CHAPTER XXIIFRENCHMEN, NEVER FORGET
WithMadame Avril de Ste. Croix I visited the house of mercy in Paris where women and child victims of German soldiers find refuge.
I visited this house and I saw there that which made me an implacable foe of any peace except on terms of extinction of the power that caused this war.
“We have very few here now,†said Madame de Ste. Croix. “I mean compared with the first three years of the war. When the Germans think themselves victorious they are ruthless in their treatment of women and of civilians generally. When they are losing they are less cruel.â€
I am glad that I did not see the first fruits of German wrath. I do not understand how any one who did see it can ever smile or be happy again. What I have seen is the mild and tempered wrath of a beaten foe. I saw, in what is called the isolation pavilion of that house of mercy, seventeen girls in a condition of health which made it impossible for them to associate with others.
This pavilion had room for twice the number, and in former times, from 1914 to 1917, this one refuge was crowded, crowded with ruined and diseasedFrench and Belgian girls. Now the German army has no time and less opportunity for such bestiality. There were only seventeen girls in the isolation pavilion of that house of mercy in Paris. The youngest girl was fourteen.
They have comfortable rooms, a little parlor with books and a piano, and a kind and devoted house mother. She is a teacher as well, and the education of these pathetic young creatures is carried on daily, as though they had a normal destiny, as indeed some of them have. Recovery, even from their dread malady, is not impossible, and the best medical care in Paris is given them freely.
In another pavilion of this house I saw another group of girls much better off. They had lived through horrors, but their health was somehow preserved. The youngest of these girls was twelve years old, and the hideous thing had happened to her two years ago. I think I have never seen a more tragic figure than this little girl. Her face was white and solemn and her eyes were old. She seldom spoke.
While we were looking at the sewing work and some of the girls were busy making us tea, a friend of the house came in to play the piano for the girls to sing. This is her regular contribution to the work. They sang, these poor little larks, standing around the piano, sang of home and love and all things beautiful.
I sat and listened and thought of peaceful America, where the war is still little more than an abstraction,a fact hardly realized except by the mothers and fathers and wives of men who have gone over.
Perhaps it was unworthy of a reporter, but the sight of these young French girls who have been forced, in the most ghastly fashion possible, to realize what this war means, was, for the moment, more than I could bear. I slipped away and ran to the farthest end of the enclosed garden.
Out of the sound of their voices I sat down and let the most unbearable part of the pain flow away in tears. As I sat there on that garden bench I heard a little soft exclamation. Looking up I saw the youngest girl, the little one who at ten years had had her life wrecked by a Hunnish criminal, more than one, for all I know. This child with the white solemn face and the old eyes stood there, pitying me for a trouble she did not understand. But for her there was only one trouble, and she assumed that I was weeping for that.
She reached out a timid little hand and laid it on mine.
“Ah, madame,†she whispered, “is it not terrible, the war?â€
It is terrible, but it has brought to the surface a heroism and a grandeur of soul that few of us knew the French people possessed. I asked Madame de Ste. Croix to tell me of the women and girls who had borne children to the German invaders. “What will you do with those boche babies?†I asked her.
“We shall assimilate them,†she said proudly. Andshe added that the mothers, married or unmarried, as a rule loved their forlorn little babes. “I have known only two women who wished to get rid of their children,†she assured me.
Nature is stronger than convention. The heart of woman is a mother heart, and nothing can ever change it. It was man and not woman who invented the myth of the illegitimate child.
Yet over there in France, even the men have risen above that harsh and cruel tradition. Madame de Ste. Croix, who takes on herself the painful duty of telling men what happened to their women when the Germans came, told me how nobly and bravely French men have stood by and sheltered them.
There was a girl who came under her care shortly before her baby was born. It was a fine little boy, fortunately the image of its mother. She had lost everything in the war, father, mother, home, and she clung passionately to her child. Only, at times, she wept bitterly thinking of the young soldier she had hoped to marry, and who was ignorant of what had befallen her.
Madame de Ste. Croix looked up the young man, found his regiment, and arranged a meeting with him. His agony when she told him was great, but not for an instant was his allegiance to his sweetheart shaken. He had mourned her as dead and he blessed the noble woman who restored her to him again.
“What has happened is not conceivably her fault,†declared this fine young soldier. “I love her more forwhat she has suffered. If I could I would marry her to-morrow and be a father to her child. But I am not sure that I can. I am not sure that it would be for her happiness.â€
With tears in his eyes the man told Madame de Ste. Croix that he was under twenty-five, and until after a man has passed that age he may not, according to French law, marry without the consent of his mother. This young man’s parents, he explained, were small town folk with a small town point of view.
Their morality was a little narrow-minded, and he feared that they would never consent to his marriage with a girl who had suffered at the hands of the Hun. They would pity her, of course, but they would not want her for a daughter. They would never be able to love the child.
“Let me go away now,†he implored, “and try to think what is best to be done.â€
A week later he returned with a radiant face. He had obtained leave and had gone home to see his mother. There, on his knees, he had told her a lie, one that must have been recorded in Heaven to his favor. He told her that he was the father of that girl’s baby, that he had wronged her, and now begged permission to right the wrong by marrying her.
The mother’s reproaches were severe, and the poor young man had the pain of seeing her suffer for what she thought was his guilt. But after she had been induced to look at the baby’s picture her good heart was awakened. She agreed to the marriage and promisedto love and care for the mother and child until the end of the war.
This man was a simple soldier, a child of working people. He did not know that he was heroic, and in fact what he did has been matched by scores of men in France. Very often after the Germans violated women and children in the invaded towns and villages, they murdered them cruelly. Those left alive have been cherished by their men, only too thankful that they were spared.
“Not that the men do not suffer,†said Madame de Ste. Croix. “We prize virtue and stainlessness in women. But we love justice more. And if this dreadful thing is hard on men whose betrothed are wronged, how much harder it is on a man whose wife has borne children to the brutal boche.
“He may forget what she has gone through, but how can he endure the presence of the child? What will be the future of those children, intruders in the family? I do not know.â€
What has happened to thousands of women and girls in invaded Belgium and France could just as well happen in this country. It would happen without the smallest doubt if the Huns landed on our shores. Can you picture it? Can you imagine what it would be, fathers and mothers of America, to stand with German guns leveled at your heads while beasts in human form violated your young daughters before your eyes?
Can you imagine what it would be for our soldiersto come home from the war and find their wives and daughters with German babies in their arms? This is what many French and Belgian soldiers have had to endure. You will not persuade any of these men to listen to arguments in favor of a peace without victory.
All over France you will see in homes, in shop windows, on blank walls a poster. There are just three words on this poster: “Frenchmen, never forget!†In the upper right-hand corner of the poster there is a picture of some woeful thing that has happened since the German hordes began to overrun the world.
Sometimes the picture is of a burned and desolated village, a shattered hulk of what was once a beautiful old church. Oftener it is a picture of ruined womanhood, blasted childhood.
In the lower left-hand corner of the poster is a picture of a smooth German salesman trying to sell something in France. “Frenchmen, never forget!†They never will forget. They have tenacious memories, our French allies.
Can any one who has visited Paris forget the statue of Strasbourg in the Place de la Concorde? It is one of eight splendid monuments in that square, each representing a city of France. When the Germans filched Alsace and Lorraine from France, after the war of 1870, Strasbourg was lost to the French. On that day they laid funeral wreaths on the statue in the Place de la Concorde, and they have kept funeral wreaths there ever since.
Until August, 1914. Then they took away the emblem of mourning, because they knew Strasbourg would be theirs again. The statue is gay with flowers now, and with flags of all the allies. Our flag is there, the flag the French callle drapeau étoilé, the bestarred banner. May it stay there until what it has gone to France for has been accomplished, until the utterly crushed and vanquished German army has been pursued beyond the Rhine, until something of what the women of France and of martyred Belgium have endured has been paid for.
Not in the same coin, however. The men who have suffered so bravely are incapable of such crimes.