THE REPATRIATES
Evian-les-Bains is a charming little French town situated near the
Swiss frontier. Before the war Evian was a health resort, rivaling
Aix-les-Bains, farther south, in its stimulating climate and its
medicinal baths. It was a place where the rich and the comfortably
circumstanced of almost every country in Europe went to regain lost
health. Now it is a place where some of the most miserable people in
all the world may be seen. For Evian is the place where Germany returns
to France those French men, women and children who are no longer of any
use as prisoners and slaves.
They are mostly the people who were taken in the first victorious rush
of the Germans in 1914. As long as they could work, or by threats and
cruelty could be induced to try to work, the Germans held them as
industrial slaves. When, through starvation, exhaustion and disease,
they became useless to their taskmasters they were returned to France.
I do not know at what rate these victims of Germany’s ambition and lust
for world power are now coming back, but last autumn and winter, when
the migration was at its height, the repatriates were being received
and cared for at the rate of five hundred to one thousand a day. They
came through Switzerland, a three days’ journey, in rough box cars,
often without food or water, and were nearly always, when they arrived,
in a condition bordering on collapse.
I want to tell about some of these French repatriates. I shall not
exaggerate or embroider the tale. It hurts cruelly to remember those
poor people. It hurts to write about them. But I want our people to
know. The next time they sit in a meeting where disloyal so-called
socialists warble their phrases about this struggle being a profiteers’
war, about peace by negotiations, and the rest of it, perhaps they will
remember.
The French government created a commission to handle the stream of
human derelicts which Germany sent back through Switzerland. The people
of Evian lent wholehearted aid to the commission, and all efforts have
been splendidly augmented by the American Red Cross.
When the trains came in at the receiving station at Evian there were
always a certain number of the returned prisoners who had to be
taken immediately to the hospital. They were in advanced stages of
tuberculosis, they were suffering from anemia and starvation and from
all the diseases of neglect. Worst of all, many women and children were
found suffering from the diseases of vice and crime.
All these sick ones go to hospitals. The American Red Cross established
a children’s hospital at Evian, since nearly sixty per cent. of
the repatriates are children, and nearly all of them need hospital
care. The French have their local hospitals, and also what they call
houses of repose where those of their countrymen not actually sick but
extremely exhausted are cared for and put into condition to travel
farther.
The emaciated, hollow-eyed and weary remnant who could walk that far
are, or were, taken to the old casino, where wealth and fashion used
to gather for bridge and expensive food and drink. There the mayor of
Evian made a touching speech welcoming the people back to their native
land, comforting and cheering them as well as he could. Then they sat
down to the first good meal they had eaten, some of them, for years.
But first _The Marseillaise_ was sung.
“Arise, children of the land,
The day of glory has arrived.”
Who could listen, without deep stirrings of emotion, to men and women
just released from prison-houses of pain and horror singing those
words? I can not imagine how they found voices to sing. Some of them,
indeed, could not sing. They could hardly speak. They just stood there
dumb and broken, their sad eyes streaming with tears. Even freedom and
the sound again of their beloved French language could not wipe out
their terrible memories.
Some of the repatriates are met at Evian by friends and relatives. Some
are cared for by the French government, sent to towns and villages
well away from the war zone. Charity and the Red Cross have done
splendid work for all refugees, but their problems are often almost
unsolvable. Hardly a man among them is fit for industry. As for the
women, the plight of many of them is pitiable.
The individual stories of some of these women I heard from the lips of
a woman known throughout France for her devoted labors in behalf of
victims of German soldiers in the invaded districts.
This noble French woman bears the beautiful name of Avril de Ste.
Croix. I mention it not because she would particularly care to have
me do so, but because she is known to a great many women in America.
Madame Avril de Ste. Croix is president of the French National Council
of Women, and as a prominent suffragist has attended a number of
meetings of the International Association for Woman Suffrage of which
an American woman, Carrie Chapman Catt, is president. Every one in
France and in the United States who knows Madame de Ste. Croix knows
that she is incapable of misstatement or misrepresentation. What she
told me I am absolutely confident was true in every particular.
In Paris there is a house of mercy established and maintained by
patriotic and generous French people for the rehabilitation of women
and girl victims of German lust, and Madame de Ste. Croix is managing
director of the establishment.
To this house was brought, about a year ago, a woman who, at the
beginning of the war, lived with her husband and five children in one
of the French cities taken by the Germans. They did not destroy this
city, but occupied it and made it a division headquarters.
Madame Doran we will call her, because it is not her name, lost her
husband’s protection and a good deal of her income at the mobilization.
The husband joined the colors, and the wife and five children made a
home in two small rooms of a tenement. The whole town was filled with
German soldiers, and Madame Doran had two men billeted on her. She
moved her family into one room and gave the other to the soldiers.
From the first these soldiers tried to debauch the poor woman. She
successfully resisted them. They moved on and two more soldiers were
billeted on her. They in turn attempted the degradation of this decent
wife and mother. She resisted these men also.
For a year and a half she lived with her children in that room,
separated only by a thin wall from lustful brutes whose orders were
that “the German seal must be set upon the enemy’s country.” In other
words, they had orders to destroy as many lives and as much virtue of
women as they possibly could.
Successive German soldiers this brave and virtuous woman continued
to resist. Finally, after a year and a half of fear and dread and
continual struggle, the soldiers then in her home went to their
officers and reported her as a quarrelsome, contentious woman, one who
made a practise of insulting German soldiers. Those unspeakable cowards
and brutes did this thing for revenge.
The authorities descended on the woman, took her children away from
her by force, sent them to German institutions and sent her to work in
a German-conquered mine in northern France. There the ultimate misery
became hers. Her husband gone, her children torn from her, her home
taken away, placed at degrading labor, her spirit broken, she fell a
prey to German lust at last.
Only by yielding to the soldiers guarding the mine workers could she
buy for herself the least privilege. Only by becoming worse than a
slave could she obtain the slightest surcease from slavery.
She fell. For about a year she was tossed from one to another of the
Huns in the neighborhood of that mine. Inevitably she became in time
a menace to health, and then the Huns in Berlin ordered her deported.
She was sent back through Switzerland to Evian with a card sewed to her
rags, a card describing her as a syphilitic prostitute.
She was too crushed with suffering to make excuses for herself or to
tell her story. There was nothing for the French government to do
except send her to a hospital near Paris where such outcasts go to die.
But Madame Doran did not die. She improved under treatment, and her
distraught mind began to clear a little.
One day Madame Avril de Ste. Croix came to the hospital. Her angel
pity and charity extends to the lowest outcasts among women, and she
looks for possible curables among them everywhere. Attracted by the
pure beauty of this victim, for she still retained some of her youthful
loveliness, Madame de Ste. Croix spoke to her, and finally drew from
her the terrible tale of her martyrdom.
At once Madame de Ste. Croix arranged for her removal to the house in
Paris. There the best medical treatment, good nursing and kindness
worked miracles. Madame Doran was soon on the road to partially
restored life and health.
Meanwhile, Madame de Ste. Croix had sought and found the soldier
husband. She told him what had befallen his wife and children. He heard
with horror, then he dropped his head on the table before him and wept
until his sleeves were drenched with tears. His bitterest grief spent,
he raised his head and said:
“Madame, whatever my poor wife’s condition, I can have no reproaches
for her. I can remember only what she was to me in the past, a true,
good wife. I loved her then and I love her now. Give her back to me,
and for the rest of her life I will atone to her for what she has
suffered.”
This great-hearted French soldier had been wounded and was now
mobilized in industry. He could make a home for his wife and Madame de
Ste. Croix helped them establish themselves anew. Then she began a long
search for the children. She wrote to the king of Spain, who is her
friend and who, since the war began, has often used his influence with
the German kaiser to find lost and imprisoned French and Belgians. The
children of these poor parents were ultimately found and were restored
to their bruised hearts.
Four of the five children were restored to them. The oldest boy, when
the Germans broke up their home, resisted the soldiers sent to take
them away. He was only a child. He did not realize the invincible
majesty of Germany and he protested with all his young might. A German
soldier kicked him, breaking his back. So he died, slowly and in great
agony.