REPATRIÉES

I

"Mademoiselle, Mademoiselle, the children are coming!"

Christmas had come and gone in a convulsion of parties, January had dripped monotonously into the abyss of time. The day was dank and cheerless, rain—the imperturbable rain of France—was falling placidly, persistently, yet through the unfathomable seas of mud that engulf Bar-le-Duc in winter I saw Madame Lassanne running towards me. I was miry, wet and exceedingly cross; Madame was several times mirier, her clothes were a sodden sop, but her eyes were like a breeze-ruffled pool that the sun has been kissing. She clutched a telegram in one shaking hand, she waved it under my eyes, she cried out something quite unintelligible, for a laugh and a sob caught it and smothered it as she fled. I watched her splash through the grey liquid sea—she was running but she did not know it. The train was not due for an hour yet.

Some days later I swam out to the farm (you don't walk in Bar in winter unless you have webbed feet, and then you fly), and there I found Madame Breda and the aunt whose name I have most reprehensibly forgotten, and Roger and Marie, and yet another old lady, and Madame, and they were all living in one small room and they all talked together, and Roger— discerning infant—howled at my uniform, and Marie stared at me out of great round eyes, and gradually little by little I pieced together the story.

When shells were falling on the village Madame Breda, as you know, set off with the children, but turning north instead of south, walked right into the line of battle. A handful of French (it was in August 1914) were flying before vastly superior German forces. They rode down the road at breakneck speed. "Sauve qui peut!" The cry shattered the air. One man's horse was shot under him. He scrambled to his feet, terror in his eyes, for the Germans were close behind. A comrade reined up, in a moment he had swung himself behind him and the mad race for life swept on, the men shouting to Madame Breda to fly. "Sauvez-vous, sauvez-vous." What she read in their eyes she never forgot. But flight for her and the children was out of the question, they were literally too frightened to move. A few minutes later they were toiling back along the road to a little village called, I think, Canel, with German soldiers mounting guard over them. There they were kept for six days, during three of which no bread was obtainable, and they nearly died of hunger. Then they were taken to Nantillois, their old home, where they remained for two months. Food was scarce, the soldiers brutal. "There are no potatoes," they cried to the Commandant; "what shall we eat?" "Il y a des betteraves,"[9] he replied coarsely as he turned away.

These French peasants must come of a sturdy stock, they are so difficult to kill. They existed somehow—only the baby died.

And then they were marched off again, this time to Carignan, once a town of perhaps 2,500 inhabitants, of whom some 1,100 remained. Here they were not treated badly, the garrison consisting of oldish men, reservists, with little stomach for the atrocities that followed in the wake of the first army. At Nantillois some ugly things appear to have happened, but at Carignan the Mayor managed to tenir tÊte, behaving like a hero at first and later like a shrewd and far-seeing man.

Some day, I hope a volume will be written in honour of these French mayors. Sermaize, left defenceless, was an exception. For the most part they stuck to their posts, shielding and protecting them in every way, raising indemnities from the very stones, placating irate commandants, encouraging the stricken, and all too often dying like gallant gentlemen when the interests of Kultur demanded that the blood of innocent victims should smoke upon its altars.

Madame Breda told me that the Mayor of Nantillois bought up all the flour he could find in the mills and shops during the first week of war, hiding it so successfully the Germans never found it. I confess I received this information with frank incredulity, for knowing something of the ways of the gentle Hun, I am profoundly convinced that if you set him in the middle of the Desert of Sahara, telling him that a grain of gold had been hidden there, he would nose round till he found it. And it wouldn't take him long, for his scent is keen. But Madame was positive. French wit was more than a match for German cunning, and the flour was distributed by a man whose life would not have been worth five minutes' purchase if his "crime" had been found out.

In spite of the flour, however, and in spite of the washing that brought Madame in a small weekly wage, "ce n'Était pas gai, vous savez." One doesn't feel hilarious on a ration of half-a-pound of meat per week, half-a-pound of black bread per day, and potatoes and vegetables doled out by an irascible Commandant.

I wonder what we would feel like if we were obliged to go to a German officer and beg from him our food? We would starve first? But what if two small hungry children clutched at our skirts and wailed for bread? When the American Relief came in and the people were able to buy various necessaries, including bacon at one franc sixty a pound, things were a little better. To those who were too poor to buy, that gem of a Mayor gave bons (free orders).

And so the months went by. Then one day soldiers tramped about selecting two people from one family, three from another, separating mother from daughter, sister from sister, but happily this time including the whole Breda family on their list.

"You are to go away."

"Away? Ah, God, where?"

"Oh, to Germany, and then to Morocco."

The poor wretches, believing them, were filled with infinite grief and dismay. They were crowded into wagons and driven to Longuyon, herded there like cattle for sixteen days, and finally taken through Germany into Switzerland and thence into France. In Germany women wearing Red Cross badges gave them food, treating them well; at the Swiss frontier they were rigorously searched, a man who had one hundred and fifty francs in German gold being given paper money instead, and losing, if Madame Breda was correctly informed, thirty-six francs on the exchange.

At Annemasse there is a Bureau des RÉfugiÉs so splendidly organised that repatriÉs can be put into immediate touch with their relatives, no mean feat when you think of the dismemberment of Northern France.

So behold Madame Breda joyfully telegraphing to Madame Lassanne, and the latter waiting at the station with tears raining down her face, and limbs trembling so much they refused to support her!

Poor soul! The end of her calvary was not yet. Roger did not know her. And his nerves had been so much affected by what he, baby though he was, had gone through that for weeks he hid his face in his grandmother's arms and screamed when his mother tried to kiss him. Screamed, too, at sudden noises, at the approach of any stranger, or at sight of a brightly-lighted room. No wonder he howled at the uniform.

And old Madame Breda, staunch, loyal thing that she was, had been too sorely tried. The long strain, the months of haunting anxiety and dread had eaten away her strength, and soon after coming to Bar she sank quietly to rest.

She talked to me of Carignan once or twice, saying it was a vast training-camp for German recruits, mere boys (des vrais gosses), few over seventeen years of age.

Once a French aviator, hovering over the town, was obliged to descend owing to some engine trouble. He was caught, tried as a spy and condemned to death. Asking for a French priest to hear his last confession, he was told it could not be permitted. A German ministered to him instead (what a refinement of cruelty!), and remaining with him to the end, declared afterwards that he died "comme un hÉros, un ChrÉtien, et un brave."

Another aviator, similarly caught, was also shot, though both, by every rule of the game, should have been treated as prisoners of war.

"Ah, Mademoiselle, c'est un vrai calvaire qu'on souffre lÀ bas," cried Madame Breda, tears standing thick in her eyes; and thinking of other repatriÉes whom I had met and whose stories burned in the memory I knew that she spoke only the truth. For lÀ-bas is prison. It is home robbed of all its sacredness, its beauty, its joy, its privacy; it is life without freedom, and under the shadow of a great fear. Shall I tell you of those other repatriÉes? I promised to spare you atrocities, but there is a martyrdom which should call forth all our sympathy and all our indignation, and they, poor souls, have endured it.

II

Madame Ballay is a young, slight, dark-eyed woman, wife of a railway employee, into whose room I stumbled accidentally one day when looking for some one else, an "accident" which happened so frequently in Bar we took it as a matter of course. No matter how unceremonious our entry, our reception was invariably the same, and almost invariably had the same ending—that of a new name inscribed upon our books, a fresh recipient gratefully acknowledging much-needed help. Almost invariably, but not quite. Once at least the ending was not routine. A dark landing, several doors. I knock tentatively at one, a voice shouts Entrez, and I fling open the door to see—well, to see a blue uniform lying on the floor and a large individual rubbing himself vigorously with a towel. "Pardon, Madame!" he exclaimed, pausing in his towelling. He was not in the least nonplussed, but for my part, not having come to France to study the nude, I fled—fled precipitately and nearly fatally, for the stairs were as dark as the landing, and my eyes were still filled with the wonder of the vision. And though many months have gone by, I am still at a loss to know why he told me to come in!

But nothing will ever teach me discretion, and so I still knock at wrong doors, though not always with such disastrous results, and often with excellent ones, as it has enabled us to help people who would have been too shy or too proud to knock at our door and ask to be inscribed upon our books.

When the war broke out the Ballays, whose home was down Belmont way, were living in Longuyon, where Monsieur had been sent some two years before. They had very few friends, so when the mobilisation order came, when from every church steeple rang out the clear, vibrant, emotion-laden call to arms, Madame was left alone and unprotected with her baby girl. There was no time to get away. The Germans surged over the frontier with incredible swiftness, and almost before the inhabitants knew that war had begun were in the streets. Then realisation came with awful rapidity, for Hell broke loose in the town. Shots rang out, wild screams of terror, oaths, shoutings, the rush of frightened feet, of heavy, brutal pursuit. Women's sobs throbbed upon the air, the wailing of children rose shrill and high; drunken ribald song, hammering upon doors, orders sharply given! Madame cowering in her kitchen saw ... heard.... She gathered her child into her arms. Where could they fly for safety? The door was broken open, a German, drunk, maddened, rushed in and seized her. Struggling, she screamed for help, and her screams attracted the attention of some men in a room below. They dashed up, and the soldier, alarmed, perhaps ashamed, slunk away. Snatching up the child, the unfortunate mother fled to the woods. There, with many other women and children, she wandered for two days and two nights. They had no food, nothing but one tin of condensed milk, which they managed to open and with which they coloured the water they gave the children. Starving, exhausted, unable to make her way down through France, she was compelled to return to the town, three-quarters of which, including the richer residential portions, had been wantonly fired. The few people she had known were gone, her own house destroyed. She wandered about the streets for five days and nights, penniless and starving, existing on scraps picked up in the gutter, sleeping in doorways, on the steps of the church. Then she stumbled upon a Belmont woman living in a street that had escaped destruction. The woman was kind to her, taking her in and giving her lodging, but unable to give her food, as she had not enough for herself.

Madame was nearly desperate when some German soldiers asked her to do their washing, paying her a few sous, with which she was able to buy food for herself and the child. But she was often hungry, there was never enough for two. The men were reservists, oldish and quiet, doing no harm and living decently. It was the first armies that were guilty of atrocities, and in Longuyon their score runs high. They behaved like madmen. Ninety civilians were wantonly shot in the streets, among them being some women and children. A woman, Madame said, took refuge in a cellar with several children—five, I think, in all; a soldier rushed in with levelled rifle. She flung herself in front of the little ones, but with an oath he fired, flung her body on one side and then killed the children. Soldiers leaning from a window shot a man as he walked down the street. They caught some civilians, told one he was innocent, another that he had fired on them, shot some, allowed others to go free; they quarrelled among themselves, they shot one another. Women, as a rule, they did not shoot. But the women paid—paid the heaviest price that can be demanded of them; nor did the presence of her children save one mother from shame. I have heard of these soldiers clambering to the roofs and crawling like evil beasts from skylight to skylight, peering down into dark attics and roof-rooms, searching for the shuddering victims who found no way of escape. And then, their rage and fury spent, they swept on, crying, "Paris kaput, À Paris, Calais, Londres. London kaput. In a fortnight" ... and the reservists marching in took their places.

For seven months Madame Ballay was unable to leave the town. She knew nothing of what was happening in France, heard no news of her husband, did not know whether he was dead or alive.

"But I was well off," she said, "because of the washing. There were women—oh, rich women, Mademoiselle, bien ÉlevÉes—who slowly starved in the streets, homeless, houseless, living on scraps, on offal and refuse. Sometimes we spared them a little, but we had never enough for ourselves."

Seven months jealously guarding the two-year old baby from harm and then repatriation, a long, weary journey into Germany, a night in a fortress, then by slow stages into Switzerland and over the frontier to France.

What a home-coming it might have been! But the baby had sickened; underfed and improperly nourished, it grew rapidly worse, it had no strength with which to fight, and M. Ballay, hurrying down from Bar-le-Duc in response to his wife's telegram (she discovered his whereabouts through the Bureau des RÉfugiÉs), arrived just two hours after the last sod had been laid upon its tiny grave.

"She was my only comfort during all those months," the poor creature said, tears raining down her face, "and now I have lost her." When she had recovered her self-control I told her I knew of people who refused to believe stories of atrocities, and would certainly refuse to believe hers.

"It is quite true," she said simply, "I SAW it," and then she added that the reservists sometimes gave food to the starving women who were reduced to beg for bread. "When they had it they would give soup to the children, but often they had none to spare, and the women suffered terribly."

Think of it, in all the rigour of a northern winter. Think of this for delicately nurtured women. Madame shivered as she spoke of it, and it was easy to tell what had painted the dark shadows under her eyes and the weary lines—lines that should not have been there for many a long year yet—round her mouth.

III

For us the whole system—if, indeed, there is any system—of repatriation was involved in mystery. Convoys were sent back at erratic intervals, chosen at haphazard, young and old, strong and weak, just anyhow as if in blind obedience to a whim. No method appeared to govern procedure, convoys being sometimes sent off just before an offensive, sometimes during weeks of comparative calm.

Probably the key to the mystery lay in the military situation; we noticed, for instance, that many were sent back just before the offensive at Verdun. Food problems, too, may have exerted an influence, as every repatriÉe assured us that Germany was starving. In the winter of 1915-1916 so many of these unfortunate people crossed the frontier, the Society decided to equip a Sanatorium for them in the Haute-Savoie, near Annemasse. Many were tubercular, others threatened with consumption, but no sooner was the Sanatorium ready than the Germans, as might be expected, stopped the exodus, and it was not until the following winter or autumn that they began to come in numbers again. Of these, a doctor who worked among them for many weeks gave me a pathetic account. Their plight, she said, was pitiable. They wept unrestrainedly at finding themselves on French soil again; even the strongest had lost her nerve. Shaken, trembling in every limb, starting at every sound, they had all the appearance of people suffering from severe mental shock; many were so confused as to be almost unintelligible, others had lost power of decision, clearness of thought, directness of action. The old were like children. There were women who sat day after day, plunged in profound silence from which nothing could rouse them. Others chattered, chattered unceasingly all day long, babbling to any one who would listen, utterly unable to control themselves. Some were thin to emaciation, others, on the contrary, were rosy and plump. Of food they never had enough. That was the complaint of them all. The American supplies kept them from starvation. "One would have died of hunger only for that," they said, but the Germans would not allow free distribution. What they got they had to pay for, but in some Communes the Mayors were able to arrange that penniless folk should pay after the war, i. e. the Commune lent the money or paid on condition that it would be refunded later.

Coffee made chiefly from acorns, black bread, half-a-pound of meat per week (a supply which sometimes failed), these Germany provided—that is to say, allowed to be sold, and it is but just to add that though every woman declared that the Boches themselves went hungry, those I spoke to added that they never tampered with the American supplies, though one or two mentioned that inferior black flour was sometimes substituted for white of a better quality. Paraffin was rarely obtainable, and fuel scarce.

Martial law, of course, prevails. House doors must never be locked, windows must be left unbarred, there are fixed hours for going to the fields, fixed hours after which one must be indoors at night. Any soldier or officer may walk into any house at any hour he chooses. "You never know when the butt-end of a rifle will burst your door open and a soldier walk in." A man passing down the street and looking in at a window sees a woman with her children sitting down to their midday meal. It is frugal enough, but it smells good.

He realises that he is hungry, he stalks in and helps himself to what he wants. If they go without, what matter? Falsehoods of every kind are freely circulated. France has been defeated; England has betrayed her; the English have seized Calais; the English have been driven into the sea; London has fallen. With the utmost duplicity every effort is made to undermine faith in the Alliance, to persuade people that England is a traitor to their cause, hoodwinking them in order to gain her own ends.

A peasant told one of our workers that she, too, had been a prisoner, and though hungry, was not otherwise ill-treated. One day when she and the other women went to get their soup the Germans, as they ladled it out, said, "There is dessert for you to-day" (the dessert being repatriation). "Yes, you are going back to France; but there is no bread there, so we don't know how you will live. You must go through Switzerland, where there is no food either. The best thing for you to do is to throw yourselves into Lake Constance."

It is by such apish tricks as these that the lot of the unhappy people is made almost intolerable.

No letters, no newspapers, no news, only a few guarded lines at rare intervals from a prisoner in Germany— is it any wonder that the strongest nerves give way, and that hysterical women creep over the frontier to France? They are alone, they are cold and hungry, and oh, how desperately they are afraid! They dare not chat together in the street, a soldier soon stops all THAT, and at any moment some pitiful unintentional offence may send them under escort into Germany.

A woman owns a foal, chance offers her an opportunity of selling it; she does so, and is sentenced to imprisonment in Germany for a year. She has sinned against an unknown or imperfectly understood law. She has no counsel to defend her; her trial, if she is honoured with one, is the hollowest mockery.

There is living in the rue St Mihiel in Bar-le-Duc, or there was in the spring of 1917, a woman who spent six months in a German prison. Her offence? A very natural one. She had heard nothing of her husband for two years; then one day a neighbour told her she had reason to believe that he was a prisoner in Germany. A hint to that effect had come in a letter. If Madame wrote to a soldier in such and such a prison he might be able to give her news of him.

The letter was written, despatched, and opened by the German censor. Now it is a crime to try and elicit information about a prisoner even if he happens to be your husband, and even if you have heard nothing of him for two long years. Madame was separated from her children and speedily found herself in a German prison—one, too, which was not reserved for French or Belgian women, but was the common prison of a large town. Here she was classed with the "drunks and disorderlies," the riff-raff, women of no character, and classed, too, with Belgian nuns and gentlewomen, many of them of the highest rank, whose offence was not that of writing letters, but of shielding, or being accused of shielding, Belgian soldiers from the Germans who were hunting them down like rats.

Compelled to wear prison clothes, to eat the miserable prison fare, work and associate with women of the worst character, many of them had been there for years, and some were serving life-sentences. Representations had been made on their behalf, but for a long time in vain. Then as a great concession they were given permission to wear their own clothes and exercise in a yard apart, but the concession was a grudging one, and when one of the nuns dared to ask for more food she was promptly transferred back again to the main building.

When the release of prisoners is being discussed round the Peace Table, it is to be hoped that the needs of these women will not be forgotten.

IV

It happened to be my fortune to visit within a fortnight two women, natives of Conflans-Jarny, both repatriÉes and neither aware that the other was in the town. Indeed, I think they were unacquainted. Yet each told me identically the same story. One was the wife of a railway employee, the other of rather better position and a woman of much refinement of mind. Both came to Bar early in 1917, and both were profoundly moved as they told their tale.

"We did not know the Germans were coming," they said. "People thought they would pass over on the other side of the hill." And so, in spite of heavy anxiety, Conflans went about its usual affairs one brilliant August day. There were only a few troops in the town—even the military authorities do not seem to have suspected danger; but the sun had not travelled far across the cloudless sky when down from the hill a woman, half distraught, half dead with fear came flying.

"The Germans!" she gasped, and looking up Conflans saw a wide tongue of flame leaping upwards—the woman's farmhouse burning—and wave upon wave of grey-coated men surging like a wind-driven sea down every road, down the hill-side. The soldiers seized their rifles, their hasty preparations were soon made, they poured volley after volley into the oncoming mass, they fought till every cartridge was expended and their comrades lay thick on the ground. Then the Germans, who outnumbered them ten, twenty, fifty to one, clubbed their rifles and the massacre began. There was no quarter given that day. "They beat them to death, Mademoiselle, and we—ah, God! we their wives, their sisters, their mothers looked on and saw it done." Conflans lay defenceless under the pitiless sun. Some twenty-seven civilians, including the priest, were promptly butchered in the streets, and one young mother, whose baby, torn from her arms, was tossed upon a bayonet, was compelled to dig a hole in her garden, compelled to put the little lacerated body in a box, compelled to bury it and fill in the grave. Other things happened, too, of which neither woman cared to speak.

And so Conflans-Jarny passed into German hands.

As time wore on Russian prisoners were encamped there. They worked in the fields, in the mines and in the hospitals.

"Ah, les pauvres gens! Figurez-vous, Mademoiselle, in the winter when snow was on the ground, when there was a wind—oh, but a wind of ice! they used to march past our street clad only in their cotton suits. Some had not even a shirt. They were dying of cold, but they were so strong they could not die. They were blue and pinched. They shook as if they had an ague. Sometimes, but not often, we were able to give them a little hot coffee; they were so grateful, they tried to thank us.... (Tears were pouring down Madame Cholley's face as she spoke.) I worked in the hospital because I had no money with which to buy food—they gave me two sous an hour—and I used to see les pauvres Russes grubbing in the dust-bins and manure heaps looking for scraps; they would gnaw filth, rotten vegetable stumps, offal, tearing it with their teeth like dogs. Once as they marched I saw one step into a field to pick up a carrot that lay on the ground. The guard shot him dead. And those that worked in the mines—ah, God only knows what they suffered. They lived underground, one did not know, but strange stories reached us. So many disappeared, they say they were killed down there and buried in the mine."

Then silence fell on the little room, silence broken only by the sound of Madame's quiet weeping.

Presently she told me that the allowance of food was one pound of coffee a month, coffee made chiefly from acorns, four tins of condensed milk at nineteen sous a tin, for three people, and one pound of fat per head per month. Haricot beans were not rationed, and bread she must have had, too, but I omitted to make a note of the amount. There was no paraffin, so in the winter she tried to make candles out of thread and oil, but the latter was dear and scarce. Meat "had not been seen in the commune for a year."

"Oh yes, the Germans are starving."

This was the text from which every repatriÉ tried to draw comfort, and it may be inferred that there was shortage in the villages. Once I even heard of shortage in a hospital, my informant being a young man, manager of a big branch store in the Northern Meuse, who had been married just three months before war was declared. He was wounded in August 1914 and taken to Germany, where one leg was amputated, the other, also badly injured, being operated on at least twice. Yet in December 1916 it was not healed. He was well treated on the whole, he told me, but his food was wretched. Coffee and bread in the morning, thin soup and vegetables at midday, coffee and bread at night.

"When we complained the orderlies said we got exactly the same food as they did," and he, too, added the unfailing, "Germany is starving."

A pathetic little picture he and his wife made in their shabby room, she a young, pretty, capable thing who nursed him assiduously, he helpless on his chaise-longue with yet another operation hanging over him. The wound was suppurating, it was feared some shrapnel still remained in the leg. Pension? He had none, not even the allocation. He had applied, of course, but was told he must wait till after the war. He had not even got the Medaille Militaire or the Croix de Guerre, though he said it was customary in France to give either one or the other to mutilated and blinded men.

There must be many sad home-comings for these repatriÉs. So many get back to find that those they loved have been killed or have died while they were away, so many return to find Death wrapping his wings closely about the makeshift home that awaits them.

"They sent me to Troyes because my husband was working on the railway there, but for a whole day I could get no news of him. Then they said he was at ChÂlons in the hospital. I hurried there—he died two hours after my arrival in my arms."

How often one hears such stories. And yet one day the world may hear a still more tragic one, the day when the curtain of silence and darkness that has fallen over the kidnapped thousands of Lille and Belgium is lifted, and we know the truth of them at last.