had done to the accustomed orderly procedure of life. I was to sail to
Bordeaux at a fixed hour; but no ship as yet went on time, though
passengers were expected to arrive on time and to sit for hours as we
were locked in the waiting room at the dock. At least it gave you an
opportunity to eye as a whole those who were to be your fellow
passengers. Everybody on my ship was evidently connected with some
problem of restoration, the most interesting being the French bent on
rehabilitating families they feared were stripped of everything. They
were even taking food. As we waited a woman who guarded two enormous
hams explained to me that her mother had begged her to bring a _jambon_.
She had not had a _jambon_ for so long. It was a new idea to me. I knew
that sweets would be welcome to my friends, and I had armed myself with
chocolates and bonbons; but a _jambon!_ Why should I not take one to my
dear Madame Marillier? Securing a permit to leave the dock, I hunted up
a neighboring market and after much negotiation persuaded a wholesale
dealer to sell me a ham, almost as big as I was. It was a problem to get
it into the ship, but it was more of a problem to get it off, get it to
Paris. I had queer ideas of what I might need in the way of luggage, and
in my equipment was a pair of enormous saddlebags into which I had
thrown high boots, heavy blankets, sweaters, woolen tights and hose—just
in case. Crowding them all into one bag, into the other I put my
_jambon_. In the long and tedious railroad journey from Bordeaux to
Paris, I was packed in with a group of fine serious young Quakers going
over to help a reconstruction project, and that terrible piece of
luggage jumped from the rack and almost brained one of my companions. I
cannot recall all the adventures of that ham, but I know that I was
never more relieved than when I laid it at the feet of my old friend.
“What in the world?” she exclaimed (or its equivalent). And Seignobos
said, “Oh, these Americans.”
I was not long in Paris before I felt keenly that many of the French
were saying, “Oh, these Americans!” We seemed to swarm over everything,
to absorb things. At least this was true in the quarters where, at the
urgency of my friends Auguste Jaccaci and William Allen White, I had
gone to live—the Hôtel de Vouillemont just off the Place de la Concorde.
Walking down the Rue de Rivoli to the Red Cross Headquarters was like
walking the streets of Washington in the vicinity of the governmental
departments active in the prosecution of the War. All the familiar faces
seemed to have been transported to Paris, as indeed great numbers of
them had. Mingling with them were officers and men on leave, many
seeking desperately to drown ghastly memories in any form of pleasure
that would bring forgetfulness, more of them intent on sightseeing,
buying gifts to take home. I found the pleasantest duty my Red Cross
uniform brought me in Paris was when stalwart doughboys accosted me.
“Say, sister, won’t you help me find something to take home to my
mother—my girl?” Before we were through with the shopping I had the
family history but never a word about the war—that was done with. They
wanted to forget it and go home. They resented the delay.
“We have paid our debt to Lafayette. Now who in hell do we owe?” This
was the legend I saw once on a camion crossing the Place de la Concorde.
I was told it was torn down by a scandalized officer and forbidden to be
used in the future. But it expressed the doughboy’s opinion, as I got
it, better than anything else I saw or heard.
Not only the scenes in my quarter but the conditions of living shattered
all my preconceived notions of hardship. I had been prepared for
hardtack, but once at Vouillemont I found that if I took the trouble to
market and bring in my purchases I could supplement the unbalanced meals
with almost anything I wanted. The prices were high to be sure—sixteen
cents each for eggs—two to four dollars a pound for butter—a dollar and
a half for a little jar of honey. Many extras could be bought more
cheaply at the American Commissariat. William Allen White was buying at
the Commissariat the prunes on which he seemed principally to live, but
marketing gave me the opportunity I wanted for finding out what the
alert Parisian shopkeepers were thinking and saying. I sounded out that
opinion daily until it was cut off by the conviction running through the
town that America no longer sympathized fully with the French, that she
was not going to force Germany to pay the sixty-five billion dollars the
people felt they should have.
[Illustration:
_Photograph by Christian Duvivier_
_Red Cross Headquarters, Paris, France, 1919_
]
The Americans living around the Place de la Concorde assured me that
Paris was not changed; not for them perhaps, but when I went among my
old French friends, most of whom had stuck it through the War, changes
stared me in the face. I had hurried to my old quarter on the Left Bank.
Great gaps in the circle around the Panthéon and in the Boulevard
Saint-Michel skirting the Luxembourg told the story of what the quarter
had endured. The _laiterie_ where once I had bought eggs and milk and
cheese was gone, the space carefully boarded. I hunted among the
neighbors for the cheerful Madame whom I had so enjoyed. She had died
with the building, they told me.
There were little neglects in the once carefully kept apartments of my
friends that affected me all out of proportion to their importance. The
door into Madame Marillier’s _chambre à coucher_ would not close.
“Nothing has been mended in Paris, you know, now for three years,” my
friend explained.
It was literally true: nothing painted, nothing mended, little replaced.
Craftsmen and tradesmen were in the trenches or in their graves. So many
of those whom once you had known, the people who had served you or had
been your comrades, were in their graves. Madame Marillier, pointing to
a long roster of names on her desk in the salon, said: “Look, these are
our dead. Read them. You will remember some of the names.” And I did,
men whom I had known twenty-five years before, and whose brilliant talk
I had listened to at her Wednesday night dinners.
They could not bring back their dead; but after all the horror life was
to go on, and they were bravely doing their best to give it something of
its character before the War.
One thing they were counting on was the return to their homes and to the
museums of their treasured _belles choses_. When I went out to dinner
with French acquaintances who had possessed beautiful things, often
pictures catalogued as national treasures, empty frames stared from the
walls. The canvases had been cut out and sent to a safe place, generally
somewhere in the South; but they would soon have them back, and that
would help.
Not only in Paris but wherever invasion was threatened there had been an
immediate effort to hustle the best loved treasures out of reach. At
Amiens, they told me, they had “sent away” the famous _L’Ange pleurant_.
It was back when I was there in March, and people were coming from all
the towns near by to see it, to gloat and weep over it.
I was concerned with the fate of the “pretty girl of Lille” that
exquisite wax bust attributed by some to Leonardo da Vinci; and when I
made Lille my headquarters for a few days I at once made inquiries. The
gallery was closed, but there had just been received many boxes of
pictures which the Germans were carrying off when stopped on their
retreat. The authorities were not adverse to having an accredited
journalist see with his own eyes what had happened, and I was permitted
to visit the gallery. The boxes were there standing against the wall,
still unopened, and on each was clearly printed the name of the picture
and of the German museum to which it had been assigned—beautiful
evidence of the amazing efficiency with which the Germans had conducted
their looting.
“Why, there,” I said as I went about, “there is the ‘pretty girl of
Lille’!”
The curator winked at me. “Do you think so?” he said. “That is what the
German Emperor thought when he went through the museum. It is a replica.
The pretty girl is in a safe place and she will stay there until I am
sure they won’t come back.” (“They” was the term I heard almost
universally applied to the Germans in the devastated regions.)
Everywhere was the same joy over the safety and the return of their
_belles choses_. I think I have never been in a group where gratitude
mingled with sorrow was stronger than when my friend Auguste Jaccaci,
who had been in Paris throughout the War at the head of the beautiful
work for Belgian and French children lost or orphaned by the War, asked
me to go with him to the opening of a room in the Louvre, closed of
course through the dark period. It was one of the smaller galleries, but
in it had been gathered new possessions, things bought in the War,
others left by wills, a collection of choicest pieces. They were
welcomed by the leading connoisseurs of the city: the directors of the
Louvre and the Luxembourg, a few artists, a few great ladies. Everybody
was in black and went about with unsmiling but touching appreciation,
hardly believing, it seemed to me, that again he or she was free to
rejoice in beauty. It was like coming home after the long funeral of a
beloved member of a family.
But I was more concerned with the everyday conditions under which humble
people were living, particularly in the territory so lately occupied.
That was where the Red Cross could now be of the most practical help, it
seemed to me. It took but little looking about to see that nothing we
could provide would come amiss, either to those who had been caught and
so remained through the War or to those who were now coming back,
generally under the protest of the authorities.
I had not imagined that a bombardment could so strip a community, a
countryside, of all the little conveniences of life. At Lens—once a
great manufacturing and mining town, now a vast mass of red brick dust,
hardly a wall left—I went about looking for signs of life, for I had
been told that a few people had weathered the horror and were to be
found living underground. Coming on what seemed to be a path running
over a pile of debris, I followed it into an opening; and there, in what
was left of a basement, sat a woman sewing. There was a fire on the
hearth. She got up to greet me—a child ran out, a little girl with
tousled head, dirty and ragged. “You must pardon the way we look. We
have been here for many months. We haven’t a comb. No pins, nothing. But
we are happy they have gone.”
Every now and then I came upon little groups who had found shelter in
enemy trenches throughout the War. In a small town southeast of Laon, in
the region occupied at the beginning of the War and held until the final
retreat, I came upon a half-dozen children who had been brought up in
the trenches. A couple of French sisters had come back to the region and
were trying to civilize them. “You have no idea,” they told me, “how
difficult it is to teach them to use handkerchiefs.” This was an apology
for running noses. But, if ignorant of all civilized ways, these
youngsters were remarkably healthy. They had had the food of the
invaders, and they had lived in the earth very much like young animals.
While they knew nothing of books they knew everything about war: guns,
batteries, shells, uniforms. On the latter they had positive ideas. They
had never seen a Red Cross uniform before, and they criticized it
openly: “pas chic”—by which I suppose they meant “bungling.” And I must
confess mine was.
Continually as I went about I asked myself how it could be that every
pin, every needle, every spool of thread, every comb, had gone. Larger
articles you understood, but these little things! The silence of the
devastated regions was even more perplexing than this stripping. I drove
to the Belgian border several times, and it was a long time before I
could make out why it was so still. Finally it occurred to me that I saw
and heard nothing alive, no cat, no dog, no hen. All these creatures had
completely disappeared. And when they began to be brought back the
rejoicing was like that of the return of the beautiful things to the
cities. One would live again perhaps.
At Vic-sur-Aisne where the American Committee for Devastated France was
carrying on its fine practical work, among the many, many, things it was
doing was attempting to restock with poultry. The daughter of an eminent
New York family had an incubator in her bedroom where she told me she
soon hoped to have a flock of chicks. The day that I was there a hen
which had been imported laid an egg. It was an event in the countryside.
I saw peasant women wipe away tears that day as they looked at that hen
and her egg. They would live again.
I shared this feeling later when spring began to come, and in going over
torn battlefields I saw the primroses. One day I heard a skylark sing
and sing until it came out of the blue and dropped like a stone to the
ground. It was like a voice of promise from heaven.
What saved one’s reason within this immense devastation—so completely,
incredibly horrible—was the intelligent and energetic way in which
restoration was going on. Highways had been opened from Paris to Lille
and on to Brussels. They included such shattered towns as Albert, Arras,
Béthune, Lens, Armentières. I could go comfortably, and did, to Ypres,
Cambrai, Saint-Quentin, Laon, Rheims—to all important points in
northeastern France and along the border. It was when you disobeyed
orders and explored unopened territory that you got into trouble. I
tried Messines Ridge and landed in a shell hole. It took twenty small
Annamese, located by my doughboy chauffeur at work on a clean-up job a
mile or so away, to lift out our car and carry it a quarter of a mile to
something like safety. The angry berating of an English officer—the
English being responsible in that territory—still rings in my ears.
The most heartening sight was the steady, slow redemption of the
mutilated land. As a rule the job of clearing away the first layer of
war debris was given to German prisoners and soldiers from French
colonies. It was a horrifying mess of abandoned tanks, artillery, guns,
shells, hand grenades—not all duds, unhappily, as daily accidents
demonstrated. With the debris cleared away, the heavy task of leveling
the land followed. It was often deeply riddled, as over the Chemin des
Dames, where the underpinning of hard white limestone lay shattered on
the top—the soil far below. After the leveling came the tractors plowing
the land, and finally the seeding. Along the highways outside of most of
the big wrecked towns I saw between Paris and Lille were short stretches
in one or another stage of this orderly redemption.
French, English, and Americans were all connected with the restoration.
What really mattered, I felt, was the work of the French: first, it was
their business; then, they understood their people—what they could and
could not expect them to do. They were most successful in getting
individuals to do the things they had always done in the way they had
always done them. The American workers, marvelous as they were, wanted
to reform the French modes of life. They were keen on sanitation and
chintz curtains; the Frenchmen were keen on community tractors; the
Frenchwomen, on community sewing machines.
After I had seen one little group of Frenchwomen gathered by an
energetic duchess in a wing of her battered château making over old
clothes for ragged refugees, who had had literally nothing new for
years, I thought I knew what the Red Cross could best do for the
devastated regions.
The Red Cross had on hand at the end of the war millions of garments,
the output of thousands of little sewing and knitting circles scattered
from ocean to ocean and from Great Lakes to Gulf. Innumerable shirts,
drawers, pajamas, scarfs, sweaters, were piled in storehouses—the most
extensive that I saw being at Lille. My cry was: “Turn them over to the
French sewing circles so rapidly forming and if possible send a sewing
machine with them. You can be sure that the Kalamazoo pajamas, the
Topeka shirts, everybody’s sweaters, will be refitted for children and
men and women who at present have not a decent shirt to their backs, or
decent drawers to their legs.” A desultory distribution was already
making, but I wanted it general and systematic. It was consoling to have
found at least one thing, obvious as it was, which I felt I could
energetically back.
Practical help was the more worth while because so intelligently turned
to use. The few returning to the towns from which they had been driven
often showed amazing resourcefulness and courage. They wanted to rebuild
their homes, set up their shops; but when they came to the town where
they once had lived it frequently was impossible to find the spot which
they supposed they owned. At Cantigny, an utterly devastated flat ruin
the day I saw it, a Frenchman and his wife appeared and quietly went
about trying to locate the site of their home. They went away in
disagreement as to where their street had run.
At Péronne I talked with a carpenter who had set up his shop. He told me
he had had difficulty in finding his old location, but he thought he was
on the right spot—at least the authorities told him he might settle
there. By pulling scaffoldings from tumbledown houses and bringing in
corrugated iron from near-by trenches he had made himself a waterproof
shelter, arranged a workbench and already was earning a little money
helping the authorities here and there in the cleaning up. A piece of
constructive work he had taken on was salvaging doors. Here he had found
a solid doorframe, there a panel; and, putting these together, he was
producing a stock. He was certain it would not be long before he would
have customers for them.
All this put heart in me in the same way the first primrose, the first
skylark, had done. There was an indomitable something in men then, as
there was in nature, something that made them live and grow.
Paris and the Peace Conference taxed my faith more severely than the
devastated regions. My brother back in the United States wrote me that
the job the Conference seemed to have set itself was as big as creating
the world. Men were not big enough for that, and one was aghast that
they felt so equal to it—or, if not that, were willing to give the
impression of feeling equal.
What scared me was that so many battered people accepted this notion of
what the Conference could and would do. From all over the globe they
brought their wrongs and hopes and needs to be satisfied. Many of them
also brought along ideas for the making and running of the new
world—ideas in which they felt the quality of inspiration. The success
of the Conference would depend in the mind of each of these suppliants,
upon his getting what he was after.
But at the very outset they were balked by their failure to reach the
one man who they believed had not only the will but the power to satisfy
their grievances and hopes—the Messiah of the Conference, Woodrow
Wilson.
There was always somebody in the complex and all-embracing organization
of the Conference to hear, sift, report their case; but again and again
they could get no notion of what was happening to it. Insistence on an
answer, on knowing how things were going, often closed doors which at
first had welcomed them. I felt this deeply in the case of the
Armenians. My interest in them had been aroused by a delegation at the
Hôtel de Vouillemont. In the number was a woman with one of the most
beautiful and tragic faces that I had ever looked on. It was not long
before this woman was putting her case before me in excellent English,
for she had had all the advantages of a European education. She and her
companions had all suffered from the cruel and relentless atrocities
which had paralyzed their country. Now their hope was that the United
States would take the mandate for Armenia. Before I realized it I had
become a determined advocate of that solution of their problem. I feel
sure that, if we had gone into the League of Nations, I should have felt
called to work for a mandate for Armenia.
The saddest thing was to see the gradual fall of their hopes, to know
the day had come when, whatever had been the original reception, they
could no longer get the ear of principals or experts. Balfour was said
to have shouted at an aide as he threw the memoranda of the Armenians in
the corner: “Do not bring me another of these things at this Conference.
I know all I want to know about this cause, and I will not read any more
memoranda.”
Something of this kind was happening in delegation after delegation, and
as hope went out of the suppliants resentment took its place. Soon many
of the disappointed were joining the no small number that from the start
had come to Paris, so far as I could see, to do their best to ruin the
Conference. From every country came political opponents of the chosen
delegates and of the settlements which they were seeking; from no
country were there more of these than from the United States, and
certainly from no country were there so many whose chief weapon was
malicious gossip.
There was nothing for these political malcontents to do but talk, and
that they did whenever they could find a listener—in cafés, on street
corners, at French dinner tables—dinner tables becoming more and more
unsympathetic as it began to be rumored that the full measure of
punishment they asked was not to be given Germany. These groups
naturally absorbed the bewildered people who were getting no answer to
their supplications, who were being put off from day to day. It was easy
to persuade them that the Peace Conference was a failure.
What startled me as the days went on was the passing of the will to
peace which had been strong, even taken for granted at the start. Hate
was replacing it. Again and again I recalled in those days a shrine I
had once seen in Brittany called “Our Lady of the Hates”—one of those
frank realistic shrines where symbolic figures portray the devils which
torment men and prevent peaceful living. That shrine haunted my dreams
when the confusion and bitterness seemed daily more confounded.
The social revolutionists at the Peace Conference never reached the
point of building barricades as I had seen them do in Paris twenty-five
years before; but they did make it rather lively on May 1st and
inconvenient for many people who wanted to do their part in keeping the
world moving in an orderly fashion—their humdrum part of delivering
milk, looking after the sick, keeping things clean. They threatened such
dire calamity if they were not allowed to meet and obstruct circulation
in certain central places that the Government, usually stupid in such
matters, shut down on their ambition so completely that of course they
collected in these forbidden places and did their best to cause
bloodshed.
I remember one young thing who thought the time had come and meant to be
in the center of carnage. She went out early in the morning and posted
herself on the steps of the Madeleine and sat there all day in a state
of honest, genuine enthusiasm ready to sacrifice herself as well as
everybody in sight. But there was no real fray—only some discouraging
little street rows, with theatrical attempts to make capital out of
them, and a few pitiful dead, little useful people with dependents
taking a holiday and eager to see.
It was a great day for American doughboys. They had been ordered to stay
indoors, to give up their firearms, and to do nothing that in any way
would invite disaster. Their answer was like that of the would-be
revolutionist for they streamed by hundreds over the monuments and
cannon of the Place de la Concorde. There was not a monument or a point
of vantage around that Place that any human being could climb to that
was not occupied by these youths. If there was to be a revolution, they
were going to be there to see it break out.
That which contributed more than anything else, it seemed to me at the
time, to the suspicion and commotion around the Peace Conference was
that it fed the onlookers (the press included) so little actual
information to chew on. The delegates and committees sat behind closed
doors, only spoke when a conclusion was reached, a document adopted. The
public wanted to sit in a gallery and hear the discussions leading to
conclusions and documents, and—being shut out—speculated, gossiped,
believed the worst, spread false and damaging reports.
It took out its resentment by creating a four-headed monster—Wilson,
Clemenceau, Lloyd George, and Orlando—preparing to dragoon the world
into a fresh crop of unholy alliances and commitments and to refuse
justice to multitudes of small and weak peoples and causes. It was
prepared beforehand to doubt whatever the Conference did.
In the confusion and discouragement the one concrete thing I found was
the International Labor Conference. At the beginning of the century one
of the hopes of pacifists like Dr. Jordan, Jane Addams, and their
associates had been the International Association for Labor Legislation,
organized in 1900. It had been carried on without much help from labor
itself until the War came; then labor set up a loud demand for
international action. The undertaking added to that Americanization of
the Place de la Concorde and the Rue de Rivoli which had struck me on my
arrival. Many men and women I had known when I was working editorially
and otherwise on labor relations turned up. It was like home to see Mr.
Gompers barging up and down the Rue de Rivoli and to run onto Mary
Anderson and Rose Schneiderman in the garden of the Tuileries.
I was lucky enough to fall in at the start with Dr. James T. Shotwell,
the active head of the labor committee of the American delegation. Dr.
Shotwell’s intelligence and patience were of the utmost help, I have
always felt, in getting the final agreement adopted, early in April in a
full session. Certainly it was due to his generous explanations that I
was able to follow what was going on.