The Living Present Part 14

During the bombardment of the Belgian and French towns these children came into Paris on every train. They were tagged like post-office packages, and it was as well they were, not only because some were too little to know or to p.r.o.nounce their names correctly, but even the older ones were often too dazed to give a coherent account of themselves; although the more robust quickly recovered. The first thing to do with this human flotsam was to wash and disinfect and feed it, clip its hair to the skull, and then, having burned the rags of arrival, dress it in clean substantial clothes. While I was in Paris Mr. Jaccaci and Mrs. Hill were meeting these trains; and, when the smaller children arrived frightened and tearful they took them in their arms and consoled them all the way to the Relief Depots. The result was that they needed the same treatment as the children.

It was generally the Cure or the Mayor of the bombarded towns that had rounded up each little parentless army and headed it toward Paris.

When the larger children were themselves again they all told the same bitter monotonous stories. Suddenly a rain of shrapnel fell on their village or town. They fled to the cellars, perhaps to the one Cave Voutee (a stone cellar with vaulted roof) and there herded in indescribable filth, darkness, fear, hunger for weeks and even months at a time. The sh.e.l.ling of a village soon stopped, but in the larger towns, strategic points desired of the enemy, the bombarding would be incessant. Mothers, or older children, would venture out for food, returning perhaps with enough to keep the pale flame of life alive, as often as not falling a huddled ma.s.s a few feet from the exit of the cellar. Mothers died of typhoid, pneumonia, in childbirth; others never had reached the cellar with their own children in the panic; one way or another these children arrived in Paris in a state of orphanhood, although later investigations proved them to have been hiding close to their mother (and sometimes father; for all men are not physically fit for war) by the width of a street, in a town where the long roar of guns dulled the senses and the affections, and the constant hail of shrapnel precluded all search for anything but food.

Moreover, many families had fled from villages lying in the path of the advancing hordes to the neighboring towns, and there separated, crowding into the nearest Caves Voutees. Most of these poor women carried a baby and were distraught with fear besides; the older children must cling to the mother's skirts or become lost in the melee.

When one considers that many of these children, in Rheims or Verdun, for instance, were in cellars not for weeks but for months, without seeing the light of day, with their hunger never satisfied, with corpses unburied for days until a momentary lull encouraged the elders to remove the sand bags at the exit and thrust them out, with their refuge rocking constantly and their ear-drums splitting with raucous sounds, where the stenches were enough to poison what red blood they had left and there were no medicines to care for the afflicted little bodies, one pities anew those mentally afflicted people who a.s.sert at automatic intervals, "I can't see any difference between the cruelty of the British blockade and the German submarines." The resistant powers of the human body, given the bare chance of remaining alive, are little short of phenomenal. But then, when Nature compounded the human frame it was to fling it into a newborn world far more difficult to survive than even the awful conditions of modern warfare.

Some of these children were wounded before they reached the cellars.

In many cases the families remained in their homes until the walls, at first pierced by the shrapnel, began to tumble about their ears. Then they would run to the homes of friends on the other side of the town, staying there until the guns, aided by the air scouts, raked such houses as had escaped the first a.s.sault. Often there were no Caves Voutees in the villages. The mothers cowered with their children under the tottering walls or lay flat on the ground until the German guns turned elsewhere; then they ran for the nearest town. But during these distracted transfers many received wounds whose scars they are likely to carry through life. The most seriously wounded were taken to the military hospitals, where they either died, or, if merely in need of bandages, were quickly turned out to make room for some poilu arriving in the everlasting procession of stretchers.

Sometimes, flat on their stomachs, the more curious and intelligent of the children watched the sh.e.l.ls sailing overhead to drop upon some beautiful villa or chateau and transpose it into a heap of stones.

Where there were English or Americans in these bombarded towns, or where the Cures or the Mayors of those invaded had not been shot or imprisoned, the children were sent as quickly as possible to Paris, the mothers, when there were any, only too content to let them go and to remain behind and take their chances with the sh.e.l.ls.

One little Belgian named Bonduelle, who, with two brothers, reached Paris in safety, is very graphic: "We are three orphans," he replied in answer to the usual questions. "Our uncle and aunt took the place of our dear parents, so soon taken from us.... It was towards the evening of Wednesday, 6th September, 1914, that I was coming back to my uncle's house from Ypres, when all at once I heard shrieks and yells in the distance. I stopped, for I was like one stunned. On hearing behind me, on the highway, German cavalry, I ran into a house where I spent the night. I could not close my eyes when I thought of the anxiety of my uncle and aunt and of the fate of my two small brothers, Michael and Roger. Early the following day I rushed to our house. Everybody was in the cellar. We shed tears on meeting again. I found two of my cousins wounded by a sh.e.l.l which had exploded outside our door. Soon another sh.e.l.l comes and smashes our house. I was wounded. Dazed with fear, my cousin and myself got out through a window from the cellar, we ran across fields and meadows to another uncle, where the rest of the family followed us soon. We remained there the whole winter, but what a sad winter! We have not taken off our clothes, for at every moment we feared to have to run away again.

"The big guns rumbled very much and the sh.e.l.ls whistled over our heads. Every one heard: 'So-and-so is killed' or 'wounded, by a sh.e.l.l.' 'Such-and-such-a-house is ruined by a sh.e.l.l.'

"After having spent more than seven months in incredible fear, my brothers and myself have left the village, at the order of the gendarmes, and the English took us to Hazebrouck, from where we went to Paris."

In some cases the parents, or, as was most generally the case, the mother, after many terrifying experiences in her village, pa.s.sed and repa.s.sed by the Germans, having heard of the relief stations in Paris, sent their children, properly tagged, to be cared for in a place of comparative safety until the end of the war. Young Bruno Van Wonterghem told his experience in characteristically simple words:

"Towards the evening of September 6th, 1914, the Germans arrived at our village with their ammunition. One would have thought the Last Judgment was about to begin. All the inhabitants were hiding in their houses. I was hiding in the attic, but, desirous to see a German, I was looking through a little window in the roof. n.o.body in the house dared to go to bed. It was already very late when we heard knocks at the door of our shop. It was some Germans who wanted to buy chocolate.

Some paid but the majority did not. They left saying, 'Let us kill the French.' The following morning they marched away toward France. In the evening one heard already the big guns in the distance.

"Turned out of France the Germans came to St. Eloi, where they remained very long. Then they advanced to Ypres. The whole winter I heard the rumbling of the big guns, and the whistling of the sh.e.l.ls. I learned also every day of the sad deaths of the victims of that awful war. I was often very frightened and I have been very happy to leave for France with my companions."

While I was in Paris the refugee children, of course, were from the invaded districts of France; the Belgian stream had long since ceased.

Already twelve hundred little victims of the first months of the war, both Belgian and French, either had been returned to their mothers or relatives by the Franco-American Committee, or placed for the educational period of their lives in families, convents, or boys'

schools. The more recent were still in the various colonies established by Mrs. Hill and the other members of the Committee, where they received instruction until such time as their parents could be found, or some kind people were willing to adopt them.

It was on my first Sunday in Paris that Mr. Jaccaci and Mrs. Hill asked me to drive out with them to Versailles and visit a sanitorium for the children whose primary need was restoration to health. It was on the estate of Madame Philip Berard, who had contributed the building, while the entire funds for its upkeep, including a trained nurse, were provided by Mrs. Bliss.

Versailles was as green and peaceful as if a few miles away the sh.e.l.ls were not ripping up a field a shot. After lunch in the famous hotel ordinarily one of the gayest in France at that time of the year, we first visited the rest hospital of Miss Morgan, Miss Marbury and Miss de Wolfe, and then drove out into the country to Madame Berard's historical estate. Here, in the courtyard of a good-sized building, we were greeted by about forty children in pink-and-white gingham ap.r.o.ns, and heads either shaved or finished off with tightly braided pigtails. It seemed to me then that they were all smiling, and--for they had been there some weeks--that most of them looked round and healthy. But I soon found that some were still too languid to play.

One lying in a long chair on the terrace at the back of the house and gazing vacantly out at the beautiful woods was tubercular, the victim of months in a damp cellar. Another, although so excessively cheerful that I suspect she was not "all there" was also confined to a long chair, with a hip affection of some sort, but she was much petted, and surrounded by all the little luxuries that the victims of her smile had remembered to send her. One beautiful child had the rickets, and several suffered from intestinal prolapsus and other internal complaints, but were on the road to recovery.

While their Swedish nurse was putting them through their gymnastic exercises I studied their faces. At first my impression was one of prevailing homeliness; scrubbed, flat, peasant faces, for the most part, without the features or the mental apparatus that provides expression. But soon I singled out two or three pretty and engaging children, and rarely one whose face was devoid of character. And they stood well and went through their exercises with precision and vigor.

It was just before we left that my wandering attention was directed toward the scene to which I alluded in my first paragraph. The greater number of the children were shouting at play in a neighboring field.

The preternaturally happy invalid was smiling at the lovely woods beyond the terrace, woods where little princes had frolicked, and older princes had wooed and won. Mr. Jaccaci was still petting the beautiful little boy who looked like the _bambino_ on the celebrated fresco of Florence; Mrs. Hill was kissing and hugging several little girls who had clung to her skirts. It was, in spite of its origin, a happy scene.

I had been waiting by the door for these ceremonies of affection to finish, when I happened to glance at the far end of the wide stone terrace. There, by the bal.u.s.trade, in the shadow of the leafy woods, stood a girl of perhaps eight or ten. Her arms hung at her sides and she was staring straight before her while she cried as I never have seen a child cry; silently, bitterly, with her heavy plain face hardly twisted in its tragic silent woe.

I called Mrs. Hill's attention to her, for I, a stranger, could not intrude upon a grief like that, and the idol of all those children immediately ran over to the desolate figure. She questioned her, she put her arms about her. She might as well have addressed one of the broken stone nymphs in the woods. That young mind, startled from the present, it may be, by witnessing the endearments lavished upon prettier and smaller children, had traveled far. She was in the past, a past that anteceded even that past of death and thundering guns and rocking walls and empty stomachs; a past when the war, of whose like she had never heard, was still in the sleepless brains of the monster criminals of history, when she lived in a home in a quiet village with the fields beyond; where she had a mother, a father, sisters, brothers; where her tears had been over childish disappointments, and her mother had dried them. Small and homely and insignificant she stood there in her tragic detachment the symbol of all the woe of France, and of the depraved brutality of a handful of ambitious men who had broken the heart of the world.

XV

THE MARRAINES

It is hardly too much to say that every woman in France, from n.o.blesse to peasant, has her filleul (G.o.dson) in the trenches; in many cases, when she still has a considerable income in spite of taxes, moratoriums, and all the rest of it, she is a marraine on the grand scale and has several hundred. Children have their filleul, correspond with him, send him little presents several times a month and weep bitterly when word comes that he is deep in his last trench.

Servants save their wages so that when the filleuls of their mistresses come home on their six days' leave they at least can provide the afternoon wine and entertain them royally in the kitchen.

Old maids, still sewing in their attic for a few sous a day, have found a gleam of brightness for the first time in their somber lives in the knowledge that they give a mite of comfort or pleasure to some unknown man, offering his life in the defence of France, and whose letters, sentimental, effusive, playful, almost resign these poor stranded women to the crucifixion of their country.

Busy women like Madame d'Andigne sit up until two in the morning writing to their grateful filleuls. Girls, who once dreamed only of marrying and living the brilliant life of the _femme du monde_ spend hours daily not only on cheerful letters, but knitting, sewing, embroidering, purchasing for humble men who will mean nothing to their future, beyond the growth of spirit they unconsciously induced. Poor women far from Paris, where, at least, thousands of these permissionnaires linger for a few hours on their way home, toil all night over their letters to men for whom they conceive a profound sentiment but never can hope to see. Shop girls save their wages and lady's maids pilfer in a n.o.ble cause.

It was Madame Berard (who was a Miss Dana of Boston) who organized this magnificent spirit into a great oeuvre, so that thousands of men could be made happy whom no kindly woman so far had been able to discover.

Madame Berard, who has three sons in the army herself, nursed at the Front for several months after the war broke out. Even officers told her that they used to go off by themselves and cry because they never received a letter, or any sort of reminder that they were anything but part of a machine defending France. These officers, of course, were from the invaded district, and in addition to their isolation, were haunted by fears for their women now in the power of men who were as cruel as they were sensual and degenerate.

When she returned to her home she immediately entered upon the career of marraine, corresponding with several hundred of the men she either had known or whose names were given to her by their commanding officers. Naturally the work progressed beyond her capacity and she called upon friends to help her out. Out of this initial and purely personal devotion grew the great oeuvre, Mon Soldat, which has met with such a warm response in this country.

Madame Berard's headquarters are in a villa in the Parc Monceau. Here is conducted all the correspondence with the agents in other cities, here come thousands of letters and presents by every mail to be forwarded to the Front, and here come the grateful--and hopeful--permissionnaires, who never depart without a present and sometimes leave one, generally an ingenious trinket made in the trenches.

When I visited the villa last summer the oeuvre had eight thousand marraines, and no doubt the number has doubled to-day. Fifteen hundred of these were American, marshalled by Madame Berard's representative in New York, Mr. R.W. Neeser. Some of these fairy G.o.dmothers had ten filleuls. Packages were dispatched to the Front every week. Women that could not afford presents wrote regularly. There were at that time over twenty thousand filleuls.

The letters received from these men of all grades must be a source of psychologic as well as sympathetic interest to the more intelligent marraines, for when the men live long enough they reveal much of their native characteristics between the formalities so dear to the French.

But too many of them write but one letter, and sometimes they do not finish that.

XVI

PROBLEMS FOR THE FUTURE

I

What the bereft mothers of France will do after this war is over and they no longer have the mutilated sons of other mothers to nurse and serve and work for, is a problem for themselves; but what the younger women will do is a problem for the men.

Practically every day of the three months I spent in Pa.s.sy I used one of the three lines of tramcars that converge at La Muette (it is almost immoral to take a taxi these days); and I often amused myself watching the women conductors. They are quick, keen, and competent, but, whether it was owing to the dingy black uniforms and distressingly unbecoming Scotch military cap or not, it never did occur to me that there would be any mad scramble for them when the men of France once more found the leisure for love and marriage.

Grim as these women looked, however, "on their job," I often noticed them laughing and joking when, off duty for a few moments, they rested under the trees at the terminus. No doubt there is in them that ineradicable love of the home so characteristic of the French race, and as there is little beauty in their cla.s.s at the best, they may appeal more to the taste of men of that cla.s.s than they did to mine.

And it may be that those who are already provided with husbands will cheerfully renounce work in their favor and return to the hearthstone.

Perhaps, however, they will not, and wise heads of the s.e.x which has ruled the world so long are conferring at odd moments upon these and other females who have taken up so many of the reins laid down by men and driven the man-made teams with a success that could not be more complete if they had been bred to it, and with a relish that has grown, and shows no sign of retroaction.

[Ill.u.s.tration: DELIVERING THE POST]

The French women of the people, however, unlovely to look upon, toil-worn, absorbed from childhood in petty economics, have little to tempt men outside of the home in which they reign, so for those that do return the problem ends. But it is an altogether different matter with the women of the leisure cla.s.ses. The industrial women who have proved so competent in the positions occupied for centuries by men merely agitate the economic brain of France, but the future of the women of the upper strata of the bourgeoisie is shaking the very soul of the social psychologist.

II