When we had seen her last, just before the war, she could have stood for the very type and symbol of the intelligent, modern woman; an energetic leader for good in her native town (a bustling industrial center in the north of France); unsentimental, beneficent; looking at life with clear, brightly observant, disillusioned eyes; rather quick to laugh at old-fashioned narrowness; a little inclined to scoff at too fervently expressed enthusiasms, such as patriotism; very broad in her sympathies, very catholic in her tastes, tolerant as to the beliefs of others, radical as to her own, above all, a thoroughgoing internationalist; physically in the prime of her life, with a splendid, bold vigor in all her movements.

Now, after less than three years of separation, she sat before us, white-haired, gaunt, shabby, her thin face of a curious grayish brown which none of us had ever seen before, her thin hands tightly clasped, her eyes burning and dry—the only dry eyes in the room as she talked.

Much of what she told us I may not repeat, for she said, with a quick gesture of terror, dreadful to see in one who for forty years had faced life so indomitably: "No, no, don't publish what I say—or at least be very careful; choose only those things that can't hurt the people who are up there, still in 'their' power."

"Why not publish what you say?" I asked her, rather challengingly. "I don't think people in general understand half enough what the life of the invaded provinces is. One never sees any really detailed descriptions of it."

She answered bitterly, "Doesn't the reason for that silence occur to you?"

"No, it doesn't. I never have understood why so little is given to the public about the sufferings of the invaded populations."

She looked at me strangely, the half-exasperated, half-patient look one gives to a child who asks a foolish, ignorant question, and explained wearily: "If those who escape tell what they have seen up there, those who are left suffer even worse torments. 'They' have spies everywhere, you know; no, that's not melodramatic nonsense, as I would have thought it three years ago, it's a literal fact. Very probably that little messenger-boy who brought the letter in here a moment ago is one. Very probably your baker is one. Anywhere in the world whatever is printed about what 'they' do to our people in their power is instantly read by some German eyes, and is instantly sent to German headquarters in the invaded regions. And it's the same with our poor, little, persistent attempts to express a little bit of what we feel for France. For instance, one of my friends who escaped at the risk of her life told about how we tried in our orphan asylum to keep the children mindful of France, how after closing hours, when the doors were shut, we took out the French flag from its hiding-place and told the children about France and whatever news of the war we had managed to hear. That article appeared, a half-column, in an obscure provincial newspaper with no indication as to which town was meant. In less than two weeks, from German headquarters in Brussels, went out a sweeping order to search to the last corner of the cellar every orphan asylum in the invaded regions. It was two o'clock in the morning when the searching squad in our town knocked at the doors. The flag was found, and our little collection of patriotic French recitations; and before dawn the superintendent, a splendid woman of fifty-seven, the salt of the earth, had disappeared. She was sent to a prison camp in Germany. Three months later we heard she was dead. Do you understand now why you must not repeat most of what I tell you, must give no clue as to how we hide our letters, how we get news from France; above all, say nothing that could give any idea of who I am? 'They' would do such dreadful things to Marguerite and little Julien and old Uncle Henri if 'they' knew that I have talked of the life there, of what 'they' have done to our people."

No, until the world turns over and we have awakened from the hideous nightmare no one may speak aloud of certain matters up there in Belgium and in the invaded provinces of France. But there are some things she told us which I may pass on to you, and I think you ought to know them. I think we all ought to know more than we do of what life is to the people who are awaiting deliverance at our hands. There are certain portions of her narration, certain detached pictures, brief dialogues and scenes, which may be set down in her own words. Your imagination must fill in the gaps.

"The first months were the worst—and the best. The worst because we could not believe at first that war was there, the stupid, imbecile anachronism we had thought buried with astrology and feudalism. For me it was like an unimaginably huge roller advancing slowly, heavily, steadily, to crush out our lives. During the day, as I worked with the wounded, I threw all my will power into the effort to disbelieve in that inexorable advance. I said to myself: 'No, it's not possible! They can't have invaded Belgium after their promises! Modern peoples don't do that sort of thing. No, it's not possible that Louvain is burned! Wild rumors are always afloat in such times. I must keep my head and not be credulous. The Germans are a highly civilized people who would not dream of such infamies as those they are being accused of.' All that I said to myself, naÏvely, by day. At night, every hour, every half-hour, I started up from sleep, drenched in cold sweat, dreaming that the crushing roller was about to pass over us. Then it came, it passed, it crushed.

"But there were other, better things about those first months. For one thing, we had hope still. We hoped constantly for deliverance. Every morning I said to the girl who brought the milk, 'Are they here yet?' 'They' meant the French troops coming to deliver us. Yes, at first we expected them from one day to the next. Then from one week to the next, then from one month to the next. Finally, now, we have no strength left for anything but silent endurance. Besides that hope, which kept us alive those first months, we were not yet in that windowless prison which 'they' have succeeded in making our own country to us. We had news of France and of the outside world through the French and English prisoners. They were brought into our improvised hospital to have their wounds dressed before they were put on the train to be sent forward to their German prisons. As we cared for them we could get news of the battles; sometimes we heard through them of the men of our families; always they were a link with the world outside. We did not know what a priceless boon that was.

"But even this slight contact was soon forbidden us. We showed too openly the comfort it brought us. Free people, as we had always been, we were not then trained, as tyranny since has trained us, to the wretched arts of secrecy. We did too much for those prisoners. The people in the streets crowded about them too eagerly, showed them too many kindnesses. 'They' decided that our one link with the outside world must be broken. Fewer and fewer prisoners were sent; finally we saw none—for weeks and weeks none at all. We knew nothing but what 'they' told us, saw no other world, were hypnotized almost into believing that no other world existed.

"The last ones who came through—that is one of my memories. We never knew by what chance they were sent through our town. One day we looked, and there in our street were half a dozen French soldiers, with bloody heads and arms, limping along between Boche guards on their way to the hospital. All our people rose like a great wave and swept towards them. The guards reversed their rifles and began clubbing with their butt ends—clubbing the old women who tried to toss food to the prisoners, clubbing the little children who stretched out handfuls of chocolate, clubbing the white-haired men who thrust cigarettes into the pockets of the torn, stained French uniforms.

"We were beginning to practise some of the humiliating arts of a captive people then; we remembered that shouting in the streets is not allowed, that no French voice must be heard in that French town, and in all that straining, pressing, yearning crowd there was not a sound, not even a murmur of joy, when the Boche guards occasionally relaxed their vigilance for a moment and some of our presents reached the prisoners.

"Then they came to the hospital—it was a great mansion before the war—and went limping painfully through the broad doors and up the long stone staircase. Outside the doors stood the military car which was to take them to the station—stood the Boche guards—and the crowd, silent, motionless, waiting for the moment when those soldiers who stood for France should reappear. All demonstrations of feeling were forbidden by the invaders, yes, but there was no demonstration—only a great silent crowd waiting. The Boche guards looked about them uneasily, but there was no violation of any order to report. Every one waited silently. Twilight fell, darkness fell, the crowd grew larger and larger, filled the street, but gave no further sign of life. Not one of 'their' rules was broken, but as far as we could see there were upturned faces, white in the dusk. An hour passed, two hours passed, and then the moment was there. The lights flared up in the great hall of the hospital—all the lights at once, as if to do justice to a grand fÊte, an occasion of supreme honor. At the top of the stairway, very pale in that great light, with bandaged heads and arms, appeared those soldiers who stood for France.

"From all that silent, rigidly self-controlled crowd went up a sigh like a great stir of the ocean. The prisoners came limping down the stairway. France was passing there before our eyes, perhaps for the last time. A thousand handkerchiefs fluttered as silent salute to France, a thousand heads were bared to her. The weary soldiers stood very erect and returned a silent military salute. In their prison car they passed slowly along between the dense ranks of their fellow-countrymen, looking deeply, as though they too thought it might be for the last time, into those French eyes. Then they were gone. We had not broken one of 'their' rules—not one. But 'they' never allowed another French soldier to pass through our town.

"Once after that we had a passing glimpse of English soldiers, a group of wretchedly ill men, with their wounds uncared for, stumbling along to the station. They were not taken to the hospital to be cared for; 'they' are always much harder on the English prisoners than on any others. Those were the days early in the war, when there were still things to buy in the shops, when we still had money to spend. How we all rushed to buy good chocolate, cigarettes! How desperately we tried to throw them to the prisoners! But there was no relaxation, that time, of the guard. Not once did we succeed. There was a double line of guards that day, and they held us far, far at a distance with their rifle butts. It was horrible—the silence of the crowd, rigorously observing the rule against demonstrations of any sort; not a sound except the thud of rifle butts on human flesh. Old M. B—— had his arm broken that day.

"With my hands full of cigarettes and chocolate, I followed them all the way to the station, my heart burning with pity for the poor men who looked at us with such sick, tired, despairing, hungry eyes. We threw them what we dared. Nothing reached them—nothing. At the station they waited, fainting with fatigue, with loss of blood, with hunger, with thirst, ringed around with soldiers, bayonets fixed. There we stood, we women and children and old men, our hands full of food and comforts—no, you never know how sickeningly your heart can throb and still go on beating. I had never thought I could hate as I did in that hour, a helpless spectator of that unnecessary cruelty. Since then I have had many lessons in how deeply even a modern woman can be forced to hate.

"The train came, the wounded men were driven aboard their cattle car. The train disappeared. They were gone. I walked home smiling—we never let 'them' see how 'their' tortures make us suffer. Later Julien, my little Julien—he was twelve then—found me still weeping furiously. He bent over me, his little body all tense and fierce. 'Don't cry so, auntie! Don't cry so! It won't last. It will soon be over.'

"That was two years ago.

"None of us Frenchwomen were allowed to stay long in hospital work. For one reason or another, we were all forbidden to go on caring for the wounded. I had the honor of being the very first to be put out of the door.

"One of the officers in charge said to me one day, some four or five months after the beginning, 'Ah, madame, we shall soon be good friends now.'

"The idea made me fall a step backward. 'What, monsieur? What do you mean?'

"'Yes, France and Germany will soon be friends. I know with absolute certainty that Germany has offered a third of Belgium to France and that France is more than satisfied to accept and end the war.'

"That is always one of the horrors up there. 'They' can tell you any news they please as 'absolute certainties.' Since we know nothing of what is going on except what they choose to tell us, we have no proofs to fling back at them; no proofs but moral ones, and 'they' find moral proofs ridiculous, of course.

"I stiffened and said, 'No, monsieur. No; France will never do that, never! You cannot understand why France will never do it, nor why I am sure that she never will. But it is true.'

"He laughed a little, as you would laugh at a child's impractical notions, and said: 'Oh, but France has done it, madame! You will see the announcement in a few days.'

"That cool assumption, my helplessness to refute him with facts, made me for an instant beside myself. I said, very hotly: 'Monsieur, if France ever does that, I will renounce my French blood. I will make myself an American.' He was still smiling indulgently at my heat. 'Oh, why, madame? Why?'

"'Because if France should do that, it would be as much a disgrace for an honest person to be French as now to be German.'

"He all but struck me with his whip.

"And five minutes later, still in my nurse's uniform, I was standing in the street, with the door of the hospital closed behind me. I can't say I was particularly regretful, either."

She looked down at her skirt of threadbare, coarse black stuff. "Do you know where I got this skirt? After a year of war I had nothing, nothing left in my wardrobe. We gave away to the poorer ones every garment we could possibly spare. And there was nothing, nothing left in any of the shops to buy. And I had no money to buy if there had been. How was I going to get an overcoat for Julien and a skirt for myself? The scrubwoman in Uncle Henri's office noticed the patches and darns on my last skirt, and said the American Committee had some clothes to distribute. I went there—yes, I—holding out my hand like any beggar. Bless Americans! There is no shame in being helped by them! They gave me there an overcoat that I made over for Julien and enough of this cloth for a skirt. It is the only one I have had for two years. Do you know what I saw all the time I sat sewing on that charity garment, come from so far? Across the street from our house is the great warehouse where the cloth from the——woolen mills was stored. All day long German automobile trucks stood in front of that building, while from the windows German soldiers threw down bale after bale of cloth. As soon as a truck was full it would start forward on its journey to the station, where the cloth was loaded on trains and sent to Germany. An empty one immediately took its place. Heavy woolens, light woolens, blankets, cashmeres, flannels, serges, twill, black, brown, blue, white, figured—hundreds and hundreds of bales. I never knew there were so many kinds of woolen cloth. I never had seen so much all together in my life as I saw tossed down from the windows of that four-story building during those three days. For it took three days of incessant work to steal all that cloth—three long days—just the time it took me to prepare those two charity garments sent from America."

She held up a thick, square, brownish cracker, and said: "Look well at that. You have never seen anything more important to human lives. That is the free American biscuit. It is distributed at ten every morning to every school-child, to every teacher, in the region under German rule. None have had enough to eat. There are no biscuits distributed on Sundays and vacation days. Those are hard days for the children to live through. They beg desperately to go to school, even when they are sick, so they may not miss their biscuit. It is by far the best thing they have to eat all day, the most palatable, the only complete food. The change in the school-children since they have had this added to their diet—it is miraculous! The experts say the biscuits are a carefully compounded product of many grains, which make it a complete aliment. We know better than that. It is manna from heaven.

"And here," she held up a red woolen knitted cap, such as American school-children wear in small towns during the winter. "Somehow the American Committees managed so that there was such a cap for every one of us. They have become the national head-dress. Hundreds and hundreds of them—and every one knit in America and sent to us. Bless America!

"Our lights? There was soon, of course, no kerosene for us, no fats to make candles. And you know the long, long, dark winters in the north of France? Do you know what we did, praying that the American Committee would forgive us and realize that blackness is too dreadful to people whose nerves are almost worn through? We set aside a part of the lard and bacon the Committee provided for us; we melted it, put home-made cotton wicks in it, and—there we had a light, a little glimmering taper, but enough to save our reason in the long evenings. Bless America!

"The schools have kept on, you know; every teacher at her post, not a day missed (even when the town was bombarded). Every year the examinations have been set—they use old examination papers sent from Paris before the war—and diplomas have been given. And besides that, at home we have tried our best to keep the life of our children what the life of French children ought to be. I remember last year, during the summer, Aunt Louise taught a group of children in our part of the town to sing the 'Marseillaise.' The studio of my cousin Jean is at the back of the house and high up, so that she thought the children's voices could not be heard from the street. The Mayor heard of what she was doing, and sent word that he would like to hear them sing. The news spread around rapidly. When he arrived with the city council, coming in one by one, as though merely to make a call, they found the big studio full to overflowing with their fellow-citizens—the old men and women who are all the fellow-citizens left there. There must have been two or three hundred of them, the most representative people of the town, all in black, all so silent, so old and sad. The children were quite abashed by such an audience, and filed up on the little platform shyly—our poor, thin, shabby, white-faced children, fifty or sixty of them.

"There was a pause, the children half afraid to begin, the rest of us thinking uneasily that we were running a great risk. Suppose the children's voices should be heard in the street, after all. Suppose the German police should enter and find us assembled thus. It would mean horrors and miseries for every family represented. The Mayor stood near the children to give them the signal to begin—and dared not. We were silent, our hearts beating fast.

"Then all at once the littlest ones began in their high, sweet treble those words that mean France, that mean liberty, that mean life itself to us:

"'Allons, enfants de la Patrie!' they sang, tilting their heads back like little birds; and all the other children followed:

"'Against us floats the red flag of tyranny!'

"We were on our feet in an instant. It was the first time any of us had heard it sung since—since our men marched away.

"I began to tremble all over, so that I could hardly stand. Every one there stared up at the children; every one's face was deadly white to his lips.

"The children sang on—sang the chorus, sang the second stanza.

"When they began the third, 'Sacred love of our fatherland, sustain our avenging arms!' the Mayor's old face grew livid. He whirled about to the audience, his white hair like a lion's mane, and with a gesture swept us all into the song.

"'Liberty, our adored liberty, fight for thy defenders!' There were three hundred voices shouting it out, the tears streaming down our cheeks. If a regiment of German guards had marched into the room, we would not have turned our heads. Nothing could have stopped us then. We were only a crowd of old men and defenseless women and children, but we were all that was left of France in our French town.

"Letters? You know 'their' rule is that none are allowed, that we may neither write nor receive news from our dear ones. But that rule, like all their rules, is broken as often as we can. There are numbers of secret letter-carriers, who risk their lives to bring and take news. But it is horribly risky. If a letter is found on you, you are liable to a crushing fine, or, worse yet, to imprisonment, and, if you have children or old people dependent on you, you dare not risk leaving them. You might as well cut their throats at once and spare them the long suffering. Even if the letter is not found on you, there is risk if you try to send or receive one. They are not, of course, addressed, so that if the letter-carrier is discovered all those to whom he is bringing mail may not be incriminated. But if he is caught 'they' always threaten him with atrocious punishments which will be remitted if he will disclose the names of those who have employed him. Generally the poor letter-carriers are loyal even to death, suffering everything rather than betray their trust. But some of them are only young boys, physically undermined by hardship and insufficient food, like all our people, and they have not the physical strength to hold out against days of starvation, or floggings, or exposure—naked—to intense cold. They give way, reveal the names of the people who are receiving letters—and then there are a dozen more homes desolate, a dozen more mothers imprisoned, a dozen more groups of children left.

"And yet we all used to get letters before the rules became so terribly strict as at present. I have had six in the three years—just six. They were from my mother—I could not live without knowing whether my old maman was alive or not. Curious, isn't it, to think that I would have been imprisoned at hard labor if any one had known that I had received a letter from my old mother?

"Of course you must never carry them on you, if out of doors, for there is always a chance that you may be searched. On the trolley line between our town and the suburb, ——, which I used to take once a week to go to see Pauline when she was so ill, it often happened. The car would stop at a sudden cry of 'Halte!' and soldiers with bayonets would herd us into a nearby house. Women—German women, brought from Germany especially for such work—were waiting for us women passengers. We were forced to undress entirely, not a garment left on our poor humiliated old bodies, and everything was searched, our purses opened, our shoes examined, our stockings turned inside out. If anything which seemed remotely incriminating was found—an old clipping from a French newspaper, a poem which might be considered patriotic—a scrap of a letter, we were taken away to prison; if not, we were allowed to dress and go on our way."

We gazed at her, pale with incredulity. It was as though Americans had heard that such treatment had been accorded Jane Addams or Margaret Deland. "Were you ever searched in that way?" we faltered.

She had an instant of burning impatience with our ignorance. "Good Heavens, yes; many and many times! How absolutely little idea you have of what is going on up there under their rule! That was nothing compared to many, many things they do—their domiciliary visits, for instance. At any hour of the day or night a squad of soldiers knock at your door suddenly, with no warning. They search your house from top to bottom, often spending three hours over the undertaking. They look into every drawer, take down all the clothes from the hooks in the closets, look under the carpets, behind the bookcases, shake out all the soiled clothes in the laundry bag, pull out everything from under the kitchen sink, read every scrap of paper in your drawer and in your waste-paper basket—it's incredible. You watch them, with perfect stupefaction at the energy and ingenuity they put into their shameful business. And what they find as 'evidence' against you! It is as stupefying. They always read every page of the children's school copy-books, for instance, and if they find a 'composition' on patriotism, even expressed in the most general terms, they tear out those pages and take them away to be filed as 'evidence.'

"You must know that they can and do often enter for these searching visits at night when every one is in bed; perhaps you can guess how tensely the mothers of young girls endeavor not to offend against the least of 'their' innumerable rules, lest they be sent away into exile and leave their children defenseless. But it is almost impossible to avoid offending against some rule or other. Anything serves as ground for accusation—a liberal book, a harmless pamphlet found in the bookcase, the possession of a copper object forgotten after the summons to give up all copper has gone out, a piece of red, white, and blue ribbon, a copy of the 'Marseillaise,' a book of patriotic poems; but, above all, the possession of anything that serves to point to communication, ever so remote, with the outside world. That is the supreme crime in their eyes. A page of a French or English newspaper is as dangerous to have in the house as a stick of dynamite.

"Many men, women, and young girls are now in a German prison somewhere for the crime of having circulated little pamphlets intended to keep up the courage of the inhabitants. These little sheets no longer exist, but what exists in spite of all these repressive measures is the unshaken faith in our future, the most utter confidence that the Allies will rescue us out of the hand of our enemies."

What she told us about the deportations I may not repeat for fear of bringing down worse horrors on the heads of those she left behind. You may be thankful that you have not to read that story.

Only two incidents am I permitted to transcribe for you—two incidents which, perhaps, sum up the whole vast and unimaginable tragedy.

"We have tried, you know, to keep the children as busy as possible with their studies, so that they would not have leisure to brood over what they see and hear every day. I've had little Marguerite go on with her English lessons steadily and read as much English as possible. One of the books her teacher gave her was 'Uncle Tom's Cabin.' She looked up from it one day, with a pale face, and said, in a sad, wondering voice: 'Why, auntie, this might have been written about us, mightn't it? It tells about things that happen to us all the time—that we have seen. The men who are flogged and starved and killed, the mothers trying in vain to follow their daughters into captivity, the young girls dragged out of their fathers' arms—it's all just like what the Germans do to us, isn't it?'"

And the other is that last hour at the railway station, when she stood beside the railway tracks, with her little Julien beside her (he was fourteen then), and told him in a fierce, choked voice, "Look, Julien! Look, remember! Never forget what you are seeing to-day," as they watched the soldiers drive into the cattle cars the old men, women, and adolescents torn from their homes in such haste that they had no change of clothing, no food, often not even their hats and wraps. "We stood there, those who were not 'taken,' the great helpless crowd of women and children, agonizing in that dreadful silence which is the last refuge of our poor battered human dignity up there. I was suffocating, literally unable to breathe. You do not know what hate and pity and horror you can feel and still live!

"The wheels of the train began grindingly to turn, the train advanced—it could not have been more unendurable to us if it had gone over our own bodies.

"And then some miraculous wind of high-hearted courage swept through that train-load of weak, doomed, and defenseless human beings. From every crevice, from every crack, waved a hand, fluttered a handkerchief, and from the train with one voice, the 'Marseillaise' went up in an indomitable shout.

"The sound of the singing and the sound of the train died away in the distance.

"We did not weep—no, we have never shown them how they can torture us. Not a tear was shed.

"But the next day our insane asylum at L—— was filled to overflowing with new cases of madness."