III The War of Compassion
Officially America declared war on Germany in the spring of 1917; actually she committed her heart to the allied cause in September, 1914, when the first shipment of the supplies of mercy arrived in Paris from the American Red Cross.
There are two ways of waging war: you can fight with artillery and armed men; you can fight with ambulances and bandages. There’s the war of destruction and the war of compassion. The one defeats the enemy directly with force; the other defeats him indirectly by maintaining the morale of the men who are fighting and, what is equally important, of the civilians behind the lines. Belgium would not be the utterly defiant and unconquered nation that she is to-day, had it not been for the mercy of Hoover and his disciples. Their voluntary presence made the captured Belgian feel that he was earning the thanks of all time—that the eyes of the world were upon him. They were neutrals, but their mere presence condemned the cause that had brought them there. Their compassion waged war against the Hun. The same is true of the American Ambulance Units which followed the French Armies into the fiercest of the carnage. They confirmed the poilu in his burning sense of injustice. That they, who could have absented themselves, should choose the damnation of destruction and dare the danger, convinced the entire French nation of its own righteousness. And it was true of the girls at the American hospitals who nursed the broken bodies which their brothers had rescued. It was true of Miss Holt’s Lighthouse for the training of blinded soldiers, which she established in Paris within eight months of war’s commencement. It was true of the American Relief Clearing House in Paris which, up to January, 1917, had received 291 shipments and had distributed eight million francs. By the time America put on armour, the American Red Cross, as the army’s expert in the strategy of compassion, found that it had to take over more than eighty-six separate organisations which had been operating in France for the best part of two years.
One cannot show pity with indignant hands and keep the mind neutral. The Galilean test holds true, “He who is not for me is against me.” You cannot leave houses, lands, children, wife—everything that counts—for the Kingdom of Heaven’s sake without developing a rudimentary aversion for the devil. All of which goes to prove that America’s heart was fighting for the Allies long before her ambassador requested his passports from the Kaiser.
The American Red Cross Commission landed in France on the 12th of June, 1917, seven days ahead of the Expeditionary Force. It had taken less than five days to organise. Its first act was to convey a monetary gift to the French hospitals. The first actual American Red Cross contribution was made in April to the Number Five British Base Hospital. The first American soldiers in France were doctors and nurses. The first American fighting done in France was done with the weapons of pity. The chief function of the American Red Cross up to the present has been to “carry on” and to bridge the gap of unavoidable delays while the army is preparing.
To prove that this “war of compassion” is no idle phrase, let me illustrate with one dramatic instance. When the Italian line broke under the pressure of Hun artillery and propaganda, the American Red Cross sent representatives forward to inaugurate relief work for the 700,000 refugees, who were pouring southward from the Friuti and Veneto, homeless, hungry, possessing nothing but misfortune, spreading despair and panic every step of the journey. Their bodies must be cared for—that was evident; it would be easy for them to carry disease throughout Italy. But the disease of their minds was an even greater danger; if their demoralisation were not checked, it would inevitably prove contagious.
The first two representatives of the American Red Cross arrived in Rome on November 5th, with a quarter of a million dollars at their disposal. That night they had a soup-kitchen going and fed 400 people. Their first day’s work is the record of an amazing spurt of energy. In that first day they sent money for relief to every American Consul in the districts affected. They mobilised the American colony in Rome and arranged by wire for similar organisations to be formed throughout the length and breadth of Italy, wherever they could lay hands on an American. On all principal junction points through which the refugees would pass, soup-kitchens were installed and clothes were purchased and ready to be distributed as the trains pulled into the stations. They were badly needed, for the passengers had endured all the rigours of the retreat with the soldiers. They had been under shell and machine-gun fire. They had been bombed by aeroplanes. No horror of warfare had been spared them. Their clothes were verminous with weeks of wearing. They were packed like cattle. Babies born on the journey were wrapped in newspapers. There were instances of officers taking off their shirts that the little bodies should not go naked. A telegram was at once despatched to Paris for food and clothes and hospital supplies. Twenty-four cars came through within a week, despite the unusual military traffic. This ends the list of what was accomplished by two men in one day.
The great thing was to make the demoralised Italians feel that America was on the spot and helping them. The sending of troops could not have reused their fighting spirit. They were sick of fighting. What they needed was the assurance that the world was not wholly brutal—that there was some one who was merciful, who did not condemn and who was moved by their sorrow. This assurance the prompt action of the American Red Cross gave. It restored in the affirmative with mercy, precisely the quality which Hun fury and propaganda had destroyed with lies. It restored to them their belief in the nobility of mankind, out of which belief grows all true courage.
As the work progressed, it branched out on a much larger scale, embracing civilian, military and child-welfare activities. In the month of November upward of half a million lire were placed in the hands of American consuls for distribution. One million lire were contributed for the benefit of soldiers’ families. A permanent headquarters was established with trained business men and men who had had experience under Hoover in Belgium in charge of its departments. Over 100 hospitals and two principal magazines of hospital stores had been lost in the retreat. The American Red Cross made up this deficiency by supplying the bedding for no less than 3,000 beds. Five weeks after the first two representatives had reached Rome three complete ambulance sections, each section being made up of 20 ambulances, a staff car, a kitchen trailer and 33 men, were turned over to the Italian Medical Service of the third Army. By the first week in December the stream of refugees had practically stopped. Italy had been made to realise that she was not fighting alone; her morale had returned to her. This work, which had been initially undertaken from purely altruistic motives, had proved to possess a value of the highest military importance—an importance of the spirit utterly out of proportion to the money and labour expended. Magnanimity arouses magnanimity. In this case it revived the flame of Garibaldi which had all but died. It achieved a strategic victory of the soul which no amount of military assistance could have accomplished. The victory of the American Red Cross on the Italian Front is all the more significant since it was not until months later that Congress declared war on Austria.
The campaign which the American Red Cross is waging in every country in which it operates, is frankly an “out to win” campaign. To win the war is its one and only object. What the army does for the courage of the body, the Red Cross does for the courage of the mind. It builds up the hearts and hopes of people who in three and a half years have grown numb. It restores the human touch to their lives and, with it, the spiritual horizon. Its business, while the army is still preparing, is to bring home to the Allies in every possible way the fact that America, with her hundred and ten millions of population, is in the war with them, eager to play the game, anxious to sacrifice as they have sacrificed, to give her man-power and resources as they have done, until justice has been established for every man and nation.
It is necessary to lay stress on this programme since it differs greatly from the popular conception of the functions of the Red Cross in the battle area. It was on the field of Solferino in 1859, that Henri Dunant went out before the fury had spent itself to tend the wounded. It was here that he was fired with his great ambition to found a non-combatant service, which should recognise no enemies and be friends with every army. His ambition was realised when in 1864 the Conference at Geneva chose the Swiss flag, reversed, as its emblem—a red cross on a field of white—and laid the foundations for those international understandings which have since formed for all combatants, except the Hun in this present warfare, the protective law for the sick and wounded. The original purpose of the Red Cross still fills the imagination of the masses to the exclusion of all else that it is doing. Directly the term “Red Cross” is mentioned the picture that forms in most men’s minds is of ambulances galloping through the thick of battle-smoke and of devoted stretcher-bearers who brave danger not to kill, but in order that they may save lives.
This war has changed all that. To-day the Red Cross has to minister to not the wounded of armies only, but to the wounded of nations. In a country like France, with trenches dug the entire length of her eastern frontier and vast territories from which the entire population has been evacuated, the wounds of her armies are small in comparison with the wounds, bodily and mental, of her civil population—wounds which are the outcome of over three years of privation. When the civil population of any country has lost its pluck, no matter how splendid the spirit of its soldiers, its armies become paralysed. The civilians can commence peace negotiations behind the backs of their men in the trenches. They can insist on peace by refusing to send them ammunition and supplies. As a matter of fact the morale of the soldiers varies directly with the morale of the civilians for whom they fight. Behind every soldier stand a woman and a group of children. Their safety is his inspiration. If they are neglected, his sacrifice is belittled. If they beg that he should lay down his arms, his determination is weakened. It is therefore a vital necessity, quite apart from the humanitarian aspect, that the wounds of the civilians of belligerent countries should be cared for. If the civilians are allowed to become disheartened and cowardly, the heroic ideal of their fighting-men is jeopardised. This fact has been recognised by the Red Cross Societies of all countries in the present war; a large part of their energies has been devoted to social and relief work of a civil nature. Even in their purely military departments, the comfort of the troops claims quite as much attention as their medical treatment and hospitalisation. As a matter of fact, the actual carrying of the wounded out of the trenches to the comparative safety of the dressing station is usually done by combatants. A man has to live continually under shell-fire to acquire the immunity to fear which passes for courage. The bravest man is likely to get “jumpy,” if he only faces up to a bombardment occasionally. There are other reasons why combatants should do the stretcher-bearing which do not need elaborating. The combatants have an expert knowledge of their own particular frontage; they are “wise” to the barraged areas; they are “up front” and continually coming and going, so it is often an economy of man-power for them to attend to their own wounded in the initial stages; they are the nearest to a comrade when he falls and all carry the necessary first-aid dressings; the emblem of the Red Cross has proved to be only a slight protection, as the Hun is quite likely not to respect it. What I am driving at is that the Red Cross has had to adapt itself to the new conditions of modern warfare, so that very many of its most important present-day functions are totally different from what popular fancy imagines.
The American Red Cross has its French Headquarters in a famous gambling club in the Place de la Concorde. It is somewhat strange to pass through these rooms where rakes once flung away fortunes, and to find them industriously orderly with the conscience of an imported nation. By far the larger part of the staff are business men of the Wall Street type—not at all the kind who have been accustomed to sentimentalise over philanthropy. There is also a sprinkling of trained social workers, clergy, journalists, and university professors. The medical profession is represented by some of the leading specialists of the States, but at Headquarters they are distinctly in the minority. The purely medical work of the American Red Cross forms only a part of its total activities. The men at the head of affairs are bankers, merchants, presidents of corporations—men who have been trained to think in millions and to visualise broad areas. Girls are very much in evidence. They are usually volunteers, drawn from all classes, who offered their services to do anything that would help. To-day they are typists, secretaries, stenographers, nurses.
The organisation is divided into three main departments: the department of military affairs, of civil affairs and of administration. Under these departments come a variety of bureaus: the bureau of rehabilitation and reconstruction; of the care and prevention of tuberculosis; of needy children and infant mortality; of refugees and relief; of the re-education of the French mutilés; of supplies; of the rolling canteens for the French armies; of the U.S. Army Division; of the Military, Medical and Surgical Division, etc. They are too numerous to mention in detail. The best way I can convey the picture of immense accomplishment is to describe what I actually saw in the field of operations.
The first place I will take you to is Evian, because here you see the tragedy and need of France as embodied in individuals. Evian-les-Bains is on Lake Geneva, looking out across the water to Switzerland. It is the first point of call across the French frontier for the repatriés returning from their German bondage. When the Boche first swept down on the northern provinces he pushed the French civilian population behind him. He has since kept them working for him as serfs, labouring in the captured coal-mines, digging his various lines of defences, setting up wire-entanglements, etc. Apart from the testimony of repatriated French civilians, I myself have seen messages addressed by Frenchmen to their wives, scrawled surreptitiously on the planks of Hun dug-outs in the hope that one day the dug-outs would be captured, and the messages passed on by a soldier of the Allies. After three and a half years of enforced labour, many of these captured civilians are worked out. To the Boche, with his ever-increasing food-shortage, they represent useless mouths. Instead of filling them he is driving their owners back, broken and useless, by way of Switzerland. To him human beings are merchandise to be sold upon the hoof like cattle. No spiritual values enter into the bargain. When the body is exhausted it is sent to the knacker’s, as though it belonged to a worn-out horse. The entire attitude is materialistic and degrading. Evian-les-Bains, the once gay gambling resort of the cosmopolitan, has become the knacker’s shop for French civilians exhausted by their German servitude. The Hun shoves them across the border at the rate of about 1,300 a day. From the start I have always felt that this war was a crusade; what I saw at Evian made me additionally certain. When I was in the trenches I never had any hatred of the Boche. Probably I shall lose my hatred in pity for him when I get to the Front again—but for the present I hate him. It’s here in France that one sees what a vileness he has created in the children’s and women’s lives.
I took the night train down from Paris. Early in the morning I woke up to find myself in the gorges of the Alps, high peaks with romantic Italian-looking settings soaring on every side. At noon we reached Lake Geneva, lying slate-coloured and sombre beneath a wintry sky. That afternoon I saw the train of repatriés arrive.
I was on the platform when the train pulled into the station. It might have been a funeral cortége, only there was a horrible difference: the corpses pretended to be alive. The American Ambulance men were there in force. They climbed into the carriages and commenced to help the infirm to alight. The exiles were all so stiff with travel that they could scarcely move at first. The windows of the train were grey with faces. Such faces! All of them old, even the little children’s. The Boche makes a present to France of only such human wreckage as is unuseful for his purposes. He is an acute man of business. The convoy consisted of two classes of persons—the very ancient and the very juvenile. You can’t set a man of eighty to dig trenches and you can’t make a prostitute out of a girl-child of ten. The only boys were of the mal-nourished variety. Men, women and children—they all had the appearance of being half-witted.
They were terribly pathetic. As I watched them I tried to picture to myself what three and a half long years of captivity must have meant. How often they must have dreamt of the exaltation of this day—and now that it had arrived, they were not exalted. They had the look of people so spiritually benumbed that they would never know despair or exaltation again. They had a broken look; their shoulders were crushed and their skirts bedraggled. Many of them carried babies—pretty little beggars with flaxen hair. It wasn’t difficult to guess their parentage.
As they were herded on the platform a low, strangled kind of moaning went up. I watched individual lips to see where the sound came from. I caught no movement. The noise was the sighing of tired animals. Every one had some treasured possession. Here was an old man with an alarm-clock; there an aged woman with an empty bird-cage. A boy carried half-a-dozen sauce-pans strung together. Another had a spare pair of patched boots under his arm. Quite a lot of them clutched a bundle of umbrellas. I found myself reflecting that these were the remnants of families who had been robbed of everything that they valued in the world. Whatever they had saved from the ruin ought to represent the possession which had claimed most of their affections, and yet—! What did an alarm-clock, an empty bird-cage, a pair of patched boots, a string of sauce-pans, a bundle of ragged umbrellas signify in any life? What utter poverty, if these were the best that they could save!
There was a band on the platform, consisting mainly of bugles and drums, to welcome them. The leader is reputed to be the laziest man in the French Army. It is said that they tried him at everything and then, in despair, sent him to Evian to drum forgotten happiness into the bones of repatriés. Whatever his former military record, he now does his utmost to impersonate the defiant and impassioned soul of France. His moustaches are curled fiercely. His brows are heavy as thunderclouds. When he drums, the veins swell out in his neck with the violence of his energy.
Suddenly, with an ominous preliminary rumble, the band struck up the Marseillaise. You should have seen the change in this crowd of corpses. You must remember that these people had been so long accustomed to lies and snares that it would probably take days to persuade them that they were actually safe home in France.
As the battle-song for which they had suffered shook the air their lips rustled like leaves. There was hardly any sound—only a hoarse whisper. Then, all of a sudden, words came—an inarticulate, sobbing commotion. Tears blinded the eyes of every spectator, even those who had witnessed similar scenes often; we were crying because the singing was so little human.
“Vive la France! Vive la France!” They waved flags—not the tri-colour, but flags which had been given them in Switzerland. They clung together dazed, women with slatternly dresses, children with peaked faces, men unhappy and unshaven. A woman caught sight of my uniform. “Vive l’Angleterre,” she cried, and they all came stumbling forward to embrace me. It was horrible. They creaked like automatons. They gestured and mouthed, but the soul had been crushed out of their eyes. You don’t need any proofs of Hun atrocities; the proofs are to be seen at Evian. There are no severed hands, no crucified bodies; only hearts that have been mutilated. Sorrow is at its saddest when it cannot even contrive to appear dignified. There is no dignity about the repatriés at Evian, with their absurd umbrellas, sauce-pans, patched-boots, alarm-clocks and bird-cages. They do not appeal to one as sacrificed patriots. There is no nobility in their vacant stare. They create a cold feeling of bodily decay—only it is the spirit that is dead and gangrenous.
There is a blasphemous story by Leonid Andreyev, which recounts the bitterness of the after years of Lazarus and the mischief Christ wrought in recalling him from the grave. After his unnatural return to life there was a blueness as of putrescence beneath his pallor; an iciness to his touch; a choking silence in his presence; a horror in his gaze, as if he were remembering his three days in the sepulchre—as if forbidden knowledge groped behind his eyes. He rarely looked at any one; there were none who courted his glance, who did not creep away to die. The terror of his fame spread beyond Bethany. Rome heard of him, and at that safe distance laughed. It did not laugh after Cæsar Augustus had sent for him. Cæsar Augustus was a god upon earth; he could not die. But when he had questioned Lazarus, peeped through the windows of his eyes, and read what lay hidden in that forbidden memory, he commanded that red-hot irons should quench such sight for ever. From Rome Lazarus groped his way back to Palestine and there, long years after his Saviour had been crucified, continued to stumble through his own particular Gethsemane of blindness. I thought of that story in the presence of this crowd, which carried with it the taint of the grave.
But the band was still playing the Marseillaise—over and over it played it. With each repetition it was as though these people, three years dead, made another effort to cast aside their shrouds. Little by little something was happening—something wonderful. Backs were straightening; skirts were being caught up; resolution was rippling from face to face—it passed and re-passed with each new roll of the drums. The hoarse cries and moaning with which we had commenced were gradually transforming themselves into singing.
There were some who were too weak to walk; these were carried by the American Red Cross men into the waiting ambulances. The remainder were marshalled into a disorderly procession and led out of the station by the band.
We were moving down the hill to the palaces beside the lake—the palaces to which all France used to troop for pleasure. We moved soddenly at first, shuffling in our steps. But the drums were still rolling out their defiance and the bugles were still blowing. The laziest man in the French Army was doing his utmost to belie his record. The ill-shod, flattened feet took up the music. They began to dance. Were there ever feet less suited to dancing? That they should dance was the acme of tragedy. Stockings fell down in creases about the ankles. Women commenced to jig their Boche babies in their arms; consumptive men and ancients waved their sauce-pans and grotesque bundles of umbrellas. The sight was damnable. It was a burlesque. It pierced the heart. What right had the Boche to leave these people so comic after he had squeezed the life-blood out of them?
All his insults to humanity became suddenly typified in these five hundred jumping tatterdemalions—the way in which he had plundered the world of its youth, its cleanness, its decency. I felt an anger which battlefields had never aroused, where men moulder above ground and become unsightly beneath the open sky. The slain of battlefields were at least motionless; they did not gape and grin at you with the dreadful humour of these perambulating dead. I felt the Galilean passion which animates every Red Cross worker at Evian: the agony to do something to make these murdered people live again. This last convoy came, I discovered, from a city behind the Boche lines against which last summer I had often directed fire. It was full in sight from my observing station. I had watched the very houses in which these people, who now walked beside me, had sheltered. For three and a half years these women’s bodies had been at the Hun’s mercy. I tried to bring the truth home to myself. Their men and young girls had been left behind. They themselves had been flung back on overburdened France only because they were no longer serviceable. They were returning actually penniless, though seemingly with money. The thrifty German makes a practice of seizing all the good redeemable French money of the repatriés before he lets them escape him, giving them in exchange worthless paper stuff of his own manufacture, which has no security behind it and is therefore not negotiable.
We came to the Casino, where endless formalities were necessary. First of all in the big hall, formerly devoted to gambling, the repatriés were fed at long tables. As I passed, odd groups seeing my uniform, hurriedly dropped whatever they were doing and, removing their caps, stood humbly at attention. There was fear in their promptness. Where they came from an officer exacted respect with the flat of his sword. What a dumb, helpless jumble of humanity! It was as though the occupants of a morgue had become galvanised and had temporarily risen from their slabs.
The band had been augmented by trumpets. It took its place in the gallery and deluged the hall with patriotic fervour. An old man climbed on a table and yelled, “Vive La France!” But they had grown tired of shouting; they soon grew tired. The cry was taken up faintly and soon exhausted itself. Nothing held their attention for long. Most of them sat hunched up and inert, weakly crying. They were not beautiful. They were not like our men who die in battle. They were animated memories of horror. “What lies before us? What lies before us?” That was the question that their silence asked perpetually. Some of them had husbands with the French army; others had sweethearts. What would those men say to the flaxen-haired babies who nestled against the women’s breasts? And the sin was not theirs—they were such tired, pretty mites. “What lies before us?” The babies, too, might well have asked that question. Do you wonder that I at last began to share the Frenchman’s hatred for the Boche?
An extraordinary person in a white tie, top hat and evening dress entered. He looked like a cross between Mr. Gerard’s description of himself in Berlin and a head-waiter. He evidently expected his advent to cause a profound sensation. I found out why: he was the official welcomer to Evian. Twice a day, for an infinity of days, he had entered in solemn fashion, faced the same tragic assembly, made the same fiery oration, gained applause at the climax of the same rounded periods and allowed his voice to break in the same rightly timed places. Having kept his audience in sufficient suspense as regards his mission, he unwrapped the muffler from his neck, removed his coat, felt his throat to see whether it was in good condition, swelled out his chest, including his waist-coat which was spanned by the broad ribbon of his office, then let loose the painter of his emotion and slipped off into the mid-stream of perfunctory eloquence. With all his disrobing he had retained his top-hat; he held it in his right hand with the brim pressed against his thigh, very much in the manner of a showman at a circus. It contributed largely to the opulence of his gestures.
He always seemed to have concluded and was always starting up afresh, as if in reluctant response to spectral clapping. He called upon the repatriés never to forget the crimes that had been wrought against them—to spread abroad the fire of their indignation, the story of their ravished womanhood and broken families all over France. They watched him leaden-eyed and wept softly. To forget, to forget, that was all that they wanted—to blot out all the past. This man with the top-hat and the evening-dress, he hadn’t suffered—how could he understand? They didn’t want to remember; with those flaxen-haired children against their breasts the one boon they craved was forgetfulness. And so they cowered and wept softly. It was intolerable.
And now the formalities commenced. They all had to be medically examined. Questions of every description were asked them. They were drifted from bureau to bureau where people sat filling up official blanks. The Americans see to the children. They come from living in cellars, from conditions which are insanitary, from cities in the army zones where they were underfed. The fear is that they may spread contagion all over France. When infectious cases are found the remnants of families have to be broken up afresh. The mothers collapse on benches sobbing their hearts out as their children are led away. For three and a half years everything they have loved has been led away—how can they believe that these Americans mean only mercy?
From three to four hours are spent in completing all these necessary investigations. Before the repatriés are conducted to their billets, all their clothes have to be disinfected and every one has to be bathed. The poor people are utterly worn out by the end of it—they have already done a continuous four days’ journey in cramped trains. Before being sent to France they have been living for from two to three weeks in Belgium. The Hun always sends the repatriés to Belgium for a few weeks before returning them. The reason for this is that they for the most part come from the army zones, and a few weeks will make any information they possess out of date. Another reason is that food is more plentiful in Belgium, thanks to the Allies’ Relief Commission. These people have been kept alive on sugar-beets for the past few months, so it is as well to feed them at the Allies’ expense for a little while, in order that they may create a better impression when they return to France. The American doctors pointed out to me the pulpy flesh of the children and the distended stomachs which, to the unpractised eye, seemed a sign of over-nourishment. “Wind and water,” they said; “that’s all these children are. They’ve no stamina. Sugar-beets are the most economic means of just keeping the body and the soul together.”
The lights are going out in the Casino. It is the hour when, in the old days, life would be becoming most feverish about the gaming tables. In little forlorn groups the repatriés are being conducted to their temporary quarters in the town. To-morrow morning before it is light, another train-load will arrive, the band will again play the Marseillaise, the American Red Cross workers will again be in attendance, the gentleman in the top-hat and white-tie will again make his fiery oration of welcome, his audience will again pay no attention but will weep softly—the tediously heart-rending scene will be rehearsed throughout in every detail by an entirely new batch of actors. Twice a day, summer and winter, the same tragedy is enacted at Evian. It is a continuous, never-ending performance.
Poor people! These whom I have seen, if they have no friends to claim them, will re-start their journey to some strange department on which they will be billeted as paupers. Here again the American Red Cross is doing good work, for it sends one of its representatives ahead to see that proper preparations have been made for their reception. After they have reached their destination, it looks them up from time to time to make sure that they are being well cared for.
If one wants to picture the case of the repatrié in its true misery, all he needs to do is to convert it into terms of his own mother or grandmother. She has lived all her life in the neighbourhood of Vimy, let us say. She was married there and it was there that she bore all her children. She and her husband have saved money; they are substantial people now and need not fear the future. Their sons are gaining their own living; one daughter is married, the others are arriving at the marriageable age. One day the Hun sweeps down on them. The sons escape to join the French army; the girls and their parents stay behind to guard their property. They are immediately evacuated from Vimy and sent to some city, such as Drocourt, further behind the Hun front-line. Here they are gradually robbed of all their possessions. At the beginning all their gold is confiscated; later even the mattresses upon their beds are requisitioned. For three and a half years they are subjected to both big and petty tyrannies, till their spirits are so broken that fear becomes their predominant emotion. The father is led away to work in the mines. One by one the daughters are commandeered and sent off into the heart of Germany, where it will be no one’s business to guard their virtue. At last the mother is left with only her youngest child. Of her sons who are fighting with the French armies she has no knowledge, whether they are living or dead. Then one day it is decided by her captors that they have no further use for her. They part her from her last remaining child and pack her off by way of Belgium and Switzerland back to her own country. She arrives at Evian penniless and half-witted with the terror of her sorrow. There is no one to claim her; the part of France that knew her is all behind the German lines. A label is tied to her, as if she was a piece of baggage, and she is shipped off to Avignon, let us say. She has never been in the South before; it is a foreign country to her. Poverty and adversity have broken her pride; she has nothing left that will command respect. There is nothing left in life to which she can fasten her affections. Such utter forlornness is never a welcome sight. Is it to be wondered at that the strangers to whom she is sent are not always glad to see her? Is it to be wondered at that, after her repatriation, she often wilts and dies? Her sorrow has the appearance of degradation. Wherever she goes, she is a threat and a peril to the fighting morale of the civilian population. Yet in her pre-war kindliness and security she might have been your mother or mine.
The American Red Cross, by maintaining contact with such people, is keeping them reminded that they are not utterly deserted—that the whole of civilised humanity cares tremendously what becomes of them and is anxious to lighten the load of their sacrifice.
I have before me a pile of sworn depositions, made by exiles returned from the invaded territories. They are separately numbered and dated; each bears the name of the region or town from which the repatrié came. Here are a few extracts which, when pieced together, form a picture of the life of captured French civilians behind the German lines. I have carefully avoided glaring atrocities. Atrocities are as a rule isolated instances, due to isolated causes. They occur, but they are not typical of the situation. The real Hun atrocity is the attitude towards life which calls chivalry sentiment, fair-play a waste of opportunity and ruthlessness strength. This attitude is all summed up in the one word Prussianism. The repatriés have been Prussianised out of their wholesome joy and belief in life; it is this that makes them the walking accusations that they are to-day. In the following depositions they give some glimpses of the calculated processes by which their happiness has been murdered.
“Lately copper, tin, and zinc have been removed in the factories and amongst the traders, and quite recently in private houses. For all these requisitions the Germans gave Requisition Bonds, but private individuals who received them never got paid the money. To force men to work ‘voluntarily’ and sign contracts the Germans employed the following means: the Germans gave these men nothing to eat, but authorised their families to send them parcels; these parcels once in the hands of the Germans are shown to these unhappy men and are not handed over until they have signed. About a week ago young boys from the age of fourteen who had come back from the Ardennes had to present themselves at the Kdr to be registered anew; a number of the young people work in the sawmills, etc.; some have died of privation and fatigue.”
“A week after Easter this year the population of LILLE was warned by poster that all must be ready to leave the town. At three o’clock in the morning private houses were invaded by the German soldiers; they sorted out women and girls who were to be deported. There then took place scandalous scenes: young girls belonging to the most worthy families in the town had to pass medical visits even with the speculum and had to endure most atrocious physical and moral suffering. These young girls were segregated like beasts anywhere in the rooms of the town halls and schoolhouses, and were mingled with the dregs of the population.”
“For a certain time the Germans did not requisition milk and allowed it to be sold, but now this is forbidden under a fine of 1,000 marks or three months’ imprisonment. Recently WIGNEHIES was fined 100,000 frcs., and as the whole of this sum was not paid the Germans inflicted punishment as follows: Several inhabitants of WIGNEHIES were caught in the act of disobeying by the gendarmes and were struck, and bitten by the police dogs of the gendarmes because they refused to denounce the sellers.... Brutal treatment is due more to the gendarmes than to the soldiers. About six weeks ago Marceau Horlet of WIGNEHIES was found, on a search by the gendarmes, to have a piece of meat in his possession. He was brutally beaten by them and bitten by the police dogs because he refused to say who had given it to him. In 1915, the youth Rémy Valléi of WIGNEHIES, age 15, was walking in the street after 6-9 p.m., which was forbidden; he was seen by two gendarmes and ran away. He was straightway killed, receiving six revolver bullets in his body.”
“At pignicourt during the CHAMPAGNE offensive the village was bombarded by the French, who were attempting to destroy the railway lines and bridges. The Commandant, by name Krama, of the Kdr, forced men and youths, and even women, to fill up the holes made by the bombardment during the action. A German general passed and reprimanded them on the ground that there was danger to the civilians; they were withdrawn for the moment, but sent back as soon as the general had left.”
“As regards the Hispano-American revictualling, it may be said with truth that without this the population of Northern France would have died of hunger, for the Germans considered themselves liberated from any responsibility. During the first months of the war before this Committee started, the Germans put up posters saying that the Allies were trying to starve Germany, who in turn was not obliged to feed the invaded territory.... When informant (who is from ST. QUENTIN) left at the general evacuation of this town, no requisition bonds were given for household goods. As the inhabitants left, their furniture was loaded on to motor lorries and taken to the station, whence it was sent by special train to Germany. This shows clearly that requisition bonds issued by the Germans show only the small proportion of what has been suffered by the inhabitants.... Informant was the witness of the execution of French civilians whose only fault was either to hide arms or pigeons: several who had committed these infractions of requisitions were shot, and the Germans announced the fact by poster of a blood-red colour. In other cases the men shot were British prisoners who had dressed in civil clothes on the arrival of the Germans. Informant had a long conversation with one of them before his execution. He told informant how he had been unable to leave ST. QUENTIN, viz., by the 28th August. Some passers-by offered to hide him. It appears that, through his ignorance of the French language, he was unaware that the Germans threatened execution to all men found after a certain date. He was discovered and condemned to death for espionage. It is obvious, as the man himself said, that one could not imagine a man acting as a spy without knowing either the language of the country or that of the enemy.”
“Before the evacuation of the population the Germans chose those who were to remain as civilian workers, viz., 120 men from 15 to 60. On the very day of the evacuation they kept back at the station 27 others. These men are now at CANTIN or SOMAIN, where they are employed on the roads or looking after munitions in the Arras group. The others at DECHY and GUESNIN are in the VIMY group and are making pill-boxes or railway lines. A certain number of these workers refused to carry out the work ordered, and as punishment during the summer were tied to chairs and exposed bareheaded to the full blaze of the sun. They were often threatened to be shot.”
“After the bombardment of LILLE the Germans entered ENNETIÈRES on the 12th October, 1914. On the next Monday 200 Uhlans occupied the Commune, and houses and haystacks were burned.... At LOMME every one was forced to work: the Saxon Kdnt. Schoper announced that all women who did not obey within 24 hours would be interned: all the women obeyed. They were employed in the making of osier-revêtement two metres high for the trenches. The men were forced to put up barbed wire near Fort Denglas, two kltrs. from the front. A few days after the evacuation of ENNETIÈRES the Uhlans shot a youth, Jean Leclercq, age 17, son of the gardener of Count D’Hespel, simply because they had found a telephone wire in the courtyard of the château.”
“Informant, who has lost his right arm, was nevertheless forced to work for the Germans, notably to unload coal and to work on the roads. He had with him males from 13 to 60. Having objected because of his lost arm, he was threatened with imprisonment. At LOMME squads of workers were given the work of putting up barbed wire; women were forced to make sand bags. In cases of refusal on either side the Kdr. inflicted four or five weeks’ imprisonment, to say nothing of blows with sticks inflicted by the soldiers. In spring 1917 a number of men were sent from LOMME to the BEAUVIN-PROVINS region to work on defences.... Those who refused to sign were threatened and struck with the butts of rifles, and left in cellars sometimes filled with water during bombardments. Several of them came back seriously ill from privation.”
“Young girls are separated from their mothers; there are levies made at every moment. Sometimes these young girls have barely a few hours before the moment of departure.... Several young girls have written to say that they are very unhappy and that they sleep in camps amongst girls of low class and condition.”
“For a long time past women have been forced to work as road labourers. These work in the quarries and transport wood cut down by the men in the mountain forest. A number of women and young girls have been removed from their families and sent in the direction of RHEIMS and RETHEL, where it is said (although this cannot be confirmed) that they are employed in aerodromes.”
These extracts should serve to explain the mental and physical depression of the returning exiles. They have been bullied out of the desire to live and out of all possession of either their bodies or their souls. They have been treated like cattle, and as cattle they have come to regard themselves. Lazaruses—that’s what they are! The unmerciful Boche, having killed and buried them, drags them out from the tomb and compels them to go through the antics of life. Le Gallienne’s poem comes to my mind:
“Loud mockers in the angry street
Say Christ is crucified again—
Twice pierced those gospel-bearing feet,
Twice broken that great heart in vain....”
That is all true at Evian. But when I see the American men and girls, leaning over the Boche babies in their cots and living their hearts into the hands and feet of the spiritually maimed, the last two lines of the poem become true for me:
“I hear, and to myself I say,
‘Why, Christ walks with me every day.’”
The work of the American Red Cross at Evian is largely devoted to children. It provides all the ambulance transportation for the repatriés, to and from the station. American doctors and nurses do all the examining of the children at the Casino. On an average, four hundred pass through their hands daily. The throat, nose, teeth, glands and skin of each child are inspected. If the child is suspected or attacked by any disease, it is immediately segregated and sent to the American hospital. If the infection is only local or necessitates further examination, the child and its family are summoned to present themselves at the American dispensary next day. Every precaution is employed to prevent the spread of infection—particularly the infection of tuberculosis. Evian is the gateway from Germany through which disease and death may be carried to the furthest limits of France. Very few of the repatriés are really healthy. It would be a wonder if they were after the privations through which they have passed. All of them are weakened in vitality and broken down in stamina. Many of them have no homes to go to and have to be sent to departments of the interior and the south. If they were sent in an unhealthy condition, it would mean the spread of epidemics.
The Red Cross has a large children’s hospital at Evian in the villas and buildings of the Hôtel Chatelêt. This hospital deals with the contagious cases. It has others, especially one at the Château des Halles, thirty kilometers from Lyons, which take the devitalised, convalescent and tubercular cases. The Château des Halles is a splendidly built modern building, arranged in an ideal way for hospital use. It stands at the head of a valley, with an all day sun exposure and large grounds. Close to the Château are a number of small villages in which it is possible to lodge the repatriés in families. This is an important part of the repatrié’s problem, as after their many partings they fight fiercely against any further separations. One of the chief reasons for having the Convalescent Hospital out in the country is that families can be quartered in the villages and so kept together.
The pathetic hunger of these people for one another after they have been so long divided, was illustrated for me on my return journey to Paris. A man of the tradesman class had been to Evian to meet his wife and his boy of about eleven. They were among the lucky ones, for they had a home to go to. He was not prepossessing in appearance. He had a weak face, lined with anxiety, broken teeth and limp hair. His wife, as so often happens in French marriages, had evidently been the manageress. She was unbeautiful in rusty black; her clothes were the ill-assorted make-shifts of the civilian who escapes from Germany. Her eyes were shifty with the habit of fear and sunken with the weariness of crying. The boy was a bright little fellow, full of defiance and anecdotes of his recent captors.
When I entered the carriage, they were sitting huddled together—the man in the middle, with an arm about either of them. He kept pressing them to him, kissing them by turn in a spasmodic unrestrained fashion, as if he still feared that he might lose them and could not convince himself of the happy truth that they were once again together. The woman did not respond to his embraces; she seemed indifferent to him, indifferent to life, indifferent to any prospects. The boy seemed fond of his father, but embarrassed by his starved demonstrativeness.
I listened to their conversation. The man’s talk was all of the future—what splendid things he would do for them. How, as long as they lived, he would never waste a moment from their sides. It appeared that he had been at Tours, on a business trip when the war broke out, and could not get back to Lille before the Germans arrived there. For three and a half years he had lived in suspense, while everything he loved had lain behind the German lines. The woman contributed no suggestions to his brilliant plans. She clung to him, but she tried to divert his affection. When she spoke it was of small domestic abuses: the exorbitant prices she had had to pay for food; the way in which the soldiery had stolen her pots and pans; the insolence she had experienced when she had lodged complaints against the men before their officers. And the boy—he wanted to be a poilu. He kept inventing revenges he would take in battle, if the war lasted long enough for his class to be called out. As darkness fell they ceased talking. I began to realise that in three and a half years they had lost contact. They were saying over and over the things that had been said already; they were trying to prevent themselves from acknowledging that they had grown different and separate. The only bond which held them as a family was their common loneliness and fear that, if they did not hold together, their intolerable loneliness would return. When the light was hooded, the boy sank his hand against his father’s shoulder; the woman nestled herself in the fold of his arm, with her head turned away from him, that he might not kiss her so often. The man sat upright, his eyes wide open, watching them sleeping with a kind of impotent despair. They were together; and yet they were not together. He had recovered them; nevertheless, he had not recovered them. Those Boches, the devils, they had kept something; they had only sent their bodies back. All night long, whenever I woke up as the train halted, the little man was still guarding them jealously as a dog guards a bone, and staring morosely at the blank wall of the future.
These were among the lucky ones; the boy and woman had had a man to meet them. Somewhere in France there was protection awaiting them and the shelter of a house that was not charity. And yet... all night while they slept the man sat awake, facing up to facts. These were among the lucky ones! That is Evian; that is the tragedy and need of France as you see it embodied in individuals.
The total number of repatriés and réfugiés now in France is said to total a million and a half. The repatriés are the French civilians who were captured by the Germans in their advance and have since been sent back. The réfugiés are the French civilians from the devastated areas, who have always remained on the Allies’ side of the line. The réfugiés are divided into two classes: réfugiés proper—that is fugitives from the front, who fled for the most part at the time of the German invasion; and évacués—those who were sent out of the war zone by the military authorities. Naturally a large percentage of this million and a half have lost everything and, irrespective of their former worldly position, now live with the narrowest margin between themselves and starvation. The French Government has treated them with generosity, but in the midst of a war it has had little time to devote to educating them into being self-supporting. A great number of funds have been privately raised for them in France; many separate organisations for their relief have been started. The American Red Cross is making this million and a half people its special care, and to do so is co-operating directly with the French Government and with existing French civilian projects. Its action is dictated by mercy and admiration, but in results this policy is the most far-seeing statesmanship. A million and a half plundered people, if neglected and allowed to remain downhearted, are likely to constitute a danger to the morale of the bravest nation. Again, from the point of view of after-war relations, to have been generous towards those who have suffered is to have won the heart of France. The caring for the French repatriates and refugees is a definite contribution to the winning of the war.
The French system of handling this human stream of tragedy is to send the sick to local hospitals and the exhausted to the maison de repos. The comparatively healthy are allowed to be claimed by friends; the utterly homeless are sent to some prefecture remote from the front-line. The prefects in turn distribute them among towns and villages, lodging them in old barracks, casinos and any buildings which war-conditions have made vacant. The adults are allowed by the Government a franc and a half per day, and the children seventy-five centimes.
The armies have drained France of her doctors since the war; until the Americans came, the available medical attention was wholly inadequate to the civilian population. The American Red Cross is now establishing dispensaries through the length and breadth of France. In country districts, inaccessible to towns, it is inaugurating automobile-dispensaries which make their rounds on fixed and advertised days. In addition to this it has started a child-welfare movement, the aim of which is to build up the birth-rate and lower the infant mortality by spreading the right kind of knowledge among the women and girls.
The condition of the refugees and repatriates, thrust into communities to which they came as paupers and crowded into buildings which were never planned for domestic purposes, has been far from enviable. In September, 1917, the American Red Cross handed over the solving of this problem to one of its experts who had organised the aid given to San Francisco after the earthquake, and who had also had charge of the relief-work necessitated by the Ohio floods at Dayton. Co-operating with the French, houses partially constructed at the outbreak of war were now completed and furnished, and approximately three thousand families were supplied with homes and privacy. The start made proved satisfactory. Supplies, running into millions of francs, were requisitioned, and the plan for getting the people out of public buildings into homes was introduced to the officials of most of the departments of France. Delegates were sent out by the Red Cross to undertake the organisation of the work. Money was apportioned for the supplying of destitute families with furniture and the instruments of trade; the object in view was not to pauperise them, but to afford them the opportunity for becoming self-supporting. Re-construction work in those devastated areas which have been won back from the Boche was hurried forward in order that the people who had been uprooted from the soil might be returned to it and, in being returned to their own particular soil, might recover their place in life and their balance.
I visited the devastated areas of the Pas-de-Calais, Somme, Oise and Aisne and saw what is being accomplished. This destroyed territory is roughly one hundred miles long by thirty miles broad at its widest point. In 1912 one-quarter of the wheat produced in France and eighty-seven per cent. of the beet crop employed in the national industry of sugar-making, were raised in these departments of the north. The invasion has diminished the national wheat production by more than a half. It is obvious, then, that in getting these districts once more under cultivation two birds are being killed with one stone: the refugee is being made a self-supporting person—an economic asset instead of a dead weight—and the tonnage problem is being solved. If more food is grown behind the Western Front, grain-ships can be released for transporting the munitions of war from America.
The French Government had already made a start in this undertaking before America came into the war. As early as 1914 it voted three hundred million francs and appointed a group of sous-préfets to see to the dispensing of it. Little by little, as the Huns have been driven back, the wealthier inhabitants, whose money was safe in Paris banks, have returned to these districts and opened oeuvres for the poorer inhabitants. Many of them have lost their sons and husbands; they find in their daily labour for others worse off than themselves an escape from life-long despair. Misfortune is a matter of comparison and contrast. We are all of us unhappy or fortunate according to our standards of selfishness and our personal interpretation of our lot. These patriots are bravely turning their experience of sorrow into the materials of service. They can speak the one and only word which makes a bond of sympathy between the prosperous and the broken-hearted, “I, too, have suffered.” I came across one such woman in the neighbourhood of Villequier-au-Mont. She was a woman of title and a royalist. Her estates had been laid waste by the invasion and all her men-folk, save her youngest son, were dead. Directly the Hun withdrew last spring, she came back to the wilderness which had been created and commenced to spend what remained of her fortune upon helping her peasants. These peasants had been the hewers of wood and drawers of water for the Hun for three and a half years. When his armies retreated, they took with them the girls and the young men, leaving behind only the weaklings, the children and the aged. Word came to the Red Cross official of the district that her remaining son had been killed in action; he was asked to break the news to her. He went out to her ruined village and found her sitting among a group of women in the shell of a house, teaching them to make garments for their families. She was pleased to see him; she was in need of more materials. She had been intending to make the journey to see him herself. She was full of her work and enthusiastic over the valiance of her people. He led her aside and told her. She fell silent. Her face quivered—that was all. Then she completed her list of requirements and went back to her women. In living to comfort other people’s grief, she had no time to nurse her own.
These “oeuvres,” or groups of workers, settle down in a shattered village or township. The military authorities place the township in their charge. They at once commence to get roofs on to such houses as still have walls. They supply farm-implements, poultry, rabbits, carts, seeds, plants, etc. They import materials from Paris and form sewing classes for the women and girls. They encourage the trades-people to re-start their shops and lend them the necessary initial capital. What is perhaps most valuable, they lure the terror-stricken population out of their caves and dug-outs, and set them an example of hope and courage. Some of the best pioneer work of this sort has been done by the English Society of Friends who now, together with the Friends of the United States, have become a part of the Bureau of the Department of Civil Affairs of the American Red Cross.
The American Red Cross works through the “oeuvres” which it found already operating in the devastated area; it places its financial backing at their disposal, its means of motor transport and its personnel; it grafts on other “oeuvres,” operating in newly taken over villages, in which Americans, French and English work side by side for the common welfare; at strategic points behind the lines it has established a chain of relief warehouses, fully equipped with motor-lorries and cars. These warehouses furnish everything that an agricultural people starting life afresh can require—food, clothes, blankets, beds, mattresses, stoves, kitchen utensils, reapers, binders, mowing-machines, threshing-machines, garden-tools, soap, tooth brushes, etc. If you can conceive of yourself as having been a prosperous farmer and waking up one morning broken in heart and dirty in person, with your barns, live-stock, daughters, sons, everything gone—not a penny left in the world—you can imagine your necessities, and then form some picture of the fore-thought that goes to the running of a Red Cross warehouse.
But the poverty of these people is not the worst condition that the Red Cross workers have to tackle; money can always replace money. Hope, trust, affection and a genial belief in the world’s goodness cannot be transplanted into another man’s heart in exchange for bitterness by even the most lavish giver. I can think of no modern parallel for their blank despair; the only eloquence which approximately expresses it is that of Job, centuries old, “Why is light given to a man whose way is hid and whom God hath hedged in? My sighing cometh before I eat. My roarings are poured out like waters. My harp is turned to mourning, and my organ into the voice of them that weep. I was not in safety, neither had I rest, neither was I quiet; yet trouble came.”
This hell which the Hun has created, beggars any description of Dante.1 It is still more appalling to remember that the external hell which one sees, does not represent one tithe of the dreariness which lies hidden behind the eyes of the inhabitants. To imagine amid such scenes is to paralyse compassion with agony. The craving, never far from one’s thoughts, is the age-old desire, “O that one might plead with God, as a man pleadeth for his neighbour!”
I started out on my trip in a staff-car from a city well behind the lines. In the first half hour of the journey the country was green and pleasant. We passed some cavalry officers galloping across a brown field; birds were battling against a flurrying wind; high overhead an aeroplane sailed serenely. There was a sense of life, motion and exhilaration abroad, but only for the first half hour of our journey. Then momentarily a depression grew up about us. Fields and trees were becoming dead, as if a swarm of locusts had eaten their way across them. Greenness was vanishing. Houses were becoming untenanted; there were holes in the walls of many of them, through which one gained glimpses of the sky. Here, by the road-side, we passed a cluster of insignificant graves. Then, almost without warning, the barbed-wire entanglements commenced, and the miles and miles of abandoned trenches. This, not a year ago from the day on which I write, was the Hun’s country. Last spring, in an attempt to straighten his line, he retreated from it. Our offensives on the Somme had converted his Front into a dangerous salient.
We are slowing down; the road is getting water-logged and full of holes. The skull of a dead town grows up on the horizon. Even at this distance the light behind empty windows glares malevolently like the nothingness in vacant sockets. A horror is over everything. The horror is not so much due to the destruction as to the total absence of any signs of life. One man creeping through the landscape would make it seem more kindly. I have been in desolated towns often, but there were always the faces of our cheery Tommies to smile out from cellars and gaps in the walls. From here life is banished utterly. The battle-line has retired eastward; one can hear the faint rumble of the guns at times. No civilian has come to re-inhabit this unhallowed spot.
We enter what were once its streets. They are nothing now but craters with boards across them. On either side the trees lie flat along the ground, sawn through within a foot of the roots. What landmarks remain are the blackened walls of houses, cracked and crashed in by falling roofs. The entire place must have been given over to explosion and incendiarism before the Huns departed. One stands in awe of such completeness of savagery; one begins to understand what is meant by the term “frightfulness.” As far as eye can reach there is nothing to be seen but decayed fangs, protruding from a swamp of filth, covered with a green slime where water has accumulated. This is not the unavoidable ruin of shell-fire. No battle was fought here. The demolition was the wanton spite of an enemy who, because he could not hold the place, was determined to leave nothing serviceable behind. With such masterly thoroughness has he done his work that the spot can never be re-peopled. The surrounding fields are too poisoned and churned up for cultivation. The French Government plans to plant a forest; it is all that can be done. As years go by, the kindliness of Nature may cause her to forget and cover up the scars of hatred with greenness. Then, perhaps, peasant lovers will wander here and refashion their dreams of a chivalrous world. Our generation will be dead by that time; throughout our lives this memorial to “frightfulness” will remain.
We have left the town and are out in the open country. It is clean and unharried. Man can murder orchards and habitations—the things which man plants and makes; he finds it more difficult to strangle the primal gifts of Nature. All along by the roadside the cement telegraph-posts have been broken off short; some of them lie flat along the ground, others hang limply in the bent shape of hairpins. Very often we have to make a detour where a steel bridge has been blown up; we cross the gulley over an improvised affair of struts and planks, and so come back into the main roadway. Every now and then we pass steam-tractors at work, ploughing huge fields into regular furrows. The French Department of Agriculture purchased in America nineteen teams of ten tractors apiece in the autumn of last year. The American Red Cross has supplied others. The fields of this district are unfenced—the farmers used to live together in villages; so the work is made easy. It is possible to throw a number of holdings together and to apply to France the same wholesale mechanical means of wheat-growing that are employed on the prairies of Canada. All the cattle and horses have been carried off into Germany. All the farm-implements have been destroyed—and destroyed with a surprising ingenuity. The same parts were destroyed in each instrument, so that an entire instrument could not be reconstructed. The farms could not have been brought under cultivation this year, had not the Government and the Red Cross lent their assistance.
We are approaching Noyon, the birthplace of Calvin. This is one of the few towns the Hun spared in his retreat; he spared it not out of a belated altruism, but purely to serve his own convenience. There were some of the French civilians who weren’t worth transporting to Germany. They would be too weak, or too old, or too young to earn their keep when he got them there. These he sorted out, irrespective of their family ties, and herded from the surrounding districts into Noyon. They were crowded into the houses and ordered under pain of death not to come out until they were given permission. They were further ordered to shutter all their windows and not to look out.
As an old lady, who narrated the story, said, “We had no idea, Monsieur, what was to happen. Les Boches had been with us for nearly three years; it never entered our heads that they were leaving. When they took the last of our young girls from us and all who were strong among our men, it was something that they had done so often and so often. When they made us hide in our houses, we thought it was only to prevent a disturbance. It is not easy to see your boys and girls marched away into slavery—Monsieur will understand that. Sometimes, on former occasions, the mothers had attacked les Boches and the young girls had become hysterical; we thought that it was to avoid such scenes that we were shut up in our houses. When darkness fell, we sat in our rooms without any lights, for they also were forbidden. All night long through our streets we heard the endless tramping of battalions, the clattering wheels of guns and limbers, the sharp orders, the halting and the marching taken up afresh. Towards dawn everything grew silent. At first it would be broken occasionally by the hurried trot of cavalry or the shuffling footsteps of a straggler. Then it grew into the absolute silence of death. It was nerve-racking and terrible. One could almost hear the breathing of the listening people in all the other houses. I do not know how time went or what was the hour. I could endure the suspense no longer. They might kill me, but... Ah well, at my age after nearly three years with ‘les Boches,’ killing is a little matter! I crept down the passage and drew back the bolts. I was very gentle; a sentry might hear me. I opened the door just a crack. I expected to hear a rifle-shot ring out, but nothing happened. I opened it wider, and saw that the street was empty and that it was broad daylight. Then I waited—I do not know how long I waited. I crouched against the wall, huddled with terror. All this took much longer in the doing than in the telling. At last I could bear myself no longer. I tiptoed out on to the pavement—and, Monsieur will believe me, I expected to drop dead. But no one disturbed me. Then I heard a rustling. Doors everywhere were opening stealthily, ah, so stealthily! Some one else tiptoed out, and some one else, and some one else. We stood there staring, aghast at our daring. Suddenly we realised what had happened. The brutes had gone. We were free. It was indescribable, what followed—we ran together, weeping and embracing. At first we wept for gladness; soon we wept for sorrow. Our youth had departed; we were all old women or very ancient men. Two hours later our poilus came, like a blue-grey wave of laughter, fighting their way through the burning country that those swine had left in a sea of smoke and flames.”
And so that was why the Hun spared Noyon. But if he spared Noyon, he spared little else.2 Every village between here and the present front line has been levelled; every fruit-tree cut down. The wilful wickedness and pettiness of the crime stir one’s heart to pity and his soul to white-hot anger. The people who did this must make payment in more than money; to settle such a debt blood is required. American soldiers who came to Europe to do a job and with no decided detestation of the Hun, are being taught by such landscapes. They know now why they came. The wounds of France are educating them.
There has been a scheme proposed in America under which certain individual cities and towns in the States shall make themselves responsible for the re-building of certain individual cities and towns in the devastated areas. The scheme is noble; it has only one drawback, namely that it specialises effort and tends to ignore the immensity of the problem as a whole. I visited one of these towns—it is a town for which Philadelphia has made itself responsible. I wish the people of Philadelphia might get a glimpse of the task they have undertaken. There is a church-spire still standing; that is about all. The rest is a pile of bricks. In the midst of this havoc some Philadelphia ladies are living, one of whom is a nurse. They run a dispensary for the people who keep house for the most part in cellars and holes in the ground. A doctor visits them to hold a clinic ever so often. They have a little warehouse, in which they keep the necessities for immediate relief work. They have a rest hut for soldiers. They employ whatever civilian labour they can hire for the roofing of some of the least damaged cottages; for this temporary reconstruction they provide the materials. When I was there, the place was well within range of enemy shell-fire. The approach had to be made by way of camouflaged roads. The sole anxiety of these brave women was that on account of their nearness to the front-line, the military might compel them to move back. In order to safeguard themselves against this and to create a good impression, they were making a strong point of entertaining whatever officers were billeted in this vicinity. Their effort to remain in this rural Gomorrah was as courageous as it was pathetic. “The people need us,” they said, and then, “you don’t think we’ll be moved back, do you?” I thought they would, and I didn’t think that the grateful officers would be able to prevent it—they were subalterns and captains for the most part. “But we once had a major to tea,” they said. “A major!” I exclaimed, trying to look impressed, “Oh well, that makes a difference!”
There was one unit I wished especially to visit; it was a unit consisting entirely of women, sent over and financed by a women’s college. When I was in America last October and heard that they were starting, I made up my mind that they were doomed to disappointment. I pictured the battlefield of the Somme as I had last seen it—a sea of mud stretching for miles, furrowed by the troughs of battered trenches, pitted every yard with shell-holes and smeared over with the wreckage of what once were human bodies. I could not imagine what useful purpose women could serve amid such surroundings. It seemed to me indecent that they should be allowed to go there. They were going to do reconstruction, I was told. Reconstruction! you can’t reconstruct towns and villages the very foundations of which have been buried. There is a Bible phrase which expresses such annihilation, “The place thereof shall know it no more.” Yes, only the names remain in one’s memory—the very sites have been covered up and the contours of the landscape re-dug with high explosives. It took millions of pounds to work this havoc. Men tunnelled under-ground and sprung mines without warning. They climbed like birds of prey, into the heavens to hurl death from the clouds. They lined up their guns, tier upon tier, almost axle to axle in places, and at a given sign rained a deluge of corruption on a country miles in front, which they could not even discern. The infantry went over the top throwing bombs and piled themselves up into mounds of silence. Nations far away toiled day and night in factories—and all that they might achieve this repellant desolation. The innocence of the project made one smile—a handful of women sailing from America to reconstruct! To reconstruct will take ten times more effort than was required to destroy. More than eight hundred years ago William the Norman burnt his way through the North Country to Chester. Yorkshire has not yet recovered; it is still a wind-swept moorland. This women’s college in America hoped to repair in our lifetime a ruin a million times more terrible. Their courage was depressing, it so exceeded the possible. They might love one village back to life, but.... That is exactly what they are doing.
I arrived at Grécourt on an afternoon in January. It is here that the women of the Smith College Unit have taken up their tenancy. We had extraordinary difficulty in finding the place. The surrounding country had been blasted and scorched by fire. There was no one left of whom we could enquire. Everything had perished. Barns, houses, everything habitable had been blown up by the departing Hun. As a study in the painstaking completion of a purpose the scenes through which we passed almost called for admiration. Berlin had ordered her armies to destroy everything before withdrawing; they had obeyed with a loving thoroughness. The world has never seen such past masters in the art of demolition. Ever since they invaded Belgium, their hand has been improving. In the neighbourhood of Grécourt they have equalled, if not surpassed, their own best efforts. I would suggest to the Kaiser that this manly performance calls for a distribution of iron crosses. It is true that his armies were beaten and retiring; but does not that fact rather enhance their valour? They were retiring, yet there were those who were brave enough to delay their departure till they had achieved this final victory over old women and children to the lasting honour of their country. Such heroes are worthy to stand beside the sinkers of the Lusitania. It is not just that they should go unrecorded.
In the midst of this hell I came across a tumbled château. Its roof, its windows, its stairways were gone; only the crumbling shell of its former happiness was left standing. A high wall ran about its grounds. The place must have been pleasant with flower-gardens once. There was an impressive entrance of wrought-iron, a porter’s lodge and a broad driveway. At the back I found rows of little wood-huts. There was a fragrance of log-fires burning. I was glad of that, for I had heard of the starving cold these women had had to endure through the first winter months of their tenure. On tapping at a door, I found the entire colony assembled. It was tea-time and Sunday. Ten out of the seventeen who form the colony were present. A box-stove, such as we use in our pioneer shacks in Canada, was throwing out a glow of cheeriness. Candles had been lighted. Little knicknacks of feminine taste had been hung here and there to disguise the bareness of the walls. A bed, in one corner, was carefully disguised as a couch. Save for the fact that there was no glass in the window—glass being unobtainable in France at present—one might easily have persuaded himself that he was back in America in the room of a girl-undergraduate.
The method of my greeting furthered this illusion. Americans, both men and women, have an extraordinary self-poise, a gift for remaining normal in the most abnormal surroundings. They refuse to allow themselves to be surprised by any upheaval of circumstances. “I should worry,” they seem to be saying, and press straight on with the job in hand. There was one small touch which made the environment seem even more friendly and unexceptional. One of the girls, on being introduced, promptly read to me a letter which she had just received from my sister in America. It made this oasis in an encircling wilderness seem very much a part of a neighbourly world. This girl is an example of the varied experiences which have trained American women into becoming the nursemaids of the French peasantry.
She was visiting relations in Liége when the war broke out. On the Sunday she went for a walk on the embattlements and was turned back. Baulked in this direction, she strolled out towards the country and found men digging trenches. That was the first she knew that war was rumoured. On the Tuesday, two days later, Hun shells were detonating on the house-tops. She was held prisoner in Liége for some months after the Forts had fallen and saw more than all the crimes against humanity that the Bryce Report has recorded. At last she disguised herself and contrived her escape into Holland. From there she worked her way back to America and now she is at Grécourt, starting shops in the villages, educating the children, and behaving generally as if to respond to the “Follow thou me” of the New Testament was an entirely unheroic proceeding for a woman.
And what are these women doing at Grécourt? To condense their purpose into a phrase, I should say that by their example they are bringing sanity back into the lives of the French peasants. That is what the American Fund for French Wounded is doing at Blérancourt, what all these reconstruction units are doing in the devastated areas, and what the American Red Cross is doing on a much larger scale for the whole of France. At Grécourt they have a dispensary and render medical aid. If the cases are grave, they are sent to the American Hospital at Nesle. They hunt out the former tradespeople among the refugees and encourage them to re-start their shops, lending them the money for the purpose. If the men are captives in Germany, then their wives are helped to carry on the business in their absence and for their sakes. Groups of mothers are brought together and set to work on making clothes for themselves and their children. Schools are opened so that the children may be more carefully supervised. Two of the girls at Grécourt have learnt to plough, and are instructing the peasant women. Cows are kept and a dairy has been started to provide the under-nourished babies of the district. An automobile-dispensary is sent out from the hospital at Nesle to visit the remoter districts. It has a seat along one side for the patient and the nurse. Over the seat is a rack for medicine and instruments. On the opposite side is a rack for splints and surgical dressings. On the floor of the car a shower-bath is arranged, which is so compact that it can be carried into the house where the water is to be heated. The water is put into a tub on a wooden base; while the doctor manipulates the pump for the shower, the nurse does the scrubbing. Most of the diseases among the children are due to dirt; the importance of keeping clean, which such colonies as that at Grécourt are impressing on all the people whom they serve, is doing much to improve the general state of health. In this direction, as in so many others, the most valuable contribution that they are making to their districts is not material and financial, but mental—the contribution of example and suggestion. Seventeen women cannot re-build in a day an external civilisation which has been blotted out by the savagery of a nation; but they can and they are re-building the souls of the human derelicts who have survived the savagery. This war is going to be won not by the combination of nations which has most men and guns, but by the side which possesses the highest spiritual qualities. The same is true of the countries which will wipe out the effects of war most quickly when the war is ended. The first countries to recover will be those which fight on in a new way, after peace has been signed, for the same ideals for which they have shed their blood. The sight of these American women, living helpfully and voluntarily for the sake of others among hideous surroundings, is a perpetual reminder to the dispirited refugees that, whatever else is lost, valiance and loyalty still survive.
From Grécourt I went farther afield to Croix, Y and Matigny. Here a young architect is in charge of the reconstruction. No attempt is being made at present to re-build the farms entirely. Labour is difficult to obtain—it is all required for military purposes. The same applies to materials. Patching is the best that can be done. Just to get a roof over one corner of a ruin is as much as can be hoped for. Until that is done the people have to live in cellars, in shell-holes, in verminous dug-outs like beasts of prey or savages. Their position is far more deplorable than that of Indians, for they once knew the comforts of civilisation. For instance, I visited a farmer who before the war was a millionaire in French money. Many of the farmers of this district were; their acreages were large even by prairie standards. The American Red Cross has managed to reconstruct one room for him in a pile of debris which was once a spacious house. There he lives with his old wife, who, during the Hun occupation, became nearly blind and almost completely paralytic. His sons and daughters have been swept beyond his knowledge by the departing armies. Before the Huns left, he had to stand by and watch them uselessly lay waste his home and possessions. His trees are cut down. His barns are laid flat. His cattle are behind the German lines. At the age of seventy, he is starting all afresh and working harder than ever he did in his life. The young architect of the Red Cross visits him often. They sit in the little room of nights, erecting barns and houses more splendid than those that have vanished, but all in the green quiet of the untested future. They shall be standing by the time the captive sons come back. It is a game at which they play for the sake of the blinded mother; she listens smilingly, nodding her old head, her frail hands folded in her lap.
These pictures which I have painted are typical of some of the things that the American Red Cross is doing. They are isolated examples, which by no means cover all its work. There are the rolling canteens which it has instituted, which follow the French armies. There are the rest houses it has built on the French line of communications for poilus who are going on leave or returning. There is the farm for the mutilated, where they are taught to be specialists in certain branches of agriculture, despite their physical curtailments. There is the great campaign against tuberculosis which it is waging. There are its well-conceived warehouses, stored with medical supplies and military and relief necessities, spreading in a great net-work of usefulness and connected by ambulance transport throughout the whole of the stricken part of France. There are its hospitals, both military and civil. There is the “Lighthouse” for men wounded in battle, founded by Miss Holt in Paris.
I visited this Lighthouse; it is a place infinitely brave and pathetic. Most of the men were picked heroes at the war; they wear their decorations in proof of it. They are greater heroes than ever now. Nothing has more deeply moved me than my few hours among those sightless eyes. In many cases the faces are hideously marred, the eyelids being quite grown together. In several cases besides the eyes, the arms or legs have gone. I have talked and written a good deal about the courage which this war has inspired in ordinary men; but the courage of these blinded men, who once were ordinary, leaves me silent and appalled. They are happy—how and why I cannot understand. Most of them have been taught at the Lighthouse how to overcome their disability and are earning their living as weavers, stenographers, potters, munition-workers. Quite a number of them have families to support. The only complaint that is made against them by their brother-workmen is that they are too rapid; they set too strenuous a pace for the men with eyes. It is a fact that in all trades where sensitiveness of touch is an asset, blindness has increased their efficiency. This is peculiarly so at the Sévres pottery-works where I saw them making the moulds for retorts. A soldier, who was teaching a seeing person Braille, explained his own quickness of perception when he exclaimed, “Ah, madame, it is your eyes which prevent you from seeing!”
I heard some of the stories of the men. There was a captain who, after he had been wounded and while there was yet time to save his sight, insisted on being taken to his General that he might inform him about a German mine. When his mission was completed, his chance of seeing was forever ended.
There was a lieutenant who was blinded in a raid and left for dead out in No Man’s Land. Just before he became unconscious, he placed two lumps of earth in line in the direction which led back to his own trenches. He knew the direction by the sound of the retreating footsteps. Whenever he came to himself he groped his way a little nearer to France and before he fainted again, registered the direction with two more lumps of earth placed in line. It took him a day to crawl back.
There was another man who illustrated in a finer way that saying, “It is your eyes which prevent you from seeing.” This man before the war was a village-priest, and no credit to his calling. He had a sister who had spent her youth for him and worshipped him beyond everything in the world. He took her adoration brutally for granted. At the outbreak of hostilities he joined the army, serving bravely in the ranks till he was hopelessly blinded. Having always been a thoroughly selfish man, his privation drove him nearly to madness. He had always used the world; now for the first time he had been used by it. His viciousness broke out in blasphemy; he hated both God and man. He made no distinction between people in the mass and the people who tried to help him. His whole desire was to inflict as much pain as he himself suffered. When his sister came to visit him, he employed every ingenuity of word and gesture to cause her agony. Do what she would, he refused to allow her love either to reach or comfort him. She was only a simple peasant woman. In her grief and loneliness she thought matters out and arrived at what seemed to her a practical solution. On her next visit to the hospital she asked to see the doctor. She was taken to him and made her request. “I love my brother,” she said; “I have always given him everything. He has lost his eyes and he cannot endure it. Because I love him, I could bear it better. I have been thinking, and I am sure it is possible: I want you to remove my eyes and to put them into his empty sockets.”
When the priest was told of her offer, he laughed derisively at her for a fool. Then the reason she had given for her intended sacrifice was told to him, “Because I love him, I could bear it better.” He fell silent. All that day he refused food; in the eternal darkness, muffled by his bandages, he was arriving at the truth: she had been willing to suffer what he was now suffering, because she loved him. The hand of love would have made the burden bearable and, if for her, why not for himself? At last, after years of refusal, the simplicity of her tenderness reached and touched him. Presently he was discharged from hospital and taken in hand by the teachers of the blind, who taught him to play the organ. One day his sister came and led him back to his village-parish. Before the war, by his example, he was a danger to God and man; now he sets a very human example of sainthood, labouring without ceasing for others more fortunate than himself. He has increased his efficiency for service by his blindness. Of him it is absolutely true that it was his eyes that prevented him from seeing—from seeing the splendour that lay hidden in himself, no less than in his fellow creatures.
So far I have sketched in the main what the war of compassion is doing for the repatriés—the captured French civilians sent back from Germany—and for the refugees of the devastated areas, who have either returned to their ruined farms and villages or were abandoned as useless when the Hun retired. To complete the picture it remains to describe what is being done for the civilian population which has always lived in the battle area of the French armies.
The question may be asked why civilians have been allowed to live here. Curiously enough it is due to the extraordinary humanity of the French Government which makes allowances for the almost religious attachment of the peasant to his tiny plot of land; it is an attachment which is as instinctive and fiercely jealous as that of a cat for her young. He will endure shelling, gassing and all the horrors that scientific invention has produced; he will see his cottage and his barns shattered by bombs and siege-guns, but he will not leave the fields that he has tilled and toiled over, unless he is driven out at the point of the bayonet. I have been told, though I have never seen it, that behind quiet parts of the line, French peasants will gather in their harvest actually in full sight of the Hun. Shells may be falling, but they go stolidly on with their work. There is another reason for this leniency of the Government: they have enough refugees on their hands already and are not going in search of further trouble, until the trouble is forced upon them by circumstances.
As may be imagined, these people live under physical conditions that are terrible. They consist for the most part of women and children; the women are over-worked and the children are neglected. Skin diseases and vermin abound. Clothes are negligible. Washing is a forgotten luxury. Much havoc is wrought by asphyxiating gases which drift across the front-line into the back-country. To the adults are issued protective masks like those that the soldiers wear, but the children do not know how to use them. Many of them are orphans, and live like little animals on roots and offal; for shelter they seek holes in the ground. The American Red Cross is specialising on its efforts to reclaim these children, realising that whatever happens to the adults, the children are the hope of the world.
The part of the Front to which I went to study this work was made famous in 1914 by the disembowellings, shootings and unspeakable indecencies that were perpetrated there. Near by is the little village in which Sister Julie risked her life by refusing to allow her wounded to be butchered. She wears the Legion of Honour now. In the same neighbourhood there lives a Mayor who, after having seen his young wife murdered, protected her murderers from the lynch-law of the mob when next day the town was recaptured. In the same district there is a meadow where fifteen old men were done to death, while a Hun officer sat under an oak-tree, drinking mocking toasts to the victims of each new execution.
The influence of more than three years of warfare has not been elevating, as far as these peasants are concerned. As early as July, a little over a month from its arrival in France, an S.O.S. was sent out by the Préfet of the department, begging the American Red Cross to come and help. In addition to the refugees of old standing, 350 children had been suddenly put into his care. He had nothing but a temporary shelter for them and his need for assistance was acute. Within a few hours the Red Cross had despatched eight workers—a doctor, nurse, bacteriologist, an administrative director and two women to take charge of the bedding, food and clothing. A camionette loaded with condensed milk and other relief necessities was sent by road. On the arrival of the party, they found the children herded together in old barracks, dirty and unfurnished, with no sanitary appliances whatsoever. The sick were crowded together with the well. Of the 350 children, twenty-one were under one year of age, and the rest between one and eight years. The reason for this sudden crisis was that the Huns were bombing the villages behind the lines with asphyxiating gas. The military authorities had therefore withdrawn all children who were too young to adjust their masks themselves, at the same time urging their mothers to carry on the patriotic duty of gathering in the harvest. It was the machinery of mercy which had been built up in six months about this nucleus of eight persons that I set out to visit.
The roads were crowded with the crack troops of France—the Foreign Legion, the Tailleurs, the Moroccans—all marching in one direction, eastward to the trenches. There were rumours of something immense about to happen—no one knew quite what. Were we going to put on a new offensive or were we going to resist one? Many answers were given: they were all guesswork. Meanwhile, our progress was slow; we were continually halting to let brigades of artillery and regiments of infantry pour into the main artery of traffic from lanes and side-roads. When we had backed our car into hedges to give them room to pass, we watched the sea of faces. They were stern and yet laughing, elated and yet childish, eloquent of the love of living and yet familiar with their old friend, Death. They knew that something big was to be demanded of them; before the demand had been made, they had determined to give to the ultimate of their strength. There was a spiritual resolution about their faces which made all their expressions one—the uplifted expression of the unconquered soul of France. That expression blotted out their racial differences. It did not matter that they were Arabs, Negroes, Normans, Parisians; they owned to one nationality—the nationality of martyrdom—and they marched with a single purpose, that freedom might be restored to the world.
When we reached the city to which we journeyed, night had fallen. There was something sinister about our entry; we were veiled in fog, and crept through the gate and beneath the ramparts with extinguished head lights. Scarcely any one was abroad. Those whom we passed, loomed out of the mist in silence, passed stealthily and vanished.
This city is among the most beautiful in France; until recently, although within range of the Hun artillery, it had been left undisturbed. In return the French had spared an equally beautiful city on the other side of the line. This clemency, shown towards two gems of architecture, was the result of one of those silent bargains that are arranged in the language of the guns. But the bargain had been broken by the time I arrived. Bombing planes had been over; the Allied planes had retaliated. Houses, emptied like cart-loads of bricks into the street, were significant of the ruin that was pending. Any moment the orchestra of destruction might break into its overture. Without cessation one could hear a distant booming. The fiddlers of death were tuning up.
Early next morning I went to see the Préfet. He is an old man, whose courage has made him honoured wherever the French tongue is spoken. Others have thought of their own safety and withdrawn into the interior. Never from the start has his sense of duty wavered. Night and day he has laboured incessantly for the refugees, whom he refers to always as “my suffering people.” He kept me waiting for some time. Directly I entered he volunteered the explanation: he had just received word from the military authorities that the whole of his civil population must be immediately evacuated. To evacuate a civil population means to tear it up and transplant it root and branch, with no more of its possession than can be carried as hand-baggage. Some 75,000 people would be made homeless directly the Préfet published the order.
It was a dramatic moment, full of tragedy. I glanced out into the square filled with wintry sunlight. I took note of the big gold gates and the monuments. I watched the citizens halting here and there to chat, or going about their errands with a quiet confidence. All this was to be shattered; it had been decided. The same thing was to happen here as had happened at Yprés. The bargain was off. The enemy city, the other side of the line, was to be shelled; this city had to take the consequences. The bargain was off not only as far as the city was concerned, but also as regards its inhabitants’ happiness. They had homes to-day; they would be fugitives to-morrow. Then I looked at the old Préfet, who had to break the news to them. He was sitting at his table in his uniform of office, supporting his head in his tired hands.
“What are you going to do?” I asked.
“I have called on the Croix Rouge Américaine to help me,” he said. “They have helped me before; they will help me again. These Americans—I have never been to America—but they are my friends. Since they came, they have looked after my babies. Their doctors and nurses have worked day and night for my suffering people. They are silent; but they do things. There is love in their hands.”
While I was still with him the Red Cross officials arrived. They had already wired to Paris. Their lorries and ambulances were converging from all points to meet the emergency. They undertook at once to place all their transport facilities at his disposal. They had started their arrangements for the handling of the children. Extra personnel were being rushed to the spot. There was one unit already in the city. They had hoped to go nearer to the Front, but on arriving had learnt that their permission had been cancelled. It was a bit of luck. They could set to work at once.
I knew this unit and went out to find it. It was composed of American society girls, who had been protected all their lives from ugliness. They had sailed from New York with the vaguest ideas of the war conditions they would encounter; they believed that they were needed to do a nurse-maid’s job for France. Their original purpose was to found a crêche for the babies of women munition-workers. When they got to Paris they found that such institutions were not wanted. They at once changed their programme, and asked to be allowed to take their crêche into the army zone and convert it into a hospital for refugee children. There were interminable delays due to passport formalities—the delays dragged on for three months. During those three months they were called on for no sacrifice; they lived just as comfortably as they had done in New York and, consequently, grew disgusted. They had sailed for France prepared to give something that they had never given before, and France did not seem to want it. At last their passports came; without taking any chances, they got out of Paris and started for the Front. Their haste was well-timed; no sooner had they departed than a message arrived, cancelling their permissions. They had reached the doomed city in which I was at present, two days before its sentence was pronounced. Within four hours of their arrival they had had their first experience of being bombed. Their intention had been to open their hospital in a town still nearer to the front-line. The hospital was prepared and waiting for them. But in the last few days the military situation had changed. A hospital so near the trenches stood a good chance of being destroyed by shell-fire; so once again the unit was held up. It volunteered to abandon its idea of running the hospital for children; it would run it as a first aid hospital for the armies. The offer was refused. These girls, whose gravest interest a year ago had been the season’s dances and the latest play, were determined to experience the thrill of sacrifice. So here they were in the doomed city, as the Red Cross officials said, “by luck”—the very place where they were most needed.
When I visited them, after leaving the Préfet’s, they had not yet heard that they were to be allowed to stay. They had heard nothing of the city’s sentence or of the evacuation of the civil population. All they knew was that the hospital, which had been appointed with their money, was only a few kilometres away and that they were forbidden even to see it. They were gloomy with the fear that within a handful of days they would be again walking the boulevards of Paris. When the news was broken to them of the part they were to play, the full significance of it did not dawn on them at once. “But we don’t want anything easy,” they complained; “this isn’t the Front.” “It will be soon,” the official told them. When they heard that they cheered up; then their share in the drama was explained. In all probability the city would soon be under constant shell-fire. Refugees would be pouring back from the forward country. The people of the city itself had to be helped to escape before the bombardment commenced. They would have to stay there taking care of the children, packing them into lorries, driving ambulances, rendering first aid, taking the wounded and decrepit out of danger and always returning to it again themselves. As the certainty of the risk and service was impressed on them their faces brightened. Risk and service, that was what they most desired; they were girls, but they hungered to play a soldier’s part. They had only dreamt of serving when they had sailed from New York. Those three months of waiting had stung their pride. It was in Paris that the dream of risk had commenced. They would make France want them. Their chance had come.
When I came out into the streets again the word was spreading. Carts were being loaded in front of houses. Everything on wheels, from wagons to perambulators, was being piled up. Everything on four legs, dogs, cattle, horses, was being harnessed and made to do its share in hauling. We left the city, going back to the next point where the refugees would be cared for. On either side of the road, as far as eye could stretch, trenches had been dug, barricades thrown up, blockades and wire-entanglements constructed. It all lay very quiet beneath the sunlight. It seemed a kind of preposterous pretence. One could not imagine these fields as a scene of battle, sweating torture and agony and death. I looked back at the city, one of the most beautiful in France, growing hazy in the distance with its spires and its ramparts. Impossible! Then I remembered the carts being hurriedly loaded and the uplifted faces of those American girls. Where had I seen their expression before? Yes. Strange that they should have caught it! Their expression was the same as that which I had noticed on the Tailleurs, the Foreign Legion and the Moroccans—the crack troops of France.... So they had become that already! At the first hint of danger, their courage had taken command; they had risen into soldiers.
Through villages swarming with troops and packed with ordnance we arrived at an old caserne, which has been converted into the children’s hospital of the district. It is in charge of one of the first of America’s children’s specialists. While he works among the refugees, his wife, who is a sculptress, makes masks for the facially mutilated. He has brought with him from the States some of his students, but his staff is in the main cosmopolitan. One of his nurses is an Australian, who was caught at the outbreak of hostilities in Austria and because of her knowledge, despite her nationality, was allowed to help to organise the Red Cross work of the enemy. Another is a French woman who wears the Croix de Guerre with the palm. She saved her wounded from the fury of the Hun when her village was lost, and helped to get them back to safety after it had been recaptured. The Matron is Swedish and Belgian. The ambulance-drivers are some of the American boys who saw service with the French armies. In this group of workers there are as many stories as there are nationalities.
If the workers have their stories, so have the five hundred little patients. This barrack, converted into a hospital, is full of babies, the youngest being only six days old when I was there. Many of the children have no parents. Others have lost their mothers; their fathers are serving in the trenches. It is not always easy to find out how they became orphans; there are such plentiful chances of losing parents who live continually under shell-fire. One little boy on being asked where his mother was, replied gravely, “My Mama, she is dead. Les Boches, they put a gun to ’er ’ead. She is finished; I ’ave no Mama.”
The unchildlike stoicism of these children is appalling. I spent two days among them and heard no crying. Those who are sick, lie motionless as waxen images in their cots. Those who are supposedly well, sit all day brooding and saying nothing. When first they arrive, their faces are earth-coloured. The first thing they have to be taught is how to be children. They have to be coaxed and induced to play; even then they soon grow weary. They seem to regard mere playing as frivolous and indecorous; and so it is in the light of the tragedies they have witnessed. Children of seven have seen more of horror in three years than most old men have read about in a life-time. Many of them have been captured by and recaptured from the Huns. They have been in villages where the dead lay in piles and not even the women were spared. They have been present while indecencies were worked upon their mothers. They have seen men hanged, shot, bayoneted and flung to roast in burning houses. The pictures of all these things hang in their eyes. When they play, it is out of politeness to the kind Americans; not because they derive any pleasure from it.
Night is the troublesome time. The children hide under their beds with terror. The nurses have to go the rounds continually. If the children would only cry, they would give warning. But instead, they creep silently out from between the sheets and crouch against the floor like dumb animals. Dumb animals! That is what they are when first they are brought in. Their most primitive instincts for the beginnings of cleanliness seem to have vanished. They have been fished out of caves, ruined dug-outs, broken houses. They are as full of skin-diseases as the beggar who sat outside Dives’ gate, only they have had no dogs to lick their sores. They have lived on offal so long that they have the faces of the extremely aged. And their hatred! Directly you utter the word “Boche,” all the little night-gowned figures sit up in their cots and curse. When they have done cursing, of their own accord, they sing the Marseillaise.
Surely if God listens to prayers of vengeance, He will answer the husky petitions of these victims of Hun cruelty! The quiet, just, deep-seated venom of these babies will work the Hun more harm than many batteries. Their fathers come back from the trenches to see them. On leaving, they turn to the American nurses, “We shall fight better now,” they say, “because we know that you are taking care of them.”
When those words are spoken, the American Red Cross knows that it is achieving its object and is winning its war of compassion. The whole drive of all its effort is to win the war in the shortest possible space of time. It is in Europe to save children for the future, to re-kindle hope in broken lives, to mitigate the toll of unavoidable suffering, but first and foremost to help men to fight better.