[D]This clause is a dead letter almost everywhere. You are much more apt to be refused an apartment because you have children than because you have dogs or birds. In fact, although you often see a sign or are greeted by the statement NI CHIENS NI ENFANTS, the prohibition, when you press the concierge, is limited to children. My bitter criticism of the people among whom I live is the attitude of a large part of them towards children. They do not like children. They do not want them. And they do not understand why any woman is fool enough to have "a big family," as they call my four. This is the most serious problem of contemporary France. It makes the winning of the war a hollow victory.
[D]This clause is a dead letter almost everywhere. You are much more apt to be refused an apartment because you have children than because you have dogs or birds. In fact, although you often see a sign or are greeted by the statement NI CHIENS NI ENFANTS, the prohibition, when you press the concierge, is limited to children. My bitter criticism of the people among whom I live is the attitude of a large part of them towards children. They do not like children. They do not want them. And they do not understand why any woman is fool enough to have "a big family," as they call my four. This is the most serious problem of contemporary France. It makes the winning of the war a hollow victory.
You pay the taxes, which are collected directly from you. The municipal tax runs to about sixteen percent of the annual rental, and now includes in a lump sum the old taxes for windows and doors. In addition, you pay a very small tax to recompense the city for having suppressed theoctroion wines and liquors and mineral waters. A new tax, which no resident in France who has an apartment can escape, is the income tax. But unless you are a French subject, you are not compelled to make a return of your sources of income. Should you choose to be taxedd'office, the collector assesses you on a basis of having an income seven times the amount of your rental. The concierge is forbidden to allow you to move from your apartment until you have shown him the receipts for the current year for all your taxes.
Once you have signed your lease and have arranged to move in, your troubles are not yet over. Proprietors furnish no chandeliers or other lights, not even the simplest. You have to go to an electrician, buy your fixtures, and have them installed, if you have not bought the lights in the apartment from the previouslocataire. You must sign contracts and make deposits for your gasand electric light. The gas company will rent you a stove and a meter. You pay the charges for connecting you up. Telephones are in the hands of the government. If you want a direct telephone, you have to sign a contract. If you want to have your telephone through the concierge'sloge, the telephone service is charged on your quarterly rent bill. In any case, you pay for the instrument and bell box and the charges for installation. A private line is not much of an advantage in Paris. The service is scarcely any quicker. With your telephone by way of the concierge, a message can be left if you do not answer, and the person calling you is informed if you are out of town.
The last of your troubles is fire insurance. Thanks to the solid construction of Paris and careful surveillance, fires are very rare. During all the years I have lived in Paris I remember no fires except those caused by the German bombs. However, you do not dare not to insure. For French law holds you responsible for damage to neighbors' apartments from water as well as fire, if the fire starts in yours. Your insurance policy insures your neighbors as well as yourself. The French law is excellent. It makes you careful. French law, also, by the way, holds you liable for accidents to your servants, of any kind and no matter how incurred. You cannot fall back on the joker of contributory carelessness. All the servant has to prove is that the accident happened while working for you.
I have forgotten to mention one further formality that was not of importance before the war but is indispensable now. An old French police law requires all foreigners to secure acertificat d'immatriculationfrom the Prefecture of Police as thesine qua nonto residence in Paris. Before the war, no one ever bothered about this. The only foreigners watched by the police were Russians, due to a provision France ought never to have agreed to in the alliance with Russia. When the war broke out and my husband went to get hispermis de séjour, he was asked for the first time for this paper. And we had been living in France on and off for six years, and had leased three apartments! This was a reason for loving Paris. Nobody bothered you, and you could live as you pleased and do as you pleased so long as you behaved yourself. Foreigners were never made to feel that they were foreigners. They enjoyed equality before the law with Frenchmen. Paris was cosmopolite in a unique sense. Hindsight blamed the laxity of the French police. But let us fervently hope that the old spirit of hospitality may not have changed with the war and that France in regard to Germany may not be as Rome in regard to Greece. Why be victor if one has to adopt the habits of the vanquished?
I have gone into the question of the housing problem with too much precision and detail, I fear, for a book of Paris sketches. But so many friends have asked me, so many strangers have written me, about takingup their abode in Paris that I feel what I have said about it will be of interest to all who are interested in Paris.
We had three months to our new residence. You always have three months at least in Paris. It is not enough if you are undecided or lazy. It is plenty if you go about hunting for a home with the same energy and persistence and enthusiasm that you put into other things. After all, what is more important than a home? We tramped the quarter, as we had done in the summer of 1909. But we now had a large family. And we had realized the fundamental truth of the beautiful old Scotch saying, "Every bairn brings its food wi' it." So we were able to aspire to two salons and three bedrooms, toconfort moderne(which means central heat, electric light, bath-rooms, elevator and hot water), and to palms and red carpet in the doorway.
For us the heart of Paris at that time was where the Boulevard du Montparnasse is crossed by the Boulevard Raspail. On the Boulevard du Montparnasse, between Baty's and the Rue Léopold-Robert, a new apartment house was being built. Before the stairs were finished we climbed to the sixth floor, lost our hearts to a view of all Paris, and signed a 3-6-9 lease. The war has come and gone. We are still there.
VON KLUCK and I had a race to see who would reach Paris first. It was close. But I won. Lots of my friends thought then and since that I was foolish to take my children back to Paris at such a time. An American woman came to Ty Coz, my little summer cottage at Saint-Jean-du-Doigt in Finistère, to remonstrate with me.
"You must be crazy," she said in her most complimentary tone, "to take those three children back to Paris now. The Germans are certainly going to capture Paris, and if they don't do it right away, they'll bombard the city until it surrenders. My dear Mrs. Gibbons, surely you read the papers and you see what awful things the Germans are doing in Belgium. Paris has no chance against their big guns. And they will cut the railways. You will have no milk, no vegetables. And here you are in Brittany, where they probably will not come, and if they do, you can get off to England by sea."
I did not argue. It would have been foolish to tell her that the Germans would not take Paris. I was no prophet, and denying a danger is not preventing it.Despite the tigress instinct of every mother to protect her own, I simply could not feel that to go home was the wrong thing to do. Herbert wrote and telegraphed approving my desire to return. As my husband could not leave Paris to come to us, it was manifestly up to us to go to him. We were more concerned about the possibility of being cut off from each other than about what the Germans might do to us. I had one advantage in making up my mind over other women around me. War and sieges and bombardments did not loom up when I read about the march through Belgium with the same sense of awfulness as to my neighbors. I knew that things look worse from a distance than they are on the spot. I remembered how normally we lived in the midst of massacre in Tarsus and when the Bulgarians were attacking Constantinople.
The removal of the Government to Bordeaux did not deter me at the last minute. It did not seem to me an indication that the game was up, but rather the decision to profit by experience of earlier wars and not stake the whole war upon the defense of the capital. It was getting cold at the seashore. I was anxious to direct myself the moving into the new apartment we had taken. Yvonne, my cook, and Dorothy, my English nurse, were as eager as I to get back to town. We just didn't let the Germans bother us! The trunks and baby-beds were loaded in one two-wheeled cart and the kiddies on hay in another. We grown-upsbicycled along behind the seventeen kilometres to Morlaix. The Brestrapidecarried scarcely any civilians. We broke in on the seclusion of a colonel sitting alone in a compartment.
"I pity you, sir," I said.
"Why?" He smiled and threw away his newspaper. That was promising. When a man puts down his newspaper for me, I know he is interesting. So few men do. My husband doesn't always. I needed to make friends with the officer. During the all night journey I wanted to manoeuvre for open windows, and you cannot do that in France unless you are on the best of terms with your fellow-travellers.
"Why do I pity you? Because you are invaded by three babies and three grown-ups when you hoped to keep the compartment for yourself. But you may not be sorry when you see the supper you are going to help eat—two roast chickens, salad sandwiches, pears just picked this morning in my garden, and the best of cider. There is plenty ofcafé au laitin thermos bottles for breakfast."
The colonel's face brightened. Dining-cars had been suppressed since the day of the mobilization. He assured me that a soldier did not mind company at night and always liked food. But he was a bit puzzled about my breakfast invitation. "Surely you are not going to Paris with these children," he said. "Are you not afraid?"
"Not as long as there is the French army between my children and the enemy," I answered.
The colonel leaned back in the corner and shut his eyes. Tears rolled down his cheeks. It was a long time before he spoke, and all he said was, "Merci! I shall tell that to my regiment to-morrow."
"Monsieur," I insisted, "what I said was nothing. All the women in France feel as I do. We have got to feel that way. You have the strength—we must have the faith. If Paris were not my home, I should not go. But it is my home, and this is the week I always return from the shore."
More than one hysterical person wrote wonderful and lurid accounts of Paris in the autumn of 1914. There was an exodus offroussardsin the first days of September and during the whole month refugees poured into the city. But the great mass of the population was not affected by the fright of a few. I arrived too late for the most critical days. My husband assured me that there had been no panic except in the imagination of certain individuals and officials. I found that very few of my friends had run away. TheHeraldappeared every morning, and Percy Mitchell's voice over the telephone from the Rue du Louvre was cheery and optimistic. There was no funk in the American colony. Most of the people I knew were helping get the Ambulance at Neuilly started or were launchingœuvresof their own. I seized on the openingfor layette work immediately, and I started afternoon sewing for Russian and Polish girls, too, in one of my servants' rooms. I am a quarrelsome wretch when I get on committees with other women. So I did thelayettesalone in my studio and had only the help of another Bryn Mawr girl, who lived in Paris, in theouvroir—as gatherings for sewing were called.
But the panic? The sense of danger? Suspense and worry over the fighting between the Marne and Aisne? Dread of air raids? I saw none of this. I heard nothing in the conversation of my friends or servants or tradespeople to make me feel Paris was in a ferment of excitement or fear. The anxiety was for loved ones fighting "out there"; the depression was the pall of death over us. No music, no singing, theatres closed, cafés shut up at eight o'clock, dark streets—these were the abnormal features of Paris life in the early months of the war. Whoever writes or talks in a way to make it appear that staying in Paris was a test of personal courage is a sorry impostor. There was no danger. None ever thought of danger.
Nor did we have the discomforts and annoyances and deprivations during the early period of the war that came to us later. Food was abundant and prices did not go up. There was plenty of labor. You could get things done without the exhausting hunt for workers with a willing spirit and knowledge of their job that we have to make now. In the month of the Battle ofthe Marne we moved into 120 Boulevard du Montparnasse. It was a new house, and we had everything to think of, plumbing, heating, fixtures, wiring for bells and lights, painting, paper-hanging, carpentering. All was done without a hitch. The moving-vans worked as in peace times. Things came by freight from Brittany and Normandy—thirty boxes in all—and were delivered to us without delay just as if there were no war. It seems incredible in retrospect that France and Paris should have been normal (after the first confusion of the mobilization) despite the terrific struggle for existence within hearing distance. But it was so. I want to put down my testimony as a housewife and mother of children in Paris that we lived normally and had no dangers or difficulties to contend with when the Germans were trying to finish up the war in a hurry.
On the second Sunday of October we had our first visit from a group of airplanes. Few bombs were dropped. Herbert and I were walking outside the fortifications near the Porte d'Orléans when they arrived. We thought of our kiddies, playing in the Luxembourg, and hurried there. The children and Dorothy described graphically how two planes had been over the Garden. But their feeling was wholly curiosity. At that time Parisians did not realize the danger of air raids.
One Sunday Herbert and I went chestnutting. Despite the swarms of excursionists around Paris, thereare lots of places to pick up on the road all the chestnuts you can carry. We walked from Saint-Cyr across country, skirting Versailles, to Marly. With heavy pockets, knotted kerchief bundles, and the beginning of stiffness in our backs, we stopped for lunch at a little country hostelry whosecavestill has a big stock of Chambertin of golden years. The critic and I are agreed upon the wisdom of censoring the name I unthinkingly put in the first draft of this chapter. Why spoil a good thing? Life is short—and so are stocks of Chambertin. And there are so many roads and so many hostelries between Saint-Cyr and Saint-Germain-en-Laye that the little I have said is a challenge to your love of Burgundy.
Madame told us how history did not repeat itself until the end of the story. What starts the same way does not always end the same way. We hope German professors of history will impress this truth upon the next generation of their close-cropped, bullet-headed students. They are at liberty to use this illustration if they want. Why limit their Paris vistas to the provoking sight of the Tour Eiffel in the distance?
"In Soixante-Dix," said Madame, flipping teamsters' crumbs off our table with a skilful swing of herserviette, "I saw my father bury our wines out there in the garden. It took several days, and he had only my brother and me to help him. I remember how he mumbled and shook his head over the possible effect ofdisturbing the goodcrus. 'They will never be the same again,' he said mournfully. Much good it did him! We had our work for nothing. The Germans came. Right where you are sitting,M'sieu-dame, the brutes thumped on the table and called for the best in the cellar. My father said he had no wine. They went to the cave. Empty. Then the officer laughed till the tears rolled down his cheeks. He sat in a chair—sprawled in a chair that cracked under his swinging—smacked his thighs, and when he could speak, he told his men to go out into the garden. With their picks and shovels they unearthed all—all,M'sieu-dame.
"So this time I remembered—and I thought hard. My husband was off the fourth day of the mobilization. Even if I had help, would not the gardencachea second time be foolish? And the oldcrusought not to be shaken—you are going to taste my Chambertin, and you will agree that it ought not to risk being shaken. It really ought not. What was I to do? When the Germans come, will they know the difference? I asked myself. So I tookvin ordinaire. I put it in bottles. I sealed it red. I worked two days to put it on the outer racks and the under racks with the good wine between. Then I cobwebbed it and moistened it with dust. I built a fire to dry it. If the Germans were in a hurry they would take the top. If they had leisure, they would fish in the bottom rows.
"But the Germans never came. I had my work asecond time for nothing. Do you think,M'sieu-dame, they will be fooled? I want to know what is best for next time."
"Next time," cried my husband. "Next time! Do you think there will be a next time?"
"Bien sûr, Monsieur," the woman answered without hesitation. "The Germans will come again. They will always come. We are not as big,hélas! They will come—unless your country—?"
Suddenly we realized that not the keeper of the inn, but France, France through a wife and mother, was speaking. A shadow fell upon us that Chambertin and the crisp autumn air could not dispel.
AFTER the initial days of mobilization, the German advance, the coming of the refugees, and the aeroplane raids, Paris became again astonishingly normal. We got used to the war quickly. A calamity is like death. It comes. You cannot change it. You must accept it and go on living. We were in the midst of the whirlwind. We had our ups and downs. There were periods of unreasonable hope, when we thought the war was going to end by the collapse of the Germans. And there were periods of equally unreasoning depression when gloom spread like a plague. Who will ever forget the hope that came with the Spring of 1915? Mysterious rumors spread of German demoralization and of the irresistible fighting machine the British were building up. Our armies were only waiting for the rainy weather to finish. Then the forward march would commence. But after a few unsuccessful attempts to break through, French and British settled down to the life of the trenches. Fortunately the Germans were equally immobilized. But during the summer, instead of our advance on thewestern front, we had to read about the German advance in Poland. The censorship worked overtime.Communiquéswere masterpieces of clever dissimulation. News was withheld in the hope of a sudden reversal of the fortune of arms. In the end we had to be told that Warsaw was in the hands of the Central Empires and thatles Impériauxwere closing in on Brest-Litovsk. In the summer of 1915, at the very beginning of the Italian intervention, the French lost faith in the new ally. Italy, untouched so far by the war and with the power of making an offensive in her own hands, could not even prevent Austria from lending powerful aid in the great German offensive against Russia! Ink and breath were spent in extolling the union of the Latin races: but the mass of the French people—from that time on—looked no more for aid to Italy.
The first snow in the LuxembourgThe first snow in the Luxembourg
We deferred hope until the spring of 1916. Surely the British would now be ready to cooperate with the French in the final offensive of the war! But the Germans, feeling certain that they had disposed of the Russians, struck first. The last days of February, 1916, were (if one except possibly the spring months of 1918) the darkest days of the war. Although the attacks against Verdun failed, the weather in Paris combined with sickening anxiety to make us feel that it was nip-and-tuck. As a contrast, the summer months of the Battle of the Somme renewed our courage. Andjust as we were reluctantly realizing that this onslaught of ours was as indecisive as the earlier German offensive against Verdun, to which it was the reply, the intervention of Rumania came to offset the admitted failure of the Dardanelles and Mesopotamian campaigns. At last, the war was to be decided in the Balkans! Before the third winter set in, however, we saw Rumania humbled by Mackensen and the Salonica army as motionless as the armies on the western front, even though Venizelos had at last succeeded in ranging Greece on our side. The German machine was not crumbling before a combination of superior numbers and superior equipment, and managed to face its enemies on all sides.
So much for what the newspapers said during those thirty months and for what we thought about thepéripétiesof the war. After each disappointment we looked for new reasons to hope. We readjusted ourselves to living in the midst of uncertainties, bereavements that would have broken our hearts had they come to us "by the hand of God," and increasing social and economic difficulties. France was saved because the French people never faltered in their belief thatdulce et decorum est pro patria mori. France was saved because Paris led a normal life in the midst of the whirlwind. The Turks have a proverb that a fish begins to corrupt at the head. If the Parisians had become demoralized, if they had given up the struggleto live normally and tranquilly, France would have been lost.
Initial reactions and early symptoms of war fever passed quickly. We soon opened up our pianos, put on our phonograph records, and took to singing again. We did not wear mourning. We insisted upon having our theatres and music-halls. We celebrated Christmas. We stopped making last year's suits do and refusing to buy finery. For thepoilus, coming home to find their women folks shabby, said it was gayer at the front. We allowed all the German composers except Wagner to re-appear on our programmes. Some stupidities, such as banishing the German language from schools and burning German books, we were never guilty of.
I remember reading with amusement and amazement an article in an American newspaper, written by someone who "did" war-stricken France in thirty days, in which this statement was made: "There are millions in France who will never smile again." Upon this absurd and false hypothesis the article was built. It was easy to be sure that the writer knew nothing whatever about France in war-time or about psychology, for that matter. Whoever has had any experience of horrors or who has lived through a great crisis knows that if you do not laugh you will go crazy. Normal human beings must have relaxation and recreation. They must have—or create—normal conditions in abnormalsurroundings. You must go on living. You must have strength to meet burdens. So you laugh and sing and dance. You entertain people and are entertained. You go to the theatre. You take exercise. You enjoy your meals. A long face is either a pose or a sign of mental derangement. In the spring of 1916 I checked up a dozen of my women friends, all of whom had husbands or sons—or both—in the war. More than half were widows or had sons killed. The husbands of two were prisoners in German camps. But all of them were planning to spend the summer in their country-homes or at the shore, just as they had done before the war. Is not this the secret of our ability to hold on during the "last quarter of an hour" and to continue to hope for victory until we had obtained it?
At the beginning of the second winter, in November, 1915, I sent my three children to live for a few weeks in my studio, which I had fixed up especially for them. They had a piano and a phonograph and books and toys. They moved over with their nurse on a Sunday afternoon, and thought it was a great lark. The next day their father went to see them and told them about the arrival of a baby sister.
Tuesday morning the children came to see us. Never shall I forget their joy. Christine said immediately, "Hello, Hope, let me fix your feet. Mama, could I tuck her blanket in? Hope's feet are cold. I want to hold her soon." A little mother, she is.Lloyd, sensitive and reserved, stood quietly looking. He patted my face and tried to speak. But his mouth was turning down at the corners for just a second, and I had to save the day by asking him a cheerful question. Mimi clapped her hands and danced and said, "I like you, mama, dat's a fine baby." When Herbert went over to the consulate to register the baby, he took Christine with him. She heard him say to the Consul-General, Mr. Thackara, that his French friends were teasing him about the large number of marriage dots he will have to provide. Christine saw in this a reflection on girl babies. With a volley of French reproof, which delighted the whole consular office, she went for him tooth and nail.
Isn't it a joke on me to have so many daughters? I have always thought myself a good pal, understanding men much better than women. Miss Mary Cassatt came in. Her comment was subtle. She said simply to Herbert that she was glad of his assured increase of interest in women's suffrage. Surprised, Herbert was betrayed into asking why. "Don't you realize," exclaimed Miss Cassatt, "that you must begin now to interest yourself in the future of your girls?" Although the coming of Hope increases the problems of feminine psychology I shall have to deal with later on, I am glad the war baby was a girl. My first thought, when they told me, was that she should not have to carry a gun.
This brings me to her name. 1915 was drawing to a close with so many darkening shadows—but shadows that did not lessen our faith in the outcome of the war—that I thought the name imposed upon us by circumstances. I called her Hope Delarue. Dear old Père Delarue is one of the best known research scholars in the Jesuit Order. Our friendship, founded back in Constantinople days, has deepened during the war. When Herbert went off on his many trips, anyone of which might have proved the last, he left me in the care of Père Delarue. The dear old man had been coming to us from time to time with the news of another loss in his family. His brother, a general in the French army, was killed. His nephews had fallen. I thought it would comfort him to feel that there was a child in the world to bear his name. Before going to Suez, Herbert gave me some flat silver marked H.D.G. It flashed into his brain the day after the baby was born that the little thing had its mother's initials!
I was up for the first time on Christmas Eve. We had a large party as usual, with a tree for the children trimmed by the grown-ups. In spite of the rain we tried to make our Christmas Day a joyful one. There was the newborn baby to celebrate. At the end of the afternoon, Herbert gave us a hurried kiss all around, and went out in the rain to catch the train for Marseilles. He sailed the next day on theAndré Lebonfor Port-Said. His was the only one of thethree passenger boats that week to escape the submarines. The P. and O.Persiawas sunk off Crete and the Japanese mail went down seventy miles from the Canal.
I did not see my husband for several months, and then he joined us in Nice for a few days before going to Verdun. It was a joyful reunion. Herbert admired his children and asked what they had done during his absence. But he forgot all about poor little Hope, who was taking her nap. Two hours after his arrival, a lusty cry brought back to his mind the fact that the number of his children was four.
Memories of these days are not painful, because we did not allow ourselves to be dominated by pain while they were being lived. The whirlwind was not of our making, nor had we gone deliberately into the midst of it. But, finding ourselves there, we made the best of it. Memories are precious. I would not have missed the Paris vistas of those years. It is a blessed thing to have in one's mind the long lines of adverse circumstances and difficulties and anxieties on either side if at the end is hope realized. And I have my own tangible Hope, a child whose merry, sunny nature is living proof of how Paris was at home in the whirlwind.
"M-M-M-MADAME m-m-must not be f-f-frightened; he said so!"
My Bretonne cook came to me pale and stammering.
"What is the trouble, Rosali?"
"P-p-policeman at the d-d-door s-s-says he m-m-must see you!"
A spick and spanagentcame into my drawing-room. He took the cigarette offered him, and explained the reason for his visit.
"My chief sent me around to ask madame to help. It is a baby case. We came here because the mother said she got a layette at madame's studio. Her name is Mlle. A——; do you remember her case? If madame could come—"
In a few minutes we were walking up the Rue Delambre to the police station of the Fourteenth Arrondissement. Mlle. A—— had come to me for baby clothes before she went to the hospital. The child's father was at the front. When the mother appealed to him to recognize the child, with the desperate way of a man who is in the trenches facing death, he replied,
"What's the use! How do I know that the child is mine?"
Before going to the hospital the girl begged me to think of something to do. When the baby was born we had him photographed and a copy sent to his father, we wrote, "The baby looks like you as you can see from this photograph. If you tear up the card or throw it away, the next shell will kill you."
At the police station, in the stuffy little room where the plain clothes men sit close to the door leading to the office of the Monsieur le Commissaire, I found Mlle. A—— and her baby.
"O Madame," she cried, "Jean got our card. He was sitting in a little circle with some comrades eating dinner. The mail arrived. His name was called. He rose and walked over to thevaguemestreand, oh, Madame, just then the shell came. It exploded where Jean had been eating his dinner, and all his comrades were killed. He says the baby,pauvre chou, looks like him and saved his life."
Theagentcame with papers. "Will madame sign here?" Jean was recognizing little Pierrot and was applying for permission to marry the baby's mother.
An old woman sitting nearby held in her hands alivret de mariage. "Quel beau bébé!" she exclaimed. "Is it a girl?"
"No, madame, a boy," replied mademoiselle, smoothingthe baby's swaddling blanket and pinning it tighter around Pierrot's little tummy.
"That's it, that's it," cried the old woman. "I came here to get a certificate myself. My daughter had a baby born this morning. It's a boy, too. It was like that in Soixante-Dix. Nearly all the babies born in war time are boys. O la, la, madame, what a baby! His father is fighting so he won't have to carry a gun." Here she pulled out a handkerchief.
The poor help the poor, when it comes tomoral, as in everything else. I was sitting in my studio interviewing women who came for baby clothes. A white-faced girl sat down in the chair at the opposite side of the table.
"What can I do for you?" said I.
"A little white dress—" she sobbed. "Could you give me a little white dress?"
"Certainly I'll give it to you, and lots of other things too."
"I don't need anything else," she said softly, "My baby died this morning. They did everything at the hospital to save her. She was born three weeks ago and they let me stay on. They wrapped her in a little piece of sheeting. I can't stand it to bury her like that!" She put her head down on the table and wept.
"Shall I give madame a little white dress?"
The twenty other mothers sitting there answered "Yes, give it to her."
To some the tears had come. Others, dry-eyed, clutched their babies.
"And flowers?" said one.
"Yes, she must have money for flowers." I hardly knew what to say to the girl, but soon the other mothers were talking to her. They were the best comforters.
How did amateur relief workers get the strength and energy to face the awfulness of the situation? What we did was not "wonderful." Relief work was a debt we owed to life. Fatigue could never be thought of. When my apartment is in a mess from front door to kitchen, straightening looks hopeless. It used to be discouraging until I pretended I had blinders on my eyes and began with the nursery table. I took off everything that didn't belong there and replaced the things that should be there. I finished the table to the last detail before making the bed. I tried to work in a leisurely frame of mind without too many glances at the clock. After a bit one whole room was tidied. Kiddies were requested not to go in there "till Mama says so." Then I tackled the next room, and so on—and so on. In relief work, too, you must begin to work on one atom of the problem. You must put blinders on your eyes to shut out all the other atoms. It is fatal to let your imagination run away with you, fatal to envisage the accumulated woe.
Once in the Rue Servandoni days an Englishman came to ask Herbert to bury his baby. He told methe story of how the baby died, and I cried all night thinking of the mother. Herbert remonstrated with me for trying to bear the whole of another's grief. Christ did that and it broke His heart. His broken heart could save humanity; but as for little me I could do nobody any good by breaking my heart over them. Relief work must be constructive with respect to the patient and instructive with respect to the worker. You have to exercise self-control of emotion and help yourself to poise by quickly concentrating your mind on what details of the problem you are fitted to cope with. You learn after a while that your enthusiasm and sympathy will not do it all. You accept the fact that you are not indispensable. You realize that you can put a person on his feet but that to carry him is beyond you. You are not the only influence for good that is touching his life. This attitude keeps you both happy and humble. And so you develop confidence in life and confidence in time. In relief work both life and time are good allies.
My work started in a modest way in my studio in September, 1914. I wanted to help mothers of newborn babies, and so I called myœuvreSAUVONS LES BÉBÉS. I wrote to friends for money and layettes, and depended—as all American women in France did—upon the personal correspondence with individuals and organizations in America to maintain and develop the work started. I had no committee, and, during thethree years I worked for the babies, only one associate. The French wife of an American artist joined me in 1915. From Princeton, Germantown, Philadelphia, Pittsburg, New York, Brooklyn and Boston people I knew and my readers sent me money and boxes through the American Relief Clearing-House. My best aids were always and invariably the police, who sent cases to me and guarded me against imposition. It soon became known in the Fourteenth (my own) Arrondissement, and the neighbouring Sixth, Fifth, Thirteenth and Fifteenth Arrondissements, that an American woman in the Rue Campagne-Première gave layettes to expectant mothers, and sometimes helped with medicines, milk, vacations, clothes and shoes for other children. I did not need to advertise or hang out a sign! In less than three years four thousand mothers of five thousand babies found their way to the Rue Campagne-Première. Sometimes I was swamped, badly swamped, but I managed to get around to all in the end. I remember one time, however, that babies were several months old before I could give their mothers a complete layette.
There was nothing unusual about my œuvre, in its size, its singlehandedness, or its spirit. Every American woman in France did what she could from the very beginning by taking up work as she saw it at hand—in her own home or neighborhood. Many did muchmore than I. There were others in Paris looking after the new-born babies.
In the summer of 1917 we Americans resident in France had to give up, all of us, the individuality of ourœuvres. This meant that most of them went out of existence. When the rumor ran from mouth to mouth in the American colony that the Red Cross insisted on taking over everything and would starve out the stubborn individualists, there was consternation. Since the Red Cross was a Government organization and controlled shipping, it was possible for them to tell us that we should receive no more cases of supplies after September first, even if friends at home kept on sending them. Some were furious; some were offended; some would give a generous slice of their fortune to fight the injunction; some laughed. But the charities' trust had come to stay, and started in to handle things and ride rough-shod over people in a way that I fear is typically American.
In the early stages of war fever, the Y.M.C.A. and the Army showed the same symptoms as the Red Cross in France. There was the idea that the American way is always and exclusively the right way; impatience with and resentment against existing organizations; a thirst for sweeping reforms; and the determination that Americans who had been on the ground from the beginning must be eliminated. The way our splendidAmbulance at Neuilly was absorbed by the army is a story of Prussianism pure and simple. The Red Cross men and their wives did not seem to get it into their heads that we had been at war for three years. I attended a drawing-room meeting one day, where a hundred women were gathered who had been sacrificing themselves in relief work ever since the day France mobilized. More than one had lost her son in the war. A new Red Cross woman, fresh from America, lectured on what the Red Cross was going to do. She smiled at us, and her peroration was this: "Now you must realize that we are at war, and that we are going to put you all to work, all to work!"
When the excitement cooled down a bit, we realized that these Red Cross volunteers meant well, that they were devoted and capable, and that we could not take too tragically their ignorance and inexperience. We realized that we were tired, that we needed a rest and change, and that the Red Cross, with its enormous funds and abundant personnel, was in a position to realize many of our dreams. Our initial resentment was in part dismay at seeing newly arrived compatriots making the same mistakes some of us had made in the beginning, and partly their obtuseness in failing to get the French point of view. Contact with suffering such as they had never seen before soon mellowed most of the Red Cross volunteers and they realized that America was coming, as my husband put it, "not tosave France, but to help France save the world."
Outside of hospitals, where there was a reason for it, we had never worn uniforms: but we got accustomed to seeing them as the A.E.F. grew although we never could master the meaning of many of them. One morning a woman in uniform, with service cap and Sam-Browne belt (not forgetting the nickel ring for hanging a dagger from), appeared in my studio. From her pocket she took a crisp new loose-leaf notebook, the like of which could no longer be indulged in by ordinary folks. As she unscrewed and adjusted her fountain-pen, she said,
"I've been sent to inspect your relief organization."
"You come from the Children's Bureau?" I asked.
"No, Civilian Relief. How do you handle the matter of investigation?"
"Well," I answered, "I cast my eye over the person, size her up, and give her what she needs. I cannot afford to investigate. You see, I have no overhead charges and I need all the money I can get for materials and all the time for handling them. The only expense is for sewing. Even that money goes to my own women. I give the sewing out to mothers on my list so they will not have to go out to work. This encourages them to nurse their babies themselves instead of sending them to anourrice."
"People begging," said my visitor, "are splendid actors, you know."
"Few women who are just about to have a baby are likely to act the impostor," I answered, "and then I do not consider my women as beggars. I'm sure that nine out of ten are not. They wouldn't need any aid if their husbands were not in the trenches earning five sous a day. For the first two years it was only one sou a day. You can generally tell the difference between a shifty woman looking for a chance to get something for nothing and the shattered little mother, unaccustomed to charity, whose children would go without winter clothes were it not for some form of outside help. Most of the women who come here look on me as a neighbor who loves babies and who keeps flannel in her cupboard. I'd rather give away an occasional layette to a dead beat than bruise the feelings of timid souls at bay. If you could see them as they come in here!"
"But you know really that there can be an immense amount of waste of good material if you don't investigate."
"I may have wasted material, but I've never failed to help. Nobody investigated me when my baby was born in a Turkish massacre. If they had, I couldn't have stood it. Of course I have faced the question. I figure that if I put in one column the number of layettes I give out and their cost, and beside it what I would spend in time and taxi fares to investigate, I should find that the price of a badly-placed layette or two would be less than the cost of investigation."
The inspector took full and rapid notes. Folding them neatly into her pocket with one clap of her notebook, she left me.
Three days later a young man appeared. He said, "I am here to represent the Red Cross. Would you mind telling me about your baby work?"
"Are you from the Children's Bureau?"
"No, I am Vital Statistics."
After the Refugees Bureau sent two inspectors to look into my activities, the Children's Bureau finally did come. They "took over" my work, which meant that no more babies in my quarter of Paris received layettes from the United States.
When I finally handed over myœuvreto the Red Cross, the interview with the husky well-fed football player of a doctor was refreshing. He was full of enthusiasm, and I felt instinctively that he was an able man with broad vision and an open mind. But, like all the men at 4 Place de la Concorde, he did not give the French credit for having already thought of and worked out many of the problems he wanted to solve. His attitude towards the French put them in what Abe and Mawruss would call the "new beginner" class in the matter of baby welfare. He cheerfully told me of organizing plans for saving French babies, plans which, compared with what we had been doing, were Kolossal. But the plans included some things which I knew would not go and others which the French had already workedout more successfully than my own compatriots. Puericulture is an advanced science in France, where baby lives are more precious than anywhere else in the world. I had tried some of the things he wanted to do and had run up against a stone wall. So had other American women. I started to sputter, but stopped short of speech. For I had a lightning vision of how parents must feel when their children, grown to manhood, plunge into work and do things they might be saved from if only—. I felt motherly towards this capable young man who was as old as myself. But something about him gave me confidence that he would work it out all right. And I knew that he was in no frame of mind to benefit by my experience.
THE following letter was in my husband's mail one day:
"A young American came to Paris about twenty-five years ago, lived for a time in the Latin Quarter, and then, following the loss of his income, obtained a minor position in the office of an importer of American goods. He liked his work, rose to a place of responsibility, eventually went into business for himself, and developed the business to a prosperous issue."He held the theory that the few Americans living and working abroad formed the nucleus of American overseas industrial expansion and that they were regarded by Europeans as representative of their fellow-countrymen. He felt that it was his duty to conduct his business and social activities in such a manner as to merit the confidence and respect of his hosts. Had he been indifferent to these responsibilities or had his patriotic fire ever burned low, his association with the active members of the American Chamber of Commerce in France and the American Club in Paris would have surely recalled and revived them. Every one knows of the results attained by these organizations in their effort to maintain the feeling of sympathetic understanding between the two great sister republics during the long and difficult period of 'watchful waiting.' Such services enter into the realm of practical diplomacy and could have been rendered efficient only by men of high standing and of the highest order of patriotism."I wish to call your attention to the editorial page of anAmerican weekly, which boasts of millions of readers, where we see a vicious attack upon ourselves. I quote textually: 'Things had reached a point among our expatriates, thefifty-eighth and lowest form of cootie, that in home circles to be pro-American was really bad form.'"Is this the general opinion in America? Is it shared by people of intelligence? The editorial in question apparently adds another high authority on public opinion to the previous judgment rendered by Mr. Wilson when he classified us as 'unpatriotic Americans living abroad.' I am interested in knowing the true facts. Must we admit that we are held in small esteem by friends at home because we live in France?"Sincerely yours,"ONE OF THECOOTIES."
"A young American came to Paris about twenty-five years ago, lived for a time in the Latin Quarter, and then, following the loss of his income, obtained a minor position in the office of an importer of American goods. He liked his work, rose to a place of responsibility, eventually went into business for himself, and developed the business to a prosperous issue.
"He held the theory that the few Americans living and working abroad formed the nucleus of American overseas industrial expansion and that they were regarded by Europeans as representative of their fellow-countrymen. He felt that it was his duty to conduct his business and social activities in such a manner as to merit the confidence and respect of his hosts. Had he been indifferent to these responsibilities or had his patriotic fire ever burned low, his association with the active members of the American Chamber of Commerce in France and the American Club in Paris would have surely recalled and revived them. Every one knows of the results attained by these organizations in their effort to maintain the feeling of sympathetic understanding between the two great sister republics during the long and difficult period of 'watchful waiting.' Such services enter into the realm of practical diplomacy and could have been rendered efficient only by men of high standing and of the highest order of patriotism.
"I wish to call your attention to the editorial page of anAmerican weekly, which boasts of millions of readers, where we see a vicious attack upon ourselves. I quote textually: 'Things had reached a point among our expatriates, thefifty-eighth and lowest form of cootie, that in home circles to be pro-American was really bad form.'
"Is this the general opinion in America? Is it shared by people of intelligence? The editorial in question apparently adds another high authority on public opinion to the previous judgment rendered by Mr. Wilson when he classified us as 'unpatriotic Americans living abroad.' I am interested in knowing the true facts. Must we admit that we are held in small esteem by friends at home because we live in France?
"Sincerely yours,"ONE OF THECOOTIES."
Being "cooties" ourselves, in the estimation of the American editorial writer, we read the protest of the American business man resident in Paris with the keenest interest and sympathy. In telling about the attitude of the Red Cross toward our relief organizations, after the United States intervened in the war, I spoke of only one phase of the mistrust—even scorn—so many of our compatriots took no pains to conceal when they learned that we belonged to the American colony. It was inconceivable that we should be living in Paris and bringing up our children there and still be good Americans. They questioned more than our patriotism and our loyalty to the country of our birth. They felt that there must be some skeleton in the closet of every American family living abroad. I have never had an American tell me to my face that my husbandwas a crook and that we were abroad "for our health," but I have had them inquire pointedly why on earth this or that friend of mine lived in exile. And I suppose my friends were asked about the past of the Gibbons menage!
"How long have you been over?" is a question as common as the "Oh!" with a curious inflection that meets the confession of a protracted residence abroad.
I am sure I do not know why the writer in the American weekly read by millions called us first "expatriates" and then "the fifty-eighth and lowest form of cooties." I cannot imagine why. He is ignorant of the people of whom he speaks. He has probably never met anyone in the American colony of a European city, or has jumped to the conclusion that an occasional bounder or cad or snob (these are always in evidence) represents as intensely patriotic and loyal Americans as exist anywhere. Or he thinks that living abroad means dislike of one's own country.
There are Americans in Europe—and some of them are to be found in Paris—who have no valid reason for being where they are more than in another place. There are criminals and courtiers. There are those who have forgotten their birthright. But they form an infinitesimally small percentage of the American colony in Paris. Most of our American residents are business men, painters, sculptors and writers, with the necessary sprinkling of professional men to minister totheir needs, of the type of the writer of the letter quoted above. Many of them came to Paris first by accident or as students and just stayed on. Without them our country would be little known in Europe: and Europe would be little known in our country. Until the war broke out, it was never realized how many Americans resided in Paris. Most of them had lived along quietly, doing their own work and minding their own business. But they had kept alive the friendship begun in the days of Franklin. Art and literature have their part in good understanding between nations: but the foundation and the binding tie are furnished by commerce and banking. The best representatives of Americanism are business men.
We of the American colony found that out during the war; and we are sorry for the ignorance and misapprehension and ingratitude of our compatriots. They judged without inquiry and tried to put into Coventry the very men whose patience and tact and devotion not only prevented a break between France and the United States during the years of uncomfortable neutrality but prepared the way for the intervention of America and the downfall of Germany.
I may not have perspective. I may be prejudiced. But I do feel that I have a right to protest against the cruel snap judgments of us made by those who never realized there was a war between right and wrong until April, 1917.
Les amis de la première heure—the friends of the first hour—as the French love to call those who refused to obey the injunction to be "neutral even in thought" were not confined to Americans resident in France. We had behind us from the first day our friends in America, friends by the hundreds of thousands, who sent money and medical supplies, clothing and kits. All who could came to France to help actively in relief work. But the machinery for the charitable effort of the United States coming to the aid of France was provided by the Americans who were permanent or partial residents in France. We were on the ground. We knew the language. We knew the needs and the peculiarities of those we were helping.
The greatest service we were privileged to render to our own country and to France was not ministering to the material needs. What we accomplished was a drop in the bucket. It was the moral significance of the relief work that counted. Our Government was neutral. The American people in the mass were far away from the conflict. The French realized all the same that individually and collectively the Americans who knew France or who were in contact with France believed in the righteousness of France's cause and in the final triumph of France's arms.
Neutrality was uncomfortable. For thirty months we were in an awkward position. We had to hold the balance between loyalty to America and friendship forFrance. On the one hand, we were called upon to comprehend the slowness of our fellow-countrymen to awaken to the moral issues at stake, especially after the sinking of theLusitania. On the other hand, we were called upon to comprehend the impatience and disappointment of our French friends. We tried to be sensible and to realize that those who were far from the fray and to whom the war was incidental could not be expected to share our intense feeling. With rare exceptions, Americans in Paris did not allow themselves to criticize the policy of their government in the presence of French or British friends. That was hard, and required as much tact as we could muster. But when we wereen famille, the fur did fly! That was natural. We had a right to our opinions, and everything we said from 1914 to the end of 1916, President Wilson and all America with him said in 1917 and 1918. We were never ashamed of being Americans. That accusation was untrue. But we were sorry that the awakening came so late. For we saw the toll of human life growing each month. We feared that France would come out of the war too weakened to profit by victory if the war dragged on. We were sometimes nervous about the aftermath.
As I look back upon the first years of the war, American neutrality appears as a tragedy. It was uncomfortable for us, and disastrous for France. But we lived through it as we lived through other things. OurFrench friends were splendid. Their patience was greater than ours.
We kept our flags ready for the inevitable day. And when it arrived at last, no Americans were prouder of the stars and stripes than we.
IN Paris the child of the people is a born artist. He has the instinct from his ancestors. His taste is formed and cultivated by what he sees around him—of the present as well as of the past—from the time he first begins to observe things. Inheritance and atmosphere influence him. One June day in 1917, our dear friend Thiébault-Sisson, art critic of theTemps, was lunching with us. He drew from his pocket a lot of photographs. They illustrated the best and most striking of the drawings by children in the primary schools of the city. M. Thiébault-Sisson had organized an exposition of children's drawings, done in their ordinary class work. The photographs were a surprise and a revelation. Having lived in Paris since the beginning of the war, I could appreciate the comments of a Parisian, proud of this eloquent showing of precocious talent. I accepted with alacrity his invitation to see the originals.
The outline, almost always enhanced by bright frank color, where the three notes of the flag played a perpetual leit-motif, was a feast for the eyes. In workof this character one expects to see the freshness and freedom of childhood. What I found that was unusual was the maturity born of suffering and intense emotion. In the drawings life in wartime was reflected with anaïvetéthat excluded neither precision nor vigor of touch. With compositions of the simplest and most studied character there was taste and a pretty feeling for color.
The most popular form of drawing was the poster. In one school the children were given the subject of calling upon the people to economize gas. One little girl made a few bold strokes outlining a gas-jet and wrote underneath, "Parisians—Economize Gas!" Asked to admonish the public to eat less bread, a boy of ten used a potato as a face. The eyes were almost human in their appeal. "Eat me please!" was written under the drawing. A further caption stated that it was the duty of patriots to save the bread for the soldiers. Sugar shortage inspired the idea of a sugar cone and the same cone cut in half. Under the former was "In 1914" and under the latter "—and now!" The best of these posters were reproduced by the thousand and put in tram-cars and railway stations. They did more to call us to order than all the graveaffichesof the Government.
A dominating note, perhaps the strongest after that of the man on furlough or the poignant expression of emotions experienced when the news came that fatherwould never return again, was the hunt for coal. Little observers, inventing nothing of this (for it was seen over and over again), pictured a coal wagon upon which two or three youngsters had scrambled and were helping themselves. Generously they were firing bits of the precious commodity to their little comrades. This was a drawing made from memory of things seen.
Winter in Paris is often mild: but early in 1917 came a protracted spell of zero weather that would have taxed the facilities of Paris in ordinary times. The coal shortage hit us at the worst possible moment. Transportation was tied up. The mines were not producing. Stocks became exhausted in a few days. The hunt for coal was cruel because it was mostly fruitless and because it imposed upon the children weary waits, hours at a time, in the street in snow and wind, with the thermometer down to zero.
Whoever saw the crowds massed in a long line in front of the coal depots, old men, women, children stamping their feet painfully, jostled, weeping or seized with mute despair at the curt announcement that there was nothing to do but return to-morrow, will never forget the worst calamity that fell upon Paris during the war. Children were hit by it more than all the rest, and in a certain sense more than by the loss of a father. For they suffered from it in their own flesh, in little hands chapped till they opened into deepcracks, in little fingers stiffened and swollen by monstrous chilblains, in frost-bitten feet. For six weeks the quest for coal was the ruling passion. It inspired the children to compositions all quite like each other in sentiment and all dominated by the conviction of an implacable fatality.
In common with most Parisians who lived in modern apartment-houses, we never had to think of heat. Like hot water, you just turned it on. To make an effort to have it no more entered into our scheme of things than to help with the stoking when we were on ship-board. How naturally one accepts the comforts and conveniences resulting from the work of others and the smooth moving of modern city life! At first we felt the coal shortage mildly. It meant piling on extra clothes and having our noses turn red and then blue, like the dolls with barometrical petticoats. The apartment was chilly, but we got up as late as we could. For once we blessed the school system in France which works the children so many hours that you wonder why the babies do not strike for an eight-hour day. As long as the municipality could supply them, schools were especially favored. After school hours anddevoirs(we had a wood fire in one room), bed time soon came for the kids. We set the victrola going, and everybody danced until they forgot the thermometer.
A passage through the LouvreA passage through the Louvre
Then we began to discover that coal means more than heat and light. We found out how many trades were obliged to say "no coal, no work." In a big city coal is certainly king, and not a limited monarch at that. Transportation depends on coal, and everything else depends upon transportation. One day there was a mass meeting of Paris laundresses. The Government had promised them coal upon payment in advance of a large part of the price. The order had been placed for weeks: no coal came. It meant livelihood to the laundresses and cleanliness to the rest of us. They had the Board of Health with them and the learned doctors of the Académie de Médecine. Think of the menace of weeks of accumulated soiled linen! It was all right for the papers to joke about abolishing starched shirts and cuffs and collars. That was a small part of the problem, affecting only men. The germs involved in not being able to wash were no joke.
Elderly people living alone and adult families calculated that it was cheaper to go to apensionthan to keep house. In some cases it was the only feasible thing. People who had the means started to go south when conditions in Paris became intolerable. But with little children it was dangerous to attempt a journey in freezing cold trains.
Just when we had exhausted the little supply of wood we had laid in originally for the luxury of a wood fire we did not need, ourpropriétairenotified us that he could get no more coal for heating or hot water. Andthe same day an inspector called to place a maximum of gas (our only means of cooking) at less than half the amount we ordinarily consumed.
The law of substitution came into force. We had long been ridiculing the Germans for theirersatzingenuity. Were we now to have to seek substitutes? Cooking is the most vital thing in life next to foodstuffs. Paris blossomed out with what I thought was an American invention, the fireless cooker. But they were calledmarmites norvégiennes. I suppose if we keep on digging at Pompeii we shall find them there. Everyone who could afford amarmitebought one. You could get them at all prices and sizes, and the newspapers published daily directions for using them. If you could not afford a fireless cooker or if you were unable to buy one (they soon gave out, of course), you took your hatbox from the Galeries Lafayette and stuffed it with newspapers and sawdust with just room in the middle for your soup-kettle.
But fireless cookers would not wash clothes. They would not give the necessary supply of hot water. The law of substitution has a limit. And what was to be theersatzfor fuel in heating? Gas? Your supply was already cut down. Electricity? Ditto. Both of these depended upon coal. Petroleum? The army had commandeered all the supplies for motor transport and airplanes. Wood alcohol? There was none to be had.
Then began the coal hunt for us. We had been pitying the poor. Now was our turn. Money was of no value. Otherpropriétaireshad served the same notice. People with larger purses than ours were in the market for coal and wood. Our children began to suffer also in their own flesh.
My husband and his secretary gave up work and joined the coal hunters. They scoured the city in taxi-cabs. Herbert found a man who knew where there was a ton of anthracite for eighty dollars. He tracked it down and found that he was the tenth person applying for it that same afternoon.
Then the kiddies came down with measles. Keeping them warm in the way the doctor ordered was utterly impossible. All we could do was to give them more blankets. When the baby got congestion of the lungs and heat and hot baths meant the difference between life and death, I cast my eye over the apartment appraising the furniture. I no longer thought of how pretty my Brittanyarmoirewas or how I loved my Empire desk. The cubic feet of wood was the sole criterion. Dining-room chairs went first into the fire in Hope's bedroom. The dining-room table, sawed into little blocks, heated the water for baths. Cupboard doors were taken off their hinges and converted into fuel. Herbert got a hand-cart and stood in line for his turn at a place where old lumber from torn-down houses was being sold. There was a crowd besiegingit as if it were a gold-mine. It was, to the owners. The junk that had been there for years disappeared at fabulous prices in a few days, doors, clapboards, window-sashes, shutters, beams, flooring, even lathes.
When our fight for Hope's life became known, friends appeared bringing treasures. A prominent American manufacturer was at the door one morning. He had climbed six flights of stairs with a huge bag of bits of wood gleaned in his factory.
"We calculate pretty close," he said apologetically. "We do not have much waste in making roll-top desks."
"Don't ask me where I got this sack of coal," said another respectable Samaritan. I felt his guilt, confirmed when he told me the story afterwards of how he had stolen it from the back of a wagon. But I was not asking questions then!
Two burly policemen, unmindful of dignity and uniforms, deposited sacks of wood on my salon floor. They had come from the Commissariat in the Fifth Arrondissement. Monsieur le Commissaire, they explained, had said that the woman who was looking after so many Paris babies in herœuvremust not be allowed to see her own baby die. They had agreed. This was the wood from their own office. Why not? For the first time I cried. Go through my experience, and you will understand how one can have a passionate love for the French. I am relating here just one littleincident of help unsolicited that came in a crisis. I had never seen that Commissaire. How he knew my baby was ill was a mystery. But I have often experienced in my Paris life the impulsive generosity, carried out at inconvenience and sacrifice, of which this is an example. There were others who needed that wood as much as I did. But I was a foreigner who had been working for babies in the Commissaire's district. A point of honor was involved. Never will you find a Frenchman lacking when he feels a sense of obligation.
François Coppée wrote a beautiful story about a young French aristocrat whose life in the army had taught him that half of the world goes through life struggling constantly to obtain what the other half has without effort. Perhaps you have read "La Croûte de Pain." After the war of Soixante-Dix the aristocrat could not bear to see bread wasted. One day he picked up a crust on the street, brushed off the mud with his handkerchief and set it on the side-walk where one who needed it would find it. And then he told his inquiring companion why. I shall always be like that with coal. For I can never forget how we kept warm in February, 1917.
NEVER were Americans in France more perplexed about the state of feeling in the United States than at the beginning of 1917. The sinking of theLusitaniaand othertorpillageshad brought forth note after note from President Wilson: but his spokesmen among the Democratic senators, especially Senator Hitchcock, were advocating measures to put an embargo on the export of arms and ammunition. If these men had succeeded, they would have helped Germany to win the war during 1916. Then President Wilson was reelected on the slogan, "He has kept us out of the war." Immediately after his re-election, Mr. Wilson began an attempt to make peace that seemed to us at the time distinctly unfriendly to the Entente. The idealism of President Wilson stirred us. But we were living too close to the war to see the advantage of a "peace without victory."
Our first intimation of a change of attitude in America came one day whenL'Information, one of our papers that comes out at noon, published a cable-gram from Washington, stating that Secretary Lansinghad declared that the reason behind President Wilson's interest in peace was that the United States felt herself on the brink of war. Herbert and I were walking home from our studios. He stopped to buy the paper that the boy on a bicycle was just giving our newswoman. Long experience had taught us that the noon paper never gave anything new. But one was always afraid to miss something. That's why afternoon papers are able to bring out so many editions. When we read this message, we realized that the President must be at the end of his rope, and that if Germany persisted in her intention to declare unlimited submarine warfare, our entering into the conflict was inevitable.
The news of the rupture of diplomatic relations arrived on a Sunday morning when the streets were full. The dispatches from Washington contained long excerpts from President Wilson's splendid speech. Relief rather than joy was the feeling we all had. We said to ourselves, "At last!" Some of our intimate French friends, when we discussed the break and the reasons the President gave for it, wondered why those reasons had not been valid long before. It was an echo of our own thoughts. But French and American were so happy over the new stand taken by the United States, over the new note in the leadership of President Wilson, that we did not allow ourselves to criticize the past. All was forgiven on that last Sundayof January. Over night President Wilson became the most popular man in France. And just one week before my Parisian friends had been reading his Senate speech of January twenty-second with a puzzled expression that turned into anger and indignation.
We had an excellent barometer of what the Frenchbourgeoisanduniversitairewas thinking in our dear old family doctor. Doctor Charon had come to us first in the Rue Servandoni days. Christine was sick one night for the first and only time in her babyhood. The young father and mother were scared to death. Doctor Charon, whom we had not known before, was called in. He assured us that there was nothing fatal. After that he came again for colds. He knew how to scold us and make us obey. Since then he has been the family friend and censor, entering into our life as only a doctor can do. He always stopped to chat a minute. His only son was at the war: he and his wife and two daughters were doing hospital work. I often felt that his heart was breaking. He suffered from the war in his soul, which was far worse than suffering in the flesh.
During the years of uncomfortable neutrality, Herbert and I tried to reassure Doctor Charon and make him see how impossible it was that all our compatriots, who had never been in France and knew nothing about France, could feel the way we did. But we often felt that he loved us despite the fact that we were Americans.On January 23, 1917, Doctor Charon talked to us at length about the Senate speech. The way President Wilson's mind worked was beyond him. He despaired of America. On January 30 he came in with a face transfigured, held out his arms, and kissed me. We both cried.
"I do not yet understand about your President," he said simply, "but you were right in telling me not to lose hope in him. To-day he is our prophet."
During the two years that followed, Doctor and Madame Charon, in common with all our French friends, had a revelation of the heart of America beating for France. They saw at close range our relief work. Not only did we give money without stint, but hundreds of Americans—who had never known France before—came over to show by tireless personal service that the friends of France were not limited to the Americans resident in France or to those who had some point of personal contact. In the end they realized that we were ready to be as prodigal with our blood as with our treasure. When my husband received his red ribbon, the Charons gave a dinner for us. Doctor Charon said: "I have one ambition now in life—to go to America."
As I have related in another chapter, February and March were tragic months for Paris. Zero weather and no coal made a combination that took our attention away from the evolution of public opinion across theseas. Germany stood firm, resisting the threats and disregarding the warnings of President Wilson's notes. But we had such an inherent mistrust of notes that we were not sure until the end of March that some sort of a modus vivendi would not be patched up, as after theLusitaniaand theSussex.
Were we even sure in the first week of April? Herbert told me to get out our flags that had been put carefully away since 1914. Although I was not as optimistic as my husband, I brought out the flags and mended them. I needed two for our studios. My voice trembled when I asked for the stars and stripes at the Bon Marché. They had a large stock, mostly brand-new. They were counting upon the imminent event. The sales girl told me that they had sold more American flags in the last fortnight than those of the other Allies put together since the beginning of the war. She said it gleefully. The new broom was sweeping clean. With all my pride in my own country, I had my misgivings about too great a demonstration. Why did not the Government or some of the patriotic organizations make a propaganda to have the flags of the Allies ready for display everywhere with the American and French when the day arrived? I suggested this to my husband, who was a member of the Union des Grandes Associations Françaises. I knew how I would feel if I were a Britisher who had been there from the beginning. Would not the French showthat wonderful characteristic of theirs, the sense of proportion?
But when the day arrived, my internationalism and cosmopolitanism, a gradual and unconscious growth, suddenly disappeared. It was a reversion to type. I became blatantly American again, and gloried in the fact that everywhere it was all Stars and Stripes. Why not? This was America's day. And ever since, despite the theoretical internationalism (or super-nationalism) I have advocated in common with my husband, I fear that practically I have been lapsing into a narrow nationalism. It is a curious phenomenon. I do not attempt to explain it.
On Thursday, April sixth, Herbert went to the American Club to lunch. Settling down to work had been hard that morning. We were feverishly awaiting the news. I was just starting lunch with the children when the telephone rang. Herbert's voice said, "Put out your flag," and then he hung up.