Part 8
Three days later saw the entire family transported to Toul and safely installed in a temporary barracks provided by Prefect Mirman. It was a big, bare, uncomfortable, insanitary affair, and it seemed as if all the young ragamuffins of France had been collected there in one sorry regiment. The story of Marthe might serve as a type for most. But there were some whose histories, written in their small peaked faces and sullen gaze, had a more sinister cast; some had lost an eye; some had lost a hand; some had lost parents; and most of them had lost their childhood gayety. Gathered up from miles along the frontier where the artillery fire was hottest, out of dank, dirty cellars or unspeakably foul dugouts and caves, living without air, baths, change of garments or the simplest sanitary arrangements, they were a dismal, pallid, vermin-infested, scarecrow little crew--and yet they were the budding hope of France, as nobody knew better than the prefect.
But what to do with them after he had got them together? It was a sore question. For what these small unfortunates needed beyond everything were baths, doctors, nurses, teachers, someone to teach them to smile again--and always more and more baths. Out of the three hundred and fifty, twenty-one were babies under one year; many of them had contagious skin diseases; a few had tuberculosis; and all, sick and well, were crowded together without discrimination.
Food and shelter were all the prefect could be sure of, for these the French Government furnished, but more in the present stress it could not promise, for all the French doctors and nurses were already occupied with the war. And the worst of it was that more and more children and mothers would be arriving as the wave of battle swept toward other villages or wholesale gassing set in. It was a thoroughly bad piece of business all round--a kind of vicious circle with no visible outlet. But not for one moment did these difficulties stump the prefect of the department of Meurthe-et-Moselle. He had rescued these children and got them together--that was his job. Now somebody had to take care of them; he couldn’t, the French Government couldn’t. Therefore--somebody else had to!
And it is exactly at this point, at that “somebody,” that the American Red Cross enters the story. For in the acute and immediate need the prefect telegraphed for aid to a well-known American woman in Paris. She brought the telegram to Major Murphy, Commissioner for Europe of the American Red Cross, and he at once got into action. Within a few hours eight workers were on their way to Toul--a doctor, a nurse, two aids, and women to take charge of the administration. At the same time there started a camionette loaded with clothing and food.
Thus began the first activity of the American Red Cross for the civil population of France--and it began very appropriately with the children.
When, one morning several weeks later, I visited this refugee center high up on a sunshiny hill, a general transformation had taken place. The children, numbering by this time about five hundred, with sixty mothers, had been moved into a newly constructed barracks of brick and cement furnished by the French Government, which also supplied heat, light, rations, cooks, unskilled labor and camion service for transportation. This plant, in its bare elements, was then turned over to the American Red Cross to supplement and run as it pleased. And when I arrived the American administration was in full swing. To me the children looked surprisingly well and happy--almost too happy, in fact, in view of their grim past! And I remarked upon this fact to the director.
“Well,” he laughed, “if you are after local color you should have seen them--and smelled them!--when we first took hold. The very first thing we did was to establish louse clinics--‘de-lousing’ is the technical term. Don’t shudder! They’re about clean now, but in the beginning we had some horrible little heads. The soldiers in the winter trenches had nothing on those children in the way of vermin and filth. And at the same time we inaugurated the good old American institution of shower baths.”
“And what did the mothers think of these?”
The doctor chuckled. “Scandalous! Immoral! Indelicate! Designed to murder their poor children outright! Some of these peasant women, you know, have never taken a bath in the altogether in their lives. They still continue the customs handed down to them since the time of Louis XI. They bathe little boys in their trousers--put ’em in the tub with their trousers on; indelicate to remove ’em, you see! They bathe little girls with their chemises on. And babies they don’t bathe at all. Yes, the shower bath was a novelty. But I may add that it was a novelty which took with the children from the start. Now they fight for a chance at it!
“Come here, Marthe, and say ‘_Bonjour_’ to the lady.” He caught by the hand a passing little girl with great bright dark eyes and dark curls neatly twined. Beside her trotted a small boy, decked in his Sunday best. Thus I had my introduction to Marthe and the substitute brother whom the Mother Marie had sent down to replace the borrowed Emile.
“She is never without that boy,” continued the director. “She seems to be afraid somebody is going to steal him.” And then he told me her story, narrated above. “Here is her mother,” he added as a woman approached along the path. “She has walked all the way from her home to spend a few days with her children. These peasant mothers come and go as they will; they visit with us a few days and then return to their fields. _Bonjour, madame_,” he said, turning to her. “How goes that crop of wheat?”
“Not bad, monsieur. But yesterday--what a misfortune! An _obus_ fell right in the middle of the field where the grain is highest and dug a crater wide as this.” She extended her two arms. “_Sale brute!_” (Dirty brute!) “_Grâce à Dieu!_ I was off in another corner of the field.”
“You are very courageous,” I said, “to work like that for your children in those bombarded fields.”
“But no! But no! It is not for the infants. It is that the soldiers of France may have food.”
“There you are!” exclaimed the director in English. “That’s what they all say--and just as unselfconsciously. They don’t know what a magnificent piece of work they’re pulling off!”
At this moment Marthe interrupted to show me her sewing and the mother passed on to her baby, the little Georgette. Later I saw this tiny, woeful creature, born in a cellar, under sound of heavy guns. Frail, transparent, pale as a snowdrop, she lay in her mother’s arms. Not once in her two years had she been seen to smile. I did not blame her. Such a world was not worth smiling on! She showed a rare judgment beyond her age. Nevertheless, for five minutes I held her in my arms, hating the Germans, and trying by all arts to bring a flash of mirth to that solemn, drooping little mouth. Vain enterprise. I might as well have tried to make the Sphinx laugh.
After that, accompanied by the director, I made a tour of the buildings, built after the usual fashion of military cantonments, in the form of a hollow square. Everything was scrupulously clean, the floors scrubbed, the windows flung wide open, and fresh sunshine flooded the dormitories, where the mothers sat chatting together, their babies at their breasts.
“This beats caves as a summer resort!” I said.
The director nodded rather grimly. In company with M. Mirman he had made rescues from some of those caves.
“And we’re going to beat them still more before we’re through. Here in this small settlement we are trying to achieve a model community. Already we have a clinic, an infirmary, a hospital of eighty beds, a kindergarten, a church, schools, a store, a recreation teacher--in short, a welfare center for children as scientific and humane as anything to be found in America. But that is not enough. Compared with the need this one single unit is only a drop in the bucket. And so we are planning to make Toul a kind of nucleus from which we shall ray out in all directions. Already we have a traveling dispensary starting from this point, with a doctor and nurse, which visits through twenty-five villages, treating the children in their homes and fetching back to the hospital the contagious and tubercular cases. Such a system keeps up the general health par in the areas visited and prevents the sudden spread of epidemics.
“At Nesle, a town in the devastated district, we have established another unit--a small hospital and another automobile dispensary which carries aid to the outlying districts. In that region, of course, the problem is somewhat different from our own, because the Germans, having retreated, the children do not need to be collected in one place to protect them from gassing or bombing. They remain in their homes--if one can call homes those ruined and burned shells, despoiled of every stick of furniture, every kitchen utensil, and even the orchards cut down and the wells defiled!--and we go to them. We go to them with our traveling clinics in an ambulance containing a full outfit of medical stores--and a bath! We carry the makings of that bath right along with us on the floor of the machine--a tub, tubing, a spray and a pumping apparatus. And when we arrive at a home where a child needs a clean-up we heat water in the kitchen, stick the small victim into the tub--without trousers or chemise, you bet!--and we bathe it after the rules laid down by the Greek nymph Arethusa, who lived in a fountain and who, according to the Limerick, used to wash, _sans_ mackintosh--b’gosh, _sans_ anything!
“It is the simple, serious truth that baths are the greatest hygienic need of these children at the present time; and by bringing baths into their homes we are helping to restore the health of the entire district. So successful have been our efforts at Toul and Nesle that the French authorities have earnestly requested us to broaden our scope and establish centers in other needy districts. And this is what we are doing as fast as we can. Eventually we intend to have a chain of centers, linked together by automobile dispensaries, strung along that whole northern frontier just behind the battle lines, in order to care for the thousands of children who, no less than the men in the trenches, are giving their lives in this war.
“As the situation stands to-day France is burning her candle at both ends; she is at one and the same time losing her men and her children. With our American soldiers once in the trenches we are going to check the colossal loss of man power; and in the interval until our fellows arrive, with our hospitals, our clinics, our traveling dispensaries and our schools we are doing our best to check the loss of her child power. This type of scientific social work is the sort of thing America excels in; for the last ten years we’ve gone in hard for it. I suppose we’ve got a flair for it, just as the French have for pure science. Anyhow, as a nation we can do that particular job better than anybody else on earth. And for the American Red Cross to throw into the breach our finely trained child specialists is to render France in this hour an inestimable benefit.”
This sketches the effort of the Red Cross for the children of the war zone in free France. But not all of France is “free,” as the French themselves touchingly call it. And that portion of it which still is not free, the immensely rich mining and manufacturing district under German rule, has also its child problem. That problem the Germans have dealt with in their characteristic brutal fashion. They are simply sweeping out of the country, as with a gigantic broom, all these small, food-consuming nonproducers. Across the Northern Swiss frontier they are being thrust into France at the rate of nearly five hundred a day--more than ten thousand a month! Here is a child problem with a vengeance! Of course it is not the children alone who are being swept out, but all the nonproducing inhabitants. If they can’t work--_heraus mit_ ’em! Dump the refuse out the back door into France. Shift the food burden of all those hundreds of thousands of useless inhabitants onto the enemy. From a purely materialistic point of view this wholesale act of dispossession is a fine move--and France is glad to have her people back at any price! Also, she has food to burn!
Evian-les-Bains is the gate of entry for these exiles--_rapatriés_ the French call them--and accordingly to Evian I went. It is a beautiful, quaint little town on Lake Geneva, high, Alp-encircled, and with an air like iced champagne. Formerly a fashionable watering place, it has now been transformed into a kind of Ellis Island receiving station for the refugees, who pour in by trainloads, twenty thousand a month.
Here daily is to be witnessed one of the most tragic processionals that history has ever yet offered to man--a nation on the march! But a nation dispossessed, broken and diseased, old men and old women and mothers with children--the past and the future generations--with the present generation strikingly absent! For the young men are held to work the mines and the factories, and the young women are held--but even in France one rarely speaks of that phase of the subject, which is the blackest of all black pages of German occupation. What “efficient” explanation is Germany going to offer, at the big post-bellum tribunal of the nations, for the girls sent into white slavery in the Ardennes?
Three years have elapsed since the Germans conquered the northern part of France, and since then the inhabitants have lived in a state of complete isolation, cut off from news of their families in free France, sons and husbands who fled before the invaders; cut off also from any reliable information concerning the war or the great outer world. Not a single letter are they permitted to send or receive. This incredible act of mental cruelty I did not believe until I arrived in Evian, questioned the refugees themselves and the authorities, and entered the famous letter room, where hundreds of thousands of letters are filed, often months ahead of time, awaiting the possible return of some exile relative.
Newspapers these people have, to be sure, but they are journals printed by the Germans in French, ostensibly to give current events, but actually to spread German propaganda and despair. I glanced through some of these papers. According to them England is speedily starving to death; Russia is about to conclude a separate peace; France has been bled white; America is a noisy four-flusher--and _Deutschland_ is _über alles_! Under ordinary conditions such a crude tissue of lies would merit only a burst of scornful laughter; but given a captured civilian population as isolated from their loved ones as if they were ghosts, a prey to constant anxiety concerning the welfare of France, and this daily insidious attack upon a morale already enfeebled by adversity is bound to have a damaging effect.
Of these journals the Gazette des Ardennes is the most notorious.
The first evening I waited at the station I do not know exactly what I expected to see--but, anyhow, something that would rend the heartstrings. I forgot that this station represented to those pilgrims the end of a three-years’ captivity; that every kilometer of the long, wearisome three-days’ journey from Belgium, where they had been quarantined, brought them nearer letters, nearer a resumption of family ties, nearer a tender welcome from free France.
It was cold. A light snow had fallen on the circle of mountains, and a chill wind blew up from the lake. The Red Cross ambulance drivers had backed their machines close to the platform to care for the sick and the old, and now they stood by the tracks, ready to lend a hand to the incoming crowd. I was in the mood of Antony: “If you have tears, prepare to shed them now!” when the refugee train pulled into the station; and to my surprise I saw flags bursting from every open window--the French Tricolor, the Stars and Stripes, Red Cross flags, handkerchiefs, bundles, any old thing--frantically waving a welcome from a thousand eager hands! Who said anybody was sad? Besides flags, the windows were crowded full of heads--happy, excited children, mothers holding up babies, and smiling, seamed old countenances wreathed in white hair. And from within the cars, above the noisy hubbub, ascended high and sweet the strains of the Marseillaise.
The train slowed to a dead stop. Suddenly an old man leaned far out of a window, waved both arms, and shouted fiercely: “_Vive la France! Vive----_” He broke off sharply, looked down into a face below him on the platform and queried in low, anxious tones: “Say! We are in France, _hein_?” What an indiscretion if he had yelled that in German territory!
“Yes, you are in France. But descend, _papa_! Descend, _maman_! _Allons mes enfants, descendez, s’il vous plait!_”
It was the cheerful voice of the Red Cross man, M. Barrois, himself a _rapatrié_, with a wife and six children left behind in Lille, who assisted daily at the detraining of the refugees.
“But these people are not sad!” I objected to M. Barrois, still full of surprise. “They do not even look tired. Are they always gay like this?”
“It’s a lively crowd to-night,” he replied soberly, “on account of so many children. But some days they do not have a word to say. And you must not be deceived by their surface gayety. The sadness is there, underneath, just the same. You’ll find it if you stay.”
He was right. The first evening I caught only the false glow of excitement of the returning pilgrims. But as I watched night after night the endless procession of those who passed I began to discriminate, and to note beneath the happy eagerness on those faces the deeper substructure of strain, of suffering so long endured that it had become a habit. And as the thousands marched before me, successive waves of exiles, always different and yet mysteriously the same in their look of subdued suffering, of strain, I had a fleeting realization of what France has borne in this war.
With such throngs pouring daily into this one small receiving station a very careful organization has of necessity been evolved in order not to congest the transportation. The following is the order of each day: At the last station on the Swiss frontier French Red Cross nurses enter the train and tag the sick and aged. At Evian these are put into ambulances, the others walking the short distance to the Casino, where await them an ample hot supper, music, and a tender speech of welcome by the mayor of Evian. After which they register, receive their letters, pass a medical examination, and are assigned lodgings in the town.
The first night I waited to see the last _malade_ and the last baby safely stowed inside before I climbed into the front seat with the ambulance driver. As we struck the open lake road an icy wind straight off Mont Blanc made me shiver. A soldier on permission clinging to the running board beside me turned up his collar, muttering: “This is worse than the trenches in the Vosges.” He had come up to search for his refugee wife, from whom he had not heard in three years.
“But she might arrive any day!” he argued hopefully. “I will teach you something extraordinary,” he continued. “A comrade of mine came up here looking for his wife; he had dreamed a dream about her. And what do you think--the very first woman who stepped off the train was she!
“I had another friend, whose wife had died in Lille leaving a little daughter of two, whom the father had never seen. He did not even know what had become of her, for he could get no word. A _rapatrié_ friend, who informed him of his wife’s death, could give no news of the little maid. Nevertheless, he came to Evian hoping to find some trace. And each day at the station as the throng passed he stood quietly holding out in his hand what looked like a postal card. And whenever a little girl appeared he thrust that card under her nose. Absurd, eh? A fool, a lunatic, sticking a piece of cardboard into every child’s face! But one day when he held it in front of a little maid she suddenly burst into tears and cried out: ‘_Maman! Maman!_’ That postal card bore the picture of her mother. And that’s the way he found his child!”
It was twilight when we arrived at the Casino, and already the place was packed. Seated at long tables the refugees had stowed their precious bundles beneath their feet and were falling upon supper with a will. Between the tables passed the women of Evian with tureens of steaming soup, huge platters of meat that the Germans would have bartered their very souls for, and great pitchers of hot milk and of wine. And how those children gobbled! And how their elders followed their example! The platters passed and repassed. Through the big double doors facing Switzerland gleamed Lake Geneva, dimly purple through the gloom. Overhead in the balcony the band began to tune up.
Suddenly all over the hall the lights flashed on strongly and the same instant the band burst into the stirring impetuous strains of Chasseurs Alpins! As that gay beloved air broke across the room an electric shock of emotion seemed to pass along the tables. Men leaped up, shouting “_Vive la France!_” Women began to weep softly. Handkerchiefs were out everywhere. Yes, the long blight of captivity, of isolation, was past forever! That tune proved it!
And it was just at this chosen moment that the mayor of Evian came forward to make his speech. It was brief, simple and touching, and at certain portions of it women bowed their heads on the table and sobbed aloud.
“My dear fellow citizens!” began the mayor. “At a moment when, after long and cruel trials, you step foot again upon the sacred soil of _la Patrie_, I come in the name of the city of Evian to address to you all a very cordial, a very warm and a very affectionate welcome.
“We know all that you have suffered. For many months convoys like yours have traversed our little village, and we have heard recounted each day the long martyrdom you have endured. We know that you have suffered cold and hunger; we know that your houses have been burned, that your rich harvests have been destroyed and the beautiful industrial region of the north has been systematically destroyed; and, what is most terrible of all, we know that young daughters have been torn from the arms of their mothers and taken away to slavery in the Ardennes. And it is because we do know all this, dear fellow citizens, that we receive you to-day with all of our heart and with all of our soul!