FRENCHMEN, NEVER FORGET
With Madame Avril de Ste. Croix I visited the house of mercy in Paris
where women and child victims of German soldiers find refuge.
I visited this house and I saw there that which made me an implacable
foe of any peace except on terms of extinction of the power that caused
this war.
“We have very few here now,” said Madame de Ste. Croix. “I mean
compared with the first three years of the war. When the Germans think
themselves victorious they are ruthless in their treatment of women and
of civilians generally. When they are losing they are less cruel.”
I am glad that I did not see the first fruits of German wrath. I do
not understand how any one who did see it can ever smile or be happy
again. What I have seen is the mild and tempered wrath of a beaten foe.
I saw, in what is called the isolation pavilion of that house of mercy,
seventeen girls in a condition of health which made it impossible for
them to associate with others.
This pavilion had room for twice the number, and in former times, from
1914 to 1917, this one refuge was crowded, crowded with ruined and
diseased French and Belgian girls. Now the German army has no time and
less opportunity for such bestiality. There were only seventeen girls
in the isolation pavilion of that house of mercy in Paris. The youngest
girl was fourteen.
They have comfortable rooms, a little parlor with books and a piano,
and a kind and devoted house mother. She is a teacher as well, and
the education of these pathetic young creatures is carried on daily,
as though they had a normal destiny, as indeed some of them have.
Recovery, even from their dread malady, is not impossible, and the best
medical care in Paris is given them freely.
In another pavilion of this house I saw another group of girls much
better off. They had lived through horrors, but their health was
somehow preserved. The youngest of these girls was twelve years old,
and the hideous thing had happened to her two years ago. I think I have
never seen a more tragic figure than this little girl. Her face was
white and solemn and her eyes were old. She seldom spoke.
While we were looking at the sewing work and some of the girls were
busy making us tea, a friend of the house came in to play the piano for
the girls to sing. This is her regular contribution to the work. They
sang, these poor little larks, standing around the piano, sang of home
and love and all things beautiful.
I sat and listened and thought of peaceful America, where the war is
still little more than an abstraction, a fact hardly realized except
by the mothers and fathers and wives of men who have gone over.
Perhaps it was unworthy of a reporter, but the sight of these young
French girls who have been forced, in the most ghastly fashion
possible, to realize what this war means, was, for the moment, more
than I could bear. I slipped away and ran to the farthest end of the
enclosed garden.
Out of the sound of their voices I sat down and let the most unbearable
part of the pain flow away in tears. As I sat there on that garden
bench I heard a little soft exclamation. Looking up I saw the youngest
girl, the little one who at ten years had had her life wrecked by
a Hunnish criminal, more than one, for all I know. This child with
the white solemn face and the old eyes stood there, pitying me for a
trouble she did not understand. But for her there was only one trouble,
and she assumed that I was weeping for that.
She reached out a timid little hand and laid it on mine.
“Ah, madame,” she whispered, “is it not terrible, the war?”
It is terrible, but it has brought to the surface a heroism and a
grandeur of soul that few of us knew the French people possessed. I
asked Madame de Ste. Croix to tell me of the women and girls who had
borne children to the German invaders. “What will you do with those
boche babies?” I asked her.
“We shall assimilate them,” she said proudly. And she added that the
mothers, married or unmarried, as a rule loved their forlorn little
babes. “I have known only two women who wished to get rid of their
children,” she assured me.
Nature is stronger than convention. The heart of woman is a mother
heart, and nothing can ever change it. It was man and not woman who
invented the myth of the illegitimate child.
Yet over there in France, even the men have risen above that harsh and
cruel tradition. Madame de Ste. Croix, who takes on herself the painful
duty of telling men what happened to their women when the Germans came,
told me how nobly and bravely French men have stood by and sheltered
them.
There was a girl who came under her care shortly before her baby was
born. It was a fine little boy, fortunately the image of its mother.
She had lost everything in the war, father, mother, home, and she clung
passionately to her child. Only, at times, she wept bitterly thinking
of the young soldier she had hoped to marry, and who was ignorant of
what had befallen her.
Madame de Ste. Croix looked up the young man, found his regiment, and
arranged a meeting with him. His agony when she told him was great, but
not for an instant was his allegiance to his sweetheart shaken. He had
mourned her as dead and he blessed the noble woman who restored her to
him again.
“What has happened is not conceivably her fault,” declared this fine
young soldier. “I love her more for what she has suffered. If I could
I would marry her to-morrow and be a father to her child. But I am not
sure that I can. I am not sure that it would be for her happiness.”
With tears in his eyes the man told Madame de Ste. Croix that he was
under twenty-five, and until after a man has passed that age he may
not, according to French law, marry without the consent of his mother.
This young man’s parents, he explained, were small town folk with a
small town point of view.
Their morality was a little narrow-minded, and he feared that they
would never consent to his marriage with a girl who had suffered at the
hands of the Hun. They would pity her, of course, but they would not
want her for a daughter. They would never be able to love the child.
“Let me go away now,” he implored, “and try to think what is best to be
done.”
A week later he returned with a radiant face. He had obtained leave and
had gone home to see his mother. There, on his knees, he had told her a
lie, one that must have been recorded in Heaven to his favor. He told
her that he was the father of that girl’s baby, that he had wronged
her, and now begged permission to right the wrong by marrying her.
The mother’s reproaches were severe, and the poor young man had the
pain of seeing her suffer for what she thought was his guilt. But after
she had been induced to look at the baby’s picture her good heart was
awakened. She agreed to the marriage and promised to love and care for
the mother and child until the end of the war.
This man was a simple soldier, a child of working people. He did not
know that he was heroic, and in fact what he did has been matched by
scores of men in France. Very often after the Germans violated women
and children in the invaded towns and villages, they murdered them
cruelly. Those left alive have been cherished by their men, only too
thankful that they were spared.
“Not that the men do not suffer,” said Madame de Ste. Croix. “We prize
virtue and stainlessness in women. But we love justice more. And if
this dreadful thing is hard on men whose betrothed are wronged, how
much harder it is on a man whose wife has borne children to the brutal
boche.
“He may forget what she has gone through, but how can he endure the
presence of the child? What will be the future of those children,
intruders in the family? I do not know.”
What has happened to thousands of women and girls in invaded Belgium
and France could just as well happen in this country. It would happen
without the smallest doubt if the Huns landed on our shores. Can you
picture it? Can you imagine what it would be, fathers and mothers of
America, to stand with German guns leveled at your heads while beasts
in human form violated your young daughters before your eyes?
Can you imagine what it would be for our soldiers to come home from
the war and find their wives and daughters with German babies in their
arms? This is what many French and Belgian soldiers have had to endure.
You will not persuade any of these men to listen to arguments in favor
of a peace without victory.
All over France you will see in homes, in shop windows, on blank walls
a poster. There are just three words on this poster: “Frenchmen, never
forget!” In the upper right-hand corner of the poster there is a
picture of some woeful thing that has happened since the German hordes
began to overrun the world.
Sometimes the picture is of a burned and desolated village, a shattered
hulk of what was once a beautiful old church. Oftener it is a picture
of ruined womanhood, blasted childhood.
In the lower left-hand corner of the poster is a picture of a smooth
German salesman trying to sell something in France. “Frenchmen, never
forget!” They never will forget. They have tenacious memories, our
French allies.
Can any one who has visited Paris forget the statue of Strasbourg in
the Place de la Concorde? It is one of eight splendid monuments in that
square, each representing a city of France. When the Germans filched
Alsace and Lorraine from France, after the war of 1870, Strasbourg was
lost to the French. On that day they laid funeral wreaths on the statue
in the Place de la Concorde, and they have kept funeral wreaths there
ever since.
Until August, 1914. Then they took away the emblem of mourning, because
they knew Strasbourg would be theirs again. The statue is gay with
flowers now, and with flags of all the allies. Our flag is there, the
flag the French call _le drapeau étoilé_, the bestarred banner. May it
stay there until what it has gone to France for has been accomplished,
until the utterly crushed and vanquished German army has been pursued
beyond the Rhine, until something of what the women of France and of
martyred Belgium have endured has been paid for.
Not in the same coin, however. The men who have suffered so bravely are
incapable of such crimes.