“Guard well the little ones to-day, Marthe. Don’t let them out of sight or play too far from home. You know Emile hates to wear his gas mask. He tears it off and hides it, the naughty rogue, soon as the back is turned. There! Listen! It has commenced again—the bombardment!”

Marthe’s mother, a short, stocky French peasant with a heavy, weather-roughened face and deep-blue eyes, held up her hand for attention; and Marthe, a slim gypsy child of seven, dirty and unkempt, with great gleaming black eyes and an uncombed mat of curly black hair, cocked an indifferent ear to listen; in fact, she was somewhat scornful of her mother’s continued terror of that distant muffled roar. Heard thus, ten kilometers or more away, it was not unlike the shock of a heavy surf breaking on a rocky coast. For three years now Marthe had heard that sound. She had heard it near at hand when a big shell had exploded bang! right on top of her own house and knocked all one side out open to the sky—after which they had dragged the furniture downstairs and lived in the cellar; she had heard it farther off when bing! bang! the spire of the old mossy stone church across the way had crashed down into the street and all of the saints save only Mother Mary and her little Son had tumbled, face down, from their niches; she had heard it the last thing at night when she went to sleep, and she had risen to its sound in the morning.

And familiarity had bred contempt. It was part of the everyday tissue of her life, common as the Boches’ avions, which went sailing high overhead in the sky, tiny as minute dragon flies, and disappeared into fleecy clouds. For Marthe and her mother lived in a little village in the war zone, just in front of a line of concealed French batteries which the enemy had long been striving to demolish.

And when the Boches became enraged at their failure in locating the French batteries which roared nightly defiance they would deliberately turn their guns upon the defenseless civilian villages in between, abandoned by all save a few old people and poor families who had nowhere else to go; and perhaps they would kill an old woman or mangle a child playing in the deserted streets; after which sport, encouraged and refreshed, they would go after the French batteries again. Jean, a village boy, had explained all this to Marthe. His entire family had been killed in an explosion, and since then he had turned into a wild, moody character, following the army or roaming the countryside.

Marthe listened to the distant struggle of artillery and then she shrugged her shoulders and said calmly: “It is not near. To-day it is not as near as yesterday. I do not think they will bother us any more. For yesterday Jean and I went through the village and counted, and every single house had been hit. They have finished with us, maman! If the guns do not come after us this afternoon may I take Emile and gather flowers for the shrines?”

Her mother shook her head. The frugal breakfast of soup over she was fastening on her apron of coarse ticking to go to work in her field. It was for the sake of that precious plot of five hectares of wheat that she had stayed on in the village, taking fearsome chances, after the enemy had started to gas the entire district and the French orders of evacuation had come.

“You would let little Emile be gassed,” she murmured reproachfully, “while you run off to gather flowers!”

“Zut! They have not gassed us for ten days. And it is cold down here, maman. Even in the middle of the day it is cold—and dark. Emile sneezes all the time. And he is getting as white as plaster.”

Her mother sighed. “Very well,” she consented grudgingly, “you may go. But for an hour only. I do not like it, though. Tie Emile’s mask behind his back where he cannot find it.”

“Yes, maman. But they are not going to gas us any more. Jean said so.”

“That Jean!” cried her mother angrily. “What does he know about it? Even the good God Himself does not know any more what they will do! And I will not have you playing with that scamp, that jeune sauvage. He is not respectable. Chasing all over the country! Following the soldiers! Hélas! What is our poor country coming to? A fine crop of young vagabonds we shall have after the war!”

She thrust into her pocket a hunk of dark sour bread and a fragment of cheese, kissed Emile and Marthe, caught up from the mattress a pallid, somber-eyed girl baby, and went out to the field.

Left to herself, Marthe took Emile, climbed the few steps leading up from her cave home and sat watching the German aëroplanes. They passed, singly or in groups, frequently. The thin drone of their motors coming from the north could be heard long before even Marthe’s keen eyes could pick out the black speck far up in the pale-blue ether. The thunder of artillery had grown fainter and died away. Certainly Jean was right. What was the fun of shooting at houses that were already knocked down?

That afternoon, with Emile clinging to her fingers and every now and then looking up with a delighted smile into her eyes, Marthe led the way to the ruined church. From the leather belt which secured the boy’s diminutive black cotton apron dangled the gas mask. According to orders Marthe had tied it behind his back, and at every step it bobbed up and down like an absurd little antiquated bustle. The sun shone brilliantly. It was an ideal day in which to be out of the cellar. Arrived at the church, with its small inclosed garden of silent inhabitants, Marthe ensconced Emile, always obedient, smiling and tender, upon a grave close under the wall of the old stone chapel, and then rambled off to gather bouquets for the shrines.

How long she remained away, how far she wandered, she did not know; but when she returned little Emile had mysteriously vanished. In her absence the old stone church had altered also. One entire side had fallen out and lay prone, a chaos of tumbled broken granite, upon the mossy ground. And now Marthe recalled having heard an explosion, but so accustomed were her ears to the sound that at the time she had but vaguely marked it. That accounted for the church certainly.

But Emile—where was Emile, obedient, tender little Emile? She ran about, peering behind gravestones, calling shrilly, and at length, smitten by a nameless anguish of horror, scared in every atom of her small being without knowing why, she fled, sobbing wildly, to her mother and poured out her story.

That night there was a hurried exodus. Marthe’s mother, broken by the death of her small son—for if his disappearance was a mystery to the girl it was not to her mother after one glance at the high-piled broken granite—decided to give up her field; but it was like wrenching her heart out of her body. Jean, chancing by that way at dusk, offered his company as far as the next village, for Marthe’s mother, a true peasant, had never in her life traveled more than a dozen kilometers from her own doorstep, and knew less of the outside world than she knew of heaven. So Jean had taken charge. And now he walked beside the refugees, carrying a huge blanketful of their possessions strapped across his shoulders and holding by the hand Marthe, who still wept bitterly at the thought of abandoning her little Emile to the cold and the dark of the deserted churchyard. She pictured him sobbing and stumbling among the mossy stones, and calling in sweet, plaintive tones for his sister. That the fall of the church wall had anything to do with the vanishing of Emile did not once enter her head. The two were separate catastrophes—the one, familiar, ordinary; the other, mystifying, terrible. She, too, bore a sack of household goods upon her back, and from her free hand dangled a small, battered bird cage.

Behind them trudged Marthe’s mother, harnessed to the shafts of a dump cart piled high with mattresses and bedding, and bearing on top the small slumbering Georgette, cozy and warm, nested deep in pillows. Since viewing the fallen wreck of the church not one sound had the mother uttered. If she had marked Jean’s opportune appearance on the scene she did not betray any sign of his presence. And now she plodded forward, shoulders bent, gripping the shafts, dry-eyed, stolid, mute. What were her thoughts upon that twilight road?

Ahead of her Marthe and Jean held low-voiced conversation as to the probable whereabouts of Emile. The boy, who upon hearing her tale had instantly divined the truth, declared it was his opinion that the sacred Mother Marie, looking out through the window from her shrine in the church, had seen Emile, and noting what a gentle and gay little kid he was had borrowed him for a time to play in the sky with her own small Son, who without doubt must be horribly bored among all those solemn, grown-up saints and angels. And this idea of the jeune sauvage, the vagabond of the fields, comforted Marthe greatly.

In time they arrived at a village which thus far had escaped shelling. A shelter was found for them. And for a month the peasant mother remained in her new, strange surroundings. But her heart was so heavy that she could not sleep or eat or speak. She suffered as an animal suffers, dumbly. A stranger would have called her sullen—a clod. For hours on end she sat in the same chair, heavy, immobile, and stared out upon a field of grain and poppies and thought of her own plot lying untended in the sun. And finally the tug of the soil became too strong. She returned.

Established once more in the damp cellar of their wrecked home she became herself again, and the first night she chatted volubly with Marthe, to whom she had scarcely addressed a word since their flight; she even sang as she hushed the small Georgette to sleep.

“Listen, petite!” she said to Marthe after supper. “I am going down the street a moment to see Madame Barrois. She tends the field next mine. Perhaps also I can get some goat’s milk for the bébé. Ne bouge pas! Sois sage—hein?” And Marthe had promised soberly not to budge and to be good. She felt lonely the first night, and she wished that Mother Marie would see fit to return Emile. There was such a thing as keeping a borrowed article too long!

Half an hour later her mother burst into the cellar, tears upon her cheek and a strange light in her eye. In her arms she bore a child who bit and wailed and kicked and screamed without cessation: “Maman! Maman! Maman!”

“Ça y est! Tais-toi, mon petit gosse!” (Enough! Enough! Keep still, my little boy!) murmured Marthe’s mother, pressing the small head close to her bosom. “Thy maman is gone, pauvre enfant!”

She placed the sobbing child in Marthe’s arms. “Listen to me,” she said. “Emile was taken from us——”

“I know. The Mother Marie borrowed him to play with the infant Jesus. Jean said so.”

“Very good. For once that Jean was not so far off. And now the good Mother Marie has given us this poor little one to nourish in Emile’s stead.”

To Marthe this exchange seemed only simple justice and she did not trouble her head with the details of the transaction. Nor did her mother explain that on arriving at the dugout of her friend she had knocked repeatedly without receiving a response and was on the point of leaving when from out of the darkness behind the door had sounded a shrill, angry, sobbing little voice: “Maman! Maman! J’ai froid! J’ai froid!”

Hastily Marthe’s mother forced the door, made a light, and discovered her friend lying upon the floor, the victim of a shell, and the child beating the still, inanimate figure with his puny fists and crying: “Maman! Wake up! I’m cold!”

After this Marthe’s mother tended her own and her neighbor’s field, and Marthe joyfully tended little Emile’s substitute.

One afternoon shortly afterward she took her new acquisition out to wash him in the canal and see what kind of bargain Mother Marie had made with her anyhow. And while she was thus employed, down on her knees scrubbing absorbedly, there drew up quietly behind her a large, military-gray automobile, from which two men descended. It was, in fact, Prefect Mirman with an American friend. M. Mirman was prefect of the department of Meurthe-et-Moselle, a portion of the country bordering on Alsace, which included a large area of the battling frontier of France. The prefect himself held a position comparable in importance to the governorship of New York, and he had in his heart a deep overflowing love for his suffering people which resembled that of Lincoln’s.

But Marthe could not know that. She sprang to her feet, terribly startled, staring behind the men at the big, gray, snorting, quivering, smoking beast—the first she had ever laid eyes on—and instinctively threw her new little brother behind her. The prefect, reading her intention of flight, laid a restraining grasp on her shoulders. Marthe faced him, pale, hostile, her pupils steadily enlarging.

“Poor unfortunates!” said the American. “Why are they permitted to remain?”

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.