Out To Win by Coningsby Dawson

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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 title 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 shell 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 township. The military authorities place the township 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 classes 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, threshing-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 God 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 hell which the Hun has created, beggars any description of
Dante.[1] It is still more appalling to remember that the external
hell which one sees, does not represent one tithe of the dreariness
which lies hidden behind the eyes of the inhabitants. To imagine amid
such scenes is to paralyse compassion with agony. The craving, never
far from one's thoughts, is the age-old desire, "O that one might
plead with God, 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 hell 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 passed 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 vanishing. 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 passed a cluster 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 accumulated. This is not the
unavoidable ruin of shell-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
refashion 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 pass 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 assistance.

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 passage 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.]

There has been a scheme proposed in America under which certain
individual cities and towns in the States shall make themselves
responsible for the re-building of certain individual cities and
towns in the devastated areas. The scheme is noble; it has only one
drawback, namely that it specialises effort and tends to ignore the
immensity of the problem as a whole. I visited one of these towns--it
is a town for which Philadelphia has made itself responsible. I wish
the people of Philadelphia might get a glimpse of the task they have
undertaken. There is a church-spire still standing; that is about
all. The rest is a pile of bricks. In the midst of this havoc some
Philadelphia ladies are living, one of whom is a nurse. They run a
dispensary for the people who keep house for the most part in cellars
and holes in the ground. A doctor visits them to hold a clinic ever
so often. They have a little warehouse, in which they keep the
necessities for immediate relief work. They have a rest hut for
soldiers. They employ whatever civilian labour they can hire for the
roofing of some of the least damaged cottages; for this temporary
reconstruction they provide the materials. When I was there, the place
was well within range of enemy shell-fire. The approach had to be made
by way of camouflaged roads. The sole anxiety of these brave women
was that on account of their nearness to the front-line, the military
might compel them to move back. In order to safeguard themselves
against this and to create a good impression, they were making a
strong point of entertaining whatever officers were billeted in
this vicinity. Their effort to remain in this rural Gomorrah was as
courageous as it was pathetic. "The people need us," they said, and
then, "you don't think we'll be moved back, do you?" I thought they
would, and I didn't think that the grateful officers would be able to
prevent it--they were subalterns and captains for the most part. "But
we once had a major to tea," they said. "A major!" I exclaimed, trying
to look impressed, "Oh well, that makes a difference!"

There was one unit I wished especially to visit; it was a unit
consisting entirely of women, sent over and financed by a women's
college. When I was in America last October and heard that they were
starting, I made up my mind that they were doomed to disappointment.
I pictured the battlefield of the Somme as I had last seen it--a sea
of mud stretching for miles, furrowed by the troughs of battered
trenches, pitted every yard with shell-holes and smeared over with
the wreckage of what once were human bodies. I could not imagine what
useful purpose women could serve amid such surroundings. It seemed
to me indecent that they should be allowed to go there. They were
going to do reconstruction, I was told. Reconstruction! you can't
reconstruct towns and villages the very foundations of which have been
buried. There is a Bible phrase which expresses such annihilation,
"The place thereof shall know it no more." Yes, only the names remain
in one's memory--the very sites have been covered up and the contours
of the landscape re-dug with high explosives. It took millions of
pounds to work this havoc. Men tunnelled under-ground and sprung mines
without warning. They climbed like birds of prey, into the heavens to
hurl death from the clouds. They lined up their guns, tier upon tier,
almost axle to axle in places, and at a given sign rained a deluge
of corruption on a country miles in front, which they could not even
discern. The infantry went over the top throwing bombs and piled
themselves up into mounds of silence. Nations far away toiled day and
night in factories--and all that they might achieve this repellant
desolation. The innocence of the project made one smile--a handful of
women sailing from America to reconstruct! To reconstruct will take
ten times more effort than was required to destroy. More than eight
hundred years ago William the Norman burnt his way through the North
Country to Chester. Yorkshire has not yet recovered; it is still a
wind-swept moorland. This women's college in America hoped to repair
in our lifetime a ruin a million times more terrible. Their courage
was depressing, it so exceeded the possible. They might love one
village back to life, but.... That is exactly what they are doing.

I arrived at Grecourt on an afternoon in January. It is here that the
women of the Smith College Unit have taken up their tenancy. We had
extraordinary difficulty in finding the place. The surrounding country
had been blasted and scorched by fire. There was no one left of whom
we could enquire. Everything had perished. Barns, houses, everything
habitable had been blown up by the departing Hun. As a study in the
painstaking completion of a purpose the scenes through which we
passed almost called for admiration. Berlin had ordered her armies to
destroy everything before withdrawing; they had obeyed with a loving
thoroughness. The world has never seen such past masters in the art
of demolition. Ever since they invaded Belgium, their hand has been
improving. In the neighbourhood of Grecourt they have equalled, if not
surpassed, their own best efforts. I would suggest to the Kaiser that
this manly performance calls for a distribution of iron crosses. It is
true that his armies were beaten and retiring; but does not that fact
rather enhance their valour? They were retiring, yet there were those
who were brave enough to delay their departure till they had achieved
this final victory over old women and children to the lasting honour
of their country. Such heroes are worthy to stand beside the sinkers
of the _Lusitania_. It is not just that they should go unrecorded.

In the midst of this hell I came across a tumbled chateau. Its roof,
its windows, its stairways were gone; only the crumbling shell of its
former happiness was left standing. A high wall ran about its grounds.
The place must have been pleasant with flower-gardens once. There was
an impressive entrance of wrought-iron, a porter's lodge and a broad
driveway. At the back I found rows of little wood-huts. There was a
fragrance of log-fires burning. I was glad of that, for I had heard
of the starving cold these women had had to endure through the first
winter months of their tenure. On tapping at a door, I found the
entire colony assembled. It was tea-time and Sunday. Ten out of the
seventeen who form the colony were present. A box-stove, such as
we use in our pioneer shacks in Canada, was throwing out a glow of
cheeriness. Candles had been lighted. Little knicknacks of feminine
taste had been hung here and there to disguise the bareness of the
walls. A bed, in one corner, was carefully disguised as a couch.
Save for the fact that there was no glass in the window--glass
being unobtainable in France at present--one might easily have
persuaded himself that he was back in America in the room of a
girl-undergraduate.

The method of my greeting furthered this illusion. Americans, both
men and women, have an extraordinary self-poise, a gift for remaining
normal in the most abnormal surroundings. They refuse to allow
themselves to be surprised by any upheaval of circumstances. "I should
worry," they seem to be saying, and press straight on with the job
in hand. There was one small touch which made the environment seem
even more friendly and unexceptional. One of the girls, on being
introduced, promptly read to me a letter which she had just received
from my sister in America. It made this oasis in an encircling
wilderness seem very much a part of a neighbourly world. This girl is
an example of the varied experiences which have trained American women
into becoming the nursemaids of the French peasantry.

She was visiting relations in Liege when the war broke out. On the
Sunday she went for a walk on the embattlements and was turned back.
Baulked in this direction, she strolled out towards the country and
found men digging trenches. That was the first she knew that war was
rumoured. On the Tuesday, two days later, Hun shells were detonating
on the house-tops. She was held prisoner in Liege for some months
after the Forts had fallen and saw more than all the crimes against
humanity that the Bryce Report has recorded. At last she disguised
herself and contrived her escape into Holland. From there she worked
her way back to America and now she is at Grecourt, starting shops in
the villages, educating the children, and behaving generally as if to
respond to the "Follow thou me" of the New Testament was an entirely
unheroic proceeding for a woman.

And what are these women doing at Grecourt? To condense their purpose
into a phrase, I should say that by their example they are bringing
sanity back into the lives of the French peasants. That is what the
American Fund for French Wounded is doing at Blerancourt, what all
these reconstruction units are doing in the devastated areas, and what
the American Red Cross is doing on a much larger scale for the whole
of France. At Grecourt they have a dispensary and render medical aid.
If the cases are grave, they are sent to the American Hospital at
Nesle. They hunt out the former tradespeople among the refugees and
encourage them to re-start their shops, lending them the money for
the purpose. If the men are captives in Germany, then their wives are
helped to carry on the business in their absence and for their sakes.
Groups of mothers are brought together and set to work on making
clothes for themselves and their children. Schools are opened so
that the children may be more carefully supervised. Two of the girls
at Grecourt have learnt to plough, and are instructing the peasant
women. Cows are kept and a dairy has been started to provide the
under-nourished babies of the district. An automobile-dispensary is
sent out from the hospital at Nesle to visit the remoter districts. It
has a seat along one side for the patient and the nurse. Over the seat
is a rack for medicine and instruments. On the opposite side is a
rack for splints and surgical dressings. On the floor of the car a
shower-bath is arranged, which is so compact that it can be carried
into the house where the water is to be heated. The water is put into
a tub on a wooden base; while the doctor manipulates the pump for the
shower, the nurse does the scrubbing. Most of the diseases among the
children are due to dirt; the importance of keeping clean, which such
colonies as that at Grecourt are impressing on all the people whom
they serve, is doing much to improve the general state of health. In
this direction, as in so many others, the most valuable contribution
that they are making to their districts is not material and financial,
but mental--the contribution of example and suggestion. Seventeen
women cannot re-build in a day an external civilisation which has been
blotted out by the savagery of a nation; but they can and they are
re-building the souls of the human derelicts who have survived the
savagery. This war is going to be won not by the combination of
nations which has most men and guns, but by the side which possesses
the highest spiritual qualities. The same is true of the countries
which will wipe out the effects of war most quickly when the war is
ended. The first countries to recover will be those which fight on
in a new way, after peace has been signed, for the same ideals for
which they have shed their blood. The sight of these American women,
living helpfully and voluntarily for the sake of others among hideous
surroundings, is a perpetual reminder to the dispirited refugees that,
whatever else is lost, valiance and loyalty still survive.

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