Evening Republican, Volume 18, Number 274, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 19 November 1914 — Woman Saves Town [ARTICLE]

Woman Saves Town

“Boss” of Soissons Greatest Heroine of War. Mme. Jeanne Watteau Macherez, In Absence of Civil Authority, Meets Germans and Convinces Them City Cannot Pay Indemnity. By WILLIAM PHILIP SIMMS. (United Press Staff Correspondent.) Paris. —In Soissons, while shells from opposing French and German batteries criss-crossed over the rooftops, whistling singularly like the air brakes of a train, I got an interview with Mme. Jeanne Watteau Macherez, the greatest heroine of the war. - Mme. Macherez is president, of the Dames Francalses, an organization something like our own Colonial Dames. It was she who, in the absence of all civil authority in Soissons, went out to meet the Germans and outdid them in an attempt to levy a tribute on the city.- When others left the stricken place on the eve of German occupation she took charge; she took over the civil business of the city; she ran the hospitals; she superintended the city’s sanitation, the city’s safety, the city’s street cleaning and everything. The circumstances of my interview with her were of the strangest. A military aviator whom we had seen flying over the city before, dodging behind patches of clouds at an altitude of some 4,000 feet to escape a rain of shells hurled by German batteries planted in rock quarries north of the city, had reported a large force of Germans marching against Soissons at a distance of not more than a mile. The French had gone to meet them; As we talked the rapid-fire guns. were, making a noise something like a threshing machine |n the distance, and an intermittent cackle of rifles could be heard less than a mile off. We stood in the street in front of the city hall. Fifty feet away, in a tiny public park which had but recently smiled with bright flowers, half a dozen men were burying the carcasses of seven horses killed an hour before by a German shell. “If, the Germans get back into the city this time,” I asked, “are you going to stay?” “I shall be all the more needed If they come back,” Mme. Macherez replied simply. “When they came the first time how did they behave?” “They wanted an Indemnity from, us, but I induced their commander to accompany me about the city to prove to him that he was asking too much. . I convinced him that we could give no more than we had." This was Mme. Macherez’s modest way of putting it. Before Seeing her T ha4-been told how by infinite tact she had resisted the demafid for tons of foodstuffs, tobacco and great quantities of wines, and had finally secured . better terms from the Germans. She had bargained like a veteran, tenaciously and at great length, and when at last the Germans were driven back they held her in profound respect. In all I talked with the woman “boss” of Soissons some fifteen minutes. They tell me that this was the longest time she had stood in one spot since the shelling of Soissons had begun. At that she was constantly giving orders and directions, stopping strangers and otherwise carrying on her duties just as though Jthe street were her office. . “And who’s going, to win?” I. asked as she started away. w “We are, of course,” she said with conviction. /‘The hearts M the wornen of Franc'fe are in the fight no less \han are the hearts of the men. Then, too, we have the English with us here

in France and the Russians on the other side of Berlin.” “And what are you getting out of all this?” I almost shouted, for a shell was making its noisy flight overhead, “Just what every true French woman is getting,” she Smiled. “A heart _full of satisfaction.”