CHAPTER XXBLED WHITE
Mr. Hoovertells us that we must save more food. Especially more wheat. With all the sacrifices we have voluntarily made, with all the ingenuity women have used to save food and still keep their families well nourished, the women are called upon to do more. As far as wheat and a few other staples are concerned, Mr. Hoover tells us that our shipments abroad are only now beginning to approach the “minimum requirements” of our soldiers and of our allies.
I know that many housewives the country over will read this announcement with dismay, and will wonder how much more will be required of them, and how much more they can contrive to give. I want to say to the housekeepers who read this, that they can not possibly know or dream the vast importance of their part in this war. They can not know what their food conservation efforts have meant to the French people, as well as the English, the Italians, and what is left of the stricken Belgians.
Every woman who has conscientiously observed the food regulations, thereby releasing food for our soldiers and the allies, has almost literally fought side by side with the men. She has stood by them andfed them, encouraged them, given them physical and spiritual power to go on, wholeheartedly, in the fight for civilization.
A soldier who goes into battle half nourished, one whose heart is heavy thinking of hungry children at home, is a soldier half beaten. He who goes forward with a well-nourished body and a mind at rest is a soldier three-quarters victorious.
This is how you have helped fight the battle for the peace of the world, women of America. And let me assure you that Europe is fully awake to the fact. Nothing that President Wilson has done, or Congress, or the men at the head of our wonderful army in France, has made a deeper impression on the allies than what the housekeepers of this country have done.
Without any compulsion, without any laws, simply because they were appealed to in the name of humanity, hundreds of thousands of women, rich and poor, in great houses and in farm kitchens, have voluntarily rearranged their whole scale of living, have divided up their food with people they will never know nor see.
It has captured the hearts of the people of Europe. They are lost in admiration. It has taught them what they never believed before—that the United States, far from being the land of the dollar, is a land of idealists.
This was precisely the kind of encouragement our allies in Europe needed. They needed it as much as they needed guns, airplanes, soldiers. It was at a very dark hour in the history of this war that the United States entered the war.
I do not mean that our allies were at the breaking point. But they were near the point of desperation because of the sudden and unexpected defection of Russia. The immediate future was heavy with dread.
Then came the news, “the Yanks are coming.” The black cloud was lifted. The world was saved. Everybody knows the difficulties that had to be overcome before an American army was landed in France. Germany did not believe that we could land an army there, but we did.
And long before that we landed enough food in France, and in other hungry lands overseas, to enable the allies to carry on until our men came. That was one of the big feats of the war, and in it the women played their part, and more than their part.
No one has had to call for a congressional investigation into the women’s share in the war. Because the men who are in the training camps, on the seas and in the fighting zone are not soldiers to us. They are our sons. The French and English soldiers, the Canadians, the men from Australia, South Africa, Italy, Belgium, they too, are mothers’ sons, and we don’t go back on our sons.
What the mothers of this country have done for the men who fight, and for their people at home, has been to bring hope to their hearts and laughter to their lips. It has enabled them to face danger with a smile.
Every once in a while since I returned from France I have heard the phrase, “The English and the French are bled white.” Don’t you believe it. After nearlyfour years of appalling carnage, after the loss of millions of their best and bravest, the courage of our allies, men and women, is marvelous. Since we came into the war that courage has become exaltation. Nothing can shake it.
For all that we have been able to do in the way of supplying the allies with food, it will not do to assume that they have more than enough to keep themselves in good condition. The English seem to have a greater shortage than the French, but that is mainly, I think, because the French know better how to prepare and serve food, and how to make a simple meal attractive.
In England I often felt not exactly hungry but a dissatisfaction which was almost as bad. The diet was monotonous. Meat was almost invariably roasted, vegetables were always boiled and served without sauces.
In France, on the other hand, they have made an art of dining, and even now, in war time, they give you the impression that you are being extremely well fed. Yet the French are short of breadstuffs. Their war bread is good, and I had enough of it at every meal. But the average person in France eats twice and three times the amount of bread at a meal that is eaten in America. Bread is literally the staff of life in France.
Meat, while expensive, was plentiful all during the winter. That was because there was so little grain. They could not afford to feed their cattle and so slaughtered them. Beginning May fifteenth the Frenchfood authorities decreed three meatless days a week for the republic, and since France is generally Catholic, that meant for the majority four days, an additional day, Friday, being observed by the Catholics.
There was milk for little children and for invalids, but, except for a small jug with my morning coffee, I never saw milk while I was in France. Butter could be used in limited quantities in cooking, but it was forbidden to be served at the table.
Sugar, too, was almost a forbidden article. Some hotels and private houses served a little sugar with coffee and tea, but mostly the saccharine substitute was offered. Just before I left France, at the end of April, sugar cards were being issued entitling the holders to a pound of white sugar each month.
Only plain bread is baked in France. The innumerable little rolls and crescents, so delicious with the morning coffee, have disappeared. There is no such thing as pastry. Sweets are supplied in jams and marmalades, a limited quantity being allowed once or twice a day. There are no desserts except fruits, fresh or preserved.
I go into this that the American housekeepers who read these articles may see how cheerfully the allies are bearing what our people would consider a real food shortage. They have enough over there, and will have as long as we give of our store, but we are not by any means supporting our allies in luxury. On what they have, however, they live and keep up a spirit that is truly marvelous.
One evening in my London hotel I sat down to dinner near a table where five young people, evidently brothers and sisters, were quietly making merry. One of the men was in the uniform of the Royal Flying Corps, the other, although of military bearing, was in the correct evening clothes of the British civilian.
I noticed that the girl sitting next the man in evening clothes was assiduous in her attentions to him, and it occurred to me that English women too often spoiled their brothers, made them selfish. This golden-haired English girl cut up her brother’s food, even fed it to him. I thought it a little absurd.
But when they rose from the table I saw with a shock that the splendid young man had had both arms cut off below the elbows. He probably had been an artillerist. At all events here he was, a helpless cripple. But from the gay demeanor of that family no one would have dreamed that they had a care in the world. They were carrying on, they would have told you.
I saw more of the French than of the English; therefore I saw more instances of their incomparable courage in the midst of war and carnage. I was in Paris when the long-distance gun of the Germans began to bombard the city.
Every fifteen minutes “boom” went the gun, and you held your breath wondering where the shell had fallen and how many people it had killed and wounded.
It was nerve-racking, there is no use denying the fact. In a battle the shells come tearing through the sky, screeching and whining as they come. But in sucha long-distance bombardment there are no preliminary sounds. A house explodes before your eyes, the pavement rises up in a geyser of earth and stones, the earth of a park or public garden suddenly flies up in a huge, fan-shaped eruption of smoke and dirt.
Afterward you hear the BOOM! It seems incredible that only three or four minutes ago men in gray-green uniforms, seventy miles away in Germany, loaded that gun, pulled a string or lever or whatever they do pull, and started that shell toward Paris.
It seems impossible to believe that while you stand there wondering, those same men are loading the big gun to again bombard an open town, full of women and children, regardless of where the shell falls.
One Sunday afternoon, just before I came away, I went down into the island of the old city, the original Paris, to say good-by to certain beautiful things I love. It was a lovely spring day and the quay of flowers and the Palace quay were crowded with Parisians out for a Sunday walk. The women wore their spring finery, and there were many little girls in shining white dresses and veils of their first communion.
The long-distance gun had been silent for about forty hours. It gets out of order easily, or else the allied airmen had been shelling it. Anyhow, it had been silent. But suddenly, about fifty yards from where I stood, the waters of the Seine shot up in a great waterspout, there was an explosion and the usual BOOM. A shell had skimmed over the heads of that Sunday crowd of inoffensive Parisians and landed inthe river. In a minute the surface of the water was sprinkled with dead fish.
Of course, the object of this bombardment is to frighten and discourage the French. Let me tell you how far it falls short of its object. The cables no doubt carried the story of one shot from that long-distance gun that struck a maternity hospital, killing in their beds mothers and new-born babies. A nurse was killed also, and many women were wounded. The hospital ward itself was reduced to matchwood. It was a horrible thing.
In the midst of all this horror, and as a result of it, a young woman was prematurely delivered of a child, a little girl. The mother died, but the little baby girl lived, and the nurses called in a priest and had that baby christened Victory.
One day, through the streets of Paris they were hauling a captured German cannon, one of the number which now reposes in the courtyard of the Hotel des Invalides. The people stopped to watch the cannon go by, but there was no demonstration of hatred.
The French respect an honorable foe; it is only unclean warfare that they scorn. This was demonstrated right then and there, for as the cannon passed on “Big Bertha,” as they call the long-distance gun, suddenly spoke, and somewhere a shell fell in Paris.
A workman in a white smock raised his fist and bawled out in the direction of the German frontier: “That’s right, bark, you cur. This one can no longer bite!”