French Officer Portrays Horrors of War - 1914

Weary of Killing

French Officer Vividly Portrays Horrors of War

Afton Enterprise, November 19, 1914

Vividly portraying the horrors of the war in Europe, in fighting in mud-filled trenches with French and German and Briton tearing at each other like savages, killing until exhausted, but always killing, Sergeant Louys of the Two Hundred and Sixteenth regiment of the French infantry reserves has written a remarkable pen picture of the ruthless war in a letter which his fiancée in this city [New York City] has just received.

 

Writing from his cot in the General hospital at Havre, the soldier concludes this grim epic of a modern war with a picture of the Sisters of Charity.

 

With his company, the Nineteenth, the sergeant found himself in a trench near Fontenoy, where the conflict raged fiercely, day and night.  After five days of furious fighting, his company was sent back for a short rest, while fresh troops piled into the mud-filled trenches into which a full, leaden rain was dripping.

 

"Like caricatures fashioned of mud, suddenly called to life, we hobbled wearily out of the holes where we had lived under a hell of bursting shells, searing flame and nauseous gases for days," he writes.  "We were relieved by other troops, who saluted us as they passed.

 

"In the trenches we crouch while the shells and bullets from the German infantry play over us--and, alas, on us.  Overhead the moon struggles about in the clouds, for the rain has ceased a little, while mad streaks of white light whisper their way from the German trenches and touch somewhere along our line.  In a moment there is a screaming shell where the light was, and we know that some of our comrades have answered France's last call.

 

"We were not paying much attention to anything after two hours of this.  We just fired when told.  The suddenly at daybreak the Germans came.  Fifty yards away we saw them, in the streaky light that beckons the sun in these table lands.  They came like solid blocks which were machines.  We fired--my God!  We fired into their faces, and they stretched out dead.  But they came on, sometimes shouting, sometimes puffing.  We beat them with the butt ends of our muskets and we stabbed them with our bayonets. It was horrible.

 

"We were exhausted from killing.  Then came the order to abandon the trenches.  There were so many there who would never hear that order, and others who cried out when they found they could not crawl away from those men, who kept on coming and coming. They looked horrible in the new light, with their stubby, dirty faces; their tight  uniforms of the color of the earth.

 

"I walked six miles to Vic-sur-Aisne, to the big hospital.  My way was along the pathway of the fire which had been there a short time before.  Everywhere death and desolation.  How France suffers!  There were tears in my eyes and they were not tears of pain, ma petite.

 

"At Vic-sur-Aisne the surgeon there, after treating me, sent me, with others, to a sanitary train at the station of Villers-Cotterets, 20 miles away.

 

"For 11 days now I am here.  We all are comfortable.  We have the attendance of the best physicians in Havre, and we have, above all, the care of the Catholic Sisters of Charity.

 

"How shall I praise enough these angels of earth?  Of infinite goodness are they, without sentimentality, or affected sensibility.  So I have seen them where death and destruction abounded, and so I see them here--the same.  In these women one find no romantic goodness that is in reality only selfishness projected for self-satisfaction.  One finds the goodness of great souls; the goodness of a pity that is divine.  Here is the spirit of France; France still lives, thank God!  Vive  la France!"