Dearest Mother:—

My literary style may be a trifle affected by Baedeker, but I hope the following details will not seem as dry as sawdust to you, for they are the very air I breathe daily.

At the beginning of the war the French Government declared a moratorium, which is the suspension of rent payments for every one in Paris paying a rent of less than two thousand francs or possibly three thousand francs. With practically all the men mobilized, many families would have starved but for this provision. The wives or widows of soldiers are given a regular income by the French Government called “allocation,”—one franc twenty-five centimes a day and seventy-five centimes for each child. The soldiers themselves get five sous a day (formerly three sous), which barely enables them to get necessities and soap and tobacco, etc.

“Chaumage” is money given to woman refugees if they have no men fighting. One franc twenty-five centimes a day for all over sixteen not working (mothers of little children, invalids, blind, etc.), and fifty centimes for children. There is a special old-age pension for men and women over sixty. In addition to these pensions there are committees—ComitÉ Franco-Belge, ComitÉ de la Marne, Secours des Meusiens, etc., who help refugees by giving money and clothes to special cases. They are so swamped with demands, however, that they cannot do much. It is a marvel to me what they and the French Government can do and what complication of financial adjustment is apparently carried on successfully. Where does the money come from to finance this war?

Perhaps it would seem that considering the chaumage, the refugees are nearly as well off as the Parisians, but I assure you it is not so: the moratorium makes a vast difference, and, above all, the strangeness of Paris, ignorance of where to find places to live and work, ill health often contracted from the hardships of the way down and the frightful shock of living through bombardment. Many of them, you see, were fairly well off in Rheims or Lille or Maubeuge, or wherever they came from, and had to flee with only the clothes they had on their backs. The people who try to do much with little and live up to their former way of living appeal to my sympathy more than the most squalid who really have the greatest misery.

We have found that people can get a furnished room for thirty centimes a day and up. Awful little rooms, dens of darkness and disease, can be found (only occasionally, praise be) for three francs a week; but I can’t consider those. I saw one yesterday—a mother and two little girls live there, and it was about the size of the cabin in our motor-boat, but made the latter seem vast and airy by comparison. With the prices of food and coal high, and constantly soaring, the poor people can just make out their rent and food, but cannot buy clothes. Shoes are thirty francs and up. You can figure it out for yourself. With our help, however, many, many poor families can get along that would otherwise be destitute. Sometimes we can give a girl a suit which will enable her to present herself for a far better position than she could hope to obtain in rags. Sometimes boys can go to school if they have warm new shoes, a black apron, and an overcoat, when without them they would stay at home and shiver in idleness. Warm strong clothing not only gives a new lease to health, but to life as a whole. You should see the little girls when I give them a hair-ribbon or a dress for their doll, if they have one.

I have gathered a lot of old stuff that I found at the Vestiaire and have brought it home and ironed it out and cut it up fresh and given it away to all sorts of little “fillettes.” I do believe in the trimmings even for the most wretched, especially if they’re kids, and I am glad to say that Mrs. Shurtleff does, too. We have a box of tinsel favors filled with tiny bonbons that we give to the littlest, if they are restless while their parents are being accommodated. The other day we had a little angel of less than two, a small refugee from Rheims with its father and mother. Her ears were pierced and supported tiny earrings. When in this war-time any one had the time and inclination to pierce that child’s ears is one on me! Her father left our part of the Vestiaire a few minutes to be fitted to an overcoat in the men’s department, and the child began to howl. I took it in my arms and rushed it after its father as fast as I could go. Then all was serene again. In some cases we go so far as to move families from crowded, dirty, unsavory quarters to as clean and as airy a place as we can find in proportion to their income. We then guarantee their rent for three months and help them to furnish. This is all in the hands of the installation department, and I have nothing to do with that, so I cannot tell you as much as I would like to.

The field work is the visiting and investigation of applicants. The war work of the Students Atelier Reunions has become known by word of mouth among the refugees. Of course, the reports and results of our work travel like wildfire and we are inundated with requests. After receiving a letter from a refugee the case is looked up by two field workers and reported at a meeting of the committee the following Saturday morning. A vote is taken as to what to do and how much to give if it is decided to give anything. The people are then told to present themselves at the Vestiaire and we give them what they need. Every type of man, woman, and child has crossed our threshold even within my month of service. How I love them all!

I try to get each story as I measure the person and search the stock and try on and tie up and list. Mother would die to see me, who have never known anything more about children than that they belonged to the animal kingdom and were awful little monkeys and might better approach more nearly the vegetable kingdom, even if they were darlings—to see me tell some mother of ten that “her little Yvonne is large for eight,” or that “Renaud has small feet for a boy of twelve.” It is I who measure and mark children’s clothes as they are sent to us, according to age, and in centimeters at that. I have been driven to ascertaining my own waist measure by the same rating and now go about heavily veiled.

My good fortune has been to be made one of the field workers and I go with either Miss Curtis or Miss Sturgis every Monday and Wednesday. Two always go together because, until we have been to a place once, we don’t know what we are getting into, and it would be foolish to go alone way to the back of the top of these big dark buildings without knowing what sort of people lived there. In their homes you do see the people chez eux. We see the extremes of cleanliness and filth, thrift and abjectness. I shall not stop to describe individual homes now, but I can tell you some of them are rare. In one home of about the same stratum as the Russian family Mother and I visited last Christmas, I stepped gingerly among the rags, coal-dust, food, and so forth on the floor, and went and sat beside the dirtiest but the darlingest child you ever saw,—blue eyes with black lashes, which always get me, you know,—but its nose running fearfully. Miss Curtis did the questioning, but I interrupted every three minutes to beseech the mother to wipe the offending organ. I finally learned that the child ought to have an operation, but it is only twenty-five months old and the doctor will not operate until she is three. I showed her the buttons on my glove, fastening and unfastening them. She looked up to me with her dirty little mouth smiling radiantly and said, “Tiens!”

They are not the type we can do much for, but I begged some warm clothes for them and they came to the Vestiaire yesterday. The name is Pruvot, and there are a mother and daughter, three sons in the war, one of whom I am going to adopt as “filleul,” a son and his wife and two little girls, and a little illegitimate child of a son who has disappeared and whose mother has abandoned it. He is the star child, Marcel Pruvot, two and a half years, and I am crazy to adopt him. What would you say if I brought him home with me? Think of what one could make of his life; but, of course, I shall not. We sent a layette to one little mother. (My mother should see the layette department, stocked up with the cutest things I ever saw.) And as a special luxury, we included some talcum powder, marked “poudre de riz” (rice powder). Mrs. Jackson went to look her up one day and found her boiling the talcum powder with water in a saucepan, just about to feed it to the little creature of three months. She had never heard of powder before.

The next big branch of work is fitting out the blind. There is more pathos, gayety, and inspiration on Tuesday and Friday afternoons than in all the rest of the week. After the men are wounded at the front they are brought back through a chain of relief stations, “postes de secours,” to hospitals, and finally to a Paris hospital. The blind are allowed to recuperate here either at the Val de Grace or the Quinze-Vingt (big hospitals), and are then sent away, usually to the country to learn a trade or to rejoin their families, or both. They must give up their military clothes, underclothes, and shoes when they are discharged, and are given only the poorest kind of civilian clothes in exchange. This is where we step in to give them decent clothes. In many cases they are not given civilian clothes at all, although I don’t understand the Government system enough to see how that is possible. So Miss Hodges, our representative in work for the blind, brings five or six of the most needy and touching cases to us and we fit them out.

The blind are the most childlike as a general rule of all the people we deal with, and the outfit we give them and the kindness and help they receive at the Vestiaire mean to them a new start in life, as we have learned from guards afterwards. Such brave fellows! It is an exception to see one downcast or morose, but when you do, your heart aches twice as much, not only for them, but for the many gay ones who have conquered despair. One boy twenty-four years old was wounded in the leg and dragged himself along the ground half conscious, to find he was dragging himself toward the German trenches. At this point he was struck again and his eyes put out. He lay between the trenches under fire for days, unconscious most of the time and feigning death the rest. By a miracle he escaped being killed. He was picked up and taken to a hospital; has been there six months, and is now starting out to learn a trade—in the dark. I love to do what I can for them, especially as this is my one chance to know the French poilu.

You would laugh to see me measuring and fitting, especially when it comes to holding up underwear to some dear blind giant. I remember all too well how at the age of eight I used to wriggle in Altman’s when mother insisted on “getting an idea how they would go” by holding “them” up to me. Every saleswoman and floorwalker got the idea clearly. There are moments when blindness is not such a misfortune.

The blind soldiers are always interested to know what their new clothes look like. “C’est de quel couleur, Mademoiselle?” “Dark brown,” I say, “and I will give you a brown and white tie.” “Ah que je serai chic, moi!” One of his comrades would nudge him and say, “Je voudrais bien avoir les yeux pour te voir, maintenant, mon vieux! C’est vrai que tu vais te marier?” (I would like to have eyes to see you now, old fellow; is it true you are just going to be married?) Then they laugh and thank me “mille fois” and shake hands and wish me good luck. Sometimes I walk down the street with them and guide them along. I admire their medals and tell them that the passers-by are looking at them, etc. We never say the word “aveugle” (blind), but “blessÉ” (wounded). Sometimes when we have to wait for their guards I sit on the table and tell them all about my crossing and about America, and, oh, a hundred things. We do have good times—for the moment.

I have tried to give you a grasp of what we have to meet and how we try to meet it. First, the French system of pensions and rents, then the giving of clothes and the moving of families, then the field work and the work for the blind. I haven’t told about the Ouvroir because I am not well enough informed. We give employment to many women in making clothes for the Vestiaire,—flannel shirts and petticoats, underclothes, dresses, everything. All materials, clothes, furniture, or their equivalent in money, come from America.

Now for our needs. We need shoes (this “we” may be taken editorially, for when my present boots take wings I don’t know what I shall do. I can’t afford French shoes in war-times); large sizes, both men’s and women’s, and all sizes children’s—women’s 5, 6, and 7 lengths, C, D, and E widths, and men’s correspondingly large. Then blankets, diaper material by the yard, men’s overcoats (we had to turn away a blind boy the other day who had had his feet and legs frozen and was lame and was just beginning to get tuberculosis), and women’s shirts and heavy union suits. These are great needs, but if there are any available just plain clothes,—dresses, suits, children’s clothes, boy’s trousers and sweaters, neckties, gloves, ribbons, stockings, caps,—send them. If Mother has any sewing-circle in New York or elsewhere at her command, I should like to use it as a part of the propaganda, if I may. I believe she suggested it. If they want to make anything, make aprons for boys and girls from four to fourteen years, the larger sizes from ten to fourteen being the most important. All the school children wear them, and always black. The stuff is like lining sateen. It is astonishing to me that not only parents, but the children, are eager for anything black. It is more practical, of course, and as it is the custom for all the school children to wear black, any child feels embarrassed and odd to wear a color. Only hair-ribbons do they like bright, and this is because they dress up on Sundays to go to the cemeteries. The apron is an all-over apron with sleeves, and buttons up the back.

My idea is to give always what fits and what is right to each person on the spot. Give her something to take pride in and live up to. I have seen a nice-looking waist for a girl to wear to her work in a paper-bag factory not only transform her looks, but the expression of her face. I consider it as much my duty to tell people at home what we need as to go to work every morning. If you could know how we long for packing-boxes to come from America. Sometimes when they do come they are filled with junk. Old dirty clothes full of holes, pieces of lace, jet passementerie, etc., and how disappointed we are! We are hoping, perhaps, for three dozen heavy union suits for men, and find some worn-out long white kid gloves.

Couldn’t you tell some of our dear friends about the Vestiaire? So often at home I have heard people say, “It is awful how little I do for the war. I would like to do more, but I don’t know just what to do.” Tell them that here’s an opportunity not only to help France, but to back up Americans.

One kind of help that appeals to me strongly, though it is entirely outside of my work here, is adopting “filleuls.” Many soldiers have wives and families who write to them and send packages and warm things, and an occasional bar of soap, cake of chocolate, or package of cigarettes. Then there are many poor fellows whose families are in the invaded provinces or killed. They have no one, no encouragement, no one to write to or get letters from or give them trifling remembrances. These are adopted as “filleuls” (godsons) by “marraines” (godmothers), who take an interest and try and fill the place of family to them. Hundreds have been so adopted in America, as you know, but there are so many more who are quite forlorn. I heard of one boy the other day who was the only one in his regiment who never got anything, but tried to go away by himself when he knew it was time for the mail to come. I adopted him like a shot. I have since taken three more temporarily, as I can’t possibly afford to keep them unless I can get some one in America to support them. Now, many of my friends cannot write French very readily and don’t want to be bothered, and it takes months, anyway, for packages to get from New York to the French front, so I thought that if I could get two or three people to support my boys, I would do the writing and the sending of packages gladly, and then report to whoever was supporting them at home and forward to the supporters the men’s letters.

You spend anywhere from three dollars up for the package and send the package once a month. I shall keep these men from now until I hear from you and make an account of what I spend for them. Please be sure and let me know.

One of our greatest needs is a small motor-car—we take great heavy packages and heavy furniture all over town, and then in the visiting work we have to go everywhere, and we get really more tired than I ever thought it possible to get and we waste so much time walking. There are many places where the trams and subways don’t go and the auto-buses have stopped running. Here they are too expensive to buy and mostly too poor in quality. They ask thirty-two hundred francs for a 1910 Ford.