way to the station, my heart burning with pity for the poor men who
looked at us with such sick, tired, despairing, hungry eyes. We threw
them what we dared. Nothing reached them--nothing. At the station they
waited, fainting with fatigue, with loss of blood, with hunger, with
thirst, ringed around with soldiers, bayonets fixed. There we stood, we
women and children and old men, our hands full of food and comforts--no,
you never know how sickeningly your heart can throb and still go on
beating. I had never thought I could hate as I did in that hour, a
helpless spectator of that unnecessary cruelty. Since then I have had
many lessons in how deeply even a modern woman can be forced to hate.
"The train came, the wounded men were driven aboard their cattle car.
The train disappeared. They were gone. I walked home smiling--we never
let 'them' see how 'their' tortures make us suffer. Later Julien, my
little Julien--he was twelve then--found me still weeping furiously. He
bent over me, his little body all tense and fierce. 'Don't cry so,
auntie! Don't cry so! It won't last. It will soon be over.'
"That was two years ago.
* * * * *
"None of us Frenchwomen were allowed to stay long in hospital work. For
one reason or another, we were all forbidden to go on caring for the
wounded. I had the honor of being the very first to be put out of the
door.
"One of the officers in charge said to me one day, some four or five
months after the beginning, 'Ah, madame, we shall soon be good friends
now.'
"The idea made me fall a step backward. 'What, monsieur? What do you
mean?'
"'Yes, France and Germany will soon be friends. I know with absolute
certainty that Germany has offered a third of Belgium to France and that
France is more than satisfied to accept and end the war.'
"That is always one of the horrors up there. 'They' can tell you any
news they please as 'absolute certainties.' Since we know nothing of
what is going on except what they choose to tell us, we have no proofs
to fling back at them; no proofs but moral ones, and 'they' find moral
proofs ridiculous, of course.
"I stiffened and said, 'No, monsieur. No; France will never do that,
never! You cannot understand why France will never do it, nor why I am
sure that she never will. But it is true.'
"He laughed a little, as you would laugh at a child's impractical
notions, and said: 'Oh, but France _has_ done it, madame! You will see
the announcement in a few days.'
"That cool assumption, my helplessness to refute him with facts, made me
for an instant beside myself. I said, very hotly: 'Monsieur, if France
ever does that, I will renounce my French blood. I will make myself an
American.' He was still smiling indulgently at my heat. 'Oh, why,
madame? Why?'
"'Because if France should do that, it would be as much a disgrace for
an honest person to be French as now to be German.'
"He all but struck me with his whip.
"And five minutes later, still in my nurse's uniform, I was standing in
the street, with the door of the hospital closed behind me. I can't say
I was particularly regretful, either."
She looked down at her skirt of threadbare, coarse black stuff. "Do you
know where I got this skirt? After a year of war I had nothing, nothing
left in my wardrobe. We gave away to the poorer ones every garment we
could possibly spare. And there was nothing, nothing left in any of the
shops to buy. And I had no money to buy if there had been. How was I
going to get an overcoat for Julien and a skirt for myself? The
scrubwoman in Uncle Henri's office noticed the patches and darns on my
last skirt, and said the American Committee had some clothes to
distribute. I went there--yes, I--holding out my hand like any beggar.
Bless Americans! There is no shame in being helped by them! They gave me
there an overcoat that I made over for Julien and enough of this cloth
for a skirt. It is the only one I have had for two years. Do you know
what I saw all the time I sat sewing on that charity garment, come from
so far? Across the street from our house is the great warehouse where
the cloth from the----woolen mills was stored. All day long German
automobile trucks stood in front of that building, while from the
windows German soldiers threw down bale after bale of cloth. As soon as
a truck was full it would start forward on its journey to the station,
where the cloth was loaded on trains and sent to Germany. An empty one
immediately took its place. Heavy woolens, light woolens, blankets,
cashmeres, flannels, serges, twill, black, brown, blue, white,
figured--hundreds and hundreds of bales. I never knew there were so many
kinds of woolen cloth. I never had seen so much all together in my life
as I saw tossed down from the windows of that four-story building during
those three days. For it took three days of incessant work to steal all
that cloth--three long days--just the time it took me to prepare those
two charity garments sent from America."
* * * * *
She held up a thick, square, brownish cracker, and said: "Look well at
that. You have never seen anything more important to human lives. That
is the free American biscuit. It is distributed at ten every morning to
every school-child, to every teacher, in the region under German rule.
None have had enough to eat. There are no biscuits distributed on
Sundays and vacation days. Those are hard days for the children to live
through. They beg desperately to go to school, even when they are sick,
so they may not miss their biscuit. It is by far the best thing they
have to eat all day, the most palatable, the only complete food. The
change in the school-children since they have had this added to their
diet--it is miraculous! The experts say the biscuits are a carefully
compounded product of many grains, which make it a complete aliment. We
know better than that. It is manna from heaven.
"And here," she held up a red woolen knitted cap, such as American
school-children wear in small towns during the winter. "Somehow the
American Committees managed so that there was such a cap for every one
of us. They have become the national head-dress. Hundreds and hundreds
of them--and every one knit in America and sent to us. Bless America!
"Our lights? There was soon, of course, no kerosene for us, no fats to
make candles. And you know the long, long, dark winters in the north of
France? Do you know what we did, praying that the American Committee
would forgive us and realize that blackness is too dreadful to people
whose nerves are almost worn through? We set aside a part of the lard
and bacon the Committee provided for us; we melted it, put home-made
cotton wicks in it, and--there we had a light, a little glimmering
taper, but enough to save our reason in the long evenings. Bless
America!
"The schools have kept on, you know; every teacher at her post, not a
day missed (even when the town was bombarded). Every year the
examinations have been set--they use old examination papers sent from
Paris before the war--and diplomas have been given. And besides that, at
home we have tried our best to keep the life of our children what the
life of French children ought to be. I remember last year, during the
summer, Aunt Louise taught a group of children in our part of the town
to sing the 'Marseillaise.' The studio of my cousin Jean is at the back
of the house and high up, so that she thought the children's voices
could not be heard from the street. The Mayor heard of what she was
doing, and sent word that he would like to hear them sing. The news
spread around rapidly. When he arrived with the city council, coming in
one by one, as though merely to make a call, they found the big studio
full to overflowing with their fellow-citizens--the old men and women
who are all the fellow-citizens left there. There must have been two or
three hundred of them, the most representative people of the town, all
in black, all so silent, so old and sad. The children were quite abashed
by such an audience, and filed up on the little platform shyly--our
poor, thin, shabby, white-faced children, fifty or sixty of them.
"There was a pause, the children half afraid to begin, the rest of us
thinking uneasily that we were running a great risk. Suppose the
children's voices should be heard in the street, after all. Suppose the
German police should enter and find us assembled thus. It would mean
horrors and miseries for every family represented. The Mayor stood near
the children to give them the signal to begin--and dared not. We were
silent, our hearts beating fast.
"Then all at once the littlest ones began in their high, sweet treble
those words that mean France, that mean liberty, that mean life itself
to us:
"'_Allons, enfants de la Patrie!_' they sang, tilting their heads back
like little birds; and all the other children followed:
"'Against us floats the red flag of tyranny!'
"We were on our feet in an instant. It was the first time any of us had
heard it sung since--since our men marched away.
"I began to tremble all over, so that I could hardly stand. Every one
there stared up at the children; every one's face was deadly white to
his lips.
"The children sang on--sang the chorus, sang the second stanza.
"When they began the third, 'Sacred love of our fatherland, sustain our
avenging arms!' the Mayor's old face grew livid. He whirled about to the
audience, his white hair like a lion's mane, and with a gesture swept us
all into the song.
"'Liberty, our adored liberty, fight for thy defenders!' There were
three hundred voices shouting it out, the tears streaming down our
cheeks. If a regiment of German guards had marched into the room, we
would not have turned our heads. Nothing could have stopped us then. We
were only a crowd of old men and defenseless women and children, but we
were all that was left of France in our French town.
"Letters? You know 'their' rule is that none are allowed, that we may
neither write nor receive news from our dear ones. But that rule, like
all their rules, is broken as often as we can. There are numbers of
secret letter-carriers, who risk their lives to bring and take news. But
it is horribly risky. If a letter is found on you, you are liable to a
crushing fine, or, worse yet, to imprisonment, and, if you have children
or old people dependent on you, you dare not risk leaving them. You
might as well cut their throats at once and spare them the long
suffering. Even if the letter is not found on you, there is risk if you
try to send or receive one. They are not, of course, addressed, so that
if the letter-carrier is discovered all those to whom he is bringing
mail may not be incriminated. But if he is caught 'they' always
threaten him with atrocious punishments which will be remitted if he
will disclose the names of those who have employed him. Generally the
poor letter-carriers are loyal even to death, suffering everything
rather than betray their trust. But some of them are only young boys,
physically undermined by hardship and insufficient food, like all our
people, and they have not the physical strength to hold out against days
of starvation, or floggings, or exposure--naked--to intense cold. They
give way, reveal the names of the people who are receiving letters--and
then there are a dozen more homes desolate, a dozen more mothers
imprisoned, a dozen more groups of children left.
"And yet we all used to get letters before the rules became so terribly
strict as at present. I have had six in the three years--just six. They
were from my mother--I could not live without knowing whether my old
_maman_ was alive or not. Curious, isn't it, to think that I would have
been imprisoned at hard labor if any one had known that I had received a
letter from my old mother?
"Of course you must never carry them on you, if out of doors, for there
is always a chance that you may be searched. On the trolley line between
our town and the suburb, ----, which I used to take once a week to go to
see Pauline when she was so ill, it often happened. The car would stop
at a sudden cry of '_Halte!_' and soldiers with bayonets would herd us
into a nearby house. Women--German women, brought from Germany
especially for such work--were waiting for us women passengers. We were
forced to undress entirely, not a garment left on our poor humiliated
old bodies, and everything was searched, our purses opened, our shoes
examined, our stockings turned inside out. If anything which seemed
remotely incriminating was found--an old clipping from a French
newspaper, a poem which might be considered patriotic--a scrap of a
letter, we were taken away to prison; if not, we were allowed to dress
and go on our way."
We gazed at her, pale with incredulity. It was as though Americans had
heard that such treatment had been accorded Jane Addams or Margaret
Deland. "Were _you_ ever searched in that way?" we faltered.
She had an instant of burning impatience with our ignorance. "Good
Heavens, yes; many and many times! How absolutely little idea you have
of what is going on up there under their rule! That was nothing compared
to many, many things they do--their domiciliary visits, for instance. At
any hour of the day or night a squad of soldiers knock at your door
suddenly, with no warning. They search your house from top to bottom,
often spending three hours over the undertaking. They look into every
drawer, take down all the clothes from the hooks in the closets, look
under the carpets, behind the bookcases, shake out all the soiled
clothes in the laundry bag, pull out everything from under the kitchen
sink, read every scrap of paper in your drawer and in your waste-paper
basket--it's incredible. You watch them, with perfect stupefaction at
the energy and ingenuity they put into their shameful business. And what
they find as 'evidence' against you! It is as stupefying. They always
read every page of the children's school copy-books, for instance, and
if they find a 'composition' on patriotism, even expressed in the most
general terms, they tear out those pages and take them away to be filed
as 'evidence.'
"You must know that they can and do often enter for these searching
visits at night when every one is in bed; perhaps you can guess how
tensely the mothers of young girls endeavor not to offend against the
least of 'their' innumerable rules, lest they be sent away into exile
and leave their children defenseless. But it is almost impossible to
avoid offending against some rule or other. Anything serves as ground
for accusation--a liberal book, a harmless pamphlet found in the
bookcase, the possession of a copper object forgotten after the summons
to give up all copper has gone out, a piece of red, white, and blue
ribbon, a copy of the 'Marseillaise,' a book of patriotic poems; but,
above all, the possession of anything that serves to point to
communication, ever so remote, with the outside world. That is the
supreme crime in their eyes. A page of a French or English newspaper is
as dangerous to have in the house as a stick of dynamite.
"Many men, women, and young girls are now in a German prison somewhere
for the crime of having circulated little pamphlets intended to keep up
the courage of the inhabitants. These little sheets no longer exist, but
what exists in spite of all these repressive measures is the unshaken
faith in our future, the most utter confidence that the Allies will
rescue us out of the hand of our enemies."
What she told us about the deportations I may not repeat for fear of
bringing down worse horrors on the heads of those she left behind. You
may be thankful that you have not to read that story.
Only two incidents am I permitted to transcribe for you--two incidents
which, perhaps, sum up the whole vast and unimaginable tragedy.
"We have tried, you know, to keep the children as busy as possible with
their studies, so that they would not have leisure to brood over what
they see and hear every day. I've had little Marguerite go on with her
English lessons steadily and read as much English as possible. One of
the books her teacher gave her was 'Uncle Tom's Cabin.' She looked up
from it one day, with a pale face, and said, in a sad, wondering voice:
'Why, auntie, this might have been written about us, mightn't it? It
tells about things that happen to us all the time--that we have seen.
The men who are flogged and starved and killed, the mothers trying in
vain to follow their daughters into captivity, the young girls dragged
out of their fathers' arms--it's all just like what the Germans do to
us, isn't it?'"
And the other is that last hour at the railway station, when she stood
beside the railway tracks, with her little Julien beside her (he was
fourteen then), and told him in a fierce, choked voice, "Look, Julien!
Look, remember! Never forget what you are seeing to-day," as they
watched the soldiers drive into the cattle cars the old men, women, and
adolescents torn from their homes in such haste that they had no change
of clothing, no food, often not even their hats and wraps. "We stood
there, those who were not 'taken,' the great helpless crowd of women and
children, agonizing in that dreadful silence which is the last refuge of
our poor battered human dignity up there. I was suffocating, literally
unable to breathe. You do not know what hate and pity and horror you can
feel and still live!
"The wheels of the train began grindingly to turn, the train
advanced--it could not have been more unendurable to us if it had gone
over our own bodies.
"And then some miraculous wind of high-hearted courage swept through
that train-load of weak, doomed, and defenseless human beings. From
every crevice, from every crack, waved a hand, fluttered a handkerchief,
and from the train with one voice, the 'Marseillaise' went up in an
indomitable shout.
"'_Allons, enfants de la Patrie._'
"The sound of the singing and the sound of the train died away in the
distance.
"We did not weep--no, we have never shown them how they can torture us.
Not a tear was shed.
"But the next day our insane asylum at L---- was filled to overflowing
with new cases of madness."
A LITTLE KANSAS LEAVEN
Between 1620 and 1630 Giles Boardman, an honest, sober, well-to-do
English master-builder found himself hindered in the exercise of his
religion. He prayed a great deal and groaned a great deal more (which
was perhaps the Puritan equivalent of swearing), but in the end he left
his old home and his prosperous business and took his wife and young
children the long, difficult, dangerous ocean voyage to the New World.
There, to the end of his homesick days, he fought a hand-to-hand battle
with wild nature to wring a living from the soil. He died at fifty-four,
an exhausted old man, but his last words were, "Praise God that I was
allowed to escape out of the pit digged for me."
His family and descendants, condemned irrevocably to an obscure struggle
for existence, did little more than keep themselves alive for about a
hundred and thirty years, during which time Giles' spirit slept.
* * * * *
In 1775 one of his great-great-grandsons, Elmer Boardman by name,
learned that the British soldiers were coming to take by force a stock
of gunpowder concealed in a barn for the use of the barely beginning
American army. He went very white, but he kissed his wife and little boy
good-bye, took down from its pegs his musket, and went out to join his
neighbors in repelling the well-disciplined English forces. He lost a
leg that day and clumped about on a wooden substitute all his
hard-working life; but, although he was never anything more than a poor
farmer, he always stood very straight with a smile on his plain face
whenever the new flag of the new country was carried past him on the
Fourth of July. He died, and his spirit slept.
* * * * *
In 1854 one of his grandsons, Peter Boardman, had managed to pull
himself up from the family tradition of hard-working poverty, and was a
prosperous grocer in Lawrence, Massachusetts. The struggle for the
possession of Kansas between the Slave States and the North announced
itself. It became known in Massachusetts that sufficiently numerous
settlements of Northerners voting for a Free State would carry the day
against slavery in the new Territory. For about a month Peter Boardman
looked very sick and yellow, had repeated violent attacks of
indigestion, and lost more than fifteen pounds. At the end of that time
he sold out his grocery (at the usual loss when a business is sold out)
and took his family by the slow, laborious caravan route out to the
little new, raw settlement on the banks of the Kaw, which was called
Lawrence for the city in the East which so many of its inhabitants had
left. Here he recovered his health rapidly, and the look of distress
left his face; indeed, he had a singular expression of secret happiness.
He was caught by the Quantrell raid and was one of those hiding in the
cornfield when Quantrell's men rode in and cut them down like rabbits.
He died there of his wounds. And his spirit slept.
* * * * *
His granddaughter, Ellen, plain, rather sallow, very serious, was a sort
of office manager in the firm of Walker and Pennypacker, the big
wholesale hardware merchants of Marshallton, Kansas. She had passed
through the public schools, had graduated from the High School, and had
planned to go to the State University; but the death of the uncle who
had brought her up after the death of her parents made that plan
impossible. She learned as quickly as possible the trade which would
bring in the most money immediately, became a good stenographer, though
never a rapid one, and at eighteen entered the employ of the hardware
firm.
She was still there at twenty-seven, on the day in August, 1914, when
she opened the paper and saw that Belgium had been invaded by the
Germans. She read with attention what was printed about the treaty
obligation involved, although she found it hard to understand. At noon
she stopped before the desk of Mr. Pennypacker, the senior member of the
firm, for whom she had a great respect, and asked him if she had made
out correctly the import of the editorial. "_Had_ the Germans promised
they wouldn't ever go into Belgium in war?"
"Looks that way," said Mr. Pennypacker, nodding, and searching for a
lost paper. The moment after, he had forgotten the question and the
questioner.
Ellen had always rather regretted not having been able to "go on with
her education," and this gave her certain little habits of mind which
differentiated her somewhat from the other stenographers and typewriters
in the office with her, and from her cousin, with whom she shared the
small bedroom in Mrs. Wilson's boarding-house. For instance, she looked
up words in the dictionary when she did not understand them, and she had
kept all her old schoolbooks on the shelf of the boarding-house bedroom.
Finding that she had only a dim recollection of where Belgium was, she
took down her old geography and located it. This was in the wait for
lunch, which meal was always late at Mrs. Wilson's. The relation between
the size of the little country and the bulk of Germany made an
impression on her. "My! it looks as though they could just make one
mouthful of it," she remarked. "It's _awfully_ little."
"Who?" asked Maggie. "What?"
"Belgium and Germany."
Maggie was blank for a moment. Then she remembered. "Oh, the war. Yes, I
know. Mr. Wentworth's fine sermon was about it yesterday. War is the
wickedest thing in the world. Anything is better than to go killing each
other. They ought to settle it by arbitration. Mr. Wentworth said so."
"They oughtn't to have done it if they'd promised not to," said Ellen.
The bell rang for the belated lunch and she went down to the dining-room
even more serious than was her habit.
She read the paper very closely for the next few days, and one morning
surprised Maggie by the loudness of her exclamation as she glanced at
the headlines.
"What's the matter?" asked her cousin. "Have they found the man who
killed that old woman?" She herself was deeply interested in a murder
case in Chicago.
Ellen did not hear her. "Well, thank _goodness_!" she exclaimed.
"England is going to help France and Belgium!"
Maggie looked over her shoulder disapprovingly. "Oh, I think it's awful!
Another country going to war! England a Christian nation, too! I don't
see how Christians _can_ go to war. And I don't see what call the
Belgians had, anyhow, to fight Germany. They might have known they
couldn't stand up against such a big country. All the Germans wanted to
do was just to walk along the roads. They wouldn't have done any harm.
Mr. Schnitzler was explaining it to me down at the office."