zone in free France. But not all of France is “free,” as the French
themselves touchingly call it. And that portion of it which still is
not free, the immensely rich mining and manufacturing district under
German rule, has also its child problem. That problem the Germans have
dealt with in their characteristic brutal fashion. They are simply
sweeping out of the country, as with a gigantic broom, all these small,
food-consuming nonproducers. Across the Northern Swiss frontier they
are being thrust into France at the rate of nearly five hundred a
day--more than ten thousand a month! Here is a child problem with a
vengeance! Of course it is not the children alone who are being swept
out, but all the nonproducing inhabitants. If they can’t work--_heraus
mit_ ’em! Dump the refuse out the back door into France. Shift the food
burden of all those hundreds of thousands of useless inhabitants onto
the enemy. From a purely materialistic point of view this wholesale act
of dispossession is a fine move--and France is glad to have her people
back at any price! Also, she has food to burn!
Evian-les-Bains is the gate of entry for these exiles--_rapatriés_ the
French call them--and accordingly to Evian I went. It is a beautiful,
quaint little town on Lake Geneva, high, Alp-encircled, and with an air
like iced champagne. Formerly a fashionable watering place, it has now
been transformed into a kind of Ellis Island receiving station for the
refugees, who pour in by trainloads, twenty thousand a month.
Here daily is to be witnessed one of the most tragic processionals
that history has ever yet offered to man--a nation on the march! But
a nation dispossessed, broken and diseased, old men and old women and
mothers with children--the past and the future generations--with the
present generation strikingly absent! For the young men are held to
work the mines and the factories, and the young women are held--but
even in France one rarely speaks of that phase of the subject, which is
the blackest of all black pages of German occupation. What “efficient”
explanation is Germany going to offer, at the big post-bellum tribunal
of the nations, for the girls sent into white slavery in the Ardennes?
Three years have elapsed since the Germans conquered the northern part
of France, and since then the inhabitants have lived in a state of
complete isolation, cut off from news of their families in free France,
sons and husbands who fled before the invaders; cut off also from any
reliable information concerning the war or the great outer world. Not
a single letter are they permitted to send or receive. This incredible
act of mental cruelty I did not believe until I arrived in Evian,
questioned the refugees themselves and the authorities, and entered the
famous letter room, where hundreds of thousands of letters are filed,
often months ahead of time, awaiting the possible return of some exile
relative.
Newspapers these people have, to be sure, but they are journals printed
by the Germans in French, ostensibly to give current events, but
actually to spread German propaganda and despair. I glanced through
some of these papers. According to them England is speedily starving to
death; Russia is about to conclude a separate peace; France has been
bled white; America is a noisy four-flusher--and _Deutschland_ is _über
alles_! Under ordinary conditions such a crude tissue of lies would
merit only a burst of scornful laughter; but given a captured civilian
population as isolated from their loved ones as if they were ghosts,
a prey to constant anxiety concerning the welfare of France, and this
daily insidious attack upon a morale already enfeebled by adversity is
bound to have a damaging effect.
Of these journals the Gazette des Ardennes is the most notorious.
The first evening I waited at the station I do not know exactly
what I expected to see--but, anyhow, something that would rend the
heartstrings. I forgot that this station represented to those pilgrims
the end of a three-years’ captivity; that every kilometer of the
long, wearisome three-days’ journey from Belgium, where they had been
quarantined, brought them nearer letters, nearer a resumption of family
ties, nearer a tender welcome from free France.
It was cold. A light snow had fallen on the circle of mountains, and
a chill wind blew up from the lake. The Red Cross ambulance drivers
had backed their machines close to the platform to care for the sick
and the old, and now they stood by the tracks, ready to lend a hand
to the incoming crowd. I was in the mood of Antony: “If you have
tears, prepare to shed them now!” when the refugee train pulled into
the station; and to my surprise I saw flags bursting from every open
window--the French Tricolor, the Stars and Stripes, Red Cross flags,
handkerchiefs, bundles, any old thing--frantically waving a welcome
from a thousand eager hands! Who said anybody was sad? Besides flags,
the windows were crowded full of heads--happy, excited children,
mothers holding up babies, and smiling, seamed old countenances
wreathed in white hair. And from within the cars, above the noisy
hubbub, ascended high and sweet the strains of the Marseillaise.
The train slowed to a dead stop. Suddenly an old man leaned far out
of a window, waved both arms, and shouted fiercely: “_Vive la France!
Vive----_” He broke off sharply, looked down into a face below him on
the platform and queried in low, anxious tones: “Say! We are in France,
_hein_?” What an indiscretion if he had yelled that in German territory!
“Yes, you are in France. But descend, _papa_! Descend, _maman_!
_Allons mes enfants, descendez, s’il vous plait!_”
It was the cheerful voice of the Red Cross man, M. Barrois, himself
a _rapatrié_, with a wife and six children left behind in Lille, who
assisted daily at the detraining of the refugees.
“But these people are not sad!” I objected to M. Barrois, still full of
surprise. “They do not even look tired. Are they always gay like this?”
“It’s a lively crowd to-night,” he replied soberly, “on account of so
many children. But some days they do not have a word to say. And you
must not be deceived by their surface gayety. The sadness is there,
underneath, just the same. You’ll find it if you stay.”
He was right. The first evening I caught only the false glow of
excitement of the returning pilgrims. But as I watched night
after night the endless procession of those who passed I began to
discriminate, and to note beneath the happy eagerness on those faces
the deeper substructure of strain, of suffering so long endured
that it had become a habit. And as the thousands marched before me,
successive waves of exiles, always different and yet mysteriously the
same in their look of subdued suffering, of strain, I had a fleeting
realization of what France has borne in this war.
With such throngs pouring daily into this one small receiving station
a very careful organization has of necessity been evolved in order
not to congest the transportation. The following is the order of each
day: At the last station on the Swiss frontier French Red Cross nurses
enter the train and tag the sick and aged. At Evian these are put
into ambulances, the others walking the short distance to the Casino,
where await them an ample hot supper, music, and a tender speech of
welcome by the mayor of Evian. After which they register, receive their
letters, pass a medical examination, and are assigned lodgings in the
town.
The first night I waited to see the last _malade_ and the last baby
safely stowed inside before I climbed into the front seat with the
ambulance driver. As we struck the open lake road an icy wind straight
off Mont Blanc made me shiver. A soldier on permission clinging to the
running board beside me turned up his collar, muttering: “This is worse
than the trenches in the Vosges.” He had come up to search for his
refugee wife, from whom he had not heard in three years.
“But she might arrive any day!” he argued hopefully. “I will teach you
something extraordinary,” he continued. “A comrade of mine came up here
looking for his wife; he had dreamed a dream about her. And what do you
think--the very first woman who stepped off the train was she!
“I had another friend, whose wife had died in Lille leaving a little
daughter of two, whom the father had never seen. He did not even know
what had become of her, for he could get no word. A _rapatrié_ friend,
who informed him of his wife’s death, could give no news of the little
maid. Nevertheless, he came to Evian hoping to find some trace. And
each day at the station as the throng passed he stood quietly holding
out in his hand what looked like a postal card. And whenever a little
girl appeared he thrust that card under her nose. Absurd, eh? A fool,
a lunatic, sticking a piece of cardboard into every child’s face! But
one day when he held it in front of a little maid she suddenly burst
into tears and cried out: ‘_Maman! Maman!_’ That postal card bore the
picture of her mother. And that’s the way he found his child!”
It was twilight when we arrived at the Casino, and already the place
was packed. Seated at long tables the refugees had stowed their
precious bundles beneath their feet and were falling upon supper with
a will. Between the tables passed the women of Evian with tureens
of steaming soup, huge platters of meat that the Germans would have
bartered their very souls for, and great pitchers of hot milk and of
wine. And how those children gobbled! And how their elders followed
their example! The platters passed and repassed. Through the big double
doors facing Switzerland gleamed Lake Geneva, dimly purple through the
gloom. Overhead in the balcony the band began to tune up.
Suddenly all over the hall the lights flashed on strongly and the same
instant the band burst into the stirring impetuous strains of Chasseurs
Alpins! As that gay beloved air broke across the room an electric shock
of emotion seemed to pass along the tables. Men leaped up, shouting
“_Vive la France!_” Women began to weep softly. Handkerchiefs were out
everywhere. Yes, the long blight of captivity, of isolation, was past
forever! That tune proved it!
And it was just at this chosen moment that the mayor of Evian came
forward to make his speech. It was brief, simple and touching, and at
certain portions of it women bowed their heads on the table and sobbed
aloud.
“My dear fellow citizens!” began the mayor. “At a moment when, after
long and cruel trials, you step foot again upon the sacred soil of _la
Patrie_, I come in the name of the city of Evian to address to you all
a very cordial, a very warm and a very affectionate welcome.
“We know all that you have suffered. For many months convoys like yours
have traversed our little village, and we have heard recounted each day
the long martyrdom you have endured. We know that you have suffered
cold and hunger; we know that your houses have been burned, that your
rich harvests have been destroyed and the beautiful industrial region
of the north has been systematically destroyed; and, what is most
terrible of all, we know that young daughters have been torn from the
arms of their mothers and taken away to slavery in the Ardennes. And it
is because we do know all this, dear fellow citizens, that we receive
you to-day with all of our heart and with all of our soul!
“I said just now that you have suffered greatly, but your sufferings
have not been alone physical; they have been also, and even above all,
spiritual. You have suffered to be without news of those who are dear,
and at not knowing exactly how things were going in free France. As for
that which concerns the news of the war and of France I am going to
tell you at once, in one word, that all you have read in Le Bruxellois
and the Gazette des Ardennes is one tissue of lies, and that, thanks
to the armies of France and her Allies, victory will finally crown our
banners.
“And now, courage, my dear fellow citizens! Your long martyrdom is
about to end. Soon you are going to hear, standing, our sacred hymn,
which has not greeted your ears for so long a time, and meantime join
me in an act of faith and hope in our well-beloved country, and shout
with me: ‘_Vive la France immortelle!_’”
The shout that followed was a shout indeed!
In closing, the Marseillaise was chanted, and by now all the audience
was frankly in tears. A Red Cross doctor standing beside me cleared his
throat.
“I’ve seen this thing a dozen times,” he observed, “and still I choke
up every time!”
Supper over the _rapatriés_ registered and passed to the rear to
receive their letters. This letter room is a marvel of perfect
arrangement. Here every inquiry from anxious relatives is received,
sorted alphabetically, and a note of it filed on an index card as if it
were a library book. Thus, when a refugee hands his registration card
across the counter, all the girl standing behind has to do is to look
him up in her index catalogue and see if he has any mail.
Ah, those long moments of suspense while the girl is looking up a
name! Those hundreds of greedy, outstretched hands across the counter!
Those faces, so schooled to endurance, twitching now with unconcealed
excitement! How slow the girl is! “No, there is nothing for you.”
An outstretched hand drops from the counter. Those mutely borne
disappointments are horrible.
Some of the tales of this famous letter room are harrowing, some
humorous. There arrived one day in Evian a woman refugee, with four
sons at the Front from whom she had not heard a single line in three
years. Her excitement may be conceived. Were they all alive? Were some
dead? Which? Impossible that all four should be preserved for three
years. The thing was outside probability. For long months she had
brooded over the chances, selected for death first one and then another
of her sons. Perhaps all had been killed by this time, for she knew
her sons were brave! There was her youngest in particular, a dashing
daredevil in the Alpine Chasseurs--the pacemakers in every attack. Yes,
undoubtedly he had gone! She must make up her mind to it. And so she
did, and unmade it, a hundred times a day. When she arrived in Evian it
was five in the afternoon, and before she stood at the mail counter,
registry slip in hand, it was nine--four mortal hours of heart-piercing
suspense, during which she had buried one, two, three, four of her
sons, and resurrected them again in a passion of hope. And now she was
going to know! Yes, there was a letter for madame--two letters. Blindly
she got herself out of the throng. The next moment there was a loud cry
and she fell face down in a dead swoon.
“And for two days,” continued the doctor who told me the incident, “she
raved with acute dementia.”
“Poor soul!” I said. “All four were killed? Her intuition was right.”
“Not a bit of it,” laughed the doctor. “All four of ’em were not
killed! All four were alive and kicking. And that was the very trouble.
It was a chance, of course, in a million. And winning that chance in
the great lottery was too much for her. She had steeled herself for
disaster. The strong shock of joy was a knock-out blow! But in a few
days she was up and speeding on the way to her sons.”
What the American Red Cross is doing for the children in this
situation may be grouped under two heads: First, immediate, temporary
aid; second, permanent work. Whatever the French Government wishes
in the way of personnel, equipment, drivers, and so on, to meet an
urgent relief need, the American Red Cross stands ready to deliver
at an hour’s notice. But--and this is important and not generally
understood--the French themselves must first express the desire, extend
the invitation for aid. We are the guests; they are the hosts. And
it is not the policy to rush in, take over the whole French problem,
willy-nilly, and begin to run things off on brisk American methods.
France has her national pride, like ourselves; and it is her pride,
even in this stress, to care for her own wherever she can. Such a
course of procedure on the part of the Red Cross may mean a little more
slowness at the outset; but it means a deeper and more sympathetic
bond between the two nations in the end--and in the end it is not less
successful than the crude head-on attack. Thus in the Evian problem the
French struggled for months to care for the thousands of refugees, and
with a pitifully scant nursing and medical staff accomplished marvels.
Still, to make a complete medical examination of every incoming
_rapatrié_ with such a staff would need a day of a hundred hours. And
without such medical attention contagious diseases and epidemics were
bound to creep into France, which, in fact, they did.
When these defects were called to the attention of the French
Government it at once frankly called for American aid. The same week
a dozen ambulances and drivers, in charge of an American _chef de
service_ who had won distinction before Verdun, were dispatched to
assist in the transportation. In passing it should be said that the
winter work of these Red Cross ambulance drivers upon the borders
of that glacier lake, in an ice-box temperature, with a keen zero
wind thrusting playful darts between the shoulder blades, deserves a
special mention. It is not a spectacular service or, save for pneumonia
microbes, especially dangerous. It is simply a plugging, monotonous
grind in freezing isolation.
After the ambulances had been dispatched a group of medical specialists
were sent out to study the problem on the ground and suggest plans of
permanent value. The result of their examination was the establishment
of a receiving hospital of one hundred beds in Evian to care for the
sick; a second hospital in Lyons for the chronic cases; and still a
third hospital on the Mediterranean for the tuberculosis patients.
In addition to the hospitals, a clinic has been established right in
the Casino itself, so that no child leaves the building without a
medical examination. And these two agencies, the inside clinic and
the outside hospitals, render the situation, so far as the danger
to the state is concerned, practically water-tight. For the clinic
catches the small, microbe-ridden victim and shoots him straight to
the hospital, thus turning a secure lock upon the spread of disease.
As is the case on the northern frontier, these children suffer chiefly
from malnutrition, contagious skin diseases and tuberculosis. It has
been estimated roughly that about ten per cent of the _rapatriés_ need
hospital attention each day, and about one-third of that ten per cent
are tuberculous.
The hospital at Evian is as modern and complete in its child equipment
as expert thought can achieve. At present there is a colony of about
fifty workers on the ground. One phase of the hospital service, as the
head nurse outlined it to me, is of especial educational value.
“All of our nurses’ aids, our _auxiliaires_, are French refugee
girls,” she explained. “This means practically a training school for
nurses. And when it is realized that the French nursing standards are
as low as the French surgery standards are high the need for general
instruction in this line becomes apparent. We shall teach these raw,
untrained peasant girls simply the first principles of caring for the
sick. But if we do no more than instill into them the fundamentals of
cleanliness, convince them that all-over baths are not scandalous, that
babies do not thrive on wine, that fresh air does not kill, that sheets
should be changed slightly oftener than once a month, that pneumonia
and tuberculous patients do not prosper in hermetically sealed rooms,
and a few other modern, common-sense maxims, I for one shall be very
content!”
These hospitals for children, established in needy zones throughout
all France as fast as may be, constitute one of the most effective
and long-range pieces of work that the American Red Cross has
undertaken, for they minister to the immediate want and at the same
time strengthen permanently the general health tone of a nation. That
the French appreciate our effort in this field is undoubted, and one
of their statesmen has said that the impetus given by America to the
conservation of child life in France is one of the most beneficial
by-products of this great war.
A CANTEENER IN FRANCE
Hooray! _Vive la belle France!_ I’m going to France! I’m going to be
a canteener! Maybe I shall go right up to the Front just behind the
first-line trenches and be under shell fire and be bombed by boche
avions and hear the _alerte_ and have to scurry to _abris_ and all that
sort of thing. I don’t know any of the details yet--nobody over here
does--but anyhow I’m going! That’s the chief thing.
I’m so excited and thrilled I scarcely know what I’m doing, but
outwardly I try to keep poised and calm, for mamma has been
disappearing at intervals into her handkerchief ever since she gave
her consent; and as for papa, he doesn’t say much; in fact, the dear
old sport is quieter than ever--but I catch him looking at me, when
he thinks I don’t see, in a way that makes me realize I’m the only
girl he’s got down here below and that he’d never send me if he had
a son to give. Not having a son and being a true-blue American with
generations of fighting blood inside of him--for the man who said
“Don’t shoot until you see the whites of their eyes!” was my father’s
great-grandfather--he’s figured it out that the best he can do is to
send his girl instead. That’s the ground of his consent. And mamma’s a
Daughter of the American Revolution, so that lets her out.
It was pure accident--or fate--which made me run into Edith on the
street a week ago to-day and thus start the wheels of destiny.
“Come in and have some tea,” she said after congratulating me on my
engagement, which had just been announced, “and tell me all about
it--and him. You deep little mouse--to pull this off right under
everybody’s nose and keep as secret as the grave! Who is he, anyhow?”
“He’s Major B----, of the Fifty-blank Infantry. He’s just received his
majority and he’s just twenty-nine.”
“Major, eh? That’s not so bad.”
“And, oh, Edith, he’s leaving for France sometime this month, and I--I
don’t know what to do!”
“What would you like to do?” asked Edie, laughing a little at my
blushes.
“I’d like to go over there, too,” I replied without hesitation, staring
straight into her deep blue eyes. “It doesn’t seem as if I could stand
it--the long, long separation. Irregular letters. And when they go into
action, not knowing, not hearing, maybe never hearing. Never. Just the
silence!”
“You’re in the same fix as a million other American women right now,”
replied Edith grimly. “And you’ve got to stand it. That’s our job.”
“I know,” I said heavily. “But it doesn’t make your own toothache any
better to know that there’s an epidemic of toothache raging over the
whole civilized world.”
Edith sat looking at me with a smile deep down in her eyes. She has
been married three years, the first of our class; and now she looks
at the entire outside world with that same air of tender smiling
abstraction.
“It’s all part of the game,” she said finally. “And we women must keep
the flag flying. Jack”--Jack’s her husband--“is going over next month.
He doesn’t have to, of course, being over the age limit. But he foresaw
this two years ago, and went and prepared himself at Plattsburg. He
wouldn’t volunteer then on account of me and baby. But now the call has
come it finds him ready. He feels the whole situation deeply. I’m glad.”
“Oh, Edie, you--brick!” I breathed, squeezing her hand hard. I thought
of her left alone with her child--and not any too much money either.
“Edie’s all right,” she murmured unsteadily, her blue eyes bright as
diamonds. “Don’t you fuss about her! But now about you--I have an idea.
What can you do? Practically, I mean.”
“I’ve had a six-months’ course in the hospital----”
“They don’t take anything but graduate nurses now.”
“----and I’ve had two years of domestic science and food values. Then
last summer I operated a cafeteria in the suburbs for the Women’s
League--did all the buying and accounts myself. It was fun. In college
I was head of the basket-ball team and the tramping club, and I’ve
never been sick a day in my life.”
“How old are you?”
“Twenty-four.”
“A bit young. However,” said Edith briskly, rising, “I’ll see what
I can do. There’s just a bare chance--but I’m not going to tell you
beforehand, for fear we burst the bubble. Run home now. Stick round the
telephone. There may be a long-distance call. Put a few things into
a bag while you’re waiting. Do you think you could go on to New York
to-night?”
I suppose my eyes must have been as big round as saucers with
excitement, for suddenly Edith bent right over and dropped a kiss on my
cheek. “You darned little kid!” she whispered. “I know exactly how you
feel. Now trot!”
I trotted--walking on air.
For the next two hours I hung round the landing where the telephone is,
and finally settled down on the top stair.
“For goodness’ sake, child!” cried mamma, stumbling over me as she came
out of the sitting-room, “what on earth are you doing here, all bunched
up in the dark?”
“I--I’m----”
Just then the telephone rang. I sprang to the receiver.