the outbreak of the war, and where the advent of our first handful of
fugitives before the warning of Louvain and Aerschoot and Termonde and
Dinant had just been announced. Our small hill-top city, covering the
steep sides of the compact pedestal crowned by its great church, had
reserved a refuge at its highest point; and we had waited all day, from
occasional train to train, for the moment at which we should attest our
hospitality. It came at last, but late in the evening, when a vague
outside rumour called me to my doorstep, where the unforgettable
impression at once assaulted me. Up the precipitous little street that
led from the station, over the old grass-grown cobbles where vehicles
rarely pass, came the panting procession of the homeless and their
comforting, their almost clinging entertainers, who seemed to hurry them
on as in a sort of overflow of expression of the fever of charity. It
was swift and eager, in the autumn darkness and under the flare of a
single lamp--with no vociferation and, but for a woman's voice, scarce a
sound save the shuffle of mounting feet and the thick-drawn breath of
emotion. The note I except, however, was that of a young mother carrying
her small child and surrounded by those who bore her on and on, almost
lifting her as they went together. The resonance through our immemorial
old street of her sobbing and sobbing cry was the voice itself of
history; it brought home to me more things than I could then quite take
the measure of, and these just because it expressed for her not direct
anguish, but the incredibility, as who should say, of honest assured
protection. Months have elapsed, and from having been then one of a few
hundred she is now one of scores and scores of thousands: yet her cry
is still in my ears, whether to speak most of what she had lately or of
what she actually felt; and it plays, to my own sense, as a great
fitful, tragic light over the dark exposure of her people.
THE AMERICAN VOLUNTEER MOTOR-AMBULANCE CORPS IN FRANCE
_A Letter to the Editor of an American Journal_
SIR,--Several of us Americans in London are so interested in the
excellent work of this body, lately organised by Mr Richard Norton and
now in active operation at the rear of a considerable part of the
longest line of battle known to history, that I have undertaken to
express to you our common conviction that our countrymen at home will
share our interest and respond to such particulars as we are by this
time able to give. The idea of the admirable enterprise was suggested to
Mr Norton when, early in the course of the War, he saw at the American
Hospital at Neuilly scores of cases of French and British wounded whose
lives were lost, or who must incur life--long disability and suffering,
through the long delay of their removal from the field of battle. To
help energetically to remedy this dire fact struck him at once as
possible, and his application of energy was so immediate and effective
that in just three weeks after his return to London to take the work in
hand he had been joined by a number of his countrymen and of others
possessed of cars, who had offered them as ambulances already fitted or
easily convertible, and had not less promptly offered themselves as
capable chauffeurs. To this promptly gathered equipment, the recruiting
of which no red tape had hampered and no postponement to
committee-meetings had delayed, were at once added certain other cars of
purchase--these made possible by funds rapidly received from many known
and unknown friends in America. The fleet so collected amounted to some
fifteen cars. To the service of the British Red Cross and that of the St
John Ambulance it then addressed itself, gratefully welcomed, and
enjoying from that moment the valuable association of Colonel A. J.
Barry of the British Army, who was already employed in part on behalf of
the Red Cross. I have within a few days had the opportunity to learn
from this zealous and accomplished coadjutor, as well as from Mr Norton
himself, some of the particulars of their comprehensive activity, they
each having been able to dash over to London for a visit of the briefest
duration. It has thus been brought home to me how much the success of
the good work depends on American generosity both in the personal and
the pecuniary way--exercised, that is, by the contribution of cars, to
which personal service, that of their contributors, attaches itself, and
of course by such gifts of money as shall make the Corps more and more
worthy of its function and of the American name.
Its function is primarily that of gathering in the wounded, and those
disabled by illness (though the question is almost always of the
former,) from the _postes de secours_ and the field hospitals, the
various nearest points to the Front, bestrewn with patient victims, to
which a motor-car can workably penetrate, and conveying them to the base
hospitals, and when necessary the railway stations, from which they may
be further directed upon places of care, centres of those possibilities
of recovery which the splendid recent extension of surgical and medical
science causes more and more to preponderate. The great and blessed fact
is that conditions of recovery are largely secured by the promptitude
and celerity that motor-transport offers, as compared with railway
services at the mercy of constant interruption and arrest, in the case
of bad and already neglected wounds, those aggravated by exposure and
delay, the long lying on the poisonous field before the blest regimental
_brancardiers_ or stretcher-bearers, waiting for the shelter of night,
but full also of their own strain of pluck, can come and remove them.
Carried mostly by rude arts, a mercy much hindered at the best, to the
shelter, often hastily improvised, at which first aid becomes possible
for them, they are there, as immediately and tenderly as possible,
stowed in our waiting or arriving cars, each of which receives as large
a number as may be consistent with the particular suffering state of the
stricken individual. Some of these are able to sit, at whatever cost
from the inevitable shake over rough country roads; for others the lying
posture only is thinkable, and the ideal car is the one which may
humanely accommodate three men outstretched and four or five seated.
Three outstretched is sometimes a tight fit, but when this is impossible
the gain in poor _blesses assis_ is the greater--wedged together though
broken shoulder or smashed arm may have to be with a like shrinking and
shuddering neighbour. The moral of these rigours is of course that the
more numerous the rescuing vehicles the less inevitable the sore
crowding. I find it difficult to express to you the sense of practical
human pity, as well as the image of general helpful energy, applied in
innumerable chance ways, that we get from the report of what the Corps
has done, and holds itself in readiness to do, thanks to the admirable
spirit of devotion without stint, of really passionate work, animating
its individual members. These have been found beneficently and
inexhaustibly active, it is interesting to be able to note, in
proportion as they possess the general _educated_ intelligence, the
cultivated tradition of tact, and I may perhaps be allowed to confess
that, for myself, I find a positive added beauty in the fact that the
unpaid chauffeur, the wise amateur driver and ready lifter, helper,
healer, and, so far as may be, consoler, is apt to be a University man
and acquainted with other pursuits. One gets the sense that the labour,
with its multiplied incidents and opportunities, is just unlimitedly
inspiring to the keen spirit or the sympathetic soul, the recruit with
energies and resources on hand that plead with him for the beauty of the
vivid and palpable social result.
Not the least of the good offices open to our helpers are the odds and
ends of aid determined by wayside encounters in a ravaged country, where
distracted women and children flee from threatened or invaded villages,
to be taken up, to be given the invaluable lift, if possible, in all
the incoherence of their alarm and misery; sometimes with the elder men
mixed in the tragic procession, tragi-comic even, very nearly, when the
domestic or household objects they have snatched up in their headlong
exodus, and are solemnly encumbered with, bear the oddest misproportion
to the gravity of the case. They are hurried in, if the car be happily
free, and carried on to comparative safety, but with the admirable
cleverness and courage of the Frenchwoman of whatever class essentially
in evidence in whatever contact; never more so, for instance, than when
a rude field hospital has had of a sudden to be knocked together in the
poor schoolhouse of a village, and the mangled and lacerated, brought
into it on stretchers or on any rough handcart or trundled barrow that
has been impressed into the service, have found the _villageoises_,
bereft of their men, full of the bravest instinctive alertness, not
wincing at sights of horror fit to try even trained sensibilities,
handling shattered remnants of humanity with an art as extemporised as
the refuge itself, and having each precarious charge ready for the
expert transfer by the time the car has hurried up. Emphasised enough by
the ceaseless thunder of the Front the quality of the French and the
British resistance and the pitch of their spirit; but one feels what is
meant none the less when one hears the variety of heroism and the
brightness of devotion in the women over all the region of battle
described from observation as unsurpassable. Do we take too much for
granted in imagining that this offered intimacy of appreciation of such
finest aspects of the admirable immortal France, and of a relation with
them almost as illuminating to ourselves as beneficent to them, may
itself rank as something of an appeal where the seeds of response to her
magnificent struggle in the eye of our free longings and liberal
impulses already exist?
I should mention that a particular great Army Corps, on the arrival of
our first cars on the scene, appealed to them for all the service they
could render, and that to this Corps they have been as yet
uninterruptedly attached, on the condition of a reserve of freedom to
respond at once to any British invitation to a transfer of activity.
Such an assurance had already been given the Commissioner for the
British Red Cross, on the part of Mr Norton and Colonel Barry, with
their arrival at Boulogne, where that body cordially welcomed them, and
whence in fact, on its request, a four-stretcher-car, with its American
owner and another of our Volunteers in charge, proceeded to work for a
fortnight, night and day, along the firing line on the Belgian frontier.
Otherwise we have continuously enjoyed, in large, defined limits, up to
the present writing, an association with one of the most tremendously
engaged French Armies. The length of its line alone, were I to state it
here in kilometres, would give some measure of the prodigious fighting
stretch across what is practically the whole breadth of France, and it
is in relation to a fraction of the former Front that we have worked.
Very quickly, I may mention, we found one of our liveliest
opportunities, Mr Norton and Colonel Barry proceeding together to
ascertain what had become of one of the field hospitals known to have
served in a small assaulted town a few days before, when, during a
bombardment, Colonel Barry had saved many lives. Just as our Volunteers
arrived a fresh bombardment began, and though assured by the fleeing
inhabitants, including the mayor of the place, who was perhaps a trifle
over-responsibly in advance of them, that there were no wounded left
behind--as in fact proved to be the case--we nevertheless pushed on for
full assurance. There were then no wounded to bring out, but it was our
first happy chance of bearing away all the hopeless and helpless women
and children we could carry. This was a less complicated matter,
however, than that of one of Colonel Barry's particular reminiscences,
an occasion when the Germans were advancing on a small place that it was
clear they would take, and when pressing news came to him of 400 wounded
in it, who were to be got out if humanly possible. They were got out and
motored away--though it took the rescuing party thus three days, in the
face of their difficulties and dangers, to effect the blest clearance.
It may be imagined how precious in such conditions the power of the
chauffeur-driven vehicle becomes, though indeed I believe the more
special moral of this transaction, as given, was in the happy fact that
the squad had blessedly been able to bring and keep with it four
doctors, whose immediate service on the spot and during transport was
the means of saving very many lives. The moral of that in turn would
seem to be that the very ideal for the general case is the not so
inconceivable volunteer who should be an ardent and gallant and not
otherwise too much preoccupied young doctor with the possession of a car
and the ability to drive it, above all the ability to offer it, as his
crowning attribute. Perhaps I sketch in such terms a slightly fantastic
figure, but there is so much of strenuous suggestion, which withal
manages at the same time to be romantic, in the information before me,
that it simply multiplies, for the hopeful mind, the possibilities and
felicities of equipped good-will. An association of the grimmest reality
clings at the same time, I am obliged to add, to the record of success I
have just cited--the very last word of which seems to have been that in
one of the houses of the little distracted town were two French Sisters
of Mercy who were in charge of an old bedridden lady and whom, with the
object of their care, every effort was made in vain to remove. They
absolutely declined all such interference with the fate God had
appointed them to meet as nuns--if it was His will to make them martyrs.
The curtain drops upon what became of them, but they too illustrate in
their way the range of the Frenchwoman's power to face the situation.
Still another form of high usefulness comes to our Corps, I should
finally mention, in its opportunities for tracing the whereabouts and
recovering the identity of the dead, the English dead, named in those
grim lists, supplied to them by the military authorities, which their
intercourse with the people in a given area where fighting has occurred
enables them often blessedly to clear up. Their pervasiveness, their
ubiquity, keeps them in touch with the people, witnesses of what happens
on the battle-swept area when, after the storm has moved on, certain of
the lifeless sweepings are gathered up. Old villagers, searched out and
questioned, testify and give a clue through which the whereabouts of the
committal to thin earth of the last mortality of this, that, or the
other of the obscurely fallen comes as a kind of irony of relief to
those waiting in suspense. This uncertainty had attached itself for
weeks to the fate in particular of many of the men concerned in the
already so historic retreat of the Allies from Mons--ground still
considerably in the hands of the Germans, but also gradually accessible
and where, as quickly as it becomes so, Colonel Barry pushes out into it
in search of information. Sternly touching are such notes of general
indication, information from the Cure, the village carpenter, the
grave-digger of the place, a man called so-and-so and a gentleman called
something else, as to the burial of forty-five dead English in the
public cemetery of such and such a small locality, as to the interment
somewhere else of 'an Englishman believed to be an officer,' as to a
hundred English surprised in a certain church and killed all but forty,
and buried, as is not always their fortune for their kindred, without
removal of their discs of identification. Among such like data we move
when not among those of a more immediate violence, and all to be in
their way scarce less considerately handled. Mixed with such gleanings
one comes upon other matters of testimony of which one hopes equal note
is made--testimony as to ferocities perpetrated upon the civil
population which I may not here specify. Every form of assistance and
inquiry takes place of course in conditions of some danger, thanks to
the risk of stray bullets and shells, not infrequently met when cars
operate, as they neither avoid doing nor wastefully seek to do, in
proximity to the lines. The Germans, moreover, are noted as taking the
view that the insignia of the Red Cross, with the implication of the
precarious freight it covers, are in all circumstances a good mark for
their shots; a view characteristic of their belligerent system at large,
but not more deterrent for the ministers of the adversary in this
connection than in any other, when the admirable end is in question.
I have doubtless said enough, however, in illustration of the interest
attaching to all this service, a service in which not one of the forces
of social energy and devotion, not one of the true social qualities,
sympathy, ingenuity, tact, and taste, fail to come into play. Such an
exercise of them, as all the incidental possibilities are taken
advantage of, represents for us all, who are happily not engaged in the
huge destructive work, the play not simply of a reparatory or
consolatory, but a positively productive and creative virtue in which
there is a peculiar honour. We Americans are as little neutrals as
possible where any aptitude for any action, of whatever kind, that
affirms life and freshly and inventively exemplifies it, instead of
overwhelming and undermining it, is concerned. Great is the chance, in
fact, for exhibiting this as our entirely elastic, our supremely
characteristic, social aptitude. We cannot do so cheaply, indeed, any
more than the opposite course is found, under whatever fatuity of
presumption, inexpensive and ready-made. What I therefore invite all
those whom this notice may reach to understand, as for that matter they
easily will, is that the expenses of our enlightened enterprise have to
be continuously met, and that if it has confidence in such support it
may go on in all the alert pride and pity that need be desired. I am
assured that the only criticism the members of the Corps make of it is
that they wish more of their friends would come and support it either
personally or financially--or, best of all, of course, both. At the
moment I write I learn this invocation to have been met to the extent of
Mr Norton's having within two or three days annexed five fresh cars,
with their owners to work them--and all, as I hear it put with elation,
'excellent University men.' As an extremely helpful factor on the part
of Volunteers is some facility in French and the goodwill to stay on for
whatever reasonable length of time, I assume the excellence of these
gentlemen to include those signal merits. Most members of the Staff of
thirty-four in all (as the number till lately at least has stood) have
been glad to pay their own living expenses; but it is taken for granted
that in cases where individuals are unable to meet that outlay
indefinitely the subscribers to the Fund will not grudge its undertaking
to find any valuable man in food and lodging. Such charges amount at the
outside to 1 dollar 75 per day. The expenses of petrol and tyres are
paid by the French Government or the British Red Cross, so that the
contributor of the car is at costs only for the maintenance of his
chauffeur, if he brings one, or for necessary repairs. Mr Eliot Norton,
of 2 Rector Street, New York, is our recipient of donations on your side
of the sea, Mr George F. Read, Hon. Treas., care of Messrs Brown,
Shipley & Co., 123 Pall Mall, S.W., kindly performs this office in
London, and I am faithfully yours,
HENRY JAMES.
LONDON, _November 25, 1914_.
FRANCE
I think that if there is a general ground in the world, on which an
appeal might be made, in a civilised circle, with a sense of its being
uttered only to meet at once and beyond the need of insistence a certain
supreme recognition and response, the idea of what France and the French
mean to the educated spirit of man would be the nameable thing. It would
be the cause uniting us most quickly in an act of glad intelligence,
uniting us with the least need of any wondering why. We should
understand and answer together just by the magic of the mention, the
touch of the two or three words, and this in proportion to our feeling
ourselves social and communicating creatures--to the point, in fact, of
a sort of shame at any imputation of our not liberally understanding, of
our waiting in any degree to be nudged or hustled. The case of France,
as one may hold it, where the perceptive social mind is concerned and
set in motion, is thus only to be called exquisite--so far as we don't
seem so to qualify things _down_. We certainly all feel, in the
beautiful connection, in two general ways; one of these being that the
spring pressed with such happy effect lifts the sense by its mere
vibration into the lightest and brightest air in which, taking our world
all round, it is given to our finer interest about things to breathe and
move; and the other being that just having our intelligence, our
experience at its freest and bravest, taken for granted, is a compliment
to us, as not purely instinctive persons, which we should miss, if it
were not paid, rather to the degree of finding the omission an insult.
Such, as I say, is our easy relation to the sound of a voice raised,
even however allusively and casually, on behalf of that great national
and social presence which has always most oppositely, most sensibly,
most obsessively, as I surely may put it, and above all most dazzlingly,
neighboured and admonished us here: after such a fashion as really to
have made the felt breath of its life, across an interval constantly
narrowing, a part of our education as distinguished from our luck. Our
luck in all our past has been enormous, the greatest luck on the whole,
assuredly, that any race has ever had; but it has never been a conscious
reaction or a gathered fruition, as one may say; it has just been a
singular felicity of position and of temperament, and this felicity has
made us observe and perceive and reflect much less than it has made us
directly act and profit and enjoy: enjoy of course by attending
tremendously to all the business involved in our position. So far as we
have had reactions, therefore, they have not sprung, when they have been
at all intensified, from the extraordinary good fortune of our state.
Unless indeed I may put it that what they _have_ very considerably
sprung from has been exactly a part of our general prodigy--the good
fortune itself of our being neighboured by a native genius so different
from our own, so suggestive of wondrous and attaching comparisons, as
to keep us chronically aware of the difference and the contrast and yet
all the while help us to see into them and through them.
We were not, to all appearance, appointed by fate for the most
perceptive and penetrative offices conceivable; so that to have over
against us and within range a proposition, as we nowadays say, that
could only grow more and more vivid, more and more engaging and
inspiring, in the measure of our growth of criticism and curiosity, or,
in other words, of the capacity just to pay attention, pay attention
otherwise than by either sticking very fast at home or inquiring of the
Antipodes, the Antipodes almost exclusively--what has that practically
been for us but one of the very choicest phases of our luck aforesaid,
one of the most appraisable of our felicities? the very one, doubtless,
that our dissimilarity of temperament and taste would have most
contradictiously and most correctively prescribed from the moment we
were not to be left simply to stew in our juice! If the advantage I so
characterise was to be in its own way thoroughly affirmative, there was
yet nothing about it to do real or injurious violence to that abysmal
good nature which sometimes strikes me as our most effective
contribution to human history. The vision of France, at any rate, so
close and so clear at propitious hours, was to grow happily
illustrational for us as nothing else in any like relation to us could
possibly have become. Other families have a way, on good opportunity, of
interesting us more than our own, and here was this immense acquaintance
extraordinarily mattering for us and at the same time not irritating us
by a single claim of cousinship or a single liberty taken on any such
score. Any liberties taken were much rather liberties, I think, of
ours--always abounding as we did in quite free, and perhaps slightly
rough, and on the whole rather superficial, movement beyond our island
circle and toward whatever lay in our path. France lay very much in our
path, our path to almost everything that could beckon us forth from our
base--and there were very few things in the world or places on the
globe that didn't so beckon us; according to which she helped us along
on our expansive course a good deal more, doubtless, than either she or
we always knew.