The snow danced in a fine white mist over the ploughed fields, and drove perpetually against the northerly sides of the tall bare tree-trunks that lined the way for miles, hardly finding a hold upon the smooth flanks of the planes, but sinking into the rough-barked limes till they looked dappled with their brown ridges and the white veining, and oddly as though covered with the pelt of some strange animal. High in the web of bare branches, the clumps of mistletoe showed as filigree nests for some race of fairy birds.
Gracious country this, for all the desolate whiteness; it lay in great rolling slopes with drifts of purplish elms in the folds, and on the levels winding steel-dark streams along whose banks the upward-springing willows burned an ardent rust colour. And as the car rocked and bounded along and the wind screen first starred in one place, then in another, then fell out altogether, one got a better and better view of it all.
What a wonderful people the French are for agriculture.... Hardly a man did I see all thedays I motored about and about, but I saw mile after mile of cultivated land, the sombrely-clad women or boys guiding the slow ploughs, the rough-coated horses pulling patiently—white horses that looked pale against the bare earth, but a dark yellow when the snow came to show up the tarnishing that the service of man brings upon beasts. Several times I saw English soldiers ploughing, and rejoiced.
We came into the town that was our bourn in the grey of the evening, passed the grey glimmer of the river between its grey stone quays, passed the grey miracle of the cathedral, and then, in the rapidly deepening dusk, turned in through great wrought iron gates into a grey courtyard.
It may have been gathered that, much as I admire both their practical perfection and their spiritual significance, I am no lover of camps, which seem to me among all things man-created upon God's earth about the most depressing. I had lived and moved and had my being in camps it seemed to me for countless ages, the edges of my soul were frayed with camps. From the moment of walking into the old house at R—— a wonderful sense of rest that brooded over the place enveloped me. The thing had an atmosphere, impossible to exaggerate, though very difficult to convey, but I shall never forget the miracle that house was to me.
It was a Hostel for the Relations of Wounded,and there are in France at present some half-dozen of these houses, supported by the Joint War Committee of the Red Cross and the Order of St. John, and staffed by V.A.D.'s. At all of them the relations of badly wounded are lodged and fed free of charge, while cars meet them and also convey them to and from the hospital. This much I knew as plain facts, what I had not been prepared for was the breath of exquisite pleasure that emanated from this house.
The house was originally a butter market, and the entrance room, set about with little tables where the relations have their meals, has one side entirely of glass; the lounge beyond, which is for the staff, is glass-roofed, while that opening on the right hand of the dining-place, the lounge for the relations, has long windows all down the side; so it will be seen that light and air are abundant on the ground floor of the Hostel in spite of the fact that it looks on to a courtyard.
From the relations' lounge, with its slim vermilion pillars ringed about with seats like those round tree-trunks, there goes up a curving staircase of red tiles, with a carved baluster of oak greyish with age, a griffon sitting upright upon the newel. Up this staircase I was taken to my room, and there the completion of peace came upon me.
One could see at a glance it would be quiet, beautifully quiet. Its window gave on to thesloping grey flanks of pointed roofs and showed a filigree spire pricking the pale bubble of the wintry sky, its walls were panelled from floor to ceiling, its hangings were of white and vermilion, its floor dark and polished, and on the wide stone hearth burned a wood fire. And, to crown all, after tiny huts, it was so big a room that the corners were filled with gracious shadow; and the firelight flickered up and down on the panelling and glimmered in the polished floor and set the shadows quivering. I lay back in a vermilion-painted chair and felt steeped in the bath of restfulness that the place was.
The whole house was very perfectly "got-up," the maximum of effect having been attained with the minimum of expense, though not of labour; it all having been achieved under the direction of a former superintendent with a genius for decoration, who is now V.A.D. Area Commandant and still lives at the Hostel. The evening I arrived there, she and the staff were busy stenciling a buff bedspread with blue galleons in full sail, varied by gulls. Everything is exceedingly simple, there is no fussy detail, nothing to catch dirt. The walls are all panelled, and painted either ivory or dark brown; the furniture is of wicker and plain wood, painted in gay colours—rich blues and vermilion; the tablecloths are of red or blue checks. In the spacious bedrooms are simple colour schemes—in one there are thick, straight curtainsof flaming orange, in another of a deep blue, in another of red and white checked material. The floors are of polished wood or red tiles strewn with rugs; vivid-coloured cushions lie in the easy chairs; and set about in earthen jars are great branches of mimosa and lilac from the South, boughs of pussy-willow, the tender velvety grey ovals blossoming into fragile yellow dust; all along the sills are indoor window-boxes filled with hyacinths of pink and white and a cold faint blue.
On the walls the only decoration is that of posters, and these create an extraordinary effect as of a series of windows, opening upon different climes and strange worlds, windows set in ivory walls. Here is an old Norman castle, grey against a sky of luminous yellow, there a stream in Brittany which you can almost hear brawling past the plane-trees with their freckled trunks, while beyond it, through another window, you see a pergola of roses whose deep red has turned wine-coloured under the moonlight, and beyond that again, the white cliffs of England go down into a peacock sea. And, in the Red Cross dining-room, a poilu, his mouth open on a yell of encouragement, charges with uplifted hands, looking over his shoulder at you with bright daring eyes, and you do not need the inscription underneath of "On les aura!" to guess what spirit urges him.
This, then, is the setting for one of the mostmerciful of the works of the Red Cross. That it is appreciated is shown by the fact that at Christmas, at this house, with its staff of Superintendent, cook, parlourmaid, housemaid and "tweeny," with one chauffeuse, there were forty relations of wounded staying. The average number of people for whom Army and Red Cross rations are drawn three times a week is twenty-five, but for these rations as for fifteen are drawn, as the food supply is too generously proportioned for a household consisting so largely of women. But it will be seen that with a constantly fluctuating population the task of housekeeping is no easy one, though it is tackled by the voluntary staff with gaiety and courage.
They have troubles of their own, too, the members of that staff, and in the big kitchen, where among the dishes on the table a pink hyacinth bloomed, the fair-haired cook I saw so busily working was back from a leave in England that was to have been her marriage-leave, had not her fiancé been killed the day before he was to join her. Now she is amongst her pots and pans again and smiling still, as I can testify. The "tweeny," who also describes herself as a boot-boy, is a young war-widow. Things like these are almost beyond the admiration of mortals less severely tested.
The material difficulties are not the worst in a hostel of this kind, which in its very nature presupposesgrief. The relations, of course, are of all kinds, after every pattern of humanity, and each makes his or her emotional demand, if not in active appeal to sympathy, yet in the strain that it entails on the sensitively organised to see others in sorrow—and unless you are sensitive you are no good for work such as this. This hostel is blessed in its Superintendent, an American V.A.D. worker of a personality sosimpatica—there is no adequate English for what I mean—that you are aware of it at first meeting with her; and she is a woman of the world, which is not always the case with women workers, however excellent.
Shortly before I came to the Hostel a very young wife arrived to see her husband, who lay desperately ill in one of the hospitals. When he died she became as a thing distraught and could not be left, and the Superintendent even had to have her to sleep in her room with her all the time she was there. Others, again, are aloof in their sorrow, though it is none the less tragic for that. The first question on the lips of the Staff when the chauffeuse comes back from taking the relatives to the hospital is, "Was it good news?"
It was good news for the couple who arrived on the same evening that I did, the mother and father of a young officer who was very badly injured. I saw them next morning in the lounge, sitting quietly on either side of the centre-stove,a business man and his wife, as neat, he in his serge suit, she in her satin blouse and carefully folded lace and smooth grey hair, as if they had not been travelling for a day and a night on end, racked by anxiety, though you could see the deep lines that the strain had left. He looked at me with those patient eyes of the elderly which hold the same unconscious pathos as those of animals, and talked in a low quiet voice, and it seemed almost an impertinence of a total stranger to assure these gentle, dignified people of her gladness that their only son was safe, yet how glad one is that any one of these brief contacts in passing should be of happiness! It is so impossible not to weep with them that weep that it is a keen joy to be able to rejoice with them that do rejoice.
"It's so free here ..." he told me, "that's what the wife and I like so. No rules and regulations, you can do just what you like as though you were in your own home ... no feeling that as you don't pay you've got to do what you're told." And there was expressed the spirit of the Hostel as I discovered it.
There are no rules, and it is always impressed upon the Superintendents that the relations are not obliged to go there, that they do so because they choose to, and must be treated as honoured guests. In the dining-room there are little tables as at an hotel, so that the different parties can keep to themselves if they prefer it; there are notimes for going out or coming in, no times for "lights out," no need to have a meal in if the visitor mentions he is going out for it. The relations who stay at these hostels are guests in every sense of the word, and there is not one trace of red tape or the faintest feeling of obligation about the whole thing.
And that must have been what I had felt in the very air of the place when I arrived, what stole with so precious a balm over me who had been in camp after camp, institution after institution. This place, with its quiet walls and its grey shutters wing-wide upon its grey walls, was not only beautiful and rich with that richness only age can give, it was instinct as well with freedom and with peace.
I have left till the last what to some people will be the dullest and what is certainly the least spectacular of all the work done by the women in France, but what is to me perhaps the most wonderful and admirable of all. I mean that of the Domestic Staffs.
For there is something thrilling about driving wounded, something eternally picturesque about nursing them, but there is no glamour about being a general servant.... A general servant, year in, year out, and with no wages at that, for I talk of the voluntary staffs, girls of gentle birth and breeding who deliberately undertake to wash dishes and clean floors and empty slops day after day. I think heroism can no higher go, and I am not trying to be funny; I mean it.
All the voluntary camps I had seen, all the hostels, the rest stations, and many hospitals, are staffed by voluntary domestic help; and the girls they wait upon, the drivers and secretaries and such like, are eager in recognition of them. But that seems to me about all the recognition they doget; they get no "snappy pars," no photographs in the picture papers, no songs are sung of them, no reward is theirs in the shape of medal or ribbon, nothing but the sense of a dish properly cleaned or rugs duly swept under. I consider that there ought to be a special medal for girls who have slaved as general servants during the war, without a thrill of romance to support them; a "Skivvy's Ribbon" as one of them laughingly suggested to me when I propounded the idea.
Take, for example, the Headquarters of the British Red Cross, at the Hotel Christol at Boulogne, to which I returned on my homeward way, as I had come to it on landing. The staff, counting the Commissioner and officials, the clerks, typists, secretaries, and Post Office girls, amount to about a hundred and forty-five people, and the house staff number seventeen and are all V.A.D.'s. The Hotel Christol is also the headquarters for all Red Cross people going on leave or arriving therefrom via Boulogne, and all have to report there; nearly all want a meal, many want a bed.
The men-workers and many of the women, such as V.A.D. Commandants, etc., live out in billets in the town, but the manageress and her assistant, the Post Office Commandant, the girl driver of the mail-car with her orderly (these two girls drive about sixty miles daily with the mails), the girls of the telephone exchange and the rest of the Post Office girls, all "live in," and in additionto the casual Red Cross workers who may appeal for a bed any time there are the relations of wounded who have been put up there whenever possible, though now a hostel is being opened in Boulogne for the purpose. All the people working in the house and all Red Cross workers arriving by boat are entitled to take their meals at the Christol, as are all Red Cross workers in Boulogne, both officers and privates, and the average number of meals served is 2,500 a week. Four or five girls act as waitresses in the dining-room, and three are always in the pantry, which must never be left for a moment during the day; so it will be seen that the headquarters of the Red Cross is a sort of hotel, except that nobody pays.
There are French servants to do the roughest work, but the girls have plenty to do without that. The house staff begin work at seven in the morning; at seven-thirty in the evening they start to turn out the forty-two offices, which they sweep and dust every day. They wash all the tea-things (not the dinner-things), and clean all the silver and glass, they make the beds and do all the waiting. A pretty good list of occupations, is it not, carried out on such a huge scale?
The girls are well looked after, for it must not be forgotten that some of them are not more than eighteen, and their parents in England have a right to demand that these children should be at once guarded and cheered. No Red Cross girlis allowed out after half-past nine in a restaurant, and none is ever allowed to dine out unaccompanied by another girl. But when a friend of a girl passes through Boulogne, then it is permitted that she and another girl may go and dine with the officer in question, always provided they are back by nine-thirty. For superiors are merciful and human creatures these days, and there is always the thought that the girl may never see that friend again. And Heaven—and the superior—knows that these girls need and deserve a little relaxation and enjoyment.
And would you not think that to girls who work as these do and behave so well would at least be given the understanding and respect of all of us who do so much less? Yet how often one hears careless remarks of censure or—worse—of belittlement. That to other nations our ways may need explaining is understandable, but we should indeed be ashamed that any amongst ourselves fail in comprehension.
What do the French think of our women? That is a question that inevitably arises in the mind of anyone who knows the differences in French and English education. Let me show the thing as I think it is, by means of a metaphor.
It is universally conceded that marriage is a more difficult proposition than friendship, that it is more a test of affection to live under one roof and share the daily commonplaces of life thanit is to meet occasionally when one can make a feast of the meeting. Yet this is not to say that marriage is the less admirable state, but only to allow that it is one requiring greater sacrifices, greater tact, and—greater affection. Therefore, when it is admitted that the presence in France for nearly four years of English soldiers, English civilians on war-work, and the consequent erection of whole temporary townships for their accommodation, is a greater test—if you will a greater strain—for the Entente than if intercourse had been limited to an occasional interchange of a handful of people, one is not saying anything derogatory either to French hosts or English guests, but merely frankly conceding that more depth of affection and understanding is necessary than would otherwise have been the case. To superficial relationships, superficial knowledge, but to the big partnerships of life, complete understanding. And, if that is never quite possible in this world, at least let the corner where knowledge cannot come be filled by tolerance.
England is no longer on terms of mere friendly intercourse with France; the bond is deeper, more indissoluble.... And as in marriage the closest bond of all is the birth of children, so in this pact of nations the greatest bond is the loss of children—lost for the same cause upon the same soil....
With a bond as deep as this—a bond alwaysacknowledged and given its meed of recognition by the most thoughtful brains and sensitive hearts—yet, as in marriage, there are bound to be minor irritations, points, not of meeting, but of conflict. Trifles, indeed, these points, compared with the magnitude of the bond which unites, but nevertheless trifles which would be better adjusted than ignored.
In the first place, we must recognise that though the things which unite us, our common ideals, our common needs, are far stronger than any difference in our modes of thought, yet those differences exist, and that, in marriage, it is often said that it is the little things which count.... Heaven forbid that we should so lose sense of proportion as to say it when the matter in hand is the marriage of nations, but nevertheless it is well not entirely to forget it.... And, of all the differences in customs between us, there is probably none more marked than in our way of treating what is known—loosely and with considerable banality—as the "sex-problem." This is not the place to discuss those differences, though, as one who has known and loved France all her life, I may mention that, personally, I see much to admire in the French system and could wish that we emulated it, but that is neither here nor there at the moment.
France has probably evolved for the happiness and welfare of her womenkind the sort of lifewhich suits best with their temperament and circumstances. Women, like water, find their own level, and no one who knows France, and knows the devotion, the business capacity, and the good works of her women, imagines them to be the butterfly creatures that English fancy used to paint them twenty or thirty years ago. As a matter of fact, the present writer had occasion, two winters ago, to make a close study of the varied scope of women's work in France—the hospitals for training offemmes du monde, the schools like Le Foyer, for the training of young girls of the upper classes to help their poorer sisters, etc., etc., all works carried on unostentatiously long before the war broke upon us and proved their usefulness. The "butterfly" Frenchwoman underwent, before the war, a far more serious social training than did the happy-go-lucky English girl, and was better equipped in consequence, with a knowledge of economic conditions, than the untrained Englishwoman could be.
But we too have our quality, and I rather think it is to be found in the greater freedom which we are allowed. We were not so well trained, but freedom stepped into the place of custom, and gave the necessary attitude of mind—that unprejudiced, untrammelled attitude which is essential to the quick grasping of a freshmétier. That is where our method—or, if you prefer it, our lack of method—helped us, even as their traininghelped the French. And the French, with their extraordinary facility of vision, do, I think, understand that we have simply pushed our freedom to its logical and legitimate outcome, that we could not be expected, after being accustomed, for many years past, to be on terms of simple easy friendship with men as with our own sex, above all, after working side by side with them since this war began, we could not be expected to say that we could not work with them in France, though we could in England, or that perhaps this girl would, and that girl couldn't....
We naturally proceeded to acten masseas we had acted individually, to do on a large scale what had been done on a small, to manipulate great bodies of women where before a few friends had worked together. In every large body of persons there are bound to be one or two individuals who fail to come up to the required standard, but that does not alter the principle that what can safely be done in small quantities can safely be done in large, provided the conditions are altered to scale.
And that is what we are doing, and what our Government is helping us to do; that is what our Women's Army and our voluntary workers in France are—the expression, on a large scale, of what bands of women have been doing so successfully on a small scale since the beginning of the war—helping, and even replacing the men.And just as, with our peculiar training and mode of thought, it is possible for the average Englishwoman to eliminate sex as a factor in the scheme of things, so it is possible to eliminate it in greater masses. In other words, it is perfectly possible, to men and girls brought up with the English method of free friendly intercourse, to work side by side, to meet, to walk together, and to remain—merely friends. Whether that is a good thing or not is another point altogether, as it is whether it makes for charm in a woman.... Certainly no woman in this world competes with a Frenchwoman for charm. It is as recognised as an Englishwoman's complexion—and considerably more lasting!
Probably it is only ourselves and the Americans among the races of the world who could have instituted such an experiment as that of our Women's Army, but there is among the nations one which is supreme in "flair," in sympathy, and a certain ability to comprehend intellectually what it might not understand emotionally, and that nation is France.
I am confident that it will never have to be said that when Englishwomen sacrificed so much—and to a Frenchwoman one does not need to point out what a sacrifice it is when a woman risks youth and looks in hard unceasing work—that Frenchwomen failed to understand them or to attribute motives to them other than those that have animatedthemselves in their own labours throughout the war.
That it must sometimes look odd to them one knows so well; how can it be otherwise? They see the girls, khaki-clad, out walking without "Tommies," hear the sounds of music and dancing coming from the recreation huts, where the girls are allowed to invite the men, andvice versa. Yet, if you investigate, you will find out that they are of an extraordinary simplicity, these girls and men, in their intercourse, in their earnest dancing, taught them by instructors from our Young Men's Christian Association, inspired by nothing more heady than lemonade, and chaperoned by the women-officers, who have attained a mixture of authority and motherly supervision over every individual girl that reminds me of nothing so much as the care, born of a sort of divine cunning, of a very dear and clever Mother Superior at a convent I once stayed at in France. For the interesting point for both the French and ourselves to note is that in the treatment of our Women's Army in France we have taken a leaf out of their book. We look after the girls with something of that love and care which surrounds a girl in France.
For many of the Women's Army are working girls, who have never been guarded in their lives, whose parents had probably, after the lower-class English way, very little influence with them, andwho, though good, honest, rough girls, were free to roam the streets of their native towns with their friends every evening once their work was over. Now, for what is for many of them the first time in their lives, they are being watched and guarded in a manner that is more French than English, and which I find admirable. As for their walks, their friendships with men, the personal observation of the acute French will show them that it is merely our Anglo-Saxon way, and the official statistics will prove to any doubters how well both the girls and the men can be trusted to behave themselves. We are a cold nation if you like, but there it is—it has its excellences, if not its charms.
So much for fundamental differences, which, when intelligence and sympathy go out to meet them, become merely points on which temperaments agree to differ amicably, each giving its meed of admiration to the other. And for minor matters, little things of different customs only, that nevertheless, occasionally, in the strain of this war, ruffle even friends, I would say something like this, which is in the hearts of us all....
France—dear lovely France, to so many of us adored for many years, who has stood to us for the romance of the world, we know that in many things our ways are not your ways and never will be, nor would we wish it otherwise. To each nation her distinctiveness, or she loses her soul.But, when those ways of ours seem to you most alien, say to yourself: "This is only England's differing way of doing what we are doing, of fighting for what we are fighting for—the saving of the right to individualism, the right to be different...." To gain that we are all having to become alike, just as to win freedom we are having for a time to give it up, and the great thing to remember is that this terrible coherent community life is being borne with only that eventually we may all be free men once more. Let us, for all time, differ in our own ways, rather than agree in the German! But also let us, while differing, understand.
On my last evening I sat and thought about the girls I had seen and known, in greater and less degrees, in passing. And I saw them, not as unthinking "sporting" young things, who were having a great adventure, but as girls who were steadily sticking to their jobs, often without enjoyment save that of knowledge of good work well done. And I thought of those prophets who gloomily foretell that the women will never want to drop into the background again—forgetful of the fact that where a woman is is never a background to herself. I smiled as I thought of the eagerness with which these hard workers in mud and snow and heat will start buying pretty clothes again and going out to parties ... and I was very thankful to know how unchangedly woman they had all remained, in spite of the fact that they had had the strength to lay the privileges and the fun of being a woman aside for a time.
I remembered what the D. of T. had said to me when we discussed the question of how the girls would settle down when it was all over, andhow he had thought that even if they did not marry all would be well, because they would have had their adventure.... I remembered too how that had seemed to me the correct answer at the time. Then later, when that awful web of depression caught me, and the horror of the school-girl conditions of life and all the apparent "brightness" had choked me, I had all the more thought it true, but marvelled; later still, when I caught glimpses of that wonderful spirit and that deep sophistication which had so cheered me, I reversed the whole judgment and thought there was nothing in it.
Now, thinking it all over, it seemed to me that somewhere midway lay Truth. These girls have had, in a certain sense, their adventure, but when it is all over, they will have a reaction from it, and I believe that reaction will be pleasant to them, that it will be the reaction, and not the memory of adventure, which will content them. It is certain that to anyone who has worked as these girls work a considerable period of doing nothing in particular will be very acceptable. They will all have to become themselves again, which will be interesting....
Dear, wonderful girls ... you who wash dishes and scrub and sweep, you girls of the Women's Army who replace men and who do it so thoroughly, you drivers who are out in all weathers, night and day, sometimes for a weekor more on end, who face hardships such as were faced in those three weeks at T—— when there were no fires and no water, how glad I am to have met you.... So I sat and thought, and then I picked up a copy ofThe Timeswhich had just come over. And in the "Personal" column this caught my eye:
"Lady wants war-work, preferably motor-driving, from three to five p.m."
And I saw that it was not only those far removed from the war who misunderstood both what it demands and that which has arisen to meet those demands.
Do we not nearly all fail to realise the magnitude and import of what is being done by these unspectacular workers behind the lines, who are yet part of war itself, and daily and nightly strengthen the hands of the fighters? Some of us in England realise as little as you in far-off countries, and yet it should be our business to know, because the least we can do is to understand so that we, in our much less fine way, can help them a little, one tithe of the amount they help our fighting men.
Not because of any desire of theirs for praise is it necessary—I never saw a healthier disregard, amounting to a kindly contempt, for what those at home think or don't think, than among the women working in France—but because it is only by knowing that we can respond generouslyenough to the needs of their work, and only by understanding that we can save our own souls from that fat and contented ignorance which induces a sleep uncommonly like death.
Nor, as long as we listen to the girls themselves, are we in any danger of thinking too much of them or of their work. Not a woman I met, English or American, working in France, but said something like this, and meant it: "What, after all, is anything we can do, except inasmuch as it may help the men a little? How could we bear to do nothing when the men are doing the most wonderful thing that has ever been done in the world?"
Transcriber's Note:Punctuation has been normalised.
Punctuation has been normalised.