THE GREATEST MOTHER IN THE WORLD
John Smith, of Harlem, gave five dollars to the Red Cross during the
last drive. It was a big sum for a man with his responsibilities and a
small income to part with, but John gave the money, and all over the
country men like him, women, too, and children gave what they could to
help the wounded and the desolated across the seas.
I want to tell John and the others how their money was spent, and I
shall ask them first to go with me to a huge basement room of the Gare
du Nord, the big north station of Paris. The room was taken over by
the American Red Cross at the beginning of the spring offensive, March
twenty-first, and here for days and nights, terrible days, sinister
nights, a stream of refugees from the invalid district poured in and
out, coming by train from Soissons, Compiegne, Montdidier, Albert, and
from dozens of little villages and farms between Laon and Amiens.
The Red Cross fed and clothed and refreshed these refugees in that
basement, loaded them on big motor-trucks and took them across the city
to the Orleans or the Quai d’Orsay stations and saw them off to the
sheltered south.
All on your money, you fortunate, generous, tender hearted givers. We
who were over there in those first desperate days of spring had the
privilege only of helping the Red Cross take care of the stricken men,
women and children who had fled before the German hordes for the second
time since the war began.
Vividly before me I see that great basement room, the only kind of
a place that is half-way safe in Paris these days. It is night, or,
rather, it is early morning, nearly two o’clock, and I have spent every
minute of the time since nine o’clock fitting shoes, your gift, to
refugee children.
When I went on duty early in the evening there were five or six babies
standing at the counter, over the edge of which their little white,
dirty, tired faces were barely visible, and their round black eyes were
fixed enviously on a huge pile of shoes waiting to be distributed.
I picked up the smallest babe, a little boy of four, and asked him if
he needed shoes. “_Oui_, madame,” he did, and stockings, too, for his
feet were literally on the ground. I grabbed a bunch of stockings,
found the right size, and explored that great pile of shoes until that
infant was fitted, and then I attended to the rest, for all those
children needed both shoes and stockings.
So, it appeared to me that night, did almost every child in France.
They came on and on, some in their mother’s arms, some toddling along,
some leading other children. I worked steadily, with only a pause now
and then when a new trainload came in and were fed.
The shoes were new and they rubbed off, and soon my hands and face and
big gingham apron were streaked and spotted with black. I was almost as
dirty as the refugees, but still the children demanded shoes.
They forgot that they had endured agonies of fear and horror, they
forgot the roar of the shells in the village streets. They forgot the
hunger and thirst and the deadly weariness of the flight. Their little
stomachs were full, they were warm and safe, and they had new stockings
and new shoes on their feet.
They had more, for when my part was done other women took them in hand
and gave them new shirts and gowns and the shiny black pinafores which
every French child, boy as well as girl, looks upon as an indispensable
article of dress. If you could have seen their smiles, heard their
lisping words of gratitude, felt their warm little handclasps, oh, you
fortunate and generous givers, you would have been repaid a thousand,
thousand times for your gift to the Red Cross.
Because the French rarely have large families, it must not be thought
that they do not value children. They adore children, as a matter
of fact, and their gratitude to the Red Cross for what was done for
children during those days of flight and anguish was pathetic to see
and hear.
Women came into the basement of the Gare du Nord in a condition of
half nudity. When the storm burst they gathered up their babies, took
what they could carry of household goods and treasures, and simply
fled. Much of what they carried was lost by the wayside. Their clothes
were rags. Some of the rags were taken off by the mothers that the
children might be kept alive, for the weather was cold and rainy. But
when these poor women came into the Red Cross room their first thought
was always for their babies.
“You have need of shoes yourself, madame,” I said to more than one. She
always answered, “Yes, but _le petit_ first.”
When you saw a woman who would not eat, who cared not at all for the
new blouse or the warm coat they offered her, who wept unceasingly or
wore a look of wild misery like insanity, you knew that she had lost
her children in the flight. That happened not infrequently. Part of the
money you gave the Red Cross is spent to find those lost children and
bring them back to the desolate mother’s breast.
Late one night during that exciting period in March the workers at
the Gare du Nord found a boy of thirteen who had been separated early
in the flight from his family. He had walked a distance of twenty
kilometers, twelve and a half miles, before he reached the railroad
station, and he carried with him on that walk, and on the journey to
Paris, two bags of feed for the horse, four or five pounds of beans in
a paper sack, a cross-cut saw, two axes, some harness and a gas mask.
When the Red Cross workers discovered him he was about all in, but
he was brave. He sat on his baggage and ate sandwiches and drank hot
chocolate like a famished tramp.
He had an aunt and a grandmother in Paris, he said, but he did not know
his aunt’s married name. He knew the name of the street she lived on,
though, and the next morning a Red Cross man went with the boy to the
street, and by simple process of calling at every house in every block
finally located the aunt.
But that wasn’t all. Eloi, his name was Eloi Beaussart, needed a job,
and the Red Cross gave it to him. Now that game youngster wears a
khaki uniform with A. R. C. on the collar, and works in a Red Cross
canteen. When I came away Eloi’s family had not yet been found, but he
was serene and hopeful. The American Red Cross, in his opinion, can do
anything if you give it time.
Your money did not wait until the refugees got to Paris before it
helped them. In front of the Red Cross headquarters in the Place de
la Concorde crowds gathered daily to see the great motor-trucks being
loaded with food to be sent up into the fringes of the war zone.
Thousands of loaves of bread, tins of meat, condensed milk, chocolate,
coffee, everything necessary and practical.
The Red Cross had a great many stations in the sections over which the
Germans swept, and while the workers in those stations were helping to
evacuate whole populations, the workers in Paris were rushing supplies
to feed them. With guns roaring and shrapnel bursting around them, the
Red Cross camions went steadily on taking hope and relief and life to
thousands of civilians and wounded soldiers.
In one station yard, waiting for trains to carry them to base hospitals
down the line, the Red Cross found and succored three thousand wounded
French soldiers. In the town of Beauvais, almost the last habitable
point near the war zone, a large number of sick civilians, mostly women
and children, were found. There was no hospital left in the place,
which had been shelled and largely evacuated, and to show you how
promptly your money acts, I am going to tell you what the Red Cross
workers did for the suffering population of Beauvais.
Some time in the early morning a hospital was established on paper.
That is, it was decided to establish a hospital. At ten o’clock that
same morning a partially furnished house was rented. At twelve o’clock
the house was in order, a surgery with full supplies was installed,
two doctors, four nurses and several helpers were at their posts, and
before the afternoon was half over forty patients were in the beds and
being treated and cared for.
Wouldn’t you rather feel that you had helped do a job like that than to
have another summer hat?
In the quaint old city of Toul, through which the famous Rhine-Marne
canal flows, and close to which our troops first held the line against
the Germans, I saw another hospital, a children’s hospital established
and supported by Red Cross money. The four hundred and sixty-six little
children in this place came from towns and villages which have been
bombarded with gas bombs, instruments of torture invented in hell
especially for the German army.
Those bombs killed, suffocated to death, a large number of babies, but
the Red Cross rescued many. There in that hospital on the hill above
Toul four hundred and sixty-six children have had their tortured lungs
cleared of the poisonous stuff, and their anguished little bodies have
been brought back to ease.
Wouldn’t you be happier helping a gassed French child back to life than
to buy a box of expensive cigars?
There is not room enough in one chapter or in a dozen of them, to tell
half of what the Red Cross has done and is doing in France alone in
this war.
Twenty-three hundred people, doctors, nurses, canteen workers,
business men, social workers and others are enrolled in France. Twenty
hospitals, seventy-six dispensaries and several sanitariums are in
operation. For wounded soldiers of the allies the Red Cross supplies
nearly four thousand hospitals. It has a model hospital train; it has
innumerable dressing stations, canteens, health stations, sewing rooms
for the destitute. Nearly three million soldiers a month are served in
Red Cross canteens alone.
In Paris there are thirteen canteens always busy serving French
soldiers on leave. In Bourg there is a canteen where thousands of our
soldiers going to Aix-les-Bains and Chambéry for their vacations
got a real American home breakfast. I heard many soldiers speak
enthusiastically of that breakfast, served by the Red Cross women, but
purchased by mothers, fathers and friends of American soldiers right
here in the United States.
Those sons of ours who are being rapidly transported to France to join
the more than a million already there soon will be training behind the
battle lines in Lorraine, Picardy, the Aisne. Soon after that they will
be fighting, the fight to death if need be, to clear the world of that
evil thing, war.
Between them and such suffering as no one who has not seen it can even
faintly imagine stands that cross of mercy and devotion. To support it
is to support and protect our own children. “Give till it hurts,” I
read on one of the Red Cross posters. Give, if you have hearts, until
your hearts stop hurting.