The War in 1870

Horowhenua Chronicle, 6 July 1915, Page 2

The War in 1870

« 110 KRUKiS OF BAZmLF-S. One of the laws of war is that civilians firing oil troops may bo summarily executed when taken—and they arc. That the people ol the town fired oil their troops is the German excuse Cor the wholesale executions in I ouvain, and the destruction ol' the town. In acting thus at Lou vain, the Germans acted as they did at Bazeilles in 1870. and at the present time, it is interesting to read the story of the latter village, as told by. 31. Zola 111 his famous novel "The (Downfall," wlienjin are some of the 'best pictures of the horrors of ,\var ever penned. Bazeilles, a village of 2000 inhabitants in 1870. and lying a little way to the south of Sedan, figured prominently in the great battle oil September Ist, in .which 220.000 Germans and 130,000 Frenchmen took part. The battle opened at daybreak, and the Bavarians began to advance across the railway bridge over the Meuse (which the French' had neglected to break down), to the attack on Bazeilles. The village was defended omstinately by the Twelvth French Army Corps, assisted by the civil population, with the result: "The Germans were inflexible; every person not (belonging to the belligerent forces, who was captured with arms in his hands, was shot down there and then, as having .placed himself beyond the law of nations. And their wrath was rising in -presence of the furious resistance offered by the village. The frightful losses they ha.l sustained during nearly five hours combat urged them on to atrocious reprisals. The gutters were running red with blood, corpses were barring the streets, and some crossways wore like oliarnel-houses, whence the rattle of death could be heard ascending to the sky. And they were seen to throw lighted straw into each house -they carried by force. Some of theiin ran ■about with torches, others smeared the walls with petroleum, and soon entire streets were ablaze—Bazeilles blazed. All Bazeille.s was becoming a Flames wore beginning to stream from the lofty windows of the church. Soma soldiers were driving an old lady out of her house after compelling her to give them matches that they might set her bed and her curtains on fire. What with all the lighten wisps of straw flung here and there, and all the petroleum poured, upon the Avails, the conflagrations were spreading from street ;o 1 street. It was Avarfarc as waged by savages—savages . infuriated :by the duration of the struggle, and avenging their dead, their heaps of dead over

whom they had to march. Bands o| men were yelling amid the smoke anc the sparks, amid all the fxightful uproai compounded of dying groans and shrieks falling walls, and discharges of musketry. They scarcely could see one another; large clouds of livid dust, Impregnated with an in sufferable stench of fat and blood, as though laden with all the abominations of massacre, flew up, obscuring the sun. And they were still killing, still destroying in every corner; the human beast was let loose, and the idiotic anger, all the furious j madness of man preying upon man. j And, at last, in front or him, Wei a could see his own house burning* Soldiers had liurried up witli torches, and others were feeding the 'flames with the , remnants of the furniture. The ground floor speedily blazed, and the smoke poured forth from all the gaping wounds of the roof and the front. The adjacent dyoworks, too. were already catching fire; and—oh the pity ot it! — little Auguste, lying in bed. delirious with fever, could still he heard calling for his mother . whose skirts were boginning to burn as her corpse, with its head pounded to pieces, lay there across the threshold. 'Mother, l,ni so thirsty; mother, give me some water,' But the flames roared, the plaint ceased, and then nothing could be distinguished save the domiciling liurrahs of the conquerors!" Three days after: 'Bazeilli's, - — was a picture of destruction, of all the abominable bavoc that devastating war can wreak when with the fury of a blizzard it sweeps through the land. The dead had already been picked up, not a single corpse remained on the paved highway of the village and the rain, was washong away the blood. Some puddles, however, were still quite red, and beside them lay suspicious remnants, things which looked like shreds of flesh ■with what seemed to bo hair adhering to them. But the appalment which froze every heart eaine from the sight of the ruins—the ruins of the village which three days previously had worn such a- smiling aspect witli its pleasant houses girt with gardens, and which now had crumbled to the ground, annihilated, displaying but scraps of walls blackened by the flaimes. The church, a huge funeral pile of smoking beams, was still burning in the centre of the place, whence arose a stout column of black smoke iwhich spread on high like a great tuft of mourning plumes above a hearse. Entire streets had disappeared, nothing remained on either hand—nothing .but piles of calcined stones fringing the gutters amid a mass of soot and cinders, a thick, inky mud, which spread over everything. At the various crossways the corner houses had been razed to the ground, carried away as it were by the .fiery blast winch had blown past these spots. Other houses had suffered less greviously, one bad by chance remained standing, isolated , whilst those on its right and left seemed to have been hacked by shrapnel, their up-reared carcases resembling gaunt skeletons. And everything exhaled an unbearable stench, the nauseating smell of fire, especially the acrid odour of petroleum with which the flooring had been deluged. The Bavarians ,had placed sentinels near the houses which were still burning, and these men, with fixed bayonets and loaded guns, seemed to bo protecting the fires in order that the flames might complete their work. With a threatening gesture, a gutteral when he had to deal -with any olistinate person, the sentry drove back the mere sightseers and the interested parties who were prowling around. Clusters of villagers had collected at a distance and stood there in silence, looking on and quivering with restrained rage. One woman, quite young, with dishevelled hair and in mmP-stained dress, obstinately remained in front of the heaped up, smoking remnants of a little house, the live cinders of which she wished to search although the sell try sternly , forbade her to approach. It was said that this woman's little child had been burnt to death in the house. And all at once, as the Bavarian brutally pushed her aside, she turned round and spat all her furious despair in his face, assailing him with insults which reeked of blood and filth, foul, obscene words which eased her feelings. Three large tumbrels were standing there, one behind the other—scavengers tumbrels, into which, as they pass along the streets of a morning, it is customary to shovel all the refuse of the.previous day; and in Me manner they had < now been filled with corpses; (stopping each time a body was flung into them, and starting off again with a great rumbling of 'wheels to halt once more further on—in this way scouring the ; whole of Bazeilles, until they fairly overflowed with heaped-up corpses. And now, motionless, by the wayside, they were waiting to be taken to the public "shoot," the neighbouring charnel place. Feet protruded from them, upreared in the air; and a hea*d, halfsevered from the trunk, hung over the side of one the vehicles." Such was the fate of Bazeilles and its inhabitants for resisting the Prussians. Jr. Mr Marco Fosella, Levin has a living witness of the above scenes so vividly described in Zola.'s great work. At the time Mr Fosella was a member of the fnternationar"Ainbulance Corps; he was present during the lighting in the two days preceding the lyjjh battle; he was through the battle itself, and in the days that followed saw what war means. He saw the great charge of ■ General Margueritte's regiments of cavalry across the plateau of Illy in a last despairing effort to break through the encircling Prussians; he sanv their formation broken down under heavy fire; he saw them reform again and again; ho saw' the last wave break itself on the Prussian lines, and he saw the remnants fall back defeated. He witnessed the awful scenes of misery on •the Peninsula of Ilges, where 80,000 j French prisoners were herded for days - J without food until they Nwere drafted f off to Germany; the chewed leather belts, the beet fields where the captives had scratched in the soil for the last . vestige of beetroot—eaten ranv, the Uhlans mustering them like dogs mustering sheep, the while prodding along weak from starvation wifli their lances, the trees stripped of their bark by tho famished horses, the ruins of (Bazeiffes and the doom of iihe villagers; he saw it all, and seeing it, he laid aside the Red, Cross uniform for that of France. But above all, says Mr. Fosella, the most horrible andunforgetable thing was the smell of fire and slaughter. I