of the Ourcq. It is garish in colour, and too much adorned with symbols in silvered cardboard and wreaths of arsenical green. No doubt it is provisional; a memorial in severer taste will ultimately testify to the riper genius of France. We descend to Chambry, another tiny village of Brie, and here we meet with a feature of poignant importance. In the great ‘push,’ the retiring Germans occupied the cemetery of Chambry, a walled enclosure at the summit of the village; this was a position of great strength, commanding the countryside in every direction.

The Germans used this cemetery as a citadel, and the holes which they made for their guns in the wall, and the breaches in the parapet, are still untouched. As their army retired the enemy were obliged to withdraw from this position, and there was a violent struggle, in the course of which the French regained the enclosure, and used it in their turn. They fired with full effect from behind the granite tombstones. After the battle the whole cemetery was a scene of ruin and confusion, but of this nothing remains now, except the gun-holes and breaches in the wall, which have not been repaired. All the monuments of the dead, on the other hand, have been replaced with extreme piety, and, the cemetery not having been nearly full before, its free spaces have been used to hold the tombs of officers and men who fell in the battle. I noted, among many of pathetic interest, the stone erected in memory of Lieut. Quiliquini, who brought his Tunisian troops, the 8th Tirailleurs, from Sfax. There seemed something which moved the fancy sorrowfully in the idea of these loyal Africans who fell to ward off the barbarians’ blow at Paris. Outside the cemetery local patriotism has fitted up, in a barn, a sort of rough museum of objects found on the battlefields. No doubt this will be a great attraction when once the tourist reassembles in his myriads. At present the solitude is broken only by occasional privileged mourners, ‘brisés d’émotion et de tristesse.’

Proceeding south, we were soon out of the battlefield of the Ourcq, the frontier being marked at Penchard by another rather garish monument to the fallen officers. This is the place where three thousand Morocco troops dashed with memorable fury of attack up the Penchard hill. At this point the road turns, revealing, far below, to the left, the clustered houses of Meaux, with its cathedral, seated in a rich glade across a curve of the silver Marne. The first stage of our pilgrimage was over, and we paused an hour in the exquisite city of which Bossuet was the Eagle-bishop. Meaux is celebrated for the miracle which snatched it from the very jaws of the dog, and prevented it from becoming another Arras, another Reims. The catastrophe seemed inevitable, when at six o’clock on September 5 a patrol of Uhlans appeared in the city. All day long they were close to Meaux, the population of which had given themselves up for lost three days before. The bombardment of the cathedral actually began, but, as by the direct interposition of God, no shell touched the building, and then, under the pressure of the English army, the Germans retired altogether. The situation of Meaux, with its row of great seventeenth-century mills on a stone bridge spanning the river—mills which still produce immense quantities of flour for Paris—is as picturesque as that of any provincial city in France, and on the occasion of our recent visit, with its brimming river, its ancient russet mills, its noble church, all bathed in the liquid gold of September, it seemed lovelier than ever before. The only sign of disturbance is the modern bridge, which the English blew up for strategical purposes, without hurting the old town in any respect.

In leaving Meaux to return to the battlefields we took a northward road almost parallel with that by which we had entered, but somewhat to the east of it, thus crossing the battlefields at a point a couple of miles farther on in the German retreat. There is little to see close to Meaux, but presently the graves begin, many of them gay with dahlias and chrysanthemums. We descended to the village of Varreddes, which takes a prominent place in the chronicle of the fighting. The struggle here was very heavy. Varreddes is a rather large village, built a little distance to the south of the canal of the Ourcq, which makes at this place a great bend, surrounding the village on three sides, while the Marne nearly isolates it on the fourth. Hence it was held by the enemy with determination as long as possible. At Varreddes the Germans did dreadful things. They ordered the population of the village to leave it at once, and a group of seventeen very old men, who were too infirm to move quickly, they set up against a wall and shot in cold blood. The priest, a venerable man of seventy-six years, they seized as a hostage, and killed in their retreat.

Many bright new roofs and walls testify in the village of Varreddes to the enterprise of the inhabitants, who have ventured to rebuild their ruined houses. The church, which has some good thirteenth-century features, seems to be intact. And yet it is precisely at Varreddes that the scheme of the battle, as it swept from west to east, is most intelligible to a civilian. The intensity of the fighting is proved by the profusion of graves, whose flags glitter and shimmer, with their petals of red, white, and blue, in every direction. Farther on, above Etrépilly, a large turfed reservoir, perched on a hillock, forms a landmark, from which the eye explores in every direction the rolling country, intersected by scarcely visible glens or trenches, through which the rivers wind. On the summit of this commanding height we found a curious monument, which called for an explanation which no one seemed competent to give. It consists of a metal shield of brilliant vermilion and azure, surmounted by seven flags—one of them the American flag—and addressed in large letters, ‘Les Prisonniers de Guerre aux Héros de la Marne.’ What prisoners these were we asked one another in vain. But it made our hearts, with a touch of added mystery, thrill in fresh response to those myriads of memorial flowers that twinkled and sparkled on the circle of brown fields around us. There is one object of horror that attracts attention here. It was a great barn or hangar, in which the bodies of the fallen Germans were heaped up after the battle, and then burned by their comrades. It is now nothing but a huge skeleton of twisted iron, grimacing at the sky.

Between Varreddes and Etrépilly, as we prepare to cross the Ourcq, we pass a little tavern at the left-hand side of the road, which carries on a newly painted sign the name ‘À l’Obus.’ The excuse for this is that on its gable-end, close to a window, it displays an unexploded German shell, rusty and red, which half penetrated the wall and stuck there, without bursting. Similar bombs are already pointed out as curiosities in tree-trunks, and will doubtless be much exploited when tourists begin to be admitted. On the east from Varreddes we had seen, through a screen of trees, the Marne below us, and the great bridge at Germigny-l’Evêque, which the Germans blew up behind them in their final retreat. We are now in the very midst of the worst slaughter of September 6 and 7, 1914, but it is very curious to see how little sign of it is left in the countryside. Occasional remnants of barbed wire, and here and there the trenches of defence, might easily be overlooked by a hasty traveller. He will more readily notice that here are orchards, starred with the rose-colour of ripening apples; there feathery boskage of acacias delicately green; here we run between violently contrasted fields, with the sulphur of mustard on one side, the purple of beetroot on the other; there the oat-harvest descends to little copses of chestnut and beech, that brood over some unseen rivulet. Everywhere the peace of uniform rustic experience, unaltered through the sober centuries, would seem stamped upon the landscape, if the little occasional groups of flapping tricolors were not there to remind us that only two brief years ago the question whether European liberty should or should not be overwhelmed for ever was fought out here with unsurpassable fury and tenacity.

The winding walled hamlet of Etrépilly is bright with the sunshine on its new orange and velvet-brown roofs, by which the damage done by the German shells is concealed. This is not the case with the little village of Vincy-Manœuvres, through which we pass next on our northward course. Vincy was heavily shelled on September 7, and still presents an appearance of dismal dilapidation. Without doubt, this is a matter which depends on the enterprise or wealth of individual proprietors, and it will be curious to see what immediate effect the decision of the Government to repair all private property at the cost of the State will have in these remote communes. It was on September 9, 1914, that the German army made a final stand on the wooded height between Vincy-Manœuvres and Acy-en-Multien, from which they were dislodged next day by the army of Manoury. This was the third and conclusive stage of the great struggle, in the course of which the sixth French army pushed back the half-encircling corps of Kluck’s reinforcements, and here we felt it necessary to bear in mind, as much as the peaceful uniformity of the landscape would permit, the great double line of attack and retreat which we had now twice traversed.

We sped on north, and were now no longer in the department of the Seine-et-Marne, but in that of the Oise. No place was more prominent in the battle than Acy-en-Multien, which we now approached. This must have been, and indeed still is, much the most attractive and picturesque of the villages which the battle of the Ourcq has immortalised. Acy lies in a wooded dimple of the high plateau, and it is scattered broadly over its site, more like an English than a French township. When it is considered with what violence the Germans were hunted out of Acy, it is surprising how few marks of their presence are left. One large house, of château pretensions, is a complete wreck, having been bombed out of existence by German shells, but the beautiful and curious church, with its twelfth-century octagonal tower and its rudiments of earliest Gothic ornament, is, so far as the eye can judge, intact. At Acy a prodigious number of French soldiers are buried in a vast cemetery, which seems to have been improvised for the occasion. The piety of relatives and friends keeps these graves so lavishly covered with nosegays that the cemetery looks like a flower-garden. The epitaphs and sentiments on the tombstones are poignant, and we lingered long and with great emotion in this sacred melancholy place. I was particularly struck by one inscription—that on the tombstone of a certain Charles Schulz, who died as a corporal, leading on his men. He had been, till the war broke out, a Protestant pastor, but in what locality the epitaph does not say. The text chosen for his place of burial—‘il tint ferme, parcequ’il voyait celui qui est invisible’—may well have been the echo of his own sentiments when he exchanged his ministry for the terrible duty of fighting for his fatherland. By his name, he was doubtless an Alsatian, and curiosity was eager to know more of this Protestant pastor-corporal who sleeps in the pretty cemetery of Acy-en-Multien.

In leaving Acy, our motor lost its way up a lane that led only to a farmyard. By this happy chance, in our descent or retreat, we enjoyed an exquisite view of the village, nestled in its grove of chestnuts around the spire of its rather fantastic church—a view which in other conditions we should have missed, since these villages, sunken in folds of the upland, have a strange faculty for making themselves invisible at a little distance. Recovering our route, we continued northward, over the high rounded plateau of the Multien, which is the local name for this part of the department of the Oise. The character of the landscape now changes, and becomes very English. Proceeding from Acy to Nanteuil-le-Hardouin is like traversing the high parts of Gloucestershire; the lie of the land exactly resembles that of the Cotswolds, and I could easily have persuaded myself that we were driving from Stow-in-the-Wold to Burford. It is obvious that this rolling country, here entirely deprived of streams and glens, offers an extraordinary opportunity for the evolutions of troops, but remarkably little shelter for them.

Nanteuil, a gloomy village, almost a town, with winding narrow streets, severely grey, and a great church which towers over the wayfarer, marks the limit of the battle north-eastwards. Although there was a good deal of fighting around Nanteuil, it shows, so far as we could perceive, no trace of injury, even on the picturesque façade of the church. We left it to enter a long avenue of oaks, and there was no mark of any kind to indicate where the battle ended. My companion humorously remarked that it was the duty of the Government to put up a poteau with the inscription, ‘Ici finit le champ de bataille de l’Ourcq’! But in the absence of such a guide-post to aid the imagination of the traveller there was nothing in the rolling agricultural landscape, from which the little flowery flags had now disappeared, to indicate that here there had been any disturbance of the peace of the world.

At this point, therefore, a picture of the battlefields of the Ourcq as they now exist should end. But an impression was awaiting us at the threshold of the very next village, Baron, which was perhaps the most poignant and certainly the most extraordinary of our whole day. As we motored along we noticed, just before reaching Baron, a high wall on the left hand containing a marble plaque, with an inscription in gold letters. Curiosity prompted us to stop and read this inscription, which stated that in the house behind this wall the musical composer, Albéric Magnard, was shot and burned on Wednesday, September 3, 1914. A funereal poem by M. Edmond Rostand described how

had lived there, died to preserve the honour of his art. We were therefore close to the scene of a horrible crime, which the magnitude of the events that closely followed it has somewhat obscured in memory. Albéric Magnard, the author of ‘Guercœur’ and other operas, born on June 9, 1865, was one of the most eminent and successful musicians of France. He had for many years possessed a country-seat at Baron, where he had built a little château, Le Manoir des Fontaines, in which he had brought together a collection of musical instruments and books which was famous.

We were reading the inscription on the wall, when a door in the latter opened and a sad woman appeared, asking us if we would like to see the place where Monsieur Magnard died. She led us through a pergola of climbing plants to a point where we suddenly saw before us what resembled a scene in some opera—a garden blazing with begonias and African marigolds, surrounded on three sides by a graceful balustrade, and velvety with green sward. Below the balustrade a little park, beautifully kept, testified to the elegant taste of the proprietor. But in the midst of this brilliance and neatness the livid shell of the house itself stood untouched since the disaster, producing in the midst of the bright parterres and trim lawns an extraordinary effect of sinister and ironic horror. It was like seeing a skeleton in a ball-dress, or a wreath of roses round a skull.

The good woman, who herself had lost in the fighting her two sons, described to us the murder. A troop of Germans was marching down the road and, attracted by something in the Manoir des Fontaines, they had insisted on being admitted by the door at which we entered. M. Magnard was in his bath-room, at the back of the house. He is believed to have appeared at the window, and a German soldier immediately shot him dead. They then set fire to the house, and they watched it till the half-calcined body of the composer fell through the rafters on to the floor of the room below. Meanwhile, they took his son and tied him, facing the scene of his father’s murder, to the trunk of a tree in the garden, and prepared to shoot him. But three peasants out of the village of Baron swore that he was not the son of M. Magnard, but of the gardener; and so, when their work was done, the Germans went off, leaving the boy alive, to be released by the villagers. The exact conditions under which the famous composer was killed are mysterious, and are likely to remain so, since no French eye witnessed the actual commission of the crime. It is possible that he offered, or appeared likely to offer, some resistance to the aggressors.

M. Rostand’s verses suggest that, in the version of the event which reached him, Magnard was attempting ‘to preserve the honour of his art.’ Whether he obeyed an instinct of self-preservation, or whether he fell a passive victim, matters very little. The incident in any case illustrates that Teutonic spirit of anarchism which Viscount Grey has stigmatised as a menace to the future of civilisation.