Part 6 (1/2)

The total number of repatries and refugies now in France is said to total a million and a half. The repatries are the French civilians who were captured by the Germans in their advance and have since been sent back. The refugies are the French civilians from the devastated areas, who have always remained on the Allies' side of the line. The refugies are divided into two cla.s.ses: refugies proper--that is fugitives from the front, who fled for the most part at the time of the German invasion; and evacues--those who were sent out of the war zone by the military authorities. Naturally a large percentage of this million and a half have lost everything and, irrespective of their former worldly position, now live with the narrowest margin between themselves and starvation. The French Government has treated them with generosity, but in the midst of a war it has had little time to devote to educating them into being self-supporting. A great number of funds have been privately raised for them in France; many separate organisations for their relief have been started. The American Red Cross is making this million and a half people its special care, and to do so is co-operating directly with the French Government and with existing French civilian projects. Its action is dictated by mercy and admiration, but in results this policy is the most far-seeing statesmans.h.i.+p. A million and a half plundered people, if neglected and allowed to remain downhearted, are likely to const.i.tute a danger to the morale of the bravest nation. Again, from the point of view of after-war relations, to have been generous towards those who have suffered is to have won the heart of France. The caring for the French repatriates and refugees is a definite contribution to the winning of the war.

The French system of handling this human stream of tragedy is to send the sick to local hospitals and the exhausted to the _maison de repos_. The comparatively healthy are allowed to be claimed by friends; the utterly homeless are sent to some prefecture remote from the front-line. The prefects in turn distribute them among towns and villages, lodging them in old barracks, casinos and any buildings which war-conditions have made vacant. The adults are allowed by the Government a franc and a half per day, and the children seventy-five centimes.

The armies have drained France of her doctors since the war; until the Americans came, the available medical attention was wholly inadequate to the civilian population. The American Red Cross is now establis.h.i.+ng dispensaries through the length and breadth of France.

In country districts, inaccessible to towns, it is inaugurating automobile-dispensaries which make their rounds on fixed and advertised days. In addition to this it has started a child-welfare movement, the aim of which is to build up the birth-rate and lower the infant mortality by spreading the right kind of knowledge among the women and girls.

The condition of the refugees and repatriates, thrust into communities to which they came as paupers and crowded into buildings which were never planned for domestic purposes, has been far from enviable. In September, 1917, the American Red Cross handed over the solving of this problem to one of its experts who had organised the aid given to San Francisco after the earthquake, and who had also had charge of the relief-work necessitated by the Ohio floods at Dayton. Co-operating with the French, houses partially constructed at the outbreak of war were now completed and furnished, and approximately three thousand families were supplied with homes and privacy. The start made proved satisfactory. Supplies, running into millions of francs, were requisitioned, and the plan for getting the people out of public buildings into homes was introduced to the officials of most of the departments of France. Delegates were sent out by the Red Cross to undertake the organisation of the work. Money was apportioned for the supplying of dest.i.tute families with furniture and the instruments of trade; the object in view was not to pauperise them, but to afford them the opportunity for becoming self-supporting. Re-construction work in those devastated areas which have been won back from the Boche was hurried forward in order that the people who had been uprooted from the soil might be returned to it and, in being returned to their own particular soil, might recover their place in life and their balance.

I visited the devastated areas of the Pas-de-Calais, Somme, Oise and Aisne and saw what is being accomplished. This destroyed territory is roughly one hundred miles long by thirty miles broad at its widest point. In 1912 one-quarter of the wheat produced in France and eighty-seven per cent. of the beet crop employed in the national industry of sugar-making, were raised in these departments of the north. The invasion has diminished the national wheat production by more than a half. It is obvious, then, that in getting these districts once more under cultivation two birds are being killed with one stone: the refugee is being made a self-supporting person--an economic a.s.set instead of a dead weight--and the tonnage problem is being solved.

If more food is grown behind the Western Front, grain-s.h.i.+ps can be released for transporting the munitions of war from America.

The French Government had already made a start in this undertaking before America came into the war. As early as 1914 it voted three hundred million francs and appointed a group of _sous-prefets_ to see to the dispensing of it. Little by little, as the Huns have been driven back, the wealthier inhabitants, whose money was safe in Paris banks, have returned to these districts and opened _oeuvres_ for the poorer inhabitants. Many of them have lost their sons and husbands; they find in their daily labour for others worse off than themselves an escape from life-long despair. Misfortune is a matter of comparison and contrast. We are all of us unhappy or fortunate according to our standards of selfishness and our personal interpretation of our lot.

These patriots are bravely turning their experience of sorrow into the materials of service. They can speak the one and only word which makes a bond of sympathy between the prosperous and the broken-hearted, ”I, too, have suffered.” I came across one such woman in the neighbourhood of Villequier-au-Mont. She was a woman of t.i.tle and a royalist. Her estates had been laid waste by the invasion and all her men-folk, save her youngest son, were dead. Directly the Hun withdrew last spring, she came back to the wilderness which had been created and commenced to spend what remained of her fortune upon helping her peasants. These peasants had been the hewers of wood and drawers of water for the Hun for three and a half years. When his armies retreated, they took with them the girls and the young men, leaving behind only the weaklings, the children and the aged. Word came to the Red Cross official of the district that her remaining son had been killed in action; he was asked to break the news to her. He went out to her ruined village and found her sitting among a group of women in the sh.e.l.l of a house, teaching them to make garments for their families. She was pleased to see him; she was in need of more materials. She had been intending to make the journey to see him herself. She was full of her work and enthusiastic over the valiance of her people. He led her aside and told her. She fell silent. Her face quivered--that was all. Then she completed her list of requirements and went back to her women. In living to comfort other people's grief, she had no time to nurse her own.

These ”oeuvres,” or groups of workers, settle down in a shattered village or towns.h.i.+p. The military authorities place the towns.h.i.+p in their charge. They at once commence to get roofs on to such houses as still have walls. They supply farm-implements, poultry, rabbits, carts, seeds, plants, etc. They import materials from Paris and form sewing cla.s.ses for the women and girls. They encourage the trades-people to re-start their shops and lend them the necessary initial capital. What is perhaps most valuable, they lure the terror-stricken population out of their caves and dug-outs, and set them an example of hope and courage. Some of the best pioneer work of this sort has been done by the English Society of Friends who now, together with the Friends of the United States, have become a part of the Bureau of the Department of Civil Affairs of the American Red Cross.

The American Red Cross works through the ”oeuvres” which it found already operating in the devastated area; it places its financial backing at their disposal, its means of motor transport and its personnel; it grafts on other ”oeuvres,” operating in newly taken over villages, in which Americans, French and English work side by side for the common welfare; at strategic points behind the lines it has established a chain of relief warehouses, fully equipped with motor-lorries and cars. These warehouses furnish everything that an agricultural people starting life afresh can require--food, clothes, blankets, beds, mattresses, stoves, kitchen utensils, reapers, binders, mowing-machines, thres.h.i.+ng-machines, garden-tools, soap, tooth brushes, etc. If you can conceive of yourself as having been a prosperous farmer and waking up one morning broken in heart and dirty in person, with your barns, live-stock, daughters, sons, everything gone--not a penny left in the world--you can imagine your necessities, and then form some picture of the fore-thought that goes to the running of a Red Cross warehouse.

But the poverty of these people is not the worst condition that the Red Cross workers have to tackle; money can always replace money.

Hope, trust, affection and a genial belief in the world's goodness cannot be transplanted into another man's heart in exchange for bitterness by even the most lavish giver. I can think of no modern parallel for their blank despair; the only eloquence which approximately expresses it is that of Job, centuries old, ”Why is light given to a man whose way is hid and whom G.o.d hath hedged in? My sighing cometh before I eat. My roarings are poured out like waters.

My harp is turned to mourning, and my organ into the voice of them that weep. I was not in safety, neither had I rest, neither was I quiet; yet trouble came.”

This h.e.l.l which the Hun has created, beggars any description of Dante.[1] It is still more appalling to remember that the external h.e.l.l which one sees, does not represent one t.i.the of the dreariness which lies hidden behind the eyes of the inhabitants. To imagine amid such scenes is to paralyse compa.s.sion with agony. The craving, never far from one's thoughts, is the age-old desire, ”O that one might plead with G.o.d, as a man pleadeth for his neighbour!”

[Footnote 1: Since this was written and just as I am returning to the front, the Hun has set to work to create this h.e.l.l for the second time. Most of the places referred to below are once more within the enemy country and all the mercy of the American Red Cross has been wiped out.]

I started out on my trip in a staff-car from a city well behind the lines. In the first half hour of the journey the country was green and pleasant. We pa.s.sed some cavalry officers galloping across a brown field; birds were battling against a flurrying wind; high overhead an aeroplane sailed serenely. There was a sense of life, motion and exhilaration abroad, but only for the first half hour of our journey.

Then momentarily a depression grew up about us. Fields and trees were becoming dead, as if a swarm of locusts had eaten their way across them. Greenness was vanis.h.i.+ng. Houses were becoming untenanted; there were holes in the walls of many of them, through which one gained glimpses of the sky. Here, by the road-side, we pa.s.sed a cl.u.s.ter of insignificant graves. Then, almost without warning, the barbed-wire entanglements commenced, and the miles and miles of abandoned trenches. This, not a year ago from the day on which I write, was the Hun's country. Last spring, in an attempt to straighten his line, he retreated from it. Our offensives on the Somme had converted his Front into a dangerous salient.

We are slowing down; the road is getting water-logged and full of holes. The skull of a dead town grows up on the horizon. Even at this distance the light behind empty windows glares malevolently like the nothingness in vacant sockets. A horror is over everything. The horror is not so much due to the destruction as to the total absence of any signs of life. One man creeping through the landscape would make it seem more kindly. I have been in desolated towns often, but there were always the faces of our cheery Tommies to smile out from cellars and gaps in the walls. From here life is banished utterly. The battle-line has retired eastward; one can hear the faint rumble of the guns at times. No civilian has come to re-inhabit this unhallowed spot.

We enter what were once its streets. They are nothing now but craters with boards across them. On either side the trees lie flat along the ground, sawn through within a foot of the roots. What landmarks remain are the blackened walls of houses, cracked and crashed in by falling roofs. The entire place must have been given over to explosion and incendiarism before the Huns departed. One stands in awe of such completeness of savagery; one begins to understand what is meant by the term ”frightfulness.” As far as eye can reach there is nothing to be seen but decayed fangs, protruding from a swamp of filth, covered with a green slime where water has acc.u.mulated. This is not the unavoidable ruin of sh.e.l.l-fire. No battle was fought here. The demolition was the wanton spite of an enemy who, because he could not hold the place, was determined to leave nothing serviceable behind.

With such masterly thoroughness has he done his work that the spot can never be re-peopled. The surrounding fields are too poisoned and churned up for cultivation. The French Government plans to plant a forest; it is all that can be done. As years go by, the kindliness of Nature may cause her to forget and cover up the scars of hatred with greenness. Then, perhaps, peasant lovers will wander here and refas.h.i.+on their dreams of a chivalrous world. Our generation will be dead by that time; throughout our lives this memorial to ”frightfulness” will remain.

We have left the town and are out in the open country. It is clean and unharried. Man can murder orchards and habitations--the things which man plants and makes; he finds it more difficult to strangle the primal gifts of Nature. All along by the roadside the cement telegraph-posts have been broken off short; some of them lie flat along the ground, others hang limply in the bent shape of hairpins.

Very often we have to make a detour where a steel bridge has been blown up; we cross the gulley over an improvised affair of struts and planks, and so come back into the main roadway. Every now and then we pa.s.s steam-tractors at work, ploughing huge fields into regular furrows. The French Department of Agriculture purchased in America nineteen teams of ten tractors apiece in the autumn of last year. The American Red Cross has supplied others. The fields of this district are unfenced--the farmers used to live together in villages; so the work is made easy. It is possible to throw a number of holdings together and to apply to France the same wholesale mechanical means of wheat-growing that are employed on the prairies of Canada. All the cattle and horses have been carried off into Germany. All the farm-implements have been destroyed--and destroyed with a surprising ingenuity. The same parts were destroyed in each instrument, so that an entire instrument could not be reconstructed. The farms could not have been brought under cultivation this year, had not the Government and the Red Cross lent their a.s.sistance.

We are approaching Noyon, the birthplace of Calvin. This is one of the few towns the Hun spared in his retreat; he spared it not out of a belated altruism, but purely to serve his own convenience. There were some of the French civilians who weren't worth transporting to Germany. They would be too weak, or too old, or too young to earn their keep when he got them there. These he sorted out, irrespective of their family ties, and herded from the surrounding districts into Noyon. They were crowded into the houses and ordered under pain of death not to come out until they were given permission. They were further ordered to shutter all their windows and not to look out.

As an old lady, who narrated the story, said, ”We had no idea, Monsieur, what was to happen. _Les Boches_ had been with us for nearly three years; it never entered our heads that they were leaving. When they took the last of our young girls from us and all who were strong among our men, it was something that they had done so often and so often. When they made us hide in our houses, we thought it was only to prevent a disturbance. It is not easy to see your boys and girls marched away into slavery--Monsieur will understand that. Sometimes, on former occasions, the mothers had attacked _les Boches_ and the young girls had become hysterical; we thought that it was to avoid such scenes that we were shut up in our houses. When darkness fell, we sat in our rooms without any lights, for they also were forbidden.

All night long through our streets we heard the endless tramping of battalions, the clattering wheels of guns and limbers, the sharp orders, the halting and the marching taken up afresh. Towards dawn everything grew silent. At first it would be broken occasionally by the hurried trot of cavalry or the shuffling footsteps of a straggler.

Then it grew into the absolute silence of death. It was nerve-racking and terrible. One could almost hear the breathing of the listening people in all the other houses. I do not know how time went or what was the hour. I could endure the suspense no longer. They might kill me, but ... Ah well, at my age after nearly three years with 'les Boches,' killing is a little matter! I crept down the pa.s.sage and drew back the bolts. I was very gentle; a sentry might hear me. I opened the door just a crack. I expected to hear a rifle-shot ring out, but nothing happened. I opened it wider, and saw that the street was empty and that it was broad daylight. Then I waited--I do not know how long I waited. I crouched against the wall, huddled with terror. All this took much longer in the doing than in the telling. At last I could bear myself no longer. I tiptoed out on to the pavement--and, Monsieur will believe me, I expected to drop dead. But no one disturbed me.

Then I heard a rustling. Doors everywhere were opening stealthily, ah, so stealthily! Some one else tiptoed out, and some one else, and some one else. We stood there staring, aghast at our daring. Suddenly we realised what had happened. The brutes had gone. We were free. It was indescribable, what followed--we ran together, weeping and embracing.

At first we wept for gladness; soon we wept for sorrow. Our youth had departed; we were all old women or very ancient men. Two hours later our poilus came, like a blue-grey wave of laughter, fighting their way through the burning country that those swine had left in a sea of smoke and flames.”

And so that was why the Hun spared Noyon. But if he spared Noyon, he spared little else.[2] Every village between here and the present front line has been levelled; every fruit-tree cut down. The wilful wickedness and pettiness of the crime stir one's heart to pity and his soul to white-hot anger. The people who did this must make payment in more than money; to settle such a debt blood is required.

American soldiers who came to Europe to do a job and with no decided detestation of the Hun, are being taught by such landscapes. They know now why they came. The wounds of France are educating them.

[Footnote 2: Goodness knows where the ”present Front-line” may be by the time this book is published. I visited Noyon in February, 1918, just before the big Hun offensive commenced.]