Out To Win by Coningsby Dawson

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The great thing was to make the demoralised Italians feel that America
was on the spot and helping them. The sending of troops could not have
reused their fighting spirit. They were sick of fighting. What they
needed was the assurance that the world was not wholly brutal--that
there was some one who was merciful, who did not condemn and who
was moved by their sorrow. This assurance the prompt action of the
American Red Cross gave. It restored in the affirmative with mercy,
precisely the quality which Hun fury and propaganda had destroyed with
lies. It restored to them their belief in the nobility of mankind, out
of which belief grows all true courage.

As the work progressed, it branched out on a much larger scale,
embracing civilian, military and child-welfare activities. In the
month of November upward of half a million lire were placed in the
hands of American consuls for distribution. One million lire were
contributed for the benefit of soldiers' families. A permanent
headquarters was established with trained business men and men who had
had experience under Hoover in Belgium in charge of its departments.
Over 100 hospitals and two principal magazines of hospital stores
had been lost in the retreat. The American Red Cross made up this
deficiency by supplying the bedding for no less than 3,000 beds.
Five weeks after the first two representatives had reached Rome
three complete ambulance sections, each section being made up of 20
ambulances, a staff car, a kitchen trailer and 33 men, were turned
over to the Italian Medical Service of the third Army. By the first
week in December the stream of refugees had practically stopped. Italy
had been made to realise that she was not fighting alone; her morale
had returned to her. This work, which had been initially undertaken
from purely altruistic motives, had proved to possess a value of the
highest military importance--an importance of the spirit utterly out
of proportion to the money and labour expended. Magnanimity arouses
magnanimity. In this case it revived the flame of Garibaldi which had
all but died. It achieved a strategic victory of the soul which no
amount of military assistance could have accomplished. The victory
of the American Red Cross on the Italian Front is all the more
significant since it was not until months later that Congress declared
war on Austria.

The campaign which the American Red Cross is waging in every country
in which it operates, is frankly an "out to win" campaign. To win the
war is its one and only object. What the army does for the courage of
the body, the Red Cross does for the courage of the mind. It builds
up the hearts and hopes of people who in three and a half years have
grown numb. It restores the human touch to their lives and, with
it, the spiritual horizon. Its business, while the army is still
preparing, is to bring home to the Allies in every possible way the
fact that America, with her hundred and ten millions of population, is
in the war with them, eager to play the game, anxious to sacrifice as
they have sacrificed, to give her man-power and resources as they have
done, until justice has been established for every man and nation.

It is necessary to lay stress on this programme since it differs
greatly from the popular conception of the functions of the Red Cross
in the battle area. It was on the field of Solferino in 1859, that
Henri Dunant went out before the fury had spent itself to tend the
wounded. It was here that he was fired with his great ambition to
found a non-combatant service, which should recognise no enemies and
be friends with every army. His ambition was realised when in 1864 the
Conference at Geneva chose the Swiss flag, reversed, as its emblem--a
red cross on a field of white--and laid the foundations for those
international understandings which have since formed for all
combatants, except the Hun in this present warfare, the protective law
for the sick and wounded. The original purpose of the Red Cross still
fills the imagination of the masses to the exclusion of all else that
it is doing. Directly the term "Red Cross" is mentioned the picture
that forms in most men's minds is of ambulances galloping through
the thick of battle-smoke and of devoted stretcher-bearers who brave
danger not to kill, but in order that they may save lives.

This war has changed all that. To-day the Red Cross has to minister
to not the wounded of armies only, but to the wounded of nations. In
a country like France, with trenches dug the entire length of her
eastern frontier and vast territories from which the entire population
has been evacuated, the wounds of her armies are small in comparison
with the wounds, bodily and mental, of her civil population--wounds
which are the outcome of over three years of privation. When the civil
population of any country has lost its pluck, no matter how splendid
the spirit of its soldiers, its armies become paralysed. The civilians
can commence peace negotiations behind the backs of their men in the
trenches. They can insist on peace by refusing to send them ammunition
and supplies. As a matter of fact the morale of the soldiers varies
directly with the morale of the civilians for whom they fight. Behind
every soldier stand a woman and a group of children. Their safety is
his inspiration. If they are neglected, his sacrifice is belittled.
If they beg that he should lay down his arms, his determination is
weakened. It is therefore a vital necessity, quite apart from the
humanitarian aspect, that the wounds of the civilians of belligerent
countries should be cared for. If the civilians are allowed to become
disheartened and cowardly, the heroic ideal of their fighting-men is
jeopardised. This fact has been recognised by the Red Cross Societies
of all countries in the present war; a large part of their energies
has been devoted to social and relief work of a civil nature. Even
in their purely military departments, the comfort of the troops
claims quite as much attention as their medical treatment and
hospitalisation. As a matter of fact, the actual carrying of the
wounded out of the trenches to the comparative safety of the dressing
station is usually done by combatants. A man has to live continually
under shell-fire to acquire the immunity to fear which passes for
courage. The bravest man is likely to get "jumpy," if he only faces up
to a bombardment occasionally. There are other reasons why combatants
should do the stretcher-bearing which do not need elaborating. The
combatants have an expert knowledge of their own particular frontage;
they are "wise" to the barraged areas; they are "up front" and
continually coming and going, so it is often an economy of man-power
for them to attend to their own wounded in the initial stages; they
are the nearest to a comrade when he falls and all carry the necessary
first-aid dressings; the emblem of the Red Cross has proved to be only
a slight protection, as the Hun is quite likely not to respect it.
What I am driving at is that the Red Cross has had to adapt itself to
the new conditions of modern warfare, so that very many of its most
important present-day functions are totally different from what
popular fancy imagines.

The American Red Cross has its French Headquarters in a famous
gambling club in the Place de la Concorde. It is somewhat strange to
pass through these rooms where rakes once flung away fortunes, and
to find them industriously orderly with the conscience of an imported
nation. By far the larger part of the staff are business men of
the Wall Street type--not at all the kind who have been accustomed
to sentimentalise over philanthropy. There is also a sprinkling
of trained social workers, clergy, journalists, and university
professors. The medical profession is represented by some of the
leading specialists of the States, but at Headquarters they are
distinctly in the minority. The purely medical work of the American
Red Cross forms only a part of its total activities. The men
at the head of affairs are bankers, merchants, presidents of
corporations--men who have been trained to think in millions and
to visualise broad areas. Girls are very much in evidence. They are
usually volunteers, drawn from all classes, who offered their services
to do anything that would help. To-day they are typists, secretaries,
stenographers, nurses.

The organisation is divided into three main departments:
the department of military affairs, of civil affairs and of
administration. Under these departments come a variety of bureaus:
the bureau of rehabilitation and reconstruction; of the care and
prevention of tuberculosis; of needy children and infant mortality;
of refugees and relief; of the re-education of the French mutiles; of
supplies; of the rolling canteens for the French armies; of the U.S.
Army Division; of the Military, Medical and Surgical Division, etc.
They are too numerous to mention in detail. The best way I can convey
the picture of immense accomplishment is to describe what I actually
saw in the field of operations.

The first place I will take you to is Evian, because here you see the
tragedy and need of France as embodied in individuals. Evian-les-Bains
is on Lake Geneva, looking out across the water to Switzerland. It is
the first point of call across the French frontier for the repatries
returning from their German bondage. When the Boche first swept down
on the northern provinces he pushed the French civilian population
behind him. He has since kept them working for him as serfs, labouring
in the captured coal-mines, digging his various lines of defences,
setting up wire-entanglements, etc. Apart from the testimony of
repatriated French civilians, I myself have seen messages addressed
by Frenchmen to their wives, scrawled surreptitiously on the planks of
Hun dug-outs in the hope that one day the dug-outs would be captured,
and the messages passed on by a soldier of the Allies. After three and
a half years of enforced labour, many of these captured civilians are
worked out. To the Boche, with his ever-increasing food-shortage, they
represent useless mouths. Instead of filling them he is driving their
owners back, broken and useless, by way of Switzerland. To him human
beings are merchandise to be sold upon the hoof like cattle. No
spiritual values enter into the bargain. When the body is exhausted it
is sent to the knacker's, as though it belonged to a worn-out horse.
The entire attitude is materialistic and degrading. Evian-les-Bains,
the once gay gambling resort of the cosmopolitan, has become the
knacker's shop for French civilians exhausted by their German
servitude. The Hun shoves them across the border at the rate of about
1,300 a day. From the start I have always felt that this war was a
crusade; what I saw at Evian made me additionally certain. When I was
in the trenches I never had any hatred of the Boche. Probably I shall
lose my hatred in pity for him when I get to the Front again--but
for the present I hate him. It's here in France that one sees what a
vileness he has created in the children's and women's lives.

I took the night train down from Paris. Early in the morning I woke
up to find myself in the gorges of the Alps, high peaks with romantic
Italian-looking settings soaring on every side. At noon we reached
Lake Geneva, lying slate-coloured and sombre beneath a wintry sky.
That afternoon I saw the train of repatries arrive.

I was on the platform when the train pulled into the station. It might
have been a funeral cortege, only there was a horrible difference: the
corpses pretended to be alive. The American Ambulance men were there
in force. They climbed into the carriages and commenced to help the
infirm to alight. The exiles were all so stiff with travel that they
could scarcely move at first. The windows of the train were grey with
faces. Such faces! All of them old, even the little children's. The
Boche makes a present to France of only such human wreckage as is
unuseful for his purposes. He is an acute man of business. The convoy
consisted of two classes of persons--the very ancient and the very
juvenile. You can't set a man of eighty to dig trenches and you can't
make a prostitute out of a girl-child of ten. The only boys were of
the mal-nourished variety. Men, women and children--they all had the
appearance of being half-witted.

They were terribly pathetic. As I watched them I tried to picture to
myself what three and a half long years of captivity must have meant.
How often they must have dreamt of the exaltation of this day--and
now that it had arrived, they were not exalted. They had the look of
people so spiritually benumbed that they would never know despair or
exaltation again. They had a broken look; their shoulders were crushed
and their skirts bedraggled. Many of them carried babies--pretty
little beggars with flaxen hair. It wasn't difficult to guess their
parentage.

As they were herded on the platform a low, strangled kind of moaning
went up. I watched individual lips to see where the sound came from.
I caught no movement. The noise was the sighing of tired animals.
Every one had some treasured possession. Here was an old man with
an alarm-clock; there an aged woman with an empty bird-cage. A boy
carried half-a-dozen sauce-pans strung together. Another had a spare
pair of patched boots under his arm. Quite a lot of them clutched a
bundle of umbrellas. I found myself reflecting that these were the
remnants of families who had been robbed of everything that they
valued in the world. Whatever they had saved from the ruin ought to
represent the possession which had claimed most of their affections,
and yet--! What did an alarm-clock, an empty bird-cage, a pair of
patched boots, a string of sauce-pans, a bundle of ragged umbrellas
signify in any life? What utter poverty, if these were the best that
they could save!

There was a band on the platform, consisting mainly of bugles and
drums, to welcome them. The leader is reputed to be the laziest man
in the French Army. It is said that they tried him at everything and
then, in despair, sent him to Evian to drum forgotten happiness into
the bones of repatries. Whatever his former military record, he now
does his utmost to impersonate the defiant and impassioned soul of
France. His moustaches are curled fiercely. His brows are heavy as
thunderclouds. When he drums, the veins swell out in his neck with the
violence of his energy.

Suddenly, with an ominous preliminary rumble, the band struck up
the Marseillaise. You should have seen the change in this crowd
of corpses. You must remember that these people had been so long
accustomed to lies and snares that it would probably take days to
persuade them that they were actually safe home in France.

As the battle-song for which they had suffered shook the air their
lips rustled like leaves. There was hardly any sound--only a hoarse
whisper. Then, all of a sudden, words came--an inarticulate, sobbing
commotion. Tears blinded the eyes of every spectator, even those who
had witnessed similar scenes often; we were crying because the singing
was so little human.

"Vive la France! Vive la France!" They waved flags--not the
tri-colour, but flags which had been given them in Switzerland. They
clung together dazed, women with slatternly dresses, children with
peaked faces, men unhappy and unshaven. A woman caught sight of my
uniform. "Vive l'Angleterre," she cried, and they all came stumbling
forward to embrace me. It was horrible. They creaked like automatons.
They gestured and mouthed, but the soul had been crushed out of their
eyes. You don't need any proofs of Hun atrocities; the proofs are to
be seen at Evian. There are no severed hands, no crucified bodies;
only hearts that have been mutilated. Sorrow is at its saddest when
it cannot even contrive to appear dignified. There is no dignity
about the repatries at Evian, with their absurd umbrellas, sauce-pans,
patched-boots, alarm-clocks and bird-cages. They do not appeal to one
as sacrificed patriots. There is no nobility in their vacant stare.
They create a cold feeling of bodily decay--only it is the spirit that
is dead and gangrenous.

There is a blasphemous story by Leonid Andreyev, which recounts the
bitterness of the after years of Lazarus and the mischief Christ
wrought in recalling him from the grave. After his unnatural return
to life there was a blueness as of putrescence beneath his pallor;
an iciness to his touch; a choking silence in his presence; a horror
in his gaze, as if he were remembering his three days in the
sepulchre--as if forbidden knowledge groped behind his eyes. He rarely
looked at any one; there were none who courted his glance, who did not
creep away to die. The terror of his fame spread beyond Bethany. Rome
heard of him, and at that safe distance laughed. It did not laugh
after Caesar Augustus had sent for him. Caesar Augustus was a god upon
earth; he could not die. But when he had questioned Lazarus, peeped
through the windows of his eyes, and read what lay hidden in that
forbidden memory, he commanded that red-hot irons should quench such
sight for ever. From Rome Lazarus groped his way back to Palestine and
there, long years after his Saviour had been crucified, continued to
stumble through his own particular Gethsemane of blindness. I thought
of that story in the presence of this crowd, which carried with it the
taint of the grave.

But the band was still playing the Marseillaise--over and over it
played it. With each repetition it was as though these people, three
years dead, made another effort to cast aside their shrouds. Little
by little something was happening--something wonderful. Backs were
straightening; skirts were being caught up; resolution was rippling
from face to face--it passed and re-passed with each new roll of the
drums. The hoarse cries and moaning with which we had commenced were
gradually transforming themselves into singing.

There were some who were too weak to walk; these were carried by the
American Red Cross men into the waiting ambulances. The remainder were
marshalled into a disorderly procession and led out of the station by
the band.

We were moving down the hill to the palaces beside the lake--the
palaces to which all France used to troop for pleasure. We moved
soddenly at first, shuffling in our steps. But the drums were still
rolling out their defiance and the bugles were still blowing. The
laziest man in the French Army was doing his utmost to belie his
record. The ill-shod, flattened feet took up the music. They began to
dance. Were there ever feet less suited to dancing? That they should
dance was the acme of tragedy. Stockings fell down in creases about
the ankles. Women commenced to jig their Boche babies in their arms;
consumptive men and ancients waved their sauce-pans and grotesque
bundles of umbrellas. The sight was damnable. It was a burlesque. It
pierced the heart. What right had the Boche to leave these people so
comic after he had squeezed the life-blood out of them?

All his insults to humanity became suddenly typified in these five
hundred jumping tatterdemalions--the way in which he had plundered the
world of its youth, its cleanness, its decency. I felt an anger which
battlefields had never aroused, where men moulder above ground and
become unsightly beneath the open sky. The slain of battlefields
were at least motionless; they did not gape and grin at you with
the dreadful humour of these perambulating dead. I felt the Galilean
passion which animates every Red Cross worker at Evian: the agony
to do something to make these murdered people live again. This last
convoy came, I discovered, from a city behind the Boche lines against
which last summer I had often directed fire. It was full in sight from
my observing station. I had watched the very houses in which these
people, who now walked beside me, had sheltered. For three and a half
years these women's bodies had been at the Hun's mercy. I tried to
bring the truth home to myself. Their men and young girls had been
left behind. They themselves had been flung back on overburdened
France only because they were no longer serviceable. They were
returning actually penniless, though seemingly with money. The thrifty
German makes a practice of seizing all the good redeemable French
money of the repatries before he lets them escape him, giving them in
exchange worthless paper stuff of his own manufacture, which has no
security behind it and is therefore not negotiable.

We came to the Casino, where endless formalities were necessary. First
of all in the big hall, formerly devoted to gambling, the repatries
were fed at long tables. As I passed, odd groups seeing my uniform,
hurriedly dropped whatever they were doing and, removing their caps,
stood humbly at attention. There was fear in their promptness. Where
they came from an officer exacted respect with the flat of his
sword. What a dumb, helpless jumble of humanity! It was as though the
occupants of a morgue had become galvanised and had temporarily risen
from their slabs.

The band had been augmented by trumpets. It took its place in the
gallery and deluged the hall with patriotic fervour. An old man
climbed on a table and yelled, "Vive La France!" But they had grown
tired of shouting; they soon grew tired. The cry was taken up faintly
and soon exhausted itself. Nothing held their attention for long.
Most of them sat hunched up and inert, weakly crying. They were not
beautiful. They were not like our men who die in battle. They were
animated memories of horror. "What lies before us? What lies before
us?" That was the question that their silence asked perpetually. Some
of them had husbands with the French army; others had sweethearts.
What would those men say to the flaxen-haired babies who nestled
against the women's breasts? And the sin was not theirs--they were
such tired, pretty mites. "What lies before us?" The babies, too,
might well have asked that question. Do you wonder that I at last
began to share the Frenchman's hatred for the Boche?

An extraordinary person in a white tie, top hat and evening dress
entered. He looked like a cross between Mr. Gerard's description of
himself in Berlin and a head-waiter. He evidently expected his advent
to cause a profound sensation. I found out why: he was the official
welcomer to Evian. Twice a day, for an infinity of days, he had
entered in solemn fashion, faced the same tragic assembly, made the
same fiery oration, gained applause at the climax of the same rounded
periods and allowed his voice to break in the same rightly timed
places. Having kept his audience in sufficient suspense as regards
his mission, he unwrapped the muffler from his neck, removed his coat,
felt his throat to see whether it was in good condition, swelled out
his chest, including his waist-coat which was spanned by the broad
ribbon of his office, then let loose the painter of his emotion and
slipped off into the mid-stream of perfunctory eloquence. With all his
disrobing he had retained his top-hat; he held it in his right hand
with the brim pressed against his thigh, very much in the manner of
a showman at a circus. It contributed largely to the opulence of his
gestures.

He always seemed to have concluded and was always starting up afresh,
as if in reluctant response to spectral clapping. He called upon the
repatries never to forget the crimes that had been wrought against
them--to spread abroad the fire of their indignation, the story of
their ravished womanhood and broken families all over France. They
watched him leaden-eyed and wept softly. To forget, to forget, that
was all that they wanted--to blot out all the past. This man with
the top-hat and the evening-dress, he hadn't suffered--how could he
understand? They didn't want to remember; with those flaxen-haired
children against their breasts the one boon they craved was
forgetfulness. And so they cowered and wept softly. It was
intolerable.

And now the formalities commenced. They all had to be medically
examined. Questions of every description were asked them. They were
drifted from bureau to bureau where people sat filling up official
blanks. The Americans see to the children. They come from living in
cellars, from conditions which are insanitary, from cities in the
army zones where they were underfed. The fear is that they may
spread contagion all over France. When infectious cases are found the
remnants of families have to be broken up afresh. The mothers collapse
on benches sobbing their hearts out as their children are led away.
For three and a half years everything they have loved has been led
away--how can they believe that these Americans mean only mercy?

From three to four hours are spent in completing all these necessary
investigations. Before the repatries are conducted to their billets,
all their clothes have to be disinfected and every one has to be
bathed. The poor people are utterly worn out by the end of it--they
have already done a continuous four days' journey in cramped trains.
Before being sent to France they have been living for from two to
three weeks in Belgium. The Hun always sends the repatries to Belgium
for a few weeks before returning them. The reason for this is that
they for the most part come from the army zones, and a few weeks will
make any information they possess out of date. Another reason is
that food is more plentiful in Belgium, thanks to the Allies' Relief
Commission. These people have been kept alive on sugar-beets for the
past few months, so it is as well to feed them at the Allies' expense
for a little while, in order that they may create a better impression
when they return to France. The American doctors pointed out to me the
pulpy flesh of the children and the distended stomachs which, to the
unpractised eye, seemed a sign of over-nourishment. "Wind and water,"
they said; "that's all these children are. They've no stamina.
Sugar-beets are the most economic means of just keeping the body and
the soul together."

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