A soldier's mother in France

The long-distance gun which has been bombarding Paris has not terrorized the civil population, as the Germans intended. I was in and out of the city for a month after the gun began to do its deadly work, and I can attest to that fact. But I remember three occasions when the wrath of the Parisians rose to such a height that I shuddered to think of the retribution that was piling up for Germany.

The first time was when a shell struck an historic old church, killing seventy-five Good Friday worshipers. The second was when the shell burst in a ward of a maternity hospital, making victims of mothers and newly born babes. The third time was when a factory was struck, and at least seven women workers were savagely slain. The shell struck the front of the factory, killing the head foreman who was just leaving the place. The man was torn limb from limb.

The entire front wall of the factory crushed inward and fell upon the women seated at their work. Six were killed outright, one died on the way to the hospital, and thirty were desperately hurt. They were nearly all war widows, wives of soldiers and refugees, those slain women and their comrades in the factory.

“After the church, after the nursery, the sewing room,” wrote the editor of Le Matin. “It will be said that the barbarians respect nothing.” Not religion, not infancy, not womanhood.

What deepened the indignation in the minds of the French public was the almost sublime courage shown by the women in that factory. There was not a single moment of panic. Instantly picking themselves up, those who were unhurt began to lift out of the mass of bricks and shattered timbers the dead and wounded. They vied with one another in their calm, quick efforts to save life, and by the time the ambulances arrived all the wounded had received first aid. The next morning at the usual hour every woman, except the seriously wounded, reported for work. Not one stayed at home.

“France can not spare workers now,” said one woman to President Poincaré, who personally visited the wrecked factory to congratulate these heroines.

Such is the metal of French wives and mothers, who have always, until this war, lived rather secluded lives within their own homes. In sheer admiration the French men, who have hitherto monopolized the higher fields of industry, and who have laughed at the idea of women in political life, are now ready to yield to any demands that women may in future put forth.

French women can probably have the vote for the asking. They have not made up their minds, in great numbers, that they want to vote. But the suffrage movement is well started, it has good leaders, women of education and social power, and there is no question as to the outcome.

War has wrought great changes in the status of women in all the countries directly involved, and in France it has almost overturned the whole social theory. The rigid system of chaperonage of girls has been greatly relaxed.

For this the Red Cross has been responsible to a certain degree. Thousands of young women who never in their lives before saw a man except in the presence of their mothers now work in station canteens at all hours of the day and night, cooking, serving, feeding soldiers and refugees, waiting on the sick and weary with tireless devotion.

I have spoken of the dearth of conductors on the French trains. There is one train attendant who never fails, and that is the young woman who collects funds for the Red Cross. Every time a train stops it is boarded by girls and women in white uniforms, who go through all the carriages shaking tin money receptacles. These are about the size and shape of a quart milk bottle, and the girl who holds it neglects nobody. “Pour la Croix Rouge! Pour les blessés!” she cries, and everybody drops small change into the milk bottle’s insatiable maw. In the course of a long journey one contributes rather heavily. But then, one should.

The educated women of France have gone in for hospital nursing as never before. No part of unpreparedness in France was more serious than the neglect of the nursing profession. Formerly almost all nursing was done by the religious orders, and to tell the truth, it was not very scientific nursing. If a sister happened to be a born nurse, so much the better. But even the best of them were untrained in the modern sense.

When the religious orders were broken up in France little or nothing was publicly done to replace the nurses. I visited a house in Paris, a sort of a nurses’ settlement, where for some years a highly educated and philanthropic woman has maintained a small training school of her own.

This woman, whose name, unfortunately, has slipped my memory, lives and works in a crowded quarter of the city where there is much tuberculosis. She established her nurses’ training school in connection with her tuberculosis work, which is extensive. She induced a number of educated girls to take up nursing, and many of them in 1914 went into war work. But they were a drop in the bucket. They were dozens where thousands were needed. So the women had to leave their homes, as our leisured women will have to, if this war outlasts 1918, and made themselves capable and devoted trained nurses.

These are the new women of France, and it would be extraordinary if, after finding freedom from the old restrictions and conventions, they should ever go back to the old ways. I met several women who were as emancipated as any young American feminist, and who seemed very happy in their new independence.

At Aix-les-Bains, where our soldiers went for their first vacation leaves, there was a young girl who was an almost startling example. She was about twenty years old and very pretty, in a delicate, patrician way. Before the war this girl would never have gone out of the house unattended. She had been educated in a private school with girls of her own social class, and but for the war would have been married by this time to a man chosen for her in the family council.

Now she was driving her own little Ford ambulance for the benefit of the American soldiers. She had joined the American Y. M. C. A., wore its becoming gray and blue uniform, with a boy’s soft hat pulled down over her bobbed black hair, and she was as busy as a maternal little wren.

I don’t know where she and the little car had operated before, but when the boys began to arrive at Aix she drove down from Paris, entirely alone except for a girl chum, an English girl, I believe, and a dozen times a day she sat at the wheel speeding between Aix and Chambéry, four miles away, carting supplies from one Y. M. C. A. headquarters to the other, and taking soldiers back and forth as well.

Mademoiselle Marcelle spoke English quaintly but fluently, but she was not a very conversational young person. She was grave and very dignified, and she loved all American soldiers too well to favor any one very much. They treated her like a princess and were ready any minute to clean the car, or oil it, or spend half a day doing things to its insides.

She was a charming little creature, Mademoiselle Marcelle. My son confided in me one evening that he didn’t think he would have to look farther for his life’s ideal, but then, so did at least a dozen other doughboys, so I considered his chances rather slim.

Even before the war the position of the French girl showed signs of change. The quality of her education had immensely improved, and in fact was practically the same as that of boys. Coeducation was unknown in the schools and in higher institutions, but in the Sorbonne, the oldest of all French universities, men and women attended the same lectures.

There have been individual parents who desired the fullest freedom for their daughters, and who educated them for the professions. There are not many women doctors in France, but the woman lawyer is highly respected and even encouraged.

One daughter of such modern parents is at present rendering good service to her country in the French foreign office. Mademoiselle St. René Taillandier is a member of the press section of the foreign office, and because of her fluent English is of the greatest assistance to English and American correspondents, especially women correspondents.

Mademoiselle St. René Taillandier’s father is a veteran member of the diplomatic corps, and her mother is a very modern minded woman. Having lived in many countries of the world, and observing the constantly widening field of women’s activities, they agreed that their daughter should be brought up as an English or an American girl. She was given a sound education, part of it in England, and she was allowed the fullest possible freedom of choice and action.

Very recently having received at the Sorbonne a degree corresponding to our master of arts, this fortunate young French woman has entered upon a most promising literary career. She has acted in the capacity of secretary to the famous novelist, Paul Bourget, and it was he who discovered her literary gift and insisted upon her developing it. Her first stories were published in the dignified Revue des Deux Mondes, and have just appeared in book form.

These changes in the status of women are going to be very good for France and her people. Already one sees their broadening effect. In the old days the French showed a certain lack of hospitality to strangers. You had to be very well known to a French family before you were invited to visit the house. This is the real reason why the French have been so little understood.

It has been said of them that they had no word for home, hence they must be less domestic than other people. They have a word for home. It is “foyer,” which means literally hearth. The family hearth was to them so sacred that they couldn’t bring themselves to admit foreigners there.

That, too, is changing. Not only middle class people, but people of wealth are opening their homes, especially to Americans. I received the most unexpected invitations to the homes of almost strangers. One woman of prominence whom I met for the first time told me that she had a country house in Brittany which she wanted to place at the disposal of American soldiers this summer.

“I have lost several near relatives in the war,” she said, “and it would be a consolation to me to feel that I was doing something for the ally that came in time to save our France from perishing. I want to know the American young man. If your son should be so unfortunate as to be wounded I hope I can take him to my house for his convalescence. I would gladly receive him and any of the American soldiers.”

The kaiser’s atrocious war, meant to crush and alienate and enslave the English, French and Americans, has had quite another effect. It has brought us into new and noble friendship. It has forged ties that never will be broken.