and buildings of the Hôtel Chatelêt. This hospital deals with the
contagious cases. It has others, especially one at the Château des
Halles, thirty kilometers from Lyons, which take the devitalised,
convalescent and tubercular cases. The Château des Halles is a
splendidly built modern building, arranged in an ideal way for
hospital use. It stands at the head of a valley, with an all day sun
exposure and large grounds. Close to the Château are a number of small
villages in which it is possible to lodge the repatriés in families.
This is an important part of the repatrié's problem, as after their
many partings they fight fiercely against any further separations. One
of the chief reasons for having the Convalescent Hospital out in the
country is that families can be quartered in the villages and so kept
together.
The pathetic hunger of these people for one another after they have
been so long divided, was illustrated for me on my return journey to
Paris. A man of the tradesman class had been to Evian to meet his wife
and his boy of about eleven. They were among the lucky ones, for they
had a home to go to. He was not prepossessing in appearance. He had a
weak face, lined with anxiety, broken teeth and limp hair. His wife,
as so often happens in French marriages, had evidently been the
manageress. She was unbeautiful in rusty black; her clothes were the
ill-assorted make-shifts of the civilian who escapes from Germany. Her
eyes were shifty with the habit of fear and sunken with the weariness
of crying. The boy was a bright little fellow, full of defiance and
anecdotes of his recent captors.
When I entered the carriage, they were sitting huddled together--the
man in the middle, with an arm about either of them. He kept pressing
them to him, kissing them by turn in a spasmodic unrestrained fashion,
as if he still feared that he might lose them and could not convince
himself of the happy truth that they were once again together. The
woman did not respond to his embraces; she seemed indifferent to him,
indifferent to life, indifferent to any prospects. The boy seemed fond
of his father, but embarrassed by his starved demonstrativeness.
I listened to their conversation. The man's talk was all of the
future--what splendid things he would do for them. How, as long
as they lived, he would never waste a moment from their sides. It
appeared that he had been at Tours, on a business trip when the war
broke out, and could not get back to Lille before the Germans arrived
there. For three and a half years he had lived in suspense, while
everything he loved had lain behind the German lines. The woman
contributed no suggestions to his brilliant plans. She clung to him,
but she tried to divert his affection. When she spoke it was of small
domestic abuses: the exorbitant prices she had had to pay for food;
the way in which the soldiery had stolen her pots and pans; the
insolence she had experienced when she had lodged complaints against
the men before their officers. And the boy--he wanted to be a poilu.
He kept inventing revenges he would take in battle, if the war lasted
long enough for his class to be called out. As darkness fell they
ceased talking. I began to realise that in three and a half years they
had lost contact. They were saying over and over the things that
had been said already; they were trying to prevent themselves from
acknowledging that they had grown different and separate. The only
bond which held them as a family was their common loneliness and fear
that, if they did not hold together, their intolerable loneliness
would return. When the light was hooded, the boy sank his hand against
his father's shoulder; the woman nestled herself in the fold of his
arm, with her head turned away from him, that he might not kiss her so
often. The man sat upright, his eyes wide open, watching them sleeping
with a kind of impotent despair. They were together; and yet they
were not together. He had recovered them; nevertheless, he had not
recovered them. Those Boches, the devils, they had kept something;
they had only sent their bodies back. All night long, whenever I
woke up as the train halted, the little man was still guarding them
jealously as a dog guards a bone, and staring morosely at the blank
wall of the future.
These were among the lucky ones; the boy and woman had had a man to
meet them. Somewhere in France there was protection awaiting them and
the shelter of a house that was not charity. And yet ... all night
while they slept the man sat awake, facing up to facts. These were
among the lucky ones! That is Evian; that is the tragedy and need of
France as you see it embodied in individuals.
* * * * *
The total number of repatriés and réfugiés now in France is said to
total a million and a half. The repatriés are the French civilians who
were captured by the Germans in their advance and have since been sent
back. The réfugiés are the French civilians from the devastated areas,
who have always remained on the Allies' side of the line. The réfugiés
are divided into two classes: réfugiés proper--that is fugitives
from the front, who fled for the most part at the time of the German
invasion; and évacués--those who were sent out of the war zone by the
military authorities. Naturally a large percentage of this million and
a half have lost everything and, irrespective of their former worldly
position, now live with the narrowest margin between themselves and
starvation. The French Government has treated them with generosity,
but in the midst of a war it has had little time to devote to
educating them into being self-supporting. A great number of
funds have been privately raised for them in France; many separate
organisations for their relief have been started. The American Red
Cross is making this million and a half people its special care, and
to do so is co-operating directly with the French Government and with
existing French civilian projects. Its action is dictated by mercy
and admiration, but in results this policy is the most far-seeing
statesmanship. A million and a half plundered people, if neglected and
allowed to remain downhearted, are likely to constitute a danger to
the morale of the bravest nation. Again, from the point of view of
after-war relations, to have been generous towards those who have
suffered is to have won the heart of France. The caring for the French
repatriates and refugees is a definite contribution to the winning of
the war.
The French system of handling this human stream of tragedy is to
send the sick to local hospitals and the exhausted to the _maison
de repos_. The comparatively healthy are allowed to be claimed by
friends; the utterly homeless are sent to some prefecture remote from
the front-line. The prefects in turn distribute them among towns and
villages, lodging them in old barracks, casinos and any buildings
which war-conditions have made vacant. The adults are allowed by the
Government a franc and a half per day, and the children seventy-five
centimes.
The armies have drained France of her doctors since the war; until
the Americans came, the available medical attention was wholly
inadequate to the civilian population. The American Red Cross is now
establishing dispensaries through the length and breadth of France.
In country districts, inaccessible to towns, it is inaugurating
automobile-dispensaries which make their rounds on fixed and
advertised days. In addition to this it has started a child-welfare
movement, the aim of which is to build up the birth-rate and lower the
infant mortality by spreading the right kind of knowledge among the
women and girls.
The condition of the refugees and repatriates, thrust into communities
to which they came as paupers and crowded into buildings which were
never planned for domestic purposes, has been far from enviable. In
September, 1917, the American Red Cross handed over the solving of
this problem to one of its experts who had organised the aid given to
San Francisco after the earthquake, and who had also had charge of the
relief-work necessitated by the Ohio floods at Dayton. Co-operating
with the French, houses partially constructed at the outbreak of war
were now completed and furnished, and approximately three thousand
families were supplied with homes and privacy. The start made
proved satisfactory. Supplies, running into millions of francs, were
requisitioned, and the plan for getting the people out of public
buildings into homes was introduced to the officials of most of the
departments of France. Delegates were sent out by the Red Cross to
undertake the organisation of the work. Money was apportioned for the
supplying of destitute families with furniture and the instruments
of trade; the object in view was not to pauperise them, but to afford
them the opportunity for becoming self-supporting. Re-construction
work in those devastated areas which have been won back from the Boche
was hurried forward in order that the people who had been uprooted
from the soil might be returned to it and, in being returned to their
own particular soil, might recover their place in life and their
balance.
I visited the devastated areas of the Pas-de-Calais, Somme, Oise and
Aisne and saw what is being accomplished. This destroyed territory
is roughly one hundred miles long by thirty miles broad at its
widest point. In 1912 one-quarter of the wheat produced in France
and eighty-seven per cent. of the beet crop employed in the national
industry of sugar-making, were raised in these departments of the
north. The invasion has diminished the national wheat production by
more than a half. It is obvious, then, that in getting these districts
once more under cultivation two birds are being killed with one stone:
the refugee is being made a self-supporting person--an economic asset
instead of a dead weight--and the tonnage problem is being solved.
If more food is grown behind the Western Front, grain-ships can be
released for transporting the munitions of war from America.
The French Government had already made a start in this undertaking
before America came into the war. As early as 1914 it voted three
hundred million francs and appointed a group of _sous-préfets_ to
see to the dispensing of it. Little by little, as the Huns have been
driven back, the wealthier inhabitants, whose money was safe in Paris
banks, have returned to these districts and opened _oeuvres_ for the
poorer inhabitants. Many of them have lost their sons and husbands;
they find in their daily labour for others worse off than themselves
an escape from life-long despair. Misfortune is a matter of comparison
and contrast. We are all of us unhappy or fortunate according to our
standards of selfishness and our personal interpretation of our lot.
These patriots are bravely turning their experience of sorrow into the
materials of service. They can speak the one and only word which makes
a bond of sympathy between the prosperous and the broken-hearted, "I,
too, have suffered." I came across one such woman in the neighbourhood
of Villequier-au-Mont. She was a woman of title and a royalist. Her
estates had been laid waste by the invasion and all her men-folk, save
her youngest son, were dead. Directly the Hun withdrew last spring,
she came back to the wilderness which had been created and commenced
to spend what remained of her fortune upon helping her peasants. These
peasants had been the hewers of wood and drawers of water for the Hun
for three and a half years. When his armies retreated, they took with
them the girls and the young men, leaving behind only the weaklings,
the children and the aged. Word came to the Red Cross official of
the district that her remaining son had been killed in action; he was
asked to break the news to her. He went out to her ruined village
and found her sitting among a group of women in the shell of a house,
teaching them to make garments for their families. She was pleased to
see him; she was in need of more materials. She had been intending
to make the journey to see him herself. She was full of her work and
enthusiastic over the valiance of her people. He led her aside and
told her. She fell silent. Her face quivered--that was all. Then she
completed her list of requirements and went back to her women. In
living to comfort other people's grief, she had no time to nurse her
own.
These "oeuvres," or groups of workers, settle down in a shattered
village or township. The military authorities place the township in
their charge. They at once commence to get roofs on to such houses
as still have walls. They supply farm-implements, poultry, rabbits,
carts, seeds, plants, etc. They import materials from Paris and
form sewing classes for the women and girls. They encourage the
trades-people to re-start their shops and lend them the necessary
initial capital. What is perhaps most valuable, they lure the
terror-stricken population out of their caves and dug-outs, and set
them an example of hope and courage. Some of the best pioneer work
of this sort has been done by the English Society of Friends who now,
together with the Friends of the United States, have become a part
of the Bureau of the Department of Civil Affairs of the American Red
Cross.
The American Red Cross works through the "oeuvres" which it found
already operating in the devastated area; it places its financial
backing at their disposal, its means of motor transport and its
personnel; it grafts on other "oeuvres," operating in newly taken over
villages, in which Americans, French and English work side by side
for the common welfare; at strategic points behind the lines it
has established a chain of relief warehouses, fully equipped with
motor-lorries and cars. These warehouses furnish everything that an
agricultural people starting life afresh can require--food, clothes,
blankets, beds, mattresses, stoves, kitchen utensils, reapers,
binders, mowing-machines, threshing-machines, garden-tools, soap,
tooth brushes, etc. If you can conceive of yourself as having been a
prosperous farmer and waking up one morning broken in heart and dirty
in person, with your barns, live-stock, daughters, sons, everything
gone--not a penny left in the world--you can imagine your necessities,
and then form some picture of the fore-thought that goes to the
running of a Red Cross warehouse.
But the poverty of these people is not the worst condition that the
Red Cross workers have to tackle; money can always replace money.
Hope, trust, affection and a genial belief in the world's goodness
cannot be transplanted into another man's heart in exchange for
bitterness by even the most lavish giver. I can think of no
modern parallel for their blank despair; the only eloquence which
approximately expresses it is that of Job, centuries old, "Why is
light given to a man whose way is hid and whom God hath hedged in? My
sighing cometh before I eat. My roarings are poured out like waters.
My harp is turned to mourning, and my organ into the voice of them
that weep. I was not in safety, neither had I rest, neither was I
quiet; yet trouble came."
This hell which the Hun has created, beggars any description of
Dante.[1] It is still more appalling to remember that the external
hell which one sees, does not represent one tithe of the dreariness
which lies hidden behind the eyes of the inhabitants. To imagine amid
such scenes is to paralyse compassion with agony. The craving, never
far from one's thoughts, is the age-old desire, "O that one might
plead with God, as a man pleadeth for his neighbour!"
[Footnote 1: Since this was written and just as I am returning to
the front, the Hun has set to work to create this hell for the second
time. Most of the places referred to below are once more within the
enemy country and all the mercy of the American Red Cross has been
wiped out.]
I started out on my trip in a staff-car from a city well behind the
lines. In the first half hour of the journey the country was green
and pleasant. We passed some cavalry officers galloping across a brown
field; birds were battling against a flurrying wind; high overhead
an aeroplane sailed serenely. There was a sense of life, motion and
exhilaration abroad, but only for the first half hour of our journey.
Then momentarily a depression grew up about us. Fields and trees were
becoming dead, as if a swarm of locusts had eaten their way across
them. Greenness was vanishing. Houses were becoming untenanted; there
were holes in the walls of many of them, through which one gained
glimpses of the sky. Here, by the road-side, we passed a cluster of
insignificant graves. Then, almost without warning, the barbed-wire
entanglements commenced, and the miles and miles of abandoned
trenches. This, not a year ago from the day on which I write, was the
Hun's country. Last spring, in an attempt to straighten his line, he
retreated from it. Our offensives on the Somme had converted his Front
into a dangerous salient.
We are slowing down; the road is getting water-logged and full of
holes. The skull of a dead town grows up on the horizon. Even at this
distance the light behind empty windows glares malevolently like the
nothingness in vacant sockets. A horror is over everything. The horror
is not so much due to the destruction as to the total absence of any
signs of life. One man creeping through the landscape would make it
seem more kindly. I have been in desolated towns often, but there were
always the faces of our cheery Tommies to smile out from cellars and
gaps in the walls. From here life is banished utterly. The battle-line
has retired eastward; one can hear the faint rumble of the guns at
times. No civilian has come to re-inhabit this unhallowed spot.
We enter what were once its streets. They are nothing now but craters
with boards across them. On either side the trees lie flat along the
ground, sawn through within a foot of the roots. What landmarks remain
are the blackened walls of houses, cracked and crashed in by falling
roofs. The entire place must have been given over to explosion and
incendiarism before the Huns departed. One stands in awe of such
completeness of savagery; one begins to understand what is meant by
the term "frightfulness." As far as eye can reach there is nothing to
be seen but decayed fangs, protruding from a swamp of filth, covered
with a green slime where water has accumulated. This is not the
unavoidable ruin of shell-fire. No battle was fought here. The
demolition was the wanton spite of an enemy who, because he could not
hold the place, was determined to leave nothing serviceable behind.
With such masterly thoroughness has he done his work that the spot
can never be re-peopled. The surrounding fields are too poisoned and
churned up for cultivation. The French Government plans to plant a
forest; it is all that can be done. As years go by, the kindliness
of Nature may cause her to forget and cover up the scars of hatred
with greenness. Then, perhaps, peasant lovers will wander here and
refashion their dreams of a chivalrous world. Our generation will
be dead by that time; throughout our lives this memorial to
"frightfulness" will remain.
We have left the town and are out in the open country. It is clean
and unharried. Man can murder orchards and habitations--the things
which man plants and makes; he finds it more difficult to strangle
the primal gifts of Nature. All along by the roadside the cement
telegraph-posts have been broken off short; some of them lie flat
along the ground, others hang limply in the bent shape of hairpins.
Very often we have to make a detour where a steel bridge has been
blown up; we cross the gulley over an improvised affair of struts and
planks, and so come back into the main roadway. Every now and then
we pass steam-tractors at work, ploughing huge fields into regular
furrows. The French Department of Agriculture purchased in America
nineteen teams of ten tractors apiece in the autumn of last year. The
American Red Cross has supplied others. The fields of this district
are unfenced--the farmers used to live together in villages; so
the work is made easy. It is possible to throw a number of holdings
together and to apply to France the same wholesale mechanical means
of wheat-growing that are employed on the prairies of Canada. All
the cattle and horses have been carried off into Germany. All the
farm-implements have been destroyed--and destroyed with a surprising
ingenuity. The same parts were destroyed in each instrument, so that
an entire instrument could not be reconstructed. The farms could not
have been brought under cultivation this year, had not the Government
and the Red Cross lent their assistance.
We are approaching Noyon, the birthplace of Calvin. This is one of
the few towns the Hun spared in his retreat; he spared it not out of
a belated altruism, but purely to serve his own convenience. There
were some of the French civilians who weren't worth transporting to
Germany. They would be too weak, or too old, or too young to earn
their keep when he got them there. These he sorted out, irrespective
of their family ties, and herded from the surrounding districts into
Noyon. They were crowded into the houses and ordered under pain of
death not to come out until they were given permission. They were
further ordered to shutter all their windows and not to look out.
As an old lady, who narrated the story, said, "We had no idea,
Monsieur, what was to happen. _Les Boches_ had been with us for nearly
three years; it never entered our heads that they were leaving. When
they took the last of our young girls from us and all who were strong
among our men, it was something that they had done so often and so
often. When they made us hide in our houses, we thought it was only
to prevent a disturbance. It is not easy to see your boys and girls
marched away into slavery--Monsieur will understand that. Sometimes,
on former occasions, the mothers had attacked _les Boches_ and the
young girls had become hysterical; we thought that it was to avoid
such scenes that we were shut up in our houses. When darkness fell,
we sat in our rooms without any lights, for they also were forbidden.
All night long through our streets we heard the endless tramping
of battalions, the clattering wheels of guns and limbers, the sharp
orders, the halting and the marching taken up afresh. Towards dawn
everything grew silent. At first it would be broken occasionally by
the hurried trot of cavalry or the shuffling footsteps of a straggler.
Then it grew into the absolute silence of death. It was nerve-racking
and terrible. One could almost hear the breathing of the listening
people in all the other houses. I do not know how time went or what
was the hour. I could endure the suspense no longer. They might kill
me, but ... Ah well, at my age after nearly three years with 'les
Boches,' killing is a little matter! I crept down the passage and drew
back the bolts. I was very gentle; a sentry might hear me. I opened
the door just a crack. I expected to hear a rifle-shot ring out, but
nothing happened. I opened it wider, and saw that the street was empty
and that it was broad daylight. Then I waited--I do not know how long
I waited. I crouched against the wall, huddled with terror. All this
took much longer in the doing than in the telling. At last I could
bear myself no longer. I tiptoed out on to the pavement--and, Monsieur
will believe me, I expected to drop dead. But no one disturbed me.
Then I heard a rustling. Doors everywhere were opening stealthily, ah,
so stealthily! Some one else tiptoed out, and some one else, and some
one else. We stood there staring, aghast at our daring. Suddenly we
realised what had happened. The brutes had gone. We were free. It was
indescribable, what followed--we ran together, weeping and embracing.
At first we wept for gladness; soon we wept for sorrow. Our youth had
departed; we were all old women or very ancient men. Two hours later
our poilus came, like a blue-grey wave of laughter, fighting their
way through the burning country that those swine had left in a sea of
smoke and flames."