BLED WHITE
Mr. Hoover tells us that we must save more food. Especially more
wheat. With all the sacrifices we have voluntarily made, with all the
ingenuity women have used to save food and still keep their families
well nourished, the women are called upon to do more. As far as wheat
and a few other staples are concerned, Mr. Hoover tells us that our
shipments abroad are only now beginning to approach the “minimum
requirements” of our soldiers and of our allies.
I know that many housewives the country over will read this
announcement with dismay, and will wonder how much more will be
required of them, and how much more they can contrive to give. I want
to say to the housekeepers who read this, that they can not possibly
know or dream the vast importance of their part in this war. They can
not know what their food conservation efforts have meant to the French
people, as well as the English, the Italians, and what is left of the
stricken Belgians.
Every woman who has conscientiously observed the food regulations,
thereby releasing food for our soldiers and the allies, has almost
literally fought side by side with the men. She has stood by them and
fed them, encouraged them, given them physical and spiritual power to
go on, wholeheartedly, in the fight for civilization.
A soldier who goes into battle half nourished, one whose heart is heavy
thinking of hungry children at home, is a soldier half beaten. He who
goes forward with a well-nourished body and a mind at rest is a soldier
three-quarters victorious.
This is how you have helped fight the battle for the peace of the
world, women of America. And let me assure you that Europe is fully
awake to the fact. Nothing that President Wilson has done, or Congress,
or the men at the head of our wonderful army in France, has made a
deeper impression on the allies than what the housekeepers of this
country have done.
Without any compulsion, without any laws, simply because they were
appealed to in the name of humanity, hundreds of thousands of women,
rich and poor, in great houses and in farm kitchens, have voluntarily
rearranged their whole scale of living, have divided up their food with
people they will never know nor see.
It has captured the hearts of the people of Europe. They are lost in
admiration. It has taught them what they never believed before--that
the United States, far from being the land of the dollar, is a land of
idealists.
This was precisely the kind of encouragement our allies in Europe
needed. They needed it as much as they needed guns, airplanes,
soldiers. It was at a very dark hour in the history of this war that
the United States entered the war.
I do not mean that our allies were at the breaking point. But they were
near the point of desperation because of the sudden and unexpected
defection of Russia. The immediate future was heavy with dread.
Then came the news, “the Yanks are coming.” The black cloud was lifted.
The world was saved. Everybody knows the difficulties that had to be
overcome before an American army was landed in France. Germany did not
believe that we could land an army there, but we did.
And long before that we landed enough food in France, and in other
hungry lands overseas, to enable the allies to carry on until our men
came. That was one of the big feats of the war, and in it the women
played their part, and more than their part.
No one has had to call for a congressional investigation into the
women’s share in the war. Because the men who are in the training
camps, on the seas and in the fighting zone are not soldiers to us.
They are our sons. The French and English soldiers, the Canadians,
the men from Australia, South Africa, Italy, Belgium, they too, are
mothers’ sons, and we don’t go back on our sons.
What the mothers of this country have done for the men who fight, and
for their people at home, has been to bring hope to their hearts and
laughter to their lips. It has enabled them to face danger with a smile.
Every once in a while since I returned from France I have heard the
phrase, “The English and the French are bled white.” Don’t you believe
it. After nearly four years of appalling carnage, after the loss of
millions of their best and bravest, the courage of our allies, men and
women, is marvelous. Since we came into the war that courage has become
exaltation. Nothing can shake it.
For all that we have been able to do in the way of supplying the allies
with food, it will not do to assume that they have more than enough to
keep themselves in good condition. The English seem to have a greater
shortage than the French, but that is mainly, I think, because the
French know better how to prepare and serve food, and how to make a
simple meal attractive.
In England I often felt not exactly hungry but a dissatisfaction which
was almost as bad. The diet was monotonous. Meat was almost invariably
roasted, vegetables were always boiled and served without sauces.
In France, on the other hand, they have made an art of dining, and
even now, in war time, they give you the impression that you are being
extremely well fed. Yet the French are short of breadstuffs. Their war
bread is good, and I had enough of it at every meal. But the average
person in France eats twice and three times the amount of bread at a
meal that is eaten in America. Bread is literally the staff of life in
France.
Meat, while expensive, was plentiful all during the winter. That was
because there was so little grain. They could not afford to feed their
cattle and so slaughtered them. Beginning May fifteenth the French
food authorities decreed three meatless days a week for the republic,
and since France is generally Catholic, that meant for the majority
four days, an additional day, Friday, being observed by the Catholics.
There was milk for little children and for invalids, but, except for
a small jug with my morning coffee, I never saw milk while I was in
France. Butter could be used in limited quantities in cooking, but it
was forbidden to be served at the table.
Sugar, too, was almost a forbidden article. Some hotels and private
houses served a little sugar with coffee and tea, but mostly the
saccharine substitute was offered. Just before I left France, at the
end of April, sugar cards were being issued entitling the holders to a
pound of white sugar each month.
Only plain bread is baked in France. The innumerable little rolls and
crescents, so delicious with the morning coffee, have disappeared.
There is no such thing as pastry. Sweets are supplied in jams and
marmalades, a limited quantity being allowed once or twice a day. There
are no desserts except fruits, fresh or preserved.
I go into this that the American housekeepers who read these articles
may see how cheerfully the allies are bearing what our people would
consider a real food shortage. They have enough over there, and will
have as long as we give of our store, but we are not by any means
supporting our allies in luxury. On what they have, however, they live
and keep up a spirit that is truly marvelous.
One evening in my London hotel I sat down to dinner near a table where
five young people, evidently brothers and sisters, were quietly making
merry. One of the men was in the uniform of the Royal Flying Corps, the
other, although of military bearing, was in the correct evening clothes
of the British civilian.
I noticed that the girl sitting next the man in evening clothes was
assiduous in her attentions to him, and it occurred to me that English
women too often spoiled their brothers, made them selfish. This
golden-haired English girl cut up her brother’s food, even fed it to
him. I thought it a little absurd.
But when they rose from the table I saw with a shock that the splendid
young man had had both arms cut off below the elbows. He probably had
been an artillerist. At all events here he was, a helpless cripple. But
from the gay demeanor of that family no one would have dreamed that
they had a care in the world. They were carrying on, they would have
told you.
I saw more of the French than of the English; therefore I saw more
instances of their incomparable courage in the midst of war and
carnage. I was in Paris when the long-distance gun of the Germans began
to bombard the city.
Every fifteen minutes “boom” went the gun, and you held your breath
wondering where the shell had fallen and how many people it had killed
and wounded.
It was nerve-racking, there is no use denying the fact. In a battle the
shells come tearing through the sky, screeching and whining as they
come. But in such a long-distance bombardment there are no preliminary
sounds. A house explodes before your eyes, the pavement rises up in
a geyser of earth and stones, the earth of a park or public garden
suddenly flies up in a huge, fan-shaped eruption of smoke and dirt.
Afterward you hear the BOOM! It seems incredible that only three or
four minutes ago men in gray-green uniforms, seventy miles away in
Germany, loaded that gun, pulled a string or lever or whatever they do
pull, and started that shell toward Paris.
It seems impossible to believe that while you stand there wondering,
those same men are loading the big gun to again bombard an open town,
full of women and children, regardless of where the shell falls.
One Sunday afternoon, just before I came away, I went down into the
island of the old city, the original Paris, to say good-by to certain
beautiful things I love. It was a lovely spring day and the quay
of flowers and the Palace quay were crowded with Parisians out for
a Sunday walk. The women wore their spring finery, and there were
many little girls in shining white dresses and veils of their first
communion.
The long-distance gun had been silent for about forty hours. It gets
out of order easily, or else the allied airmen had been shelling it.
Anyhow, it had been silent. But suddenly, about fifty yards from where
I stood, the waters of the Seine shot up in a great waterspout, there
was an explosion and the usual BOOM. A shell had skimmed over the heads
of that Sunday crowd of inoffensive Parisians and landed in the river.
In a minute the surface of the water was sprinkled with dead fish.
Of course, the object of this bombardment is to frighten and discourage
the French. Let me tell you how far it falls short of its object. The
cables no doubt carried the story of one shot from that long-distance
gun that struck a maternity hospital, killing in their beds mothers and
new-born babies. A nurse was killed also, and many women were wounded.
The hospital ward itself was reduced to matchwood. It was a horrible
thing.
In the midst of all this horror, and as a result of it, a young woman
was prematurely delivered of a child, a little girl. The mother died,
but the little baby girl lived, and the nurses called in a priest and
had that baby christened Victory.
One day, through the streets of Paris they were hauling a captured
German cannon, one of the number which now reposes in the courtyard of
the Hotel des Invalides. The people stopped to watch the cannon go by,
but there was no demonstration of hatred.
The French respect an honorable foe; it is only unclean warfare that
they scorn. This was demonstrated right then and there, for as the
cannon passed on “Big Bertha,” as they call the long-distance gun,
suddenly spoke, and somewhere a shell fell in Paris.
A workman in a white smock raised his fist and bawled out in the
direction of the German frontier: “That’s right, bark, you cur. This
one can no longer bite!”