he spared little else.[2] Every village between here and the present
front line has been levelled; every fruit-tree cut down. The wilful
wickedness and pettiness of the crime stir one's heart to pity and
his soul to white-hot anger. The people who did this must make
payment in more than money; to settle such a debt blood is required.
American soldiers who came to Europe to do a job and with no decided
detestation of the Hun, are being taught by such landscapes. They know
now why they came. The wounds of France are educating them.
[Footnote 2: Goodness knows where the "present Front-line" may be by
the time this book is published. I visited Noyon in February, 1918,
just before the big Hun offensive commenced.]
There has been a scheme proposed in America under which certain
individual cities and towns in the States shall make themselves
responsible for the re-building of certain individual cities and
towns in the devastated areas. The scheme is noble; it has only one
drawback, namely that it specialises effort and tends to ignore the
immensity of the problem as a whole. I visited one of these towns--it
is a town for which Philadelphia has made itself responsible. I wish
the people of Philadelphia might get a glimpse of the task they have
undertaken. There is a church-spire still standing; that is about
all. The rest is a pile of bricks. In the midst of this havoc some
Philadelphia ladies are living, one of whom is a nurse. They run a
dispensary for the people who keep house for the most part in cellars
and holes in the ground. A doctor visits them to hold a clinic ever
so often. They have a little warehouse, in which they keep the
necessities for immediate relief work. They have a rest hut for
soldiers. They employ whatever civilian labour they can hire for the
roofing of some of the least damaged cottages; for this temporary
reconstruction they provide the materials. When I was there, the place
was well within range of enemy shell-fire. The approach had to be made
by way of camouflaged roads. The sole anxiety of these brave women
was that on account of their nearness to the front-line, the military
might compel them to move back. In order to safeguard themselves
against this and to create a good impression, they were making a
strong point of entertaining whatever officers were billeted in
this vicinity. Their effort to remain in this rural Gomorrah was as
courageous as it was pathetic. "The people need us," they said, and
then, "you don't think we'll be moved back, do you?" I thought they
would, and I didn't think that the grateful officers would be able to
prevent it--they were subalterns and captains for the most part. "But
we once had a major to tea," they said. "A major!" I exclaimed, trying
to look impressed, "Oh well, that makes a difference!"
There was one unit I wished especially to visit; it was a unit
consisting entirely of women, sent over and financed by a women's
college. When I was in America last October and heard that they were
starting, I made up my mind that they were doomed to disappointment.
I pictured the battlefield of the Somme as I had last seen it--a sea
of mud stretching for miles, furrowed by the troughs of battered
trenches, pitted every yard with shell-holes and smeared over with
the wreckage of what once were human bodies. I could not imagine what
useful purpose women could serve amid such surroundings. It seemed
to me indecent that they should be allowed to go there. They were
going to do reconstruction, I was told. Reconstruction! you can't
reconstruct towns and villages the very foundations of which have been
buried. There is a Bible phrase which expresses such annihilation,
"The place thereof shall know it no more." Yes, only the names remain
in one's memory--the very sites have been covered up and the contours
of the landscape re-dug with high explosives. It took millions of
pounds to work this havoc. Men tunnelled under-ground and sprung mines
without warning. They climbed like birds of prey, into the heavens to
hurl death from the clouds. They lined up their guns, tier upon tier,
almost axle to axle in places, and at a given sign rained a deluge
of corruption on a country miles in front, which they could not even
discern. The infantry went over the top throwing bombs and piled
themselves up into mounds of silence. Nations far away toiled day and
night in factories--and all that they might achieve this repellant
desolation. The innocence of the project made one smile--a handful of
women sailing from America to reconstruct! To reconstruct will take
ten times more effort than was required to destroy. More than eight
hundred years ago William the Norman burnt his way through the North
Country to Chester. Yorkshire has not yet recovered; it is still a
wind-swept moorland. This women's college in America hoped to repair
in our lifetime a ruin a million times more terrible. Their courage
was depressing, it so exceeded the possible. They might love one
village back to life, but.... That is exactly what they are doing.
I arrived at Grécourt on an afternoon in January. It is here that the
women of the Smith College Unit have taken up their tenancy. We had
extraordinary difficulty in finding the place. The surrounding country
had been blasted and scorched by fire. There was no one left of whom
we could enquire. Everything had perished. Barns, houses, everything
habitable had been blown up by the departing Hun. As a study in the
painstaking completion of a purpose the scenes through which we
passed almost called for admiration. Berlin had ordered her armies to
destroy everything before withdrawing; they had obeyed with a loving
thoroughness. The world has never seen such past masters in the art
of demolition. Ever since they invaded Belgium, their hand has been
improving. In the neighbourhood of Grécourt they have equalled, if not
surpassed, their own best efforts. I would suggest to the Kaiser that
this manly performance calls for a distribution of iron crosses. It is
true that his armies were beaten and retiring; but does not that fact
rather enhance their valour? They were retiring, yet there were those
who were brave enough to delay their departure till they had achieved
this final victory over old women and children to the lasting honour
of their country. Such heroes are worthy to stand beside the sinkers
of the _Lusitania_. It is not just that they should go unrecorded.
In the midst of this hell I came across a tumbled château. Its roof,
its windows, its stairways were gone; only the crumbling shell of its
former happiness was left standing. A high wall ran about its grounds.
The place must have been pleasant with flower-gardens once. There was
an impressive entrance of wrought-iron, a porter's lodge and a broad
driveway. At the back I found rows of little wood-huts. There was a
fragrance of log-fires burning. I was glad of that, for I had heard
of the starving cold these women had had to endure through the first
winter months of their tenure. On tapping at a door, I found the
entire colony assembled. It was tea-time and Sunday. Ten out of the
seventeen who form the colony were present. A box-stove, such as
we use in our pioneer shacks in Canada, was throwing out a glow of
cheeriness. Candles had been lighted. Little knicknacks of feminine
taste had been hung here and there to disguise the bareness of the
walls. A bed, in one corner, was carefully disguised as a couch.
Save for the fact that there was no glass in the window--glass
being unobtainable in France at present--one might easily have
persuaded himself that he was back in America in the room of a
girl-undergraduate.
The method of my greeting furthered this illusion. Americans, both
men and women, have an extraordinary self-poise, a gift for remaining
normal in the most abnormal surroundings. They refuse to allow
themselves to be surprised by any upheaval of circumstances. "I should
worry," they seem to be saying, and press straight on with the job
in hand. There was one small touch which made the environment seem
even more friendly and unexceptional. One of the girls, on being
introduced, promptly read to me a letter which she had just received
from my sister in America. It made this oasis in an encircling
wilderness seem very much a part of a neighbourly world. This girl is
an example of the varied experiences which have trained American women
into becoming the nursemaids of the French peasantry.
She was visiting relations in Liége when the war broke out. On the
Sunday she went for a walk on the embattlements and was turned back.
Baulked in this direction, she strolled out towards the country and
found men digging trenches. That was the first she knew that war was
rumoured. On the Tuesday, two days later, Hun shells were detonating
on the house-tops. She was held prisoner in Liége for some months
after the Forts had fallen and saw more than all the crimes against
humanity that the Bryce Report has recorded. At last she disguised
herself and contrived her escape into Holland. From there she worked
her way back to America and now she is at Grécourt, starting shops in
the villages, educating the children, and behaving generally as if to
respond to the "Follow thou me" of the New Testament was an entirely
unheroic proceeding for a woman.
And what are these women doing at Grécourt? To condense their purpose
into a phrase, I should say that by their example they are bringing
sanity back into the lives of the French peasants. That is what the
American Fund for French Wounded is doing at Blérancourt, what all
these reconstruction units are doing in the devastated areas, and what
the American Red Cross is doing on a much larger scale for the whole
of France. At Grécourt they have a dispensary and render medical aid.
If the cases are grave, they are sent to the American Hospital at
Nesle. They hunt out the former tradespeople among the refugees and
encourage them to re-start their shops, lending them the money for
the purpose. If the men are captives in Germany, then their wives are
helped to carry on the business in their absence and for their sakes.
Groups of mothers are brought together and set to work on making
clothes for themselves and their children. Schools are opened so
that the children may be more carefully supervised. Two of the girls
at Grécourt have learnt to plough, and are instructing the peasant
women. Cows are kept and a dairy has been started to provide the
under-nourished babies of the district. An automobile-dispensary is
sent out from the hospital at Nesle to visit the remoter districts. It
has a seat along one side for the patient and the nurse. Over the seat
is a rack for medicine and instruments. On the opposite side is a
rack for splints and surgical dressings. On the floor of the car a
shower-bath is arranged, which is so compact that it can be carried
into the house where the water is to be heated. The water is put into
a tub on a wooden base; while the doctor manipulates the pump for the
shower, the nurse does the scrubbing. Most of the diseases among the
children are due to dirt; the importance of keeping clean, which such
colonies as that at Grécourt are impressing on all the people whom
they serve, is doing much to improve the general state of health. In
this direction, as in so many others, the most valuable contribution
that they are making to their districts is not material and financial,
but mental--the contribution of example and suggestion. Seventeen
women cannot re-build in a day an external civilisation which has been
blotted out by the savagery of a nation; but they can and they are
re-building the souls of the human derelicts who have survived the
savagery. This war is going to be won not by the combination of
nations which has most men and guns, but by the side which possesses
the highest spiritual qualities. The same is true of the countries
which will wipe out the effects of war most quickly when the war is
ended. The first countries to recover will be those which fight on
in a new way, after peace has been signed, for the same ideals for
which they have shed their blood. The sight of these American women,
living helpfully and voluntarily for the sake of others among hideous
surroundings, is a perpetual reminder to the dispirited refugees that,
whatever else is lost, valiance and loyalty still survive.
From Grécourt I went farther afield to Croix, Y and Matigny. Here
a young architect is in charge of the reconstruction. No attempt
is being made at present to re-build the farms entirely. Labour is
difficult to obtain--it is all required for military purposes. The
same applies to materials. Patching is the best that can be done. Just
to get a roof over one corner of a ruin is as much as can be hoped
for. Until that is done the people have to live in cellars, in
shell-holes, in verminous dug-outs like beasts of prey or savages.
Their position is far more deplorable than that of Indians, for they
once knew the comforts of civilisation. For instance, I visited a
farmer who before the war was a millionaire in French money. Many of
the farmers of this district were; their acreages were large even by
prairie standards. The American Red Cross has managed to reconstruct
one room for him in a pile of debris which was once a spacious house.
There he lives with his old wife, who, during the Hun occupation,
became nearly blind and almost completely paralytic. His sons and
daughters have been swept beyond his knowledge by the departing
armies. Before the Huns left, he had to stand by and watch them
uselessly lay waste his home and possessions. His trees are cut down.
His barns are laid flat. His cattle are behind the German lines. At
the age of seventy, he is starting all afresh and working harder than
ever he did in his life. The young architect of the Red Cross visits
him often. They sit in the little room of nights, erecting barns and
houses more splendid than those that have vanished, but all in the
green quiet of the untested future. They shall be standing by the time
the captive sons come back. It is a game at which they play for the
sake of the blinded mother; she listens smilingly, nodding her old
head, her frail hands folded in her lap.
These pictures which I have painted are typical of some of the things
that the American Red Cross is doing. They are isolated examples,
which by no means cover all its work. There are the rolling canteens
which it has instituted, which follow the French armies. There are
the rest houses it has built on the French line of communications for
_poilus_ who are going on leave or returning. There is the farm for
the mutilated, where they are taught to be specialists in certain
branches of agriculture, despite their physical curtailments. There
is the great campaign against tuberculosis which it is waging. There
are its well-conceived warehouses, stored with medical supplies and
military and relief necessities, spreading in a great net-work of
usefulness and connected by ambulance transport throughout the whole
of the stricken part of France. There are its hospitals, both military
and civil. There is the "Lighthouse" for men wounded in battle,
founded by Miss Holt in Paris.
I visited this Lighthouse; it is a place infinitely brave and
pathetic. Most of the men were picked heroes at the war; they wear
their decorations in proof of it. They are greater heroes than ever
now. Nothing has more deeply moved me than my few hours among those
sightless eyes. In many cases the faces are hideously marred, the
eyelids being quite grown together. In several cases besides the eyes,
the arms or legs have gone. I have talked and written a good deal
about the courage which this war has inspired in ordinary men; but the
courage of these blinded men, who once were ordinary, leaves me silent
and appalled. They are happy--how and why I cannot understand. Most
of them have been taught at the Lighthouse how to overcome their
disability and are earning their living as weavers, stenographers,
potters, munition-workers. Quite a number of them have families
to support. The only complaint that is made against them by their
brother-workmen is that they are too rapid; they set too strenuous
a pace for the men with eyes. It is a fact that in all trades where
sensitiveness of touch is an asset, blindness has increased their
efficiency. This is peculiarly so at the Sévres pottery-works where I
saw them making the moulds for retorts. A soldier, who was teaching a
seeing person Braille, explained his own quickness of perception when
he exclaimed, "Ah, madame, it is your eyes which prevent you from
seeing!"
I heard some of the stories of the men. There was a captain who, after
he had been wounded and while there was yet time to save his sight,
insisted on being taken to his General that he might inform him about
a German mine. When his mission was completed, his chance of seeing
was forever ended.
There was a lieutenant who was blinded in a raid and left for dead
out in No Man's Land. Just before he became unconscious, he placed
two lumps of earth in line in the direction which led back to his
own trenches. He knew the direction by the sound of the retreating
footsteps. Whenever he came to himself he groped his way a little
nearer to France and before he fainted again, registered the direction
with two more lumps of earth placed in line. It took him a day to
crawl back.
There was another man who illustrated in a finer way that saying, "It
is your eyes which prevent you from seeing." This man before the war
was a village-priest, and no credit to his calling. He had a sister
who had spent her youth for him and worshipped him beyond everything
in the world. He took her adoration brutally for granted. At the
outbreak of hostilities he joined the army, serving bravely in the
ranks till he was hopelessly blinded. Having always been a thoroughly
selfish man, his privation drove him nearly to madness. He had always
used the world; now for the first time he had been used by it. His
viciousness broke out in blasphemy; he hated both God and man. He made
no distinction between people in the mass and the people who tried to
help him. His whole desire was to inflict as much pain as he himself
suffered. When his sister came to visit him, he employed every
ingenuity of word and gesture to cause her agony. Do what she would,
he refused to allow her love either to reach or comfort him. She was
only a simple peasant woman. In her grief and loneliness she thought
matters out and arrived at what seemed to her a practical solution.
On her next visit to the hospital she asked to see the doctor. She was
taken to him and made her request. "I love my brother," she said; "I
have always given him everything. He has lost his eyes and he cannot
endure it. Because I love him, I could bear it better. I have been
thinking, and I am sure it is possible: I want you to remove my eyes
and to put them into his empty sockets."
When the priest was told of her offer, he laughed derisively at her
for a fool. Then the reason she had given for her intended sacrifice
was told to him, "Because I love him, I could bear it better." He fell
silent. All that day he refused food; in the eternal darkness, muffled
by his bandages, he was arriving at the truth: she had been willing
to suffer what he was now suffering, because she loved him. The hand
of love would have made the burden bearable and, if for her, why not
for himself? At last, after years of refusal, the simplicity of her
tenderness reached and touched him. Presently he was discharged from
hospital and taken in hand by the teachers of the blind, who taught
him to play the organ. One day his sister came and led him back to his
village-parish. Before the war, by his example, he was a danger to
God and man; now he sets a very human example of sainthood, labouring
without ceasing for others more fortunate than himself. He has
increased his efficiency for service by his blindness. Of him it
is absolutely true that it was his eyes that prevented him from
seeing--from seeing the splendour that lay hidden in himself, no less
than in his fellow creatures.
So far I have sketched in the main what the war of compassion is
doing for the repatriés--the captured French civilians sent back from
Germany--and for the refugees of the devastated areas, who have either
returned to their ruined farms and villages or were abandoned as
useless when the Hun retired. To complete the picture it remains to
describe what is being done for the civilian population which has
always lived in the battle area of the French armies.
The question may be asked why civilians have been allowed to live
here. Curiously enough it is due to the extraordinary humanity of
the French Government which makes allowances for the almost religious
attachment of the peasant to his tiny plot of land; it is an
attachment which is as instinctive and fiercely jealous as that of
a cat for her young. He will endure shelling, gassing and all the
horrors that scientific invention has produced; he will see his
cottage and his barns shattered by bombs and siege-guns, but he will
not leave the fields that he has tilled and toiled over, unless he
is driven out at the point of the bayonet. I have been told, though
I have never seen it, that behind quiet parts of the line, French
peasants will gather in their harvest actually in full sight of the
Hun. Shells may be falling, but they go stolidly on with their work.
There is another reason for this leniency of the Government: they have
enough refugees on their hands already and are not going in search
of further trouble, until the trouble is forced upon them by
circumstances.
As may be imagined, these people live under physical conditions that
are terrible. They consist for the most part of women and children;
the women are over-worked and the children are neglected. Skin
diseases and vermin abound. Clothes are negligible. Washing is a
forgotten luxury. Much havoc is wrought by asphyxiating gases which
drift across the front-line into the back-country. To the adults are
issued protective masks like those that the soldiers wear, but the
children do not know how to use them. Many of them are orphans, and
live like little animals on roots and offal; for shelter they seek
holes in the ground. The American Red Cross is specialising on its
efforts to reclaim these children, realising that whatever happens to
the adults, the children are the hope of the world.
The part of the Front to which I went to study this work was made
famous in 1914 by the disembowellings, shootings and unspeakable
indecencies that were perpetrated there. Near by is the little village
in which Sister Julie risked her life by refusing to allow her wounded
to be butchered. She wears the Legion of Honour now. In the same
neighbourhood there lives a Mayor who, after having seen his young
wife murdered, protected her murderers from the lynch-law of the mob
when next day the town was recaptured. In the same district there is
a meadow where fifteen old men were done to death, while a Hun officer
sat under an oak-tree, drinking mocking toasts to the victims of each
new execution.
The influence of more than three years of warfare has not been
elevating, as far as these peasants are concerned. As early as July,
a little over a month from its arrival in France, an S.O.S. was sent
out by the Préfet of the department, begging the American Red Cross
to come and help. In addition to the refugees of old standing, 350
children had been suddenly put into his care. He had nothing but a
temporary shelter for them and his need for assistance was acute.
Within a few hours the Red Cross had despatched eight workers--a
doctor, nurse, bacteriologist, an administrative director and two
women to take charge of the bedding, food and clothing. A camionette
loaded with condensed milk and other relief necessities was sent by
road. On the arrival of the party, they found the children herded
together in old barracks, dirty and unfurnished, with no sanitary
appliances whatsoever. The sick were crowded together with the well.
Of the 350 children, twenty-one were under one year of age, and the
rest between one and eight years. The reason for this sudden crisis
was that the Huns were bombing the villages behind the lines with
asphyxiating gas. The military authorities had therefore withdrawn
all children who were too young to adjust their masks themselves, at
the same time urging their mothers to carry on the patriotic duty of
gathering in the harvest. It was the machinery of mercy which had been
built up in six months about this nucleus of eight persons that I set
out to visit.