For ten days the Bavarians had Gerbeviller.  They tore it to pieces before they got it, then burned the remains because they said the population sniped at them.  All the orgy of Louvain was repeated here, unchronicled to our people at home.  The church looks like a Swiss cheese from shell-holes.  Its steeple was bound to be an observation post, reasoned the Germans; so they poured shells into it.  But the brewery had a tall chimney which was an even better lookout, and the brewery is the one building unharmed in the town.  The Bavarians knew that they would need that for their commissariat.  For a Bavarian will not fight without his beer.  The land was littered with barrels after they had gone.  I saw some in trenches occupied by Bavarian reserves not far back of where their firing-line had been.

“However, the fact that the brewery is intact and the church in ruins does not prove that a brewery is better than a church.  It only proves which is the Lord’s side in this war,” said Sister Julie.  But I get ahead of my story.

In the middle of the main street were half a dozen smoke-blackened houses which remained standing, an oasis in the sea of destruction, with doors and windows intact facing gaps where doors and windows had been.  We entered with a sense of awe of the chance which had spared these buildings.

“Sister Julie!” the major called.

A short, sturdy nun of about sixty years answered cheerily and appeared in the dark hall.  She led us into the sitting-room, where she spryly placed chairs for our little party.  She was smiling; her eyes were sparkling with a hospitable and kindly interest in us, while I felt, on my part, that thrill of curiosity that one always has when he meets some celebrated person for the first time—­curiosity no less keen than if I were to meet Barbara Frietchie.

Through all that battle of ten days, with the cannon never silent day or night, with shells screaming overhead and crashing into houses; through ten days of thunder and lightning and earthquake, she and her four sister associates remained in Gerbeviller.  When the town was fired they moved from one building to another.  They nursed both wounded French and Germans; also wounded townspeople who could not flee with the others.

“You were not frightened?  You did not think of going away?” she was asked.

“Frightened?” she answered.  “I had not time to think of that.  Go away?  How could I when the Lord’s work had come to me?”

President Poincare went in person to give her the Legion of Honour, the first given to a woman in this war; so rarely given to a woman, and here bestowed with the love of a nation.  Sister Marie was in the kitchen at the time, cooking the meal for the sick for whom the sisters are still caring.  So Sister Julie took the President of France into the kitchen to meet Sister Marie, quite as she would take you or me.  A human being is simply a human being to Sister Julie, to be treated courteously; and great men may not cause a meal for the sick to burn.  After the complexity of French politics, President Poincare was anything but unfavourably impressed by the incident.