A soldier's mother in France

One morning, in a big American camp in France, I witnessed the arrival of a long-delayed batch of mail from home. No words of mine can describe how joyfully it was received. Officers and men alike were children in their happiness. They sang and shouted while the letters and parcels were being distributed, and afterward a deep silence fell on the camp while the letters were being read.

Alas for those who received no letters that day. My heart ached for them, and I want to urge, as part of the patriotic duty of every citizen, that as far as possible no soldier is neglected in this respect. Every man and woman with a relative or friend in the army, and this will soon mean practically every citizen of the United States, ought to write frequently to their soldiers.

If you haven’t time to write long letters, write short ones. If you haven’t time for short letters, write postcards. But write something.

As soon as the men go to training camp begin to write to them. Nearly every soldier has a period of bewilderment and homesickness, and this usually occurs early in his military career. Young, so young, most of our splendid soldiers, many of whom when they are drafted leave home for the first time in their lives. It does not do to risk breaking the home ties altogether.

One of the things that burden the hearts of our English allies is the fear that this may have happened in the case of a great many of the brave Australian and New Zealand soldiers. They are incredibly remote from their homes. It takes letters three months to cross the immense waste of waters that lie between those south Pacific islands and the French battle-fields. Three months for a mother to answer a question asked her by her son. Six months for an exchange of words between a husband and wife.

Thousands of the Anzacs have been away from home, been separated from their families for three years. When they have leave of absence they go to England, and clubs and canteens have been opened for them in London and elsewhere. But their home ties are never knit. The English fear that in many, many cases they will never knit again.

We do not want that to happen to our soldiers and the best, indeed the only way to prevent it, is to write letters, frequent letters, and the right kind of letters.

I watched those soldiers in our camp overseas reading their letters from home. They did not read them just once and then fold them up and put them in their pockets. Every letter was read a dozen times over, until the words were learned by heart. That is why it is so important that the right kind of letters be written.

Don’t write, “The interest on the mortgage is due again next week and I’m sure I don’t know where the money is coming from.” Don’t tell your boys that you have had a bad spell of neuralgia and can hardly see to write. Don’t tell him that Jennie is doing badly in school and shows a sulky temper. Those are your worries, not his. He has responsibilities ahead of him, and possibly troubles and suffering immeasurably bigger than anything you face.

Above all, never deplore the fact that he is in the war, and never tell him that you are praying for an early peace. No American soldier whose mind has been enlightened to the true state of affairs in this war wants an early peace. He knows that an early peace would be a dangerous, a fatal, peace, one pleasing only to the Germans and their starving and enslaved allies.

In all the neutral countries, but even more in the allied countries, German propaganda is working overtime to bring about an early peace. German agents are everywhere trying to undermine the morale of the allied people, especially the women, and through them the soldiers. How they get into France is a mystery, but they get there, and they often remain undetected for a long time.

I remember visiting in the home of a simple bourgeois French family where the one remaining soldier son was home on leave. Three sons of that family had given up their lives for France, one at the Marne, one at Verdun, and one in the first battle of the Somme. The one remaining son was in a dangerous service, and perhaps one can hardly blame his mother and sisters for listening to any suggestion of a possible peace.

They had heard, one of the sisters said, as we sat at tea, without cream or cakes, or even bread, that France and Austria were about to sign a separate peace. They hoped the news was true, because then Italy would make peace, and the allies would only have to fight the Germans in France and Flanders.

“Never, my dear sister,” said the resolute young French soldier, “listen to any talk of that kind. Never repeat it, especially in the hearing of a soldier. We have our work to do, and you must help us, not weaken us. There is only one kind of peace we want, and that is the peace that will come when Germany is conquered.”

He got up from his seat and left the room, returning soon with a poster, one of the many beautiful and striking war posters the French have produced. This one showed a terrible procession of old men, women and children being driven from their homes by the advance of German troops. The Germans were striking the helpless people with the flat of their swords and laughing brutally at their sufferings.

“This is no fiction,” said the French soldier to me. “This is fact. And this is what would happen again in a few years if we made peace too soon. Why not end it for all time now? We men are ready to give our lives. We embrace the earth when we fall, for the sacrifice of a few lives now is nothing to the horrors that are in store for our children to come, unless we win, really win, this war.”

I said: “I will tell the American people what you have said, and what I know to be true, for I have seen something of this war, and I know what might happen in my country unless we win a complete victory.”

Because I am particularly concerned lest our women unwittingly weaken the least bit the morale and the fighting spirit of our soldiers, I am going to tell them what I have seen.

My only son, I have said before, is a soldier. He is at the front. Yet, after what I have seen of this war, I would never speak of peace to him. I don’t want him to think of peace. I want him to think of fighting.

Since this war began, nearly two million people, not fighters, but women and children and men too old and infirm to fight, have been driven in wretchedness from their homes. This in France alone.

We know what happened in Belgium, in Serbia, in Roumania and Poland. Armenia? Words fail in describing what happened there. I have seen only France, and I can speak only of France. Two million French people have fled before fire and sword.

But that isn’t anything very terrible, by comparison. To lose your home and everything you possess is a bearable thing—by comparison. On a Sunday soon after the great spring battle began I spent the day in a railroad station at a junction where hundreds of trains rushed ceaselessly to the north bearing soldiers and munitions, and to the south with wounded men, refugees and broken guns and airplanes. Many refugees were fed and comforted by the French Red Cross at the station that day.

It was my privilege to help a little those noble French women. I filled hundreds of cups with coffee, strong and hot, and I helped to feed the exhausted who could not even stand up at the counter where coffee and sandwiches were served. We literally fed them, holding the food to their lips.

There was one old woman—perhaps she was not really old, but her sufferings had emaciated her and seamed her face with wrinkles—who was my special care for an hour. She had to be given brandy before she could sit up, and she had to be fed hot milk from a spoon, like a baby. She was almost dead. Another woman, her neighbor in the ruined and violated village that once was their home, told me in quick whispers that old woman’s story.

When the Germans invaded France in August, 1914, this woman lived in a small town directly in the path of the Wurtemburg army that swept in from Lorraine. Her husband kept a small shop where tobacco and fruit and such like were sold. They had a home and three children—Cécile, sixteen; Georges, twelve, and Marcel, six. They were quiet people, like all the other villagers, and the mobilizing of their men when war came was the first great and terrifying event in their lives. This woman’s husband had a club foot and could not be mobilized. She had no son old enough to fight, so she was counted lucky.

Then the Germans came. They swarmed in early one morning and the horrified villagers at once began to see war in its most frightful guise. Soldiers broke into the home of the club-footed man and demanded tobacco. He led the way to his little shop and told them to help themselves. They did, and when they had filled their pockets and their haversacks they shot the lame man through the heart. Meantime, with torch and grenade, other soldiers were setting fire to the village. They burned the dead tobacconist’s home, and when the wife rushed from the house with her youngest child in her arms they shot the child. He screamed “Mother!” just once, and died.

She and her two remaining children fled, but Cécile, the sixteen-year-old daughter, did not get very far. She was seized by a German officer, and it was a year before her mother saw her again. When those two met again the girl was a skeleton, and she bore in her arms a skeleton baby. It was a girl. Otherwise they would not have permitted her to take it back to France.

The reunited family made their way to a relative in a village near Peronne. When the Germans swept over that district in 1916 they fled again, and in the flight Cécile, never strong after her experience in Germany, died. Soon afterward the baby died. Georges, now a sturdy boy of fourteen, was all that was left. After the Germans retreated last November they went back to their village near Peronne, and the boy worked for their support—until March twenty-first, this year. Then they fled again, and here she was—alone.

“Where is Georges?” I asked.

“Do not speak so loud, madame,” implored the neighbor. “The poor one can not be told just yet, but Georges was killed by a shell that burst near the station when we got on the train. Not all of us could get on that train. She thinks that Georges was left behind and that he will come to-morrow.”

I could write stories like that to fill a book. Indeed, it has been done, officially done, by the French government, and every story was carefully authenticated before it was published. I tell this story because it was told to me while I was feeding the wretched victim.

I speak only of what I know, and I know that this woman, one of thousands, is just a type, an example, of what has happened, what is happening to-day, but what must never happen again. The only way to prevent it happening again, perhaps to our American women, is to put out of the world the thing Germany stands for and which she is fighting desperately to keep alive and powerful.