Out To Win by Coningsby Dawson

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10

From Grecourt I went farther afield to Croix, Y and Matigny. Here
a young architect is in charge of the reconstruction. No attempt
is being made at present to re-build the farms entirely. Labour is
difficult to obtain--it is all required for military purposes. The
same applies to materials. Patching is the best that can be done. Just
to get a roof over one corner of a ruin is as much as can be hoped
for. Until that is done the people have to live in cellars, in
shell-holes, in verminous dug-outs like beasts of prey or savages.
Their position is far more deplorable than that of Indians, for they
once knew the comforts of civilisation. For instance, I visited a
farmer who before the war was a millionaire in French money. Many of
the farmers of this district were; their acreages were large even by
prairie standards. The American Red Cross has managed to reconstruct
one room for him in a pile of debris which was once a spacious house.
There he lives with his old wife, who, during the Hun occupation,
became nearly blind and almost completely paralytic. His sons and
daughters have been swept beyond his knowledge by the departing
armies. Before the Huns left, he had to stand by and watch them
uselessly lay waste his home and possessions. His trees are cut down.
His barns are laid flat. His cattle are behind the German lines. At
the age of seventy, he is starting all afresh and working harder than
ever he did in his life. The young architect of the Red Cross visits
him often. They sit in the little room of nights, erecting barns and
houses more splendid than those that have vanished, but all in the
green quiet of the untested future. They shall be standing by the time
the captive sons come back. It is a game at which they play for the
sake of the blinded mother; she listens smilingly, nodding her old
head, her frail hands folded in her lap.

These pictures which I have painted are typical of some of the things
that the American Red Cross is doing. They are isolated examples,
which by no means cover all its work. There are the rolling canteens
which it has instituted, which follow the French armies. There are
the rest houses it has built on the French line of communications for
_poilus_ who are going on leave or returning. There is the farm for
the mutilated, where they are taught to be specialists in certain
branches of agriculture, despite their physical curtailments. There
is the great campaign against tuberculosis which it is waging. There
are its well-conceived warehouses, stored with medical supplies and
military and relief necessities, spreading in a great net-work of
usefulness and connected by ambulance transport throughout the whole
of the stricken part of France. There are its hospitals, both military
and civil. There is the "Lighthouse" for men wounded in battle,
founded by Miss Holt in Paris.

I visited this Lighthouse; it is a place infinitely brave and
pathetic. Most of the men were picked heroes at the war; they wear
their decorations in proof of it. They are greater heroes than ever
now. Nothing has more deeply moved me than my few hours among those
sightless eyes. In many cases the faces are hideously marred, the
eyelids being quite grown together. In several cases besides the eyes,
the arms or legs have gone. I have talked and written a good deal
about the courage which this war has inspired in ordinary men; but the
courage of these blinded men, who once were ordinary, leaves me silent
and appalled. They are happy--how and why I cannot understand. Most
of them have been taught at the Lighthouse how to overcome their
disability and are earning their living as weavers, stenographers,
potters, munition-workers. Quite a number of them have families
to support. The only complaint that is made against them by their
brother-workmen is that they are too rapid; they set too strenuous
a pace for the men with eyes. It is a fact that in all trades where
sensitiveness of touch is an asset, blindness has increased their
efficiency. This is peculiarly so at the Sevres pottery-works where I
saw them making the moulds for retorts. A soldier, who was teaching a
seeing person Braille, explained his own quickness of perception when
he exclaimed, "Ah, madame, it is your eyes which prevent you from
seeing!"

I heard some of the stories of the men. There was a captain who, after
he had been wounded and while there was yet time to save his sight,
insisted on being taken to his General that he might inform him about
a German mine. When his mission was completed, his chance of seeing
was forever ended.

There was a lieutenant who was blinded in a raid and left for dead
out in No Man's Land. Just before he became unconscious, he placed
two lumps of earth in line in the direction which led back to his
own trenches. He knew the direction by the sound of the retreating
footsteps. Whenever he came to himself he groped his way a little
nearer to France and before he fainted again, registered the direction
with two more lumps of earth placed in line. It took him a day to
crawl back.

There was another man who illustrated in a finer way that saying, "It
is your eyes which prevent you from seeing." This man before the war
was a village-priest, and no credit to his calling. He had a sister
who had spent her youth for him and worshipped him beyond everything
in the world. He took her adoration brutally for granted. At the
outbreak of hostilities he joined the army, serving bravely in the
ranks till he was hopelessly blinded. Having always been a thoroughly
selfish man, his privation drove him nearly to madness. He had always
used the world; now for the first time he had been used by it. His
viciousness broke out in blasphemy; he hated both God and man. He made
no distinction between people in the mass and the people who tried to
help him. His whole desire was to inflict as much pain as he himself
suffered. When his sister came to visit him, he employed every
ingenuity of word and gesture to cause her agony. Do what she would,
he refused to allow her love either to reach or comfort him. She was
only a simple peasant woman. In her grief and loneliness she thought
matters out and arrived at what seemed to her a practical solution.
On her next visit to the hospital she asked to see the doctor. She was
taken to him and made her request. "I love my brother," she said; "I
have always given him everything. He has lost his eyes and he cannot
endure it. Because I love him, I could bear it better. I have been
thinking, and I am sure it is possible: I want you to remove my eyes
and to put them into his empty sockets."

When the priest was told of her offer, he laughed derisively at her
for a fool. Then the reason she had given for her intended sacrifice
was told to him, "Because I love him, I could bear it better." He fell
silent. All that day he refused food; in the eternal darkness, muffled
by his bandages, he was arriving at the truth: she had been willing
to suffer what he was now suffering, because she loved him. The hand
of love would have made the burden bearable and, if for her, why not
for himself? At last, after years of refusal, the simplicity of her
tenderness reached and touched him. Presently he was discharged from
hospital and taken in hand by the teachers of the blind, who taught
him to play the organ. One day his sister came and led him back to his
village-parish. Before the war, by his example, he was a danger to
God and man; now he sets a very human example of sainthood, labouring
without ceasing for others more fortunate than himself. He has
increased his efficiency for service by his blindness. Of him it
is absolutely true that it was his eyes that prevented him from
seeing--from seeing the splendour that lay hidden in himself, no less
than in his fellow creatures.

So far I have sketched in the main what the war of compassion is
doing for the repatries--the captured French civilians sent back from
Germany--and for the refugees of the devastated areas, who have either
returned to their ruined farms and villages or were abandoned as
useless when the Hun retired. To complete the picture it remains to
describe what is being done for the civilian population which has
always lived in the battle area of the French armies.

The question may be asked why civilians have been allowed to live
here. Curiously enough it is due to the extraordinary humanity of
the French Government which makes allowances for the almost religious
attachment of the peasant to his tiny plot of land; it is an
attachment which is as instinctive and fiercely jealous as that of
a cat for her young. He will endure shelling, gassing and all the
horrors that scientific invention has produced; he will see his
cottage and his barns shattered by bombs and siege-guns, but he will
not leave the fields that he has tilled and toiled over, unless he
is driven out at the point of the bayonet. I have been told, though
I have never seen it, that behind quiet parts of the line, French
peasants will gather in their harvest actually in full sight of the
Hun. Shells may be falling, but they go stolidly on with their work.
There is another reason for this leniency of the Government: they have
enough refugees on their hands already and are not going in search
of further trouble, until the trouble is forced upon them by
circumstances.

As may be imagined, these people live under physical conditions that
are terrible. They consist for the most part of women and children;
the women are over-worked and the children are neglected. Skin
diseases and vermin abound. Clothes are negligible. Washing is a
forgotten luxury. Much havoc is wrought by asphyxiating gases which
drift across the front-line into the back-country. To the adults are
issued protective masks like those that the soldiers wear, but the
children do not know how to use them. Many of them are orphans, and
live like little animals on roots and offal; for shelter they seek
holes in the ground. The American Red Cross is specialising on its
efforts to reclaim these children, realising that whatever happens to
the adults, the children are the hope of the world.

The part of the Front to which I went to study this work was made
famous in 1914 by the disembowellings, shootings and unspeakable
indecencies that were perpetrated there. Near by is the little village
in which Sister Julie risked her life by refusing to allow her wounded
to be butchered. She wears the Legion of Honour now. In the same
neighbourhood there lives a Mayor who, after having seen his young
wife murdered, protected her murderers from the lynch-law of the mob
when next day the town was recaptured. In the same district there is
a meadow where fifteen old men were done to death, while a Hun officer
sat under an oak-tree, drinking mocking toasts to the victims of each
new execution.

The influence of more than three years of warfare has not been
elevating, as far as these peasants are concerned. As early as July,
a little over a month from its arrival in France, an S.O.S. was sent
out by the Prefet of the department, begging the American Red Cross
to come and help. In addition to the refugees of old standing, 350
children had been suddenly put into his care. He had nothing but a
temporary shelter for them and his need for assistance was acute.
Within a few hours the Red Cross had despatched eight workers--a
doctor, nurse, bacteriologist, an administrative director and two
women to take charge of the bedding, food and clothing. A camionette
loaded with condensed milk and other relief necessities was sent by
road. On the arrival of the party, they found the children herded
together in old barracks, dirty and unfurnished, with no sanitary
appliances whatsoever. The sick were crowded together with the well.
Of the 350 children, twenty-one were under one year of age, and the
rest between one and eight years. The reason for this sudden crisis
was that the Huns were bombing the villages behind the lines with
asphyxiating gas. The military authorities had therefore withdrawn
all children who were too young to adjust their masks themselves, at
the same time urging their mothers to carry on the patriotic duty of
gathering in the harvest. It was the machinery of mercy which had been
built up in six months about this nucleus of eight persons that I set
out to visit.

The roads were crowded with the crack troops of France--the Foreign
Legion, the Tailleurs, the Moroccans--all marching in one direction,
eastward to the trenches. There were rumours of something immense
about to happen--no one knew quite what. Were we going to put on a
new offensive or were we going to resist one? Many answers were given:
they were all guesswork. Meanwhile, our progress was slow; we were
continually halting to let brigades of artillery and regiments
of infantry pour into the main artery of traffic from lanes and
side-roads. When we had backed our car into hedges to give them
room to pass, we watched the sea of faces. They were stern and yet
laughing, elated and yet childish, eloquent of the love of living and
yet familiar with their old friend, Death. They knew that something
big was to be demanded of them; before the demand had been made,
they had determined to give to the ultimate of their strength. There
was a spiritual resolution about their faces which made all their
expressions one--the uplifted expression of the unconquered soul of
France. That expression blotted out their racial differences. It did
not matter that they were Arabs, Negroes, Normans, Parisians; they
owned to one nationality--the nationality of martyrdom--and they
marched with a single purpose, that freedom might be restored to the
world.

When we reached the city to which we journeyed, night had fallen.
There was something sinister about our entry; we were veiled in fog,
and crept through the gate and beneath the ramparts with extinguished
head lights. Scarcely any one was abroad. Those whom we passed, loomed
out of the mist in silence, passed stealthily and vanished.

This city is among the most beautiful in France; until recently,
although within range of the Hun artillery, it had been left
undisturbed. In return the French had spared an equally beautiful city
on the other side of the line. This clemency, shown towards two gems
of architecture, was the result of one of those silent bargains that
are arranged in the language of the guns. But the bargain had been
broken by the time I arrived. Bombing planes had been over; the Allied
planes had retaliated. Houses, emptied like cart-loads of bricks into
the street, were significant of the ruin that was pending. Any moment
the orchestra of destruction might break into its overture. Without
cessation one could hear a distant booming. The fiddlers of death were
tuning up.

Early next morning I went to see the Prefet. He is an old man, whose
courage has made him honoured wherever the French tongue is spoken.
Others have thought of their own safety and withdrawn into the
interior. Never from the start has his sense of duty wavered. Night
and day he has laboured incessantly for the refugees, whom he refers
to always as "my suffering people." He kept me waiting for some
time. Directly I entered he volunteered the explanation: he had just
received word from the military authorities that the whole of his
civil population must be immediately evacuated. To evacuate a civil
population means to tear it up and transplant it root and branch, with
no more of its possession than can be carried as hand-baggage. Some
75,000 people would be made homeless directly the Prefet published the
order.

It was a dramatic moment, full of tragedy. I glanced out into the
square filled with wintry sunlight. I took note of the big gold gates
and the monuments. I watched the citizens halting here and there to
chat, or going about their errands with a quiet confidence. All this
was to be shattered; it had been decided. The same thing was to happen
here as had happened at Ypres. The bargain was off. The enemy city,
the other side of the line, was to be shelled; this city had to take
the consequences. The bargain was off not only as far as the city was
concerned, but also as regards its inhabitants' happiness. They had
homes to-day; they would be fugitives to-morrow. Then I looked at
the old Prefet, who had to break the news to them. He was sitting at
his table in his uniform of office, supporting his head in his tired
hands.

"What are you going to do?" I asked.

"I have called on the Croix Rouge Americaine to help me," he
said. "They have helped me before; they will help me again. These
Americans--I have never been to America--but they are my friends.
Since they came, they have looked after my babies. Their doctors and
nurses have worked day and night for my suffering people. They are
silent; but they do things. There is love in their hands."

While I was still with him the Red Cross officials arrived. They had
already wired to Paris. Their lorries and ambulances were converging
from all points to meet the emergency. They undertook at once to place
all their transport facilities at his disposal. They had started their
arrangements for the handling of the children. Extra personnel were
being rushed to the spot. There was one unit already in the city. They
had hoped to go nearer to the Front, but on arriving had learnt that
their permission had been cancelled. It was a bit of luck. They could
set to work at once.

I knew this unit and went out to find it. It was composed of American
society girls, who had been protected all their lives from ugliness.
They had sailed from New York with the vaguest ideas of the war
conditions they would encounter; they believed that they were needed
to do a nurse-maid's job for France. Their original purpose was to
found a creche for the babies of women munition-workers. When they
got to Paris they found that such institutions were not wanted. They
at once changed their programme, and asked to be allowed to take
their creche into the army zone and convert it into a hospital for
refugee children. There were interminable delays due to passport
formalities--the delays dragged on for three months. During those
three months they were called on for no sacrifice; they lived just
as comfortably as they had done in New York and, consequently, grew
disgusted. They had sailed for France prepared to give something that
they had never given before, and France did not seem to want it. At
last their passports came; without taking any chances, they got out
of Paris and started for the Front. Their haste was well-timed; no
sooner had they departed than a message arrived, cancelling their
permissions. They had reached the doomed city in which I was at
present, two days before its sentence was pronounced. Within four
hours of their arrival they had had their first experience of being
bombed. Their intention had been to open their hospital in a town
still nearer to the front-line. The hospital was prepared and waiting
for them. But in the last few days the military situation had changed.
A hospital so near the trenches stood a good chance of being destroyed
by shell-fire; so once again the unit was held up. It volunteered to
abandon its idea of running the hospital for children; it would run it
as a first aid hospital for the armies. The offer was refused. These
girls, whose gravest interest a year ago had been the season's dances
and the latest play, were determined to experience the thrill of
sacrifice. So here they were in the doomed city, as the Red Cross
officials said, "by luck"--the very place where they were most needed.

When I visited them, after leaving the Prefet's, they had not yet
heard that they were to be allowed to stay. They had heard nothing of
the city's sentence or of the evacuation of the civil population. All
they knew was that the hospital, which had been appointed with their
money, was only a few kilometres away and that they were forbidden
even to see it. They were gloomy with the fear that within a handful
of days they would be again walking the boulevards of Paris. When
the news was broken to them of the part they were to play, the full
significance of it did not dawn on them at once. "But we don't want
anything easy," they complained; "this isn't the Front." "It will
be soon," the official told them. When they heard that they cheered
up; then their share in the drama was explained. In all probability
the city would soon be under constant shell-fire. Refugees would be
pouring back from the forward country. The people of the city itself
had to be helped to escape before the bombardment commenced. They
would have to stay there taking care of the children, packing them
into lorries, driving ambulances, rendering first aid, taking the
wounded and decrepit out of danger and always returning to it again
themselves. As the certainty of the risk and service was impressed on
them their faces brightened. Risk and service, that was what they most
desired; they were girls, but they hungered to play a soldier's part.
They had only dreamt of serving when they had sailed from New York.
Those three months of waiting had stung their pride. It was in Paris
that the dream of risk had commenced. They would make France want
them. Their chance had come.

When I came out into the streets again the word was spreading. Carts
were being loaded in front of houses. Everything on wheels, from
wagons to perambulators, was being piled up. Everything on four legs,
dogs, cattle, horses, was being harnessed and made to do its share
in hauling. We left the city, going back to the next point where the
refugees would be cared for. On either side of the road, as far as eye
could stretch, trenches had been dug, barricades thrown up, blockades
and wire-entanglements constructed. It all lay very quiet beneath the
sunlight. It seemed a kind of preposterous pretence. One could not
imagine these fields as a scene of battle, sweating torture and agony
and death. I looked back at the city, one of the most beautiful in
France, growing hazy in the distance with its spires and its ramparts.
Impossible! Then I remembered the carts being hurriedly loaded and
the uplifted faces of those American girls. Where had I seen their
expression before? Yes. Strange that they should have caught it! Their
expression was the same as that which I had noticed on the Tailleurs,
the Foreign Legion and the Moroccans--the crack troops of France....
So they had become that already! At the first hint of danger, their
courage had taken command; they had risen into soldiers.

Through villages swarming with troops and packed with ordnance
we arrived at an old caserne, which has been converted into the
children's hospital of the district. It is in charge of one of the
first of America's children's specialists. While he works among the
refugees, his wife, who is a sculptress, makes masks for the facially
mutilated. He has brought with him from the States some of his
students, but his staff is in the main cosmopolitan. One of his nurses
is an Australian, who was caught at the outbreak of hostilities in
Austria and because of her knowledge, despite her nationality, was
allowed to help to organise the Red Cross work of the enemy. Another
is a French woman who wears the Croix de Guerre with the palm. She
saved her wounded from the fury of the Hun when her village was lost,
and helped to get them back to safety after it had been recaptured.
The Matron is Swedish and Belgian. The ambulance-drivers are some
of the American boys who saw service with the French armies. In this
group of workers there are as many stories as there are nationalities.

If the workers have their stories, so have the five hundred little
patients. This barrack, converted into a hospital, is full of babies,
the youngest being only six days old when I was there. Many of the
children have no parents. Others have lost their mothers; their
fathers are serving in the trenches. It is not always easy to find out
how they became orphans; there are such plentiful chances of losing
parents who live continually under shell-fire. One little boy on being
asked where his mother was, replied gravely, "My Mama, she is dead.
Les Boches, they put a gun to 'er 'ead. She is finished; I 'ave no
Mama."

The unchildlike stoicism of these children is appalling. I spent
two days among them and heard no crying. Those who are sick, lie
motionless as waxen images in their cots. Those who are supposedly
well, sit all day brooding and saying nothing. When first they arrive,
their faces are earth-coloured. The first thing they have to be taught
is how to be children. They have to be coaxed and induced to play;
even then they soon grow weary. They seem to regard mere playing as
frivolous and indecorous; and so it is in the light of the tragedies
they have witnessed. Children of seven have seen more of horror in
three years than most old men have read about in a life-time. Many
of them have been captured by and recaptured from the Huns. They have
been in villages where the dead lay in piles and not even the women
were spared. They have been present while indecencies were worked upon
their mothers. They have seen men hanged, shot, bayoneted and flung
to roast in burning houses. The pictures of all these things hang
in their eyes. When they play, it is out of politeness to the kind
Americans; not because they derive any pleasure from it.

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10