Part 8

“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!

“I said just now that you have suffered greatly, but your sufferings have not been alone physical; they have been also, and even above all, spiritual. You have suffered to be without news of those who are dear, and at not knowing exactly how things were going in free France. As for that which concerns the news of the war and of France I am going to tell you at once, in one word, that all you have read in Le Bruxellois and the Gazette des Ardennes is one tissue of lies, and that, thanks to the armies of France and her Allies, victory will finally crown our banners.

“And now, courage, my dear fellow citizens! Your long martyrdom is about to end. Soon you are going to hear, standing, our sacred hymn, which has not greeted your ears for so long a time, and meantime join me in an act of faith and hope in our well-beloved country, and shout with me: ‘_Vive la France immortelle!_’”

The shout that followed was a shout indeed!

In closing, the Marseillaise was chanted, and by now all the audience was frankly in tears. A Red Cross doctor standing beside me cleared his throat.

“I’ve seen this thing a dozen times,” he observed, “and still I choke up every time!”

Supper over the _rapatriés_ registered and passed to the rear to receive their letters. This letter room is a marvel of perfect arrangement. Here every inquiry from anxious relatives is received, sorted alphabetically, and a note of it filed on an index card as if it were a library book. Thus, when a refugee hands his registration card across the counter, all the girl standing behind has to do is to look him up in her index catalogue and see if he has any mail.

Ah, those long moments of suspense while the girl is looking up a name! Those hundreds of greedy, outstretched hands across the counter! Those faces, so schooled to endurance, twitching now with unconcealed excitement! How slow the girl is! “No, there is nothing for you.” An outstretched hand drops from the counter. Those mutely borne disappointments are horrible.

Some of the tales of this famous letter room are harrowing, some humorous. There arrived one day in Evian a woman refugee, with four sons at the Front from whom she had not heard a single line in three years. Her excitement may be conceived. Were they all alive? Were some dead? Which? Impossible that all four should be preserved for three years. The thing was outside probability. For long months she had brooded over the chances, selected for death first one and then another of her sons. Perhaps all had been killed by this time, for she knew her sons were brave! There was her youngest in particular, a dashing daredevil in the Alpine Chasseurs--the pacemakers in every attack. Yes, undoubtedly he had gone! She must make up her mind to it. And so she did, and unmade it, a hundred times a day. When she arrived in Evian it was five in the afternoon, and before she stood at the mail counter, registry slip in hand, it was nine--four mortal hours of heart-piercing suspense, during which she had buried one, two, three, four of her sons, and resurrected them again in a passion of hope. And now she was going to know! Yes, there was a letter for madame--two letters. Blindly she got herself out of the throng. The next moment there was a loud cry and she fell face down in a dead swoon.

“And for two days,” continued the doctor who told me the incident, “she raved with acute dementia.”

“Poor soul!” I said. “All four were killed? Her intuition was right.”

“Not a bit of it,” laughed the doctor. “All four of ’em were not killed! All four were alive and kicking. And that was the very trouble. It was a chance, of course, in a million. And winning that chance in the great lottery was too much for her. She had steeled herself for disaster. The strong shock of joy was a knock-out blow! But in a few days she was up and speeding on the way to her sons.”

What the American Red Cross is doing for the children in this situation may be grouped under two heads: First, immediate, temporary aid; second, permanent work. Whatever the French Government wishes in the way of personnel, equipment, drivers, and so on, to meet an urgent relief need, the American Red Cross stands ready to deliver at an hour’s notice. But--and this is important and not generally understood--the French themselves must first express the desire, extend the invitation for aid. We are the guests; they are the hosts. And it is not the policy to rush in, take over the whole French problem, willy-nilly, and begin to run things off on brisk American methods. France has her national pride, like ourselves; and it is her pride, even in this stress, to care for her own wherever she can. Such a course of procedure on the part of the Red Cross may mean a little more slowness at the outset; but it means a deeper and more sympathetic bond between the two nations in the end--and in the end it is not less successful than the crude head-on attack. Thus in the Evian problem the French struggled for months to care for the thousands of refugees, and with a pitifully scant nursing and medical staff accomplished marvels. Still, to make a complete medical examination of every incoming _rapatrié_ with such a staff would need a day of a hundred hours. And without such medical attention contagious diseases and epidemics were bound to creep into France, which, in fact, they did.

When these defects were called to the attention of the French Government it at once frankly called for American aid. The same week a dozen ambulances and drivers, in charge of an American _chef de service_ who had won distinction before Verdun, were dispatched to assist in the transportation. In passing it should be said that the winter work of these Red Cross ambulance drivers upon the borders of that glacier lake, in an ice-box temperature, with a keen zero wind thrusting playful darts between the shoulder blades, deserves a special mention. It is not a spectacular service or, save for pneumonia microbes, especially dangerous. It is simply a plugging, monotonous grind in freezing isolation.

After the ambulances had been dispatched a group of medical specialists were sent out to study the problem on the ground and suggest plans of permanent value. The result of their examination was the establishment of a receiving hospital of one hundred beds in Evian to care for the sick; a second hospital in Lyons for the chronic cases; and still a third hospital on the Mediterranean for the tuberculosis patients.

In addition to the hospitals, a clinic has been established right in the Casino itself, so that no child leaves the building without a medical examination. And these two agencies, the inside clinic and the outside hospitals, render the situation, so far as the danger to the state is concerned, practically water-tight. For the clinic catches the small, microbe-ridden victim and shoots him straight to the hospital, thus turning a secure lock upon the spread of disease. As is the case on the northern frontier, these children suffer chiefly from malnutrition, contagious skin diseases and tuberculosis. It has been estimated roughly that about ten per cent of the _rapatriés_ need hospital attention each day, and about one-third of that ten per cent are tuberculous.

The hospital at Evian is as modern and complete in its child equipment as expert thought can achieve. At present there is a colony of about fifty workers on the ground. One phase of the hospital service, as the head nurse outlined it to me, is of especial educational value.

“All of our nurses’ aids, our _auxiliaires_, are French refugee girls,” she explained. “This means practically a training school for nurses. And when it is realized that the French nursing standards are as low as the French surgery standards are high the need for general instruction in this line becomes apparent. We shall teach these raw, untrained peasant girls simply the first principles of caring for the sick. But if we do no more than instill into them the fundamentals of cleanliness, convince them that all-over baths are not scandalous, that babies do not thrive on wine, that fresh air does not kill, that sheets should be changed slightly oftener than once a month, that pneumonia and tuberculous patients do not prosper in hermetically sealed rooms, and a few other modern, common-sense maxims, I for one shall be very content!”