A soldier's mother in France

John Smith, of Harlem, gave five dollars to the Red Cross during the last drive. It was a big sum for a man with his responsibilities and a small income to part with, but John gave the money, and all over the country men like him, women, too, and children gave what they could to help the wounded and the desolated across the seas.

I want to tell John and the others how their money was spent, and I shall ask them first to go with me to a huge basement room of the Gare du Nord, the big north station of Paris. The room was taken over by the American Red Cross at the beginning of the spring offensive, March twenty-first, and here for days and nights, terrible days, sinister nights, a stream of refugees from the invalid district poured in and out, coming by train from Soissons, Compiegne, Montdidier, Albert, and from dozens of little villages and farms between Laon and Amiens.

The Red Cross fed and clothed and refreshed these refugees in that basement, loaded them on big motor-trucks and took them across the city to the Orleans or the Quai d’Orsay stations and saw them off to the sheltered south.

All on your money, you fortunate, generous, tender hearted givers. We who were over there in those first desperate days of spring had the privilege only of helping the Red Cross take care of the stricken men, women and children who had fled before the German hordes for the second time since the war began.

Vividly before me I see that great basement room, the only kind of a place that is half-way safe in Paris these days. It is night, or, rather, it is early morning, nearly two o’clock, and I have spent every minute of the time since nine o’clock fitting shoes, your gift, to refugee children.

When I went on duty early in the evening there were five or six babies standing at the counter, over the edge of which their little white, dirty, tired faces were barely visible, and their round black eyes were fixed enviously on a huge pile of shoes waiting to be distributed.

I picked up the smallest babe, a little boy of four, and asked him if he needed shoes. “Oui, madame,” he did, and stockings, too, for his feet were literally on the ground. I grabbed a bunch of stockings, found the right size, and explored that great pile of shoes until that infant was fitted, and then I attended to the rest, for all those children needed both shoes and stockings.

So, it appeared to me that night, did almost every child in France. They came on and on, some in their mother’s arms, some toddling along, some leading other children. I worked steadily, with only a pause now and then when a new trainload came in and were fed.

The shoes were new and they rubbed off, and soon my hands and face and big gingham apron were streaked and spotted with black. I was almost as dirty as the refugees, but still the children demanded shoes.

They forgot that they had endured agonies of fear and horror, they forgot the roar of the shells in the village streets. They forgot the hunger and thirst and the deadly weariness of the flight. Their little stomachs were full, they were warm and safe, and they had new stockings and new shoes on their feet.

They had more, for when my part was done other women took them in hand and gave them new shirts and gowns and the shiny black pinafores which every French child, boy as well as girl, looks upon as an indispensable article of dress. If you could have seen their smiles, heard their lisping words of gratitude, felt their warm little handclasps, oh, you fortunate and generous givers, you would have been repaid a thousand, thousand times for your gift to the Red Cross.

Because the French rarely have large families, it must not be thought that they do not value children. They adore children, as a matter of fact, and their gratitude to the Red Cross for what was done for children during those days of flight and anguish was pathetic to see and hear.

Women came into the basement of the Gare du Nord in a condition of half nudity. When the storm burst they gathered up their babies, took what they could carry of household goods and treasures, and simply fled. Much of what they carried was lost by the wayside. Their clothes were rags. Some of the rags were taken off by the mothers that the children might be kept alive, for the weather was cold and rainy. But when these poor women came into the Red Cross room their first thought was always for their babies.

“You have need of shoes yourself, madame,” I said to more than one. She always answered, “Yes, but le petit first.”

When you saw a woman who would not eat, who cared not at all for the new blouse or the warm coat they offered her, who wept unceasingly or wore a look of wild misery like insanity, you knew that she had lost her children in the flight. That happened not infrequently. Part of the money you gave the Red Cross is spent to find those lost children and bring them back to the desolate mother’s breast.

Late one night during that exciting period in March the workers at the Gare du Nord found a boy of thirteen who had been separated early in the flight from his family. He had walked a distance of twenty kilometers, twelve and a half miles, before he reached the railroad station, and he carried with him on that walk, and on the journey to Paris, two bags of feed for the horse, four or five pounds of beans in a paper sack, a cross-cut saw, two axes, some harness and a gas mask. When the Red Cross workers discovered him he was about all in, but he was brave. He sat on his baggage and ate sandwiches and drank hot chocolate like a famished tramp.

He had an aunt and a grandmother in Paris, he said, but he did not know his aunt’s married name. He knew the name of the street she lived on, though, and the next morning a Red Cross man went with the boy to the street, and by simple process of calling at every house in every block finally located the aunt.

But that wasn’t all. Eloi, his name was Eloi Beaussart, needed a job, and the Red Cross gave it to him. Now that game youngster wears a khaki uniform with A. R. C. on the collar, and works in a Red Cross canteen. When I came away Eloi’s family had not yet been found, but he was serene and hopeful. The American Red Cross, in his opinion, can do anything if you give it time.

Your money did not wait until the refugees got to Paris before it helped them. In front of the Red Cross headquarters in the Place de la Concorde crowds gathered daily to see the great motor-trucks being loaded with food to be sent up into the fringes of the war zone. Thousands of loaves of bread, tins of meat, condensed milk, chocolate, coffee, everything necessary and practical.

The Red Cross had a great many stations in the sections over which the Germans swept, and while the workers in those stations were helping to evacuate whole populations, the workers in Paris were rushing supplies to feed them. With guns roaring and shrapnel bursting around them, the Red Cross camions went steadily on taking hope and relief and life to thousands of civilians and wounded soldiers.

In one station yard, waiting for trains to carry them to base hospitals down the line, the Red Cross found and succored three thousand wounded French soldiers. In the town of Beauvais, almost the last habitable point near the war zone, a large number of sick civilians, mostly women and children, were found. There was no hospital left in the place, which had been shelled and largely evacuated, and to show you how promptly your money acts, I am going to tell you what the Red Cross workers did for the suffering population of Beauvais.

Some time in the early morning a hospital was established on paper. That is, it was decided to establish a hospital. At ten o’clock that same morning a partially furnished house was rented. At twelve o’clock the house was in order, a surgery with full supplies was installed, two doctors, four nurses and several helpers were at their posts, and before the afternoon was half over forty patients were in the beds and being treated and cared for.

Wouldn’t you rather feel that you had helped do a job like that than to have another summer hat?

In the quaint old city of Toul, through which the famous Rhine-Marne canal flows, and close to which our troops first held the line against the Germans, I saw another hospital, a children’s hospital established and supported by Red Cross money. The four hundred and sixty-six little children in this place came from towns and villages which have been bombarded with gas bombs, instruments of torture invented in hell especially for the German army.

Those bombs killed, suffocated to death, a large number of babies, but the Red Cross rescued many. There in that hospital on the hill above Toul four hundred and sixty-six children have had their tortured lungs cleared of the poisonous stuff, and their anguished little bodies have been brought back to ease.

Wouldn’t you be happier helping a gassed French child back to life than to buy a box of expensive cigars?

There is not room enough in one chapter or in a dozen of them, to tell half of what the Red Cross has done and is doing in France alone in this war.

Twenty-three hundred people, doctors, nurses, canteen workers, business men, social workers and others are enrolled in France. Twenty hospitals, seventy-six dispensaries and several sanitariums are in operation. For wounded soldiers of the allies the Red Cross supplies nearly four thousand hospitals. It has a model hospital train; it has innumerable dressing stations, canteens, health stations, sewing rooms for the destitute. Nearly three million soldiers a month are served in Red Cross canteens alone.

In Paris there are thirteen canteens always busy serving French soldiers on leave. In Bourg there is a canteen where thousands of our soldiers going to Aix-les-Bains and Chambéry for their vacations got a real American home breakfast. I heard many soldiers speak enthusiastically of that breakfast, served by the Red Cross women, but purchased by mothers, fathers and friends of American soldiers right here in the United States.

Those sons of ours who are being rapidly transported to France to join the more than a million already there soon will be training behind the battle lines in Lorraine, Picardy, the Aisne. Soon after that they will be fighting, the fight to death if need be, to clear the world of that evil thing, war.

Between them and such suffering as no one who has not seen it can even faintly imagine stands that cross of mercy and devotion. To support it is to support and protect our own children. “Give till it hurts,” I read on one of the Red Cross posters. Give, if you have hearts, until your hearts stop hurting.