Recently I have been in four of the countries concerned in the present war--Belgium, France, Germany, and England. I was also in Holland, having traversed it from end to end within a week after the fall of Antwerp, when every road coming up out of the south was filled with Belgian refugees.
In Belgium I saw this:
Homeless men, women, and children by thousands and hundreds of thousands. Many of them had been prosperous, a few had been wealthy, practically all had been comfortable. Now, with scarcely an exception, they stood all upon one common plane of misery. They had lost their homes, their farms, their work-shops, their livings, and their means of making livings.
I saw them tramping aimlessly along wind-swept, rain-washed roads, fleeing from burning and devastated villages. I saw them sleeping in open fields upon the miry earth, with no cover and no shelter. I saw them herded together in the towns and cities to which many of them ultimately fled, existing God alone knows how. I saw them--ragged, furtive scarecrows--prowling in the shattered ruins of their homes, seeking salvage where there was no salvage to be found. I saw them living like the beasts of the field, upon such things as the beasts of the field would reject.
I saw them standing in long lines waiting for their poor share of the dole of a charity which already was nearly exhausted. I saw their towns when hardly one stone stood upon another. I saw their abandoned farm lands, where the harvests rotted in the furrows and the fruit hung mildewed and ungathered upon the trees. I saw their cities where trade was dead and credit was a thing which no longer existed. I saw them staggering from weariness and from the weakness of hunger. I saw all these sights repeated and multiplied infinitely--yes, and magnified, too--but not once did I see a man or woman or even a child that wept or cried out.
If the Belgian soldiers won the world's admiration by the resistance which they made against tremendously overpowering numbers, the people of Belgium--the families of their soldiers--should have the world's admiration and pity for the courage, the patience, and the fortitude they have displayed under the load of an affliction too dolorous for any words to describe, too terrible for any imagination to picture.
In France I saw a pastoral land overrun by soldiers and racked by war until it seemed the very earth would cry out for mercy. I saw a country literally stripped of its men in order that the regiments might be filled. I saw women hourly striving to do the ordained work of their fathers, husbands, brothers, and sons, hourly piecing together the jarred and broken fragments of their lives. I saw countless villages turned into smoking, filthy, ill-smelling heaps of ruins. I saw schools that were converted into hospitals and factories changed into barracks.
I saw the industries that were abandoned and the shops that were bare of customers, the shopkeepers standing before empty shelves looking bankruptcy in the face. I saw the unburied dead lying between battle lines, where for weeks they had lain, and where for weeks, and perhaps months to come, they would continue to lie, and I saw the graves of countless numbers of other dead who were so hurriedly and carelessly buried that their limbs in places protruded through the soil, poisoning the air with hideous smells and giving abundant promise of the pestilence which must surely follow. I saw districts noted for their fecundity on the raw edge of famine, and a people proverbial for their light-heartedness who had forgotten how to smile.
In Germany I saw innumerable men maimed and mutilated in every conceivable fashion. I saw these streams of wounded pouring back from the front endlessly. In two days I saw trains bearing 14,000 wounded men passing through one town. I saw people of all classes undergoing privations and enduring hardships in order that the forces at the front might have food and supplies. I saw thousands of women wearing widow's weeds, and thousands of children who had been orphaned.
I saw great hosts of prisoners of war on their way to prison camps, where in the very nature of things they must forego all hope of having for months, and perhaps years, those small creature comforts which make life endurable to a civilized human being. I saw them, crusted with dirt, worn with incredible exertions, alive with crawling vermin, their uniforms already in tatters, and their broken shoes falling off their feet.
On the day before I quit German soil--the war being then less than three months old--I counted, in the course of a short ride through the City of Aix-la-Chapelle two convalescent soldiers who were totally blind, three who had lost an arm, and one, a boy of 18 or thereabout, who had lost both arms. How many men less badly injured I saw in that afternoon I do not know; I hesitate even to try to estimate the total figure for fear I might be accused of exaggeration.
In Holland I saw the people of an already crowded country wrestling valorously with the problem of striving to feed and house and care for the enormous numbers of penniless refugees who had come out of Belgium.
I saw worn-out groups of peasants huddled on railroad platforms and along the railroad tracks, too weary to stir another step.
In England I saw still more thousands of these refugees, bewildered, broken by misfortune, owning only what they wore upon their backs, speaking an alien tongue, strangers in a strange land. I saw, as I have seen in Holland, people of all classes giving of their time, their means, and their services to provide some temporary relief for these poor wanderers who were without a country. I saw the new recruits marching off, and I knew that for the children many of them were leaving behind there would be no Santa Claus unless the American people out of the fullness of their own abundance filled the Christmas stockings and stocked the Christmas larders.
And seeing these things, I realized how tremendous was the need for organized and systematic aid then and how enormously that need would grow when Winter came--when the soldiers shivered in the trenches, and the hospital supplies ran low, as indeed they have before now begun to run low, and the winds searched through the holes made by the cannon balls and struck at the women and children cowering in their squalid and desolated homes. From my own experiences and observations I knew that more nurses, more surgeons, more surgical necessities, and yet more, past all calculating, would be sorely needed when the plague and famine and cold came to take their toll among armies that already were thinned by sickness and wounds.
The American Red Cross, by the terms of the Treaty of Geneva, gives aid to the invalided and the injured soldiers of any army and all the armies. If any small word from me, attempting to describe actual conditions, can be of value to the American Red Cross in its campaign of mercy, I write it gladly. I wish only that I had the power to write lines which would make the American people see the situation as it is now--which would make them understand how infinitely worse that situation must surely become during the next few months.
*How Paris Dropped Gayety*
*By Anne Rittenhouse.*
[From THE NEW YORK TIMES, Sept. 23, 1914.]
On Friday night the Grand Boulevards were alive with people, motors, voitures, singing, dancing, and each cafe thronged by the gayest light hearts in the world.
On Saturday night the boulevards were thronged with growling, ominous, surging crowds, with faces like those of the Commune, speaking strong words for and against war.
On Sunday night mobs tore down signs, broke windows, shouted the "Marseillaise," wreaked their vengeance on those who belonged to a nation that France thought had plunged their country into ghastly war.
Aliens sought shelter; hotels closed their massive doors intended for defense. Mounted troops corralled the mobs as cowboys round up belligerent cattle. Detached groups smashed and mishandled things that came in the way.
Monday night a calm so intense that one felt frightened. Boulevards deserted, cafes closed, hotels shuttered. Patrols of the Civil Garde in massed formation. France was keeping her pledge to high civilization.
Yellow circulars were pasted on the buildings warning all that France was in danger and appealing by that token to all male citizens to guard the women and the weak.
At daylight only was the dead silence broken; France was marching to war at that hour. Will any one who was here forget that daily daybreak tramp, that measured march of the thousands going to the front? Cavalry with the sun striking the helmets; infantry with their scarlet overcoats too large; aviators with their boxed machines, the stormy petrels of modern war; and the dogs, veritably the dogs of war, going on the humanest mission of all, to search for the wounded in the woods of battle.
And, side by side with the marching millions, on the pavement, were the women belonging to them; the women who were to stay behind.
As though the Judgment Trumpet had sounded, France was changed in the twinkling of an eye. And added to that subconscious terror that lurked in every American soul of another revolution--a terror that was dispelled after the third day when France reached out her long arm and mobilized her people into a strong component whole with but one heart, was an inexplainable dread of this terrible calm.
We knew about trained armies going to war, but here was a situation where the Biblical description of the Last Day was carried out, the man at the wheel dropped his work and was taken; he who was at the plowshare left his furrow....
First we were afraid we would not have enough to eat. A famine was prophesied, and the credulous who know nothing of the vast sources which supply France with food clamored to get to England. Then there were frenzied stories of hotels closing and prices soaring. None of which happened or had any chance of happening. Food was never better, and today we have fruit that melts in the mouth; fish that swims in the sauce, the lack of which Talleyrand deplored in England; little green string beans that no other country produces or knows how to cook.
Prices never rose for the fraction of a sou. If one had a credit at a hotel, all was well, but unless one had ready money in small notes, none of the restaurants would accept an order. Here, and here only, was a snag concerning food. It is true that women went for twenty-four hours without food, but the reason was the lack of small change, not of eatables.
After the panic caused by a thousand rumors annexed to a dozen disheartening and revolutionary conditions, after the people felt that the Commune was the figment of imagination, not inspired prophecy; that money was getting easier; that, above all, America was looking after its own, though her move toward that end seemed to take months instead of days, and because we counted by heart-beats, not calendars; after all this, we found time and interest to observe the phenomena around us. We began to feel ashamed of our petty madness on the worldly subject of money and ships and safe passage home; our passionate, twentieth century, overindulged selves who were neither fighting nor giving our beloveds in battle, and who were harassing those who were in a death struggle. Never throughout the centuries to come, whether the map of Europe is changed or not, should the stranger within her gates ever forget the courtesy of Paris.
At night powerful searchlights backed up by artillery guard the city from the monster of the air.
This is fiction come true. It is Conan Doyle, Kipling, Wells come to measure. From the moment of sunset until sunrise those comets with an orbit patrol the skies. Pointing with blazing fingers to the moon and the stars, to the horizon, they proclaim that Paris watches while her people sleep.
The idea has given comfort to thousands. You, in your safe, tranquil homes, cannot know the pleasure it gives to look out of the window in the wakeful nights and watch those wheeling comets circling, circling to catch the Zeppelin that may come.
And behind the light is the gun. Rooftop artillery! The new warfare! On the roof of the fashionable Automobile Club on the Place de la Concorde the little blue firing guns wheel with the blazing fingers. Always ready to send shot and shell into a bulging speck in the sky that does not return the luminous signals. So on the roof of the Observatoir, so on the encircling environs; sometimes three, sometimes six, they are always going. People stand in the streets to watch, hypnotized by the moment into horizon gazing. There will be a speck in the sky; people grow tense; the comet catches it; is that wigwagging on the roof, those challenges in fire, returned? No. The speck passes; we breathe again.
And so it goes: a ceaseless centre of interest. It is the novelty of the world war.
The highest artillery in the world is on the Eiffel Tower. At its dizzy top, pointing to the sky, are machine guns that are trained to fire at an enemy's balloon. It is an answer to the prayer of the people that these guns have not yet been used.
But it is not only in the artillery on the top of the Eiffel Tower that interest centres; it is in the wireless that sends the messages to land and sea, safeguarding armies and navies, patrolling the earth and water.
Strange, isn't it, that the plaything of a nation has become its safeguard?
That was a stirring day when Paris sang "God Save the King." Gen. French arrived from London, coming quietly to confer with M. Viviani, the Minister for War, and with President Poincare. He was the first English General to come to the aid of France since Cromwell commissioned the British Ambassador to go to the aid of Anne of Austria. And the French heart responded as only it can; the people stood, with raised hats, in quadruple rows wherever he passed, as English, French, and foreign voices sang a benediction to Britain's King. History was made there.
That night Gen. French dined at the Ritz among a few friends. Even the newspapers seemed not to know it, and those of us who had the good chance to be there enjoyed him at leisure. He wore his field uniform of khaki in strong contrast to the French Generals, who are always in glittering gold, although he represents an empire and they a republic.
He is an admirable looking soldier, somewhat small of stature, firmly knit, bronzed, white haired, blue eyed, calm. He spoke of their responsibilities without exaggeration or amelioration. He did not make light of the task before his soldiers, and his grave manner seemed a prophecy of that terrible fight near Mons, above the French frontier, which was so soon to take place and where English blood was freely spilled for France's sake.
Another day that we shall be glad we saw when it is written into the narrative history of this Summer by some future Mme. Sevigne, was when the first German flag arrived. Before it came, two soldiers exhibited a German frontier post in front of a cafe on the boulevard, which started the excitement, but the reception of the flag by the Government and its placement in the Invalides, where is Napoleon's tomb, was an hour of dramatic tenseness.
The only music heard in Paris since the first day of August, the day of mobilization, accompanied this flag to its resting place along with those historic relics of former French victories. The procession went over the Alexander Bridge, that superb structure dedicated in honor of the Russian Czar, whose son is now fulfilling his pledge of friendship to France. The flag was met at the Invalides by the old soldiers who bore medals of the Franco-Prussian war. In the solemn inclosure, where all stood at salute, the veterans stood with lances. The flag was presented to an old sick soldier, who stumped forward on a wooden leg, his breast covered with the medals of the Crimea and the Italian campaign. He received it for France, and when it was placed over the organ, the listening crowds that jammed the Place des Invalides heard the singing of the "Marseillaise" by the cracked old voices first, then by the sturdier younger voices, and so it joined in, this vast concourse of solemn listeners.
France has gone into this war with the spirit of the Crusaders, but the spirit of French wit cannot be repressed even under the most terrifying conditions. So after the news of the superhuman effort made by that national baby, Belgium, in detaining the huge German forces for many days, there was a placard on one of the gates at the station, placed there by some gay refugee, saying that a train de luxe would leave for Berlin the next day.
It tickled the sensibilities of travelers very much, and it gave rise to the sale of postcards by an enterprising soul. These cards gave one the right, so they said, of a daily train to Berlin to visit the tomb of Guillame. They were bought by the thousands as souvenirs of the war and as one of the few things that caused a smile in this saddened city.
Another incident that amused the people was the remark of a young soldier who had single-handed taken some German prisoners, and who, when asked whether he had done it by the revolver or the bayonet, answered that he had only held out a slice of bread and butter and the Germans had followed him.
Amusement and irritation followed the order that all telephoning must be done in French. The sensation produced depended on the temperament of the person. Certainly queer things were said over the lines, and no one could blame the "Allo girl" for laughing. The majority of Americans took it in good part by saying that it was a French lesson for five cents.
Another accomplishment that has been furthered in Paris during the last three weeks is bicycle riding. With the paucity of transportation some means of getting over the magnificent distances of this city had to be found. So people who could ride rented bicycles, and those who had not learned began to take lessons. The girls who work, and those who go on errands for the Croix Rouge, wear a most attractive costume of pale blue or violet. It has a short divided skirt, a slim blouse with blue-and-white striped collar; there is a small hat to match, and the young cyclists whirling around on their missions of mercy are a pleasant sight for very sad eyes.