Chapter IV: Part 4

The prefect smiled slightly. “They are not. They stay without permission. It is impossible for you Americans, who are always traveling about, to conceive the love, the passion with which our poor people cling to the nourishing soil. Transplant them rudely, scientifically as you may say, and they pine, they die. That is the simple truth. Well, what are we to do? For example, take this situation. All throughout this northern-frontier district the civilian population was ordered to evacuate when the enemy started its deliberate bombarding and gassing of defenseless open towns.

“Some of these little villages lie directly in the line of attack. It is conceivable that, given a temporary reverse of our army, they might fall into Prussian hands. And should that unfortunate event occur I do not want left in those villages any women, any young maids, any half-grown lads or any infants! The majority of the population, of course, get out instantly when the evacuation orders come. But there is always left a residue of those who cannot or will not go, poor people in villages or farmers who have never traveled farther than twenty kilometers in their lives, and whom it is as hard to uproot, even in this time of stress, as it is to uproot a hardy old tree. Simply they prefer to remain here and take their chances. But that must not be!

“So for the past two months, since the evacuation orders became effective, I have driven from one end to another of my department, searching out those who remain behind. And I explain, I beg, I urge, I entreat. I promise that they shall not go far from home; that their children shall remain with them; that as soon as it is safe they shall return; and if they have crops in the ground they may go certain days to tend them, leaving the children in safety. It has defects, of course, this plan of mine, for often our shelters are bombed, but just at present it is the best I can do.”

And here the prefect, one of the most romantic and truly great figures in France, looked down at the reluctant young person he had been holding fast while he discoursed, and said: “Well, little mother! How goes it, eh?”

Silence. Marthe simply stared at him, clutching tightly behind her the substitute Emile, naked save for a pair of diminutive trousers.

“Where is _maman_?”

Silence.

“Who is that you are hiding behind you?”

“Nobody. There’s nobody behind me!” At this mendacious statement the prefect, father of his district, laughed. “Ha! ’Tis a little angel then? I’m going to see!”

He bent over her shoulder. But Marthe, who had been edging out from under the restraining hand, suddenly whirled, caught up the boy, scudded to her cellar across the way, and shut and barricaded the door. She was not going to risk a second disappearance!

The prefect approached, knocked, and addressed gentle, persuasive words to the invisible occupants. There was no response.

“We shall have to wait,” he said, returning to the automobile. “Of course we could use violence--but there’s been enough of that!”

And wait they did for more than two hours, the prefect calm, patient, determined. In the interval he related some of his experiences as prefect in connection with the German capture of French towns at the commencement of the war. That the iron had entered the soul of this strong, tender governor of his people was evident, for with all his manifold duties he had taken time to compile a book of officially vouched-for cases of outrages occurring within his own department, for the benefit of those who pooh-poohed the idea of German atrocities. The first sentence of that poignant little book reads: “_Voici un livre d’horreurs; c’est, hélas! un livre de vérité_.” (This is a book of horrors; it is, alas, a book of truth!)

And those Americans who hold that the Germans are really very fine fellows, but simply misled by their overlords, should have a confidential chat with Prefect Mirman, the great-hearted governor of that frontier section of France.

It was deep twilight before Marthe’s mother returned from her work. With two fields under bombardment to tend instead of one, life was no joke. To her the prefect explained the object of his visit. Since the fathers of France were away fighting, he, the prefect, was trying to be father to all the children in his department, to watch over them, to keep them decent boys and girls, in church and in school, to teach them trades and safeguard them until their parents’ return.

Marthe’s mother listened, pondered, put a few practical questions. The place to which he would take them--it was far? No, close at hand; in effect, just behind that hill. And her children, they would be with her? But surely! And she could return when necessary to care for her fields? The prefect gave her his word. Whereupon Marthe’s mother, so sparing of emotion, suddenly burst into tears and consented.

Three days later saw the entire family transported to Toul and safely installed in a temporary barracks provided by Prefect Mirman. It was a big, bare, uncomfortable, insanitary affair, and it seemed as if all the young ragamuffins of France had been collected there in one sorry regiment. The story of Marthe might serve as a type for most. But there were some whose histories, written in their small peaked faces and sullen gaze, had a more sinister cast; some had lost an eye; some had lost a hand; some had lost parents; and most of them had lost their childhood gayety. Gathered up from miles along the frontier where the artillery fire was hottest, out of dank, dirty cellars or unspeakably foul dugouts and caves, living without air, baths, change of garments or the simplest sanitary arrangements, they were a dismal, pallid, vermin-infested, scarecrow little crew--and yet they were the budding hope of France, as nobody knew better than the prefect.

But what to do with them after he had got them together? It was a sore question. For what these small unfortunates needed beyond everything were baths, doctors, nurses, teachers, someone to teach them to smile again--and always more and more baths. Out of the three hundred and fifty, twenty-one were babies under one year; many of them had contagious skin diseases; a few had tuberculosis; and all, sick and well, were crowded together without discrimination.

Food and shelter were all the prefect could be sure of, for these the French Government furnished, but more in the present stress it could not promise, for all the French doctors and nurses were already occupied with the war. And the worst of it was that more and more children and mothers would be arriving as the wave of battle swept toward other villages or wholesale gassing set in. It was a thoroughly bad piece of business all round--a kind of vicious circle with no visible outlet. But not for one moment did these difficulties stump the prefect of the department of Meurthe-et-Moselle. He had rescued these children and got them together--that was his job. Now somebody had to take care of them; he couldn’t, the French Government couldn’t. Therefore--somebody else had to!

And it is exactly at this point, at that “somebody,” that the American Red Cross enters the story. For in the acute and immediate need the prefect telegraphed for aid to a well-known American woman in Paris. She brought the telegram to Major Murphy, Commissioner for Europe of the American Red Cross, and he at once got into action. Within a few hours eight workers were on their way to Toul--a doctor, a nurse, two aids, and women to take charge of the administration. At the same time there started a camionette loaded with clothing and food.

Thus began the first activity of the American Red Cross for the civil population of France--and it began very appropriately with the children.

When, one morning several weeks later, I visited this refugee center high up on a sunshiny hill, a general transformation had taken place. The children, numbering by this time about five hundred, with sixty mothers, had been moved into a newly constructed barracks of brick and cement furnished by the French Government, which also supplied heat, light, rations, cooks, unskilled labor and camion service for transportation. This plant, in its bare elements, was then turned over to the American Red Cross to supplement and run as it pleased. And when I arrived the American administration was in full swing. To me the children looked surprisingly well and happy--almost too happy, in fact, in view of their grim past! And I remarked upon this fact to the director.

“Well,” he laughed, “if you are after local color you should have seen them--and smelled them!--when we first took hold. The very first thing we did was to establish louse clinics--‘de-lousing’ is the technical term. Don’t shudder! They’re about clean now, but in the beginning we had some horrible little heads. The soldiers in the winter trenches had nothing on those children in the way of vermin and filth. And at the same time we inaugurated the good old American institution of shower baths.”

“And what did the mothers think of these?”

The doctor chuckled. “Scandalous! Immoral! Indelicate! Designed to murder their poor children outright! Some of these peasant women, you know, have never taken a bath in the altogether in their lives. They still continue the customs handed down to them since the time of Louis XI. They bathe little boys in their trousers--put ’em in the tub with their trousers on; indelicate to remove ’em, you see! They bathe little girls with their chemises on. And babies they don’t bathe at all. Yes, the shower bath was a novelty. But I may add that it was a novelty which took with the children from the start. Now they fight for a chance at it!

“Come here, Marthe, and say ‘_Bonjour_’ to the lady.” He caught by the hand a passing little girl with great bright dark eyes and dark curls neatly twined. Beside her trotted a small boy, decked in his Sunday best. Thus I had my introduction to Marthe and the substitute brother whom the Mother Marie had sent down to replace the borrowed Emile.

“She is never without that boy,” continued the director. “She seems to be afraid somebody is going to steal him.” And then he told me her story, narrated above. “Here is her mother,” he added as a woman approached along the path. “She has walked all the way from her home to spend a few days with her children. These peasant mothers come and go as they will; they visit with us a few days and then return to their fields. _Bonjour, madame_,” he said, turning to her. “How goes that crop of wheat?”

“Not bad, monsieur. But yesterday--what a misfortune! An _obus_ fell right in the middle of the field where the grain is highest and dug a crater wide as this.” She extended her two arms. “_Sale brute!_” (Dirty brute!) “_Grâce à Dieu!_ I was off in another corner of the field.”

“You are very courageous,” I said, “to work like that for your children in those bombarded fields.”

“But no! But no! It is not for the infants. It is that the soldiers of France may have food.”

“There you are!” exclaimed the director in English. “That’s what they all say--and just as unselfconsciously. They don’t know what a magnificent piece of work they’re pulling off!”

At this moment Marthe interrupted to show me her sewing and the mother passed on to her baby, the little Georgette. Later I saw this tiny, woeful creature, born in a cellar, under sound of heavy guns. Frail, transparent, pale as a snowdrop, she lay in her mother’s arms. Not once in her two years had she been seen to smile. I did not blame her. Such a world was not worth smiling on! She showed a rare judgment beyond her age. Nevertheless, for five minutes I held her in my arms, hating the Germans, and trying by all arts to bring a flash of mirth to that solemn, drooping little mouth. Vain enterprise. I might as well have tried to make the Sphinx laugh.

After that, accompanied by the director, I made a tour of the buildings, built after the usual fashion of military cantonments, in the form of a hollow square. Everything was scrupulously clean, the floors scrubbed, the windows flung wide open, and fresh sunshine flooded the dormitories, where the mothers sat chatting together, their babies at their breasts.

“This beats caves as a summer resort!” I said.

The director nodded rather grimly. In company with M. Mirman he had made rescues from some of those caves.

“And we’re going to beat them still more before we’re through. Here in this small settlement we are trying to achieve a model community. Already we have a clinic, an infirmary, a hospital of eighty beds, a kindergarten, a church, schools, a store, a recreation teacher--in short, a welfare center for children as scientific and humane as anything to be found in America. But that is not enough. Compared with the need this one single unit is only a drop in the bucket. And so we are planning to make Toul a kind of nucleus from which we shall ray out in all directions. Already we have a traveling dispensary starting from this point, with a doctor and nurse, which visits through twenty-five villages, treating the children in their homes and fetching back to the hospital the contagious and tubercular cases. Such a system keeps up the general health par in the areas visited and prevents the sudden spread of epidemics.

“At Nesle, a town in the devastated district, we have established another unit--a small hospital and another automobile dispensary which carries aid to the outlying districts. In that region, of course, the problem is somewhat different from our own, because the Germans, having retreated, the children do not need to be collected in one place to protect them from gassing or bombing. They remain in their homes--if one can call homes those ruined and burned shells, despoiled of every stick of furniture, every kitchen utensil, and even the orchards cut down and the wells defiled!--and we go to them. We go to them with our traveling clinics in an ambulance containing a full outfit of medical stores--and a bath! We carry the makings of that bath right along with us on the floor of the machine--a tub, tubing, a spray and a pumping apparatus. And when we arrive at a home where a child needs a clean-up we heat water in the kitchen, stick the small victim into the tub--without trousers or chemise, you bet!--and we bathe it after the rules laid down by the Greek nymph Arethusa, who lived in a fountain and who, according to the Limerick, used to wash, _sans_ mackintosh--b’gosh, _sans_ anything!

“It is the simple, serious truth that baths are the greatest hygienic need of these children at the present time; and by bringing baths into their homes we are helping to restore the health of the entire district. So successful have been our efforts at Toul and Nesle that the French authorities have earnestly requested us to broaden our scope and establish centers in other needy districts. And this is what we are doing as fast as we can. Eventually we intend to have a chain of centers, linked together by automobile dispensaries, strung along that whole northern frontier just behind the battle lines, in order to care for the thousands of children who, no less than the men in the trenches, are giving their lives in this war.

“As the situation stands to-day France is burning her candle at both ends; she is at one and the same time losing her men and her children. With our American soldiers once in the trenches we are going to check the colossal loss of man power; and in the interval until our fellows arrive, with our hospitals, our clinics, our traveling dispensaries and our schools we are doing our best to check the loss of her child power. This type of scientific social work is the sort of thing America excels in; for the last ten years we’ve gone in hard for it. I suppose we’ve got a flair for it, just as the French have for pure science. Anyhow, as a nation we can do that particular job better than anybody else on earth. And for the American Red Cross to throw into the breach our finely trained child specialists is to render France in this hour an inestimable benefit.”

This sketches the effort of the Red Cross for the children of the war zone in free France. But not all of France is “free,” as the French themselves touchingly call it. And that portion of it which still is not free, the immensely rich mining and manufacturing district under German rule, has also its child problem. That problem the Germans have dealt with in their characteristic brutal fashion. They are simply sweeping out of the country, as with a gigantic broom, all these small, food-consuming nonproducers. Across the Northern Swiss frontier they are being thrust into France at the rate of nearly five hundred a day--more than ten thousand a month! Here is a child problem with a vengeance! Of course it is not the children alone who are being swept out, but all the nonproducing inhabitants. If they can’t work--_heraus mit_ ’em! Dump the refuse out the back door into France. Shift the food burden of all those hundreds of thousands of useless inhabitants onto the enemy. From a purely materialistic point of view this wholesale act of dispossession is a fine move--and France is glad to have her people back at any price! Also, she has food to burn!

Evian-les-Bains is the gate of entry for these exiles--_rapatriés_ the French call them--and accordingly to Evian I went. It is a beautiful, quaint little town on Lake Geneva, high, Alp-encircled, and with an air like iced champagne. Formerly a fashionable watering place, it has now been transformed into a kind of Ellis Island receiving station for the refugees, who pour in by trainloads, twenty thousand a month.

Here daily is to be witnessed one of the most tragic processionals that history has ever yet offered to man--a nation on the march! But a nation dispossessed, broken and diseased, old men and old women and mothers with children--the past and the future generations--with the present generation strikingly absent! For the young men are held to work the mines and the factories, and the young women are held--but even in France one rarely speaks of that phase of the subject, which is the blackest of all black pages of German occupation. What “efficient” explanation is Germany going to offer, at the big post-bellum tribunal of the nations, for the girls sent into white slavery in the Ardennes?

Three years have elapsed since the Germans conquered the northern part of France, and since then the inhabitants have lived in a state of complete isolation, cut off from news of their families in free France, sons and husbands who fled before the invaders; cut off also from any reliable information concerning the war or the great outer world. Not a single letter are they permitted to send or receive. This incredible act of mental cruelty I did not believe until I arrived in Evian, questioned the refugees themselves and the authorities, and entered the famous letter room, where hundreds of thousands of letters are filed, often months ahead of time, awaiting the possible return of some exile relative.

Newspapers these people have, to be sure, but they are journals printed by the Germans in French, ostensibly to give current events, but actually to spread German propaganda and despair. I glanced through some of these papers. According to them England is speedily starving to death; Russia is about to conclude a separate peace; France has been bled white; America is a noisy four-flusher--and _Deutschland_ is _über alles_! Under ordinary conditions such a crude tissue of lies would merit only a burst of scornful laughter; but given a captured civilian population as isolated from their loved ones as if they were ghosts, a prey to constant anxiety concerning the welfare of France, and this daily insidious attack upon a morale already enfeebled by adversity is bound to have a damaging effect.

Of these journals the Gazette des Ardennes is the most notorious.

The first evening I waited at the station I do not know exactly what I expected to see--but, anyhow, something that would rend the heartstrings. I forgot that this station represented to those pilgrims the end of a three-years’ captivity; that every kilometer of the long, wearisome three-days’ journey from Belgium, where they had been quarantined, brought them nearer letters, nearer a resumption of family ties, nearer a tender welcome from free France.

It was cold. A light snow had fallen on the circle of mountains, and a chill wind blew up from the lake. The Red Cross ambulance drivers had backed their machines close to the platform to care for the sick and the old, and now they stood by the tracks, ready to lend a hand to the incoming crowd. I was in the mood of Antony: “If you have tears, prepare to shed them now!” when the refugee train pulled into the station; and to my surprise I saw flags bursting from every open window--the French Tricolor, the Stars and Stripes, Red Cross flags, handkerchiefs, bundles, any old thing--frantically waving a welcome from a thousand eager hands! Who said anybody was sad? Besides flags, the windows were crowded full of heads--happy, excited children, mothers holding up babies, and smiling, seamed old countenances wreathed in white hair. And from within the cars, above the noisy hubbub, ascended high and sweet the strains of the Marseillaise.

The train slowed to a dead stop. Suddenly an old man leaned far out of a window, waved both arms, and shouted fiercely: “_Vive la France! Vive----_” He broke off sharply, looked down into a face below him on the platform and queried in low, anxious tones: “Say! We are in France, _hein_?” What an indiscretion if he had yelled that in German territory!

“Yes, you are in France. But descend, _papa_! Descend, _maman_! _Allons mes enfants, descendez, s’il vous plait!_”

It was the cheerful voice of the Red Cross man, M. Barrois, himself a _rapatrié_, with a wife and six children left behind in Lille, who assisted daily at the detraining of the refugees.

“But these people are not sad!” I objected to M. Barrois, still full of surprise. “They do not even look tired. Are they always gay like this?”

“It’s a lively crowd to-night,” he replied soberly, “on account of so many children. But some days they do not have a word to say. And you must not be deceived by their surface gayety. The sadness is there, underneath, just the same. You’ll find it if you stay.”

He was right. The first evening I caught only the false glow of excitement of the returning pilgrims. But as I watched night after night the endless procession of those who passed I began to discriminate, and to note beneath the happy eagerness on those faces the deeper substructure of strain, of suffering so long endured that it had become a habit. And as the thousands marched before me, successive waves of exiles, always different and yet mysteriously the same in their look of subdued suffering, of strain, I had a fleeting realization of what France has borne in this war.

With such throngs pouring daily into this one small receiving station a very careful organization has of necessity been evolved in order not to congest the transportation. The following is the order of each day: At the last station on the Swiss frontier French Red Cross nurses enter the train and tag the sick and aged. At Evian these are put into ambulances, the others walking the short distance to the Casino, where await them an ample hot supper, music, and a tender speech of welcome by the mayor of Evian. After which they register, receive their letters, pass a medical examination, and are assigned lodgings in the town.

The first night I waited to see the last _malade_ and the last baby safely stowed inside before I climbed into the front seat with the ambulance driver. As we struck the open lake road an icy wind straight off Mont Blanc made me shiver. A soldier on permission clinging to the running board beside me turned up his collar, muttering: “This is worse than the trenches in the Vosges.” He had come up to search for his refugee wife, from whom he had not heard in three years.

“But she might arrive any day!” he argued hopefully. “I will teach you something extraordinary,” he continued. “A comrade of mine came up here looking for his wife; he had dreamed a dream about her. And what do you think--the very first woman who stepped off the train was she!

“I had another friend, whose wife had died in Lille leaving a little daughter of two, whom the father had never seen. He did not even know what had become of her, for he could get no word. A _rapatrié_ friend, who informed him of his wife’s death, could give no news of the little maid. Nevertheless, he came to Evian hoping to find some trace. And each day at the station as the throng passed he stood quietly holding out in his hand what looked like a postal card. And whenever a little girl appeared he thrust that card under her nose. Absurd, eh? A fool, a lunatic, sticking a piece of cardboard into every child’s face! But one day when he held it in front of a little maid she suddenly burst into tears and cried out: ‘_Maman! Maman!_’ That postal card bore the picture of her mother. And that’s the way he found his child!”

It was twilight when we arrived at the Casino, and already the place was packed. Seated at long tables the refugees had stowed their precious bundles beneath their feet and were falling upon supper with a will. Between the tables passed the women of Evian with tureens of steaming soup, huge platters of meat that the Germans would have bartered their very souls for, and great pitchers of hot milk and of wine. And how those children gobbled! And how their elders followed their example! The platters passed and repassed. Through the big double doors facing Switzerland gleamed Lake Geneva, dimly purple through the gloom. Overhead in the balcony the band began to tune up.

Suddenly all over the hall the lights flashed on strongly and the same instant the band burst into the stirring impetuous strains of Chasseurs Alpins! As that gay beloved air broke across the room an electric shock of emotion seemed to pass along the tables. Men leaped up, shouting “_Vive la France!_” Women began to weep softly. Handkerchiefs were out everywhere. Yes, the long blight of captivity, of isolation, was past forever! That tune proved it!

And it was just at this chosen moment that the mayor of Evian came forward to make his speech. It was brief, simple and touching, and at certain portions of it women bowed their heads on the table and sobbed aloud.

“My dear fellow citizens!” began the mayor. “At a moment when, after long and cruel trials, you step foot again upon the sacred soil of _la Patrie_, I come in the name of the city of Evian to address to you all a very cordial, a very warm and a very affectionate welcome.

“We know all that you have suffered. For many months convoys like yours have traversed our little village, and we have heard recounted each day the long martyrdom you have endured. We know that you have suffered cold and hunger; we know that your houses have been burned, that your rich harvests have been destroyed and the beautiful industrial region of the north has been systematically destroyed; and, what is most terrible of all, we know that young daughters have been torn from the arms of their mothers and taken away to slavery in the Ardennes. And it is because we do know all this, dear fellow citizens, that we receive you to-day with all of our heart and with all of our soul!

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

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

The shout that followed was a shout indeed!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

These hospitals for children, established in needy zones throughout all France as fast as may be, constitute one of the most effective and long-range pieces of work that the American Red Cross has undertaken, for they minister to the immediate want and at the same time strengthen permanently the general health tone of a nation. That the French appreciate our effort in this field is undoubted, and one of their statesmen has said that the impetus given by America to the conservation of child life in France is one of the most beneficial by-products of this great war.

A CANTEENER IN FRANCE

Hooray! _Vive la belle France!_ I’m going to France! I’m going to be a canteener! Maybe I shall go right up to the Front just behind the first-line trenches and be under shell fire and be bombed by boche avions and hear the _alerte_ and have to scurry to _abris_ and all that sort of thing. I don’t know any of the details yet--nobody over here does--but anyhow I’m going! That’s the chief thing.

I’m so excited and thrilled I scarcely know what I’m doing, but outwardly I try to keep poised and calm, for mamma has been disappearing at intervals into her handkerchief ever since she gave her consent; and as for papa, he doesn’t say much; in fact, the dear old sport is quieter than ever--but I catch him looking at me, when he thinks I don’t see, in a way that makes me realize I’m the only girl he’s got down here below and that he’d never send me if he had a son to give. Not having a son and being a true-blue American with generations of fighting blood inside of him--for the man who said “Don’t shoot until you see the whites of their eyes!” was my father’s great-grandfather--he’s figured it out that the best he can do is to send his girl instead. That’s the ground of his consent. And mamma’s a Daughter of the American Revolution, so that lets her out.

It was pure accident--or fate--which made me run into Edith on the street a week ago to-day and thus start the wheels of destiny.

“Come in and have some tea,” she said after congratulating me on my engagement, which had just been announced, “and tell me all about it--and him. You deep little mouse--to pull this off right under everybody’s nose and keep as secret as the grave! Who is he, anyhow?”

“He’s Major B----, of the Fifty-blank Infantry. He’s just received his majority and he’s just twenty-nine.”

“Major, eh? That’s not so bad.”

“And, oh, Edith, he’s leaving for France sometime this month, and I--I don’t know what to do!”

“What would you like to do?” asked Edie, laughing a little at my blushes.

“I’d like to go over there, too,” I replied without hesitation, staring straight into her deep blue eyes. “It doesn’t seem as if I could stand it--the long, long separation. Irregular letters. And when they go into action, not knowing, not hearing, maybe never hearing. Never. Just the silence!”

“You’re in the same fix as a million other American women right now,” replied Edith grimly. “And you’ve got to stand it. That’s our job.”

“I know,” I said heavily. “But it doesn’t make your own toothache any better to know that there’s an epidemic of toothache raging over the whole civilized world.”

Edith sat looking at me with a smile deep down in her eyes. She has been married three years, the first of our class; and now she looks at the entire outside world with that same air of tender smiling abstraction.

“It’s all part of the game,” she said finally. “And we women must keep the flag flying. Jack”--Jack’s her husband--“is going over next month. He doesn’t have to, of course, being over the age limit. But he foresaw this two years ago, and went and prepared himself at Plattsburg. He wouldn’t volunteer then on account of me and baby. But now the call has come it finds him ready. He feels the whole situation deeply. I’m glad.”

“Oh, Edie, you--brick!” I breathed, squeezing her hand hard. I thought of her left alone with her child--and not any too much money either.

“Edie’s all right,” she murmured unsteadily, her blue eyes bright as diamonds. “Don’t you fuss about her! But now about you--I have an idea. What can you do? Practically, I mean.”

“I’ve had a six-months’ course in the hospital----”

“They don’t take anything but graduate nurses now.”

“----and I’ve had two years of domestic science and food values. Then last summer I operated a cafeteria in the suburbs for the Women’s League--did all the buying and accounts myself. It was fun. In college I was head of the basket-ball team and the tramping club, and I’ve never been sick a day in my life.”

“How old are you?”

“Twenty-four.”

“A bit young. However,” said Edith briskly, rising, “I’ll see what I can do. There’s just a bare chance--but I’m not going to tell you beforehand, for fear we burst the bubble. Run home now. Stick round the telephone. There may be a long-distance call. Put a few things into a bag while you’re waiting. Do you think you could go on to New York to-night?”

I suppose my eyes must have been as big round as saucers with excitement, for suddenly Edith bent right over and dropped a kiss on my cheek. “You darned little kid!” she whispered. “I know exactly how you feel. Now trot!”

I trotted--walking on air.

For the next two hours I hung round the landing where the telephone is, and finally settled down on the top stair.

“For goodness’ sake, child!” cried mamma, stumbling over me as she came out of the sitting-room, “what on earth are you doing here, all bunched up in the dark?”

“I--I’m----”

Just then the telephone rang. I sprang to the receiver.

“Oh, I see!” said mamma, laughing as she went downstairs.

But she didn’t.

Central got the long-distance line cleared and then over the wire there came a woman’s clear, crisp, businesslike voice: “I wish to speak to Miss Carlotta Murray.”

“This is she.”

“Miss Murray, could you sail for France a week from Saturday?”

My heart gave a sort of big thrilly jerk and I had a sudden shock as if my nerves had got short-circuited.

“Ye-yes!” I gulped faintly.

“What? Speak louder.”

“Yes!” I shouted into the mouthpiece, holding on to the wall for support. “Dee-lighted!”

“Very well. Be at our office at eleven to-morrow morning. You’d better come prepared to go straight on to Washington to arrange about your passes. Good-b----”

“Wait!” I cried excitedly. “Who is it speaking? I don’t know who you are.”

“Red Cross Headquarters. New York office. Good-by.”

She hung up and left me gasping in the darkness on the stair. Well, I was in deep over my head now; and so I found mamma and put it straight up to her: Would she give her consent if papa did? At first she refused up and down, but by six o’clock I had her coaxed round to the point where she was packing my suitcase and making up lists of things I’d need in France--woolen underwear and galoshes and sweaters and first-aid outfits and what nots. And all the time we didn’t either of us know what I was going to do when I got over there any more than the man in the moon. The call had tumbled right out of a clear sky. But once I’d got mamma to see the situation as it really was, outside her motherhood so to speak, she was as keen as mustard for it.

We had dinner upstairs in my room. Delia served it on a tray. And when she heard I was sailing for France she just said, “Oh, my Gawd! Submarines!” and dropped the tray and burst into tears. You’d have thought the submarines were right under my bed. At that mamma broke down altogether and Delia embraced her--Delia’s been with us ever since I was born--and there followed a hectic half hour. I was beginning to think Delia had spilled the beans for me with her “Oh, my Gawd!” when all of a sudden mamma glanced at the clock, pulled herself together and exclaimed sharply:

“Good gracious, child, get into your clothes--quick! Do you want to miss that train? Delia, run down and phone for a taxi.”

Delia went, still dribbling tears and tomato bisque. Then mamma rushed off a telegram to Uncle Jim to meet me in New York, rushed me into my things, rushed me down to the station, through the gate, onto the train, gave me a swift breathless hug and departed. That’s the way she is, all tears one second and a regular little whiz-bang field marshal the next. But it was some evening!

The next morning in New York Uncle Jim and I breakfasted at the Belmont, after which I walked over to Red Cross Headquarters, had an interview, and took the train to Washington. I had already wired papa, who was down there on business, to meet me, and told him to watch out for a life-size jolt. When I stepped off the train, there he was, leaning against a pillar and looking, as the novelists say, singularly handsome and debonair.

“Hello, Miss Murray!” he said, taking my bag away from the porter. “Now come on with your jolt.”

“_Vive la France!_” I said by way of commencement.

“Ha! So that’s the bill of fare? With all my heart. May she _vive_ forever. But what’s that got to do with the price of winter umbrellas?”

“The _Rochambeau_ sails a week from to-morrow.”

“Well,” said papa, still bluffing away, though I could see from the way he started that I had landed him one right over the heart, “I haven’t any stock in her. The submarines may go as far as they like.”

“They want me to sail on her--as a canteener.”

“As a whatter?” demanded papa.

“A canteener. A person that works in a canteen. You know--serves hot drinks and food and all to the soldiers.”

“Who wants you to go?” he growled in his crossest cross-examining-witness manner.

“President Wilson. God. American Red Cross. Mamma. Delia. Me.”

“Pretty good references,” observed papa dryly. “Especially Delia. But not worth a single red cent in the present instance--unless indorsed by me. Now let’s get down to brass tacks. What is this all about?”

That’s the way papa always talks with me, straight from the shoulder, just as if I were his law partner and we were threshing out a case. And so I told him. I told him how the high commissioner for Europe of the American Red Cross had cabled to Washington for women to be sent immediately to France to work in canteens; how Washington had telegraphed to New York to collect a group of workers without delay; how New York had telegraphed to Boston for names of suitable persons with training along that line; how Edith, the president of her Red Cross chapter, had been called into council--and how that led to me.

“It’s the finger of destiny, papa,” I wound up; “and it’s pointed straight at me--like the man in the ad. There’s just one hitch.”

“Only one?” observed papa with his grim little half smile.

“The cable says women over thirty.”

“Well,” chuckled papa, “I guess that lets you out--for about six years anyhow. And by that time the war will be over. Though Bairnsfeather says that the first seven years will be the worst, and after that every fourteenth year.”

“I’m within the draft limit,” I protested. “And if they take infants of twenty-one to be soldiers I don’t see why a college graduate of twenty-four, captain of the basket-ball team and with a record in Greek, hasn’t enough gumption to stand behind a counter and deal out sandwiches and coffee. It makes me sick!”

“Well, all that’s a minor matter,” said papa. “It’s fitness, not age or lack of it, that counts. But let’s waive that for the moment and get down to the kernel of this proposition. Why are you interested in this thing? Why do you want to go--or think that you want to go? Now don’t hand out any cheap sentimentality. Don’t insult the cause by any tawdry emotionalism. Come clean. What are your reasons?”

Followed a conference--or moral examination, rather--which lasted for over four hours, straight through dinner, up to eleven o’clock; and still we sat on at table, papa smoking one cigar after another, until the big hotel dining-room was deserted and the lights went out. There was no question from the first of a downright refusal. He simply talked to me, eye to eye and man to man. He spoke as if I were his son, a soldier, going off to war, and he charted the cardinal points of conduct. He saw the thing big from the start, and I loved him for it. Then we talked about life and love and marriage, the rights of men and nations, and how this war was going to temper and fuse America like steel that’s been through fire; we talked about personal responsibility, the Red Cross, and he showed how any human institution rested straight back on the individual, so that if I fell down on my job the whole organization would feel the shock. He didn’t give me a whole decalogue of “Don’ts” to guide me over there, but he did give me three big “Do’s.” Here they are:

Number One: Get round your own job and leave it to the other fellow to get round his.

Number Two: Keep alive and lovable. Women, he said, are a little more apt than men to go to seed.

Number Three: Keep your sense of humor.

Altogether, it was the best talk I’ve ever had on earth, and when it was done he kissed me; and then we sailed out arm in arm for some ice-cream soda at the corner drug store, and I treated him and he treated me--our immemorial custom.

It was all settled the next morning that I was to go to war. They didn’t even query my age!

That morning, after breakfast, papa said, “Guess I’ll just walk over with you to that shebang of yours, in case you need identification.”

“No, you don’t!” I said. “I’m going to get this on my own credentials--my cafeteria credentials!--and not because I’m the daughter of Judge Murray, alias Old Silver Tongue. ‘Get round your own job and leave it to the other fellow to get round his.’ Axiom One.”

Papa grinned. “Strike one--right over the plate. All right. Let me hear what the jury decides.” And we went our separate ways.

At the office in the Women’s Bureau it took less than ten minutes to get through the red tape and settle my future, as follows: I’m to be a canteen worker. I pay all my own expenses. And I literally do pay them, with my cafeteria money and a check I received for writing a movie. I’ve signed on for six months, during which time I can’t marry an American army officer--without losing my job and getting sent home to America. Wow! For further orders report to Number Four, Place de la Concorde, Paris, France, seat of a world war for civilization. Think of it, oh, my soul! Well, sink or swim, live or die, survive or perish, the Murray family gives its heart and its hand to this vote!

The last week has been one mad, wild, excited scramble--with canteen uniforms, French lessons, gum boots, telephones, typhoid and paratyphoid injections, girls dropping in to say good-by, mamma dismal as a corbie crow weeping off in odd corners, and papa humming mournfully: “‘I didn’t raise my kidlet to be a soldierette.’”

On Tuesday night I said good-by to Robert. We dined together downtown and then Bob said, “Let’s go round to Lucille’s and dance.”

And so we did. But I just couldn’t seem to put any spirit into it.

“Do you realize, Bob,” I said, “that this is our last dance together?”