HINTS FOR THOSE WHO WANT TO HELP
PARIS, January, 1916.
At home people who read of some splendid act of courage or
self-sacrifice on the part of the Allies, are often moved to exclaim:
"I wish I could help! I wish I could _do_ something!"
This is to tell them how easily, at what bargain prices, at what little
cost to themselves that wish can be gratified.
In the United States, owing to the war, many have grown suddenly rich;
those already wealthy are increasing their fortunes. Here in France the
war has robbed every one; the rich are less rich, the poor more
destitute. Every franc any one can spare is given to the government, to
the Bank of France, to fight the enemy and to preserve the country.
The calls made upon the purses of the people never cease, and each
appeal is so worthy that it cannot be denied. In consequence, for the
war charities there is not so much money as there was. People are not
less willing, but have less to give. So, in order to obtain money, those
who ask must appeal to the imagination, must show why the cause for
which they plead is the most pressing. They advertise just which men
will benefit, and in what way, whether in blankets, gloves, tobacco,
masks, or leaves of absence.
Those in charge of the relief organizations have learned that those who
have money to give like to pick and choose. A tale of suffering that
appeals to one, leaves another cold. One gives less for the wounded
because he thinks those injured in battle are wards of the state. But
for the children orphaned by the war he will give largely. So the
petitioners dress their shop-windows.
To the charitably disposed, and over here that means every Frenchman,
they offer bargains. They have "white sales," "fire sales." As, at our
expositions, we have special days named after the different States, they
have special days for the Belgians, Poles, and Serbians.
For these days they prepare long in advance. Their approach is heralded,
advertised; all Paris, or it may be the whole of France, knows they are
coming.
Christmas Day and the day after were devoted exclusively to the man in
the trenches, to obtain money to bring him home on leave. Those days
were _les journees du poilu_.
The services of the best black-and-white artists in France were
commandeered. For advertising purposes they designed the most appealing
posters. Unlike those issued by our suffragettes, calling attention to
the importance of November 2, they gave some idea of what was wanted.
They did not show Burne-Jones young women blowing trumpets. They were
not symbolical, or allegorical; they were homely, pathetic, humorous,
human. They were aimed straight at the heart and pocketbook.
They showed the _poilu_ returning home on leave, and on surprising his
wife or his sweetheart with her hands helpless in the washtub, kissing
her on the back of the neck. In the corner the dog danced on his hind
legs, barking joyfully.
They showed the men in the trenches, and while one stood at the
periscope the other opened their Christmas boxes; they showed father and
son shoulder to shoulder marching through the snow, mud, and sleet; they
showed the old couple at home with no fire in the grate, saying: "It is
cold for us, but not so cold as for our son in the trench."
For every contribution to this Christmas fund those who gave received a
decoration. According to the sum, these ran from paper badges on a pin
to silver and gold medals.
The whole of France contributed to this fund. The proudest shops filled
their windows with the paper badges, and so well was the fund organized
that in every town and city petitioners in the streets waylaid every
pedestrian.
Even in Modena, on the boundary-line of Italy, when I was returning
to France, and sharing a lonely Christmas with the conductor of the
wagon-lit, we were held up by train-robbers, who took our money and
then pinned medals on us.
Until we reached Paris we did not know why. It was only later we learned
that in the two days' campaign the _poilus_ was benefited to the sum of
many millions of francs.
In Paris and over all France, for every one is suffering through the
war, there is some individual or organization at work to relieve that
suffering. Every one helps, and the spirit in which they help is most
wonderful and most beautiful. No one is forgotten.
When the French artists were called to the front, the artists' models of
the Place Pigalle and Montmartre were left destitute. They had not "put
by." They were butterflies.
So some women of the industrious, busy-bee order formed a society to
look after the artists' models. They gave them dolls to dress, and on
the sale of dolls the human manikins now live.
Nor is any one who wants to help allowed to feel that he or she is
too poor; that for his sou or her handiwork there is no need. The
_midinettes_, the "cash" girls of the great department stores and
millinery shops, had no money to contribute, so some one thought of
giving them a chance to help the soldiers with their needles.
It was purposed they should make cockades in the national colors. Every
French girl is taught to sew; each is born with good taste. They were
invited to show their good taste in the designing of cockades, which
people would buy for a franc, which franc would be sent to some soldier.
[Illustration: A poster inviting the proprietors of restaurants and
hotels and their guests to welcome the soldiers who have permission to
visit Paris, especially those who come from the districts invaded by
the Germans.]
The French did not go about this in a hole-in-a-corner way in a back
street. They did not let the "cash" girl feel her artistic effort was
only a blind to help her help others. They held a "salon" for the
cockades.
And they held it in the same Palace of Art, where at the annual salon
are hung the paintings of the great French artists. The cockades are
exhibited in one hall, and next to them is an exhibition of the precious
tapestries rescued from the Rheims cathedral.
In the hall beyond that is an exhibition of lace. To this, museums,
duchesses, and queens have sent laces that for centuries have been
family heirlooms. But the cockades of Mimi Pinson by the thousands and
thousands are given just as much space, are arranged with the same taste
and by the same artist who grouped and catalogued the queens' lace
handkerchiefs.
And each little Mimi Pinson can go to the palace and point to the
cockade she made with her own fingers, or point to the spot where it
was, and know she has sent a franc to a soldier of France.
These days the streets of Paris are filled with soldiers, each of whom
has given to France some part of his physical self. That his country may
endure, that she may continue to enjoy and teach liberty, he has seen
his arm or his leg, or both, blown off, or cut off. But when on the
boulevards you meet him walking with crutches or with an empty sleeve
pinned beneath his Cross of War, and he thinks your glance is one of
pity, he resents it. He holds his head more stiffly erect. He seems to
say: "I know how greatly you envy me!"
And who would dispute him? Long after the war is ended, so long as he
lives, men and women of France will honor him, and in their eyes he
will read their thanks. But there is one soldier who cannot read their
thanks, who is spared the sight of their pity. He is the one who has
made all but the supreme sacrifice. He is the one who is blind. He sits
in perpetual darkness. You can remember certain nights that seemed to
stretch to doomsday, when sleep was withheld and you tossed and lashed
upon the pillow, praying for the dawn. Imagine a night of such torture
dragged out over many years, with the dreadful knowledge that the dawn
will never come. Imagine Paris with her bridges, palaces, parks, with
the Seine, the Tuileries, the boulevards, the glittering shop-windows
conveyed to you only through noise. Only through the shrieks of
motor-horns and the shuffling of feet.
The men who have been blinded in battle have lost more than sight. They
have been robbed of their independence. They feel they are a burden.
It is not only the physical loss they suffer, but the thought that no
longer are they of use, that they are a care, that in the scheme of
things--even in their own little circles of family and friends--there
is for them no place. It is not unfair to the _poilu_ to say that the
officer who is blinded suffers more than the private. As a rule, he
is more highly strung, more widely educated; he has seen more; his
experience of the world is broader; he has more to lose. Before the war
he may have been a lawyer, doctor, man of many affairs. For him it is
harder than, for example, the peasant to accept a future of unending
blackness spent in plaiting straw or weaving rag carpets. Under such
conditions life no longer tempts him. Instead, death tempts him, and the
pistol seems very near at hand.
[Illustration: All over France, on Christmas Day and the day after,
money was collected to send comforts and things good to eat to the
men at the front.]
It was to save men of the officer class from despair and from suicide,
to make them know that for them there still was a life of usefulness,
work, and accomplishment, that there was organized in France the
Committee for Men Blinded in Battle. The idea was to bring back to
officers who had lost their sight, courage, hope, and a sense of
independence, to give them work not merely mechanical but more in
keeping with their education and intelligence. The President of
France is patron of the society, and on its committees in Paris and New
York are many distinguished names. The French Government has promised a
house near Paris where the blind soldiers may be educated. When I saw
them they were in temporary quarters in the Hotel de Crillon, lent to
them by the proprietor. They had been gathered from hospitals in
different parts of France by Miss Winifred Holt, who for years has been
working for the blind in her Lighthouse in New York. She is assisted in
the work in Paris by Mrs. Peter Cooper Hewitt. The officers were brought
to the Crillon by French ladies, whose duty it was to guide them through
the streets. Some of them also were their instructors, and in order to
teach them to read and write with their fingers had themselves learned
the Braille alphabet. This requires weeks of very close and patient
study. And no nurse's uniform goes with it. But the reward was great.
It was evident in the alert and eager interest of the men who, perhaps,
only a week before had wished to "curse God, and die." But since then
hope had returned to each of them, and he had found a door open, and a
new life.
And he was facing it with the same or with even a greater courage than
that with which he had led his men into the battle that blinded him.
Some of the officers were modelling in clay, others were learning
typewriting, one with a drawing-board was studying to be an architect,
others were pressing their finger-tips over the raised letters of the
Braille alphabet.
Opposite each officer, on the other side of the table, sat a woman he
could not see. She might be young and beautiful, as many of them were.
She might be white-haired and a great lady bearing an ancient title,
from the faubourg across the bridges, but he heard only a voice.
The voice encouraged his progress, or corrected his mistakes, and a
hand, detached and descending from nowhere, guided his hand, gently, as
one guides the fingers of a child. The officer was again a child. In
life for the second time he was beginning with A, B, and C. The officer
was tall, handsome, and deeply sunburned. In his uniform of a chasseur
d'Afrique he was a splendid figure. On his chest were the medals of the
campaigns in Morocco and Algiers, and the crimson ribbon of the Legion
of Honor. The officer placed his forefinger on a card covered with
raised hieroglyphics.
"N," he announced.
"No," the voice answered him.
"M?" His tone did not carry conviction.
"You are guessing," accused the voice. The officer was greatly confused.
"No, no, mademoiselle!" he protested. "Truly, I thought it was an 'M.'"
He laughed guiltily. The laugh shook you. You saw all that he could
never see: inside the room the great ladies and latest American
countesses, eager to help, forgetful of self, full of wonderful, womanly
sympathy; and outside, the Place de la Concorde, the gardens of the
Tuileries, the trees of the Champs-Elysees, the sun setting behind the
gilded dome of the Invalides. All these were lost to him, and yet as
he sat in the darkness, because he could not tell an N from an M, he
laughed, and laughed happily. From where did he draw his strength and
courage? Was it the instinct for life that makes a drowning man fight
against an ocean? Was it his training as an officer of the Grande Armee?
Was it that spirit of the French that is the one thing no German knows,
and no German can ever break? Or was it the sound of a woman's voice and
the touch of a woman's hand? If the reader wants to contribute something
to help teach a new profession to these gentlemen, who in the fight for
civilization have contributed their eyesight, write to the secretary of
the committee, Mrs. Peter Cooper Hewitt, Hotel Ritz, Paris.
[Illustration: A poster advertising the fund to bring from the trenches
"permissionaires," those soldiers who obtain permission to return home
for six days.]
There are some other very good bargains. Are you a lover of art, and
would you become a patron of art? If that is your wish, you can buy an
original water-color for fifty cents, and so help an art student who is
fighting at the front, and assist in keeping alive his family in Paris.
Is not that a good bargain?
As everybody knows, the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris is free to
students from all the world. It is the alma mater of some of the
best-known American artists and architects. On its rolls are the names
of Sargent, St. Gaudens, Stanford White, Whitney Warren, Beckwith,
Coffin, MacMonnies.
Certain schools and colleges are so fortunate as to inspire great
devotion on the part of their students, as, in the story told of every
college, of the student being led from the football field, who struggles
in front of the grand stand and shouts: "Let me go back. I'd die for
dear old ----"
But the affection of the students of the Beaux-Arts for their masters,
their fellow students and the institution is very genuine.
They do not speak of the distinguished artists, architects, engravers,
and sculptors who instruct them as "Doc," or "Prof." Instead they call
him "master," and no matter how often they say it, they say it each time
as though they meant it.
The American students, even when they return to Paris rich and famous,
go at once to call upon the former master of their atelier, who, it may
be, is not at all famous or rich, and pay their respects.
And, no matter if his school of art has passed, and the torch he carried
is in the hands of younger Frenchmen, his former pupils still salute him
as master, and with much the same awe as the village cure shows for the
cardinal.
When the war came 3,000 of the French students of the Beaux-Arts, past
and present, were sent to the front, and there was no one to look after
their parents, families, or themselves, it seemed a chance for Americans
to try to pay back some of the debt so many generations of American
artists, architects, and sculptors owed to the art of France.
Whitney Warren, the American architect, is one of the few Americans who,
in spite of the extreme unpopularity of our people, is still regarded by
the French with genuine affection. And in every way possible he tries to
show the French that it is not the American people who are neutral, but
the American Government.
One of the ways he offers to Americans to prove their friendship for
France is in helping the students of the Beaux-Arts. He has organized a
committee of French and American students which works twelve hours a day
in the palace of the Beaux-Arts itself, on the left bank of the Seine.
It is hard to understand how in such surroundings they work, not all
day, but at all. The rooms were decorated in the time of the first
Napoleon; the ceilings and walls are white and gold, and in them are
inserted paintings and panels. The windows look into formal gardens and
courts filled with marble statues and busts, bronze medallions and
copies of frescoes brought from Athens and Rome. In this atmosphere the
students bang typewriters, fold blankets, nail boxes, sort out woollen
gloves, cigarettes, loaves of bread, and masks against asphyxiating gas.
The mask they send to the front was invented by Francis Jacques, of
Harvard, one of the committee, and has been approved by the French
Government.
There is a department which sends out packages to the soldiers in the
trenches, to those who are prisoners, and to the soldiers in the
hospitals. There is a system of demand cards on which is a list of
what the committee is able to supply. In the trenches the men mark
the particular thing they want and return the card. The things most
in demand seem to be corn-cob pipes and tobacco from America,
sketch-books, and small boxes of water-colors.
The committee also edits and prints a monthly magazine. It is sent to
those at the front, and gives them news of their fellow students, and
is illustrated, it is not necessary to add, with remarkable talent and
humor. It is printed by hand. The committee also supplies the students
with post-cards on which the students paint pictures in water-colors and
sign them. Every student and ex-student, even the masters paint these
pictures. Some of them are very valuable. At two francs fifty centimes
the autograph alone is a bargain. In many cases your fifty cents will
not only make you a patron of art, but it may feed a very hungry family.
Write to Ronald Simmons or Cyrus Thomas, Ecole des Beaux-Arts, 17 Quai
Malaquais.
There is another very good bargain, and extremely cheap. Would you like
to lift a man bodily out of the trenches, and for six days not only
remove him from the immediate proximity of asphyxiating gas, shells,
and bullets, but land him, of all places to a French soldier the most
desired, in Paris? Not only land him there, but for six days feed and
lodge him, and give him a present to take away? It will cost you fifteen
francs, or three dollars. If so, write to _Journal des Restaurateurs_,
24 Rue Richelieu, Paris.
In Paris, we hear that on Wall Street there are some very fine bargains.
We hear that in gambling in war brides and ammunition everybody is
making money. Very little of that money finds its way to France. Some
day I may print a list of the names of those men in America who are
making enormous fortunes out of this war, and who have not contributed
to any charity or fund for the relief of the wounded or of their
families. If you don't want your name on that list you might send money
to the American Ambulance at Neuilly, or to any of the 6,300 hospitals
in France, to the clearing-house, through H. H. Harjes, 31 Boulevard
Haussman, or direct to the American Red Cross.
Or if you want to help the orphans of soldiers killed in battle write to
August F. Jaccaci, Hotel de Crillon; if you want to help the families of
soldiers rendered homeless by this war, to the Secours National through
Mrs. Whitney Warren, 16 West Forty-Seventh Street, New York; if you want
to clothe a French soldier against the snows of the Vosges send him a
Lafayette kit. In the clearing-house in Paris I have seen on file 20,000
letters from French soldiers asking for this kit. Some of them were
addressed to the Marquis de Lafayette, but the clothes will get to the
front sooner if you forward two dollars to the Lafayette Kit Fund, Hotel
Vanderbilt, New York. If you want to help the Belgian refugees, address
Mrs. Herman Harjes, Hotel de Crillon, Paris; if the Serbian refugees,
address Monsieur Vesnitch, the Serbian minister to France.
If among these bargains you cannot find one to suit you, you should
consult your doctor. Tell him there is something wrong with your heart.