WRITE TO HIM OFTEN--BUT
One morning, in a big American camp in France, I witnessed the arrival
of a long-delayed batch of mail from home. No words of mine can
describe how joyfully it was received. Officers and men alike were
children in their happiness. They sang and shouted while the letters
and parcels were being distributed, and afterward a deep silence fell
on the camp while the letters were being read.
Alas for those who received no letters that day. My heart ached for
them, and I want to urge, as part of the patriotic duty of every
citizen, that as far as possible no soldier is neglected in this
respect. Every man and woman with a relative or friend in the army, and
this will soon mean practically every citizen of the United States,
ought to write frequently to their soldiers.
If you haven’t time to write long letters, write short ones. If you
haven’t time for short letters, write postcards. But write something.
As soon as the men go to training camp begin to write to them. Nearly
every soldier has a period of bewilderment and homesickness, and this
usually occurs early in his military career. Young, so young, most of
our splendid soldiers, many of whom when they are drafted leave home
for the first time in their lives. It does not do to risk breaking the
home ties altogether.
One of the things that burden the hearts of our English allies is the
fear that this may have happened in the case of a great many of the
brave Australian and New Zealand soldiers. They are incredibly remote
from their homes. It takes letters three months to cross the immense
waste of waters that lie between those south Pacific islands and the
French battle-fields. Three months for a mother to answer a question
asked her by her son. Six months for an exchange of words between a
husband and wife.
Thousands of the Anzacs have been away from home, been separated from
their families for three years. When they have leave of absence they go
to England, and clubs and canteens have been opened for them in London
and elsewhere. But their home ties are never knit. The English fear
that in many, many cases they will never knit again.
We do not want that to happen to our soldiers and the best, indeed the
only way to prevent it, is to write letters, frequent letters, and the
right kind of letters.
I watched those soldiers in our camp overseas reading their letters
from home. They did not read them just once and then fold them up and
put them in their pockets. Every letter was read a dozen times over,
until the words were learned by heart. That is why it is so important
that the right kind of letters be written.
Don’t write, “The interest on the mortgage is due again next week and
I’m sure I don’t know where the money is coming from.” Don’t tell your
boys that you have had a bad spell of neuralgia and can hardly see to
write. Don’t tell him that Jennie is doing badly in school and shows a
sulky temper. Those are your worries, not his. He has responsibilities
ahead of him, and possibly troubles and suffering immeasurably bigger
than anything you face.
Above all, never deplore the fact that he is in the war, and never
tell him that you are praying for an early peace. No American soldier
whose mind has been enlightened to the true state of affairs in this
war wants an early peace. He knows that an early peace would be a
dangerous, a fatal, peace, one pleasing only to the Germans and their
starving and enslaved allies.
In all the neutral countries, but even more in the allied countries,
German propaganda is working overtime to bring about an early peace.
German agents are everywhere trying to undermine the morale of the
allied people, especially the women, and through them the soldiers. How
they get into France is a mystery, but they get there, and they often
remain undetected for a long time.
I remember visiting in the home of a simple bourgeois French family
where the one remaining soldier son was home on leave. Three sons of
that family had given up their lives for France, one at the Marne, one
at Verdun, and one in the first battle of the Somme. The one remaining
son was in a dangerous service, and perhaps one can hardly blame his
mother and sisters for listening to any suggestion of a possible peace.
They had heard, one of the sisters said, as we sat at tea, without
cream or cakes, or even bread, that France and Austria were about to
sign a separate peace. They hoped the news was true, because then Italy
would make peace, and the allies would only have to fight the Germans
in France and Flanders.
“Never, my dear sister,” said the resolute young French soldier,
“listen to any talk of that kind. Never repeat it, especially in the
hearing of a soldier. We have our work to do, and you must help us, not
weaken us. There is only one kind of peace we want, and that is the
peace that will come when Germany is conquered.”
He got up from his seat and left the room, returning soon with a
poster, one of the many beautiful and striking war posters the French
have produced. This one showed a terrible procession of old men, women
and children being driven from their homes by the advance of German
troops. The Germans were striking the helpless people with the flat of
their swords and laughing brutally at their sufferings.
“This is no fiction,” said the French soldier to me. “This is fact. And
this is what would happen again in a few years if we made peace too
soon. Why not end it for all time now? We men are ready to give our
lives. We embrace the earth when we fall, for the sacrifice of a few
lives now is nothing to the horrors that are in store for our children
to come, unless we win, really win, this war.”
I said: “I will tell the American people what you have said, and what I
know to be true, for I have seen something of this war, and I know what
might happen in my country unless we win a complete victory.”
Because I am particularly concerned lest our women unwittingly weaken
the least bit the morale and the fighting spirit of our soldiers, I am
going to tell them what I have seen.
My only son, I have said before, is a soldier. He is at the front.
Yet, after what I have seen of this war, I would never speak of peace
to him. I don’t want him to think of peace. I want him to think of
fighting.
Since this war began, nearly two million people, not fighters, but
women and children and men too old and infirm to fight, have been
driven in wretchedness from their homes. This in France alone.
We know what happened in Belgium, in Serbia, in Roumania and Poland.
Armenia? Words fail in describing what happened there. I have seen only
France, and I can speak only of France. Two million French people have
fled before fire and sword.
But that isn’t anything very terrible, by comparison. To lose your
home and everything you possess is a bearable thing--by comparison.
On a Sunday soon after the great spring battle began I spent the day
in a railroad station at a junction where hundreds of trains rushed
ceaselessly to the north bearing soldiers and munitions, and to the
south with wounded men, refugees and broken guns and airplanes. Many
refugees were fed and comforted by the French Red Cross at the station
that day.
It was my privilege to help a little those noble French women. I filled
hundreds of cups with coffee, strong and hot, and I helped to feed the
exhausted who could not even stand up at the counter where coffee and
sandwiches were served. We literally fed them, holding the food to
their lips.
There was one old woman--perhaps she was not really old, but her
sufferings had emaciated her and seamed her face with wrinkles--who
was my special care for an hour. She had to be given brandy before she
could sit up, and she had to be fed hot milk from a spoon, like a baby.
She was almost dead. Another woman, her neighbor in the ruined and
violated village that once was their home, told me in quick whispers
that old woman’s story.
When the Germans invaded France in August, 1914, this woman lived in a
small town directly in the path of the Wurtemburg army that swept in
from Lorraine. Her husband kept a small shop where tobacco and fruit
and such like were sold. They had a home and three children--Cécile,
sixteen; Georges, twelve, and Marcel, six. They were quiet people, like
all the other villagers, and the mobilizing of their men when war came
was the first great and terrifying event in their lives. This woman’s
husband had a club foot and could not be mobilized. She had no son old
enough to fight, so she was counted lucky.
Then the Germans came. They swarmed in early one morning and the
horrified villagers at once began to see war in its most frightful
guise. Soldiers broke into the home of the club-footed man and demanded
tobacco. He led the way to his little shop and told them to help
themselves. They did, and when they had filled their pockets and their
haversacks they shot the lame man through the heart. Meantime, with
torch and grenade, other soldiers were setting fire to the village.
They burned the dead tobacconist’s home, and when the wife rushed from
the house with her youngest child in her arms they shot the child. He
screamed “Mother!” just once, and died.
She and her two remaining children fled, but Cécile, the
sixteen-year-old daughter, did not get very far. She was seized by a
German officer, and it was a year before her mother saw her again. When
those two met again the girl was a skeleton, and she bore in her arms a
skeleton baby. It was a girl. Otherwise they would not have permitted
her to take it back to France.
The reunited family made their way to a relative in a village near
Peronne. When the Germans swept over that district in 1916 they fled
again, and in the flight Cécile, never strong after her experience in
Germany, died. Soon afterward the baby died. Georges, now a sturdy
boy of fourteen, was all that was left. After the Germans retreated
last November they went back to their village near Peronne, and the boy
worked for their support--until March twenty-first, this year. Then
they fled again, and here she was--alone.
“Where is Georges?” I asked.
“Do not speak so loud, madame,” implored the neighbor. “The poor one
can not be told just yet, but Georges was killed by a shell that burst
near the station when we got on the train. Not all of us could get on
that train. She thinks that Georges was left behind and that he will
come to-morrow.”
I could write stories like that to fill a book. Indeed, it has been
done, officially done, by the French government, and every story was
carefully authenticated before it was published. I tell this story
because it was told to me while I was feeding the wretched victim.
I speak only of what I know, and I know that this woman, one of
thousands, is just a type, an example, of what has happened, what is
happening to-day, but what must never happen again. The only way to
prevent it happening again, perhaps to our American women, is to put
out of the world the thing Germany stands for and which she is fighting
desperately to keep alive and powerful.