CHAPTER XXII
AT HOME IN THE WHIRLWIND

AFTER the initial days of mobilization, the German advance, the coming of the refugees, and the aeroplane raids, Paris became again astonishingly normal. We got used to the war quickly. A calamity is like death. It comes. You cannot change it. You must accept it and go on living. We were in the midst of the whirlwind. We had our ups and downs. There were periods of unreasonable hope, when we thought the war was going to end by the collapse of the Germans. And there were periods of equally unreasoning depression when gloom spread like a plague. Who will ever forget the hope that came with the Spring of 1915? Mysterious rumors spread of German demoralization and of the irresistible fighting machine the British were building up. Our armies were only waiting for the rainy weather to finish. Then the forward march would commence. But after a few unsuccessful attempts to break through, French and British settled down to the life of the trenches. Fortunately the Germans were equally immobilized. But during the summer, instead of our advance on the western front, we had to read about the German advance in Poland. The censorship worked overtime. CommuniquÉs were masterpieces of clever dissimulation. News was withheld in the hope of a sudden reversal of the fortune of arms. In the end we had to be told that Warsaw was in the hands of the Central Empires and that les ImpÉriaux were closing in on Brest-Litovsk. In the summer of 1915, at the very beginning of the Italian intervention, the French lost faith in the new ally. Italy, untouched so far by the war and with the power of making an offensive in her own hands, could not even prevent Austria from lending powerful aid in the great German offensive against Russia! Ink and breath were spent in extolling the union of the Latin races: but the mass of the French people—from that time on—looked no more for aid to Italy.

The first snow in the Luxembourg
The first snow in the Luxembourg

We deferred hope until the spring of 1916. Surely the British would now be ready to cooperate with the French in the final offensive of the war! But the Germans, feeling certain that they had disposed of the Russians, struck first. The last days of February, 1916, were (if one except possibly the spring months of 1918) the darkest days of the war. Although the attacks against Verdun failed, the weather in Paris combined with sickening anxiety to make us feel that it was nip-and-tuck. As a contrast, the summer months of the Battle of the Somme renewed our courage. And just as we were reluctantly realizing that this onslaught of ours was as indecisive as the earlier German offensive against Verdun, to which it was the reply, the intervention of Rumania came to offset the admitted failure of the Dardanelles and Mesopotamian campaigns. At last, the war was to be decided in the Balkans! Before the third winter set in, however, we saw Rumania humbled by Mackensen and the Salonica army as motionless as the armies on the western front, even though Venizelos had at last succeeded in ranging Greece on our side. The German machine was not crumbling before a combination of superior numbers and superior equipment, and managed to face its enemies on all sides.

So much for what the newspapers said during those thirty months and for what we thought about the pÉripÉties of the war. After each disappointment we looked for new reasons to hope. We readjusted ourselves to living in the midst of uncertainties, bereavements that would have broken our hearts had they come to us "by the hand of God," and increasing social and economic difficulties. France was saved because the French people never faltered in their belief that dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. France was saved because Paris led a normal life in the midst of the whirlwind. The Turks have a proverb that a fish begins to corrupt at the head. If the Parisians had become demoralized, if they had given up the struggle to live normally and tranquilly, France would have been lost.

Initial reactions and early symptoms of war fever passed quickly. We soon opened up our pianos, put on our phonograph records, and took to singing again. We did not wear mourning. We insisted upon having our theatres and music-halls. We celebrated Christmas. We stopped making last year's suits do and refusing to buy finery. For the poilus, coming home to find their women folks shabby, said it was gayer at the front. We allowed all the German composers except Wagner to re-appear on our programmes. Some stupidities, such as banishing the German language from schools and burning German books, we were never guilty of.

I remember reading with amusement and amazement an article in an American newspaper, written by someone who "did" war-stricken France in thirty days, in which this statement was made: "There are millions in France who will never smile again." Upon this absurd and false hypothesis the article was built. It was easy to be sure that the writer knew nothing whatever about France in war-time or about psychology, for that matter. Whoever has had any experience of horrors or who has lived through a great crisis knows that if you do not laugh you will go crazy. Normal human beings must have relaxation and recreation. They must have—or create—normal conditions in abnormal surroundings. You must go on living. You must have strength to meet burdens. So you laugh and sing and dance. You entertain people and are entertained. You go to the theatre. You take exercise. You enjoy your meals. A long face is either a pose or a sign of mental derangement. In the spring of 1916 I checked up a dozen of my women friends, all of whom had husbands or sons—or both—in the war. More than half were widows or had sons killed. The husbands of two were prisoners in German camps. But all of them were planning to spend the summer in their country-homes or at the shore, just as they had done before the war. Is not this the secret of our ability to hold on during the "last quarter of an hour" and to continue to hope for victory until we had obtained it?

At the beginning of the second winter, in November, 1915, I sent my three children to live for a few weeks in my studio, which I had fixed up especially for them. They had a piano and a phonograph and books and toys. They moved over with their nurse on a Sunday afternoon, and thought it was a great lark. The next day their father went to see them and told them about the arrival of a baby sister.

Tuesday morning the children came to see us. Never shall I forget their joy. Christine said immediately, "Hello, Hope, let me fix your feet. Mama, could I tuck her blanket in? Hope's feet are cold. I want to hold her soon." A little mother, she is. Lloyd, sensitive and reserved, stood quietly looking. He patted my face and tried to speak. But his mouth was turning down at the corners for just a second, and I had to save the day by asking him a cheerful question. Mimi clapped her hands and danced and said, "I like you, mama, dat's a fine baby." When Herbert went over to the consulate to register the baby, he took Christine with him. She heard him say to the Consul-General, Mr. Thackara, that his French friends were teasing him about the large number of marriage dots he will have to provide. Christine saw in this a reflection on girl babies. With a volley of French reproof, which delighted the whole consular office, she went for him tooth and nail.

Isn't it a joke on me to have so many daughters? I have always thought myself a good pal, understanding men much better than women. Miss Mary Cassatt came in. Her comment was subtle. She said simply to Herbert that she was glad of his assured increase of interest in women's suffrage. Surprised, Herbert was betrayed into asking why. "Don't you realize," exclaimed Miss Cassatt, "that you must begin now to interest yourself in the future of your girls?" Although the coming of Hope increases the problems of feminine psychology I shall have to deal with later on, I am glad the war baby was a girl. My first thought, when they told me, was that she should not have to carry a gun.

This brings me to her name. 1915 was drawing to a close with so many darkening shadows—but shadows that did not lessen our faith in the outcome of the war—that I thought the name imposed upon us by circumstances. I called her Hope Delarue. Dear old PÈre Delarue is one of the best known research scholars in the Jesuit Order. Our friendship, founded back in Constantinople days, has deepened during the war. When Herbert went off on his many trips, anyone of which might have proved the last, he left me in the care of PÈre Delarue. The dear old man had been coming to us from time to time with the news of another loss in his family. His brother, a general in the French army, was killed. His nephews had fallen. I thought it would comfort him to feel that there was a child in the world to bear his name. Before going to Suez, Herbert gave me some flat silver marked H.D.G. It flashed into his brain the day after the baby was born that the little thing had its mother's initials!

I was up for the first time on Christmas Eve. We had a large party as usual, with a tree for the children trimmed by the grown-ups. In spite of the rain we tried to make our Christmas Day a joyful one. There was the newborn baby to celebrate. At the end of the afternoon, Herbert gave us a hurried kiss all around, and went out in the rain to catch the train for Marseilles. He sailed the next day on the AndrÉ Lebon for Port-Said. His was the only one of the three passenger boats that week to escape the submarines. The P. and O. Persia was sunk off Crete and the Japanese mail went down seventy miles from the Canal.

I did not see my husband for several months, and then he joined us in Nice for a few days before going to Verdun. It was a joyful reunion. Herbert admired his children and asked what they had done during his absence. But he forgot all about poor little Hope, who was taking her nap. Two hours after his arrival, a lusty cry brought back to his mind the fact that the number of his children was four.

Memories of these days are not painful, because we did not allow ourselves to be dominated by pain while they were being lived. The whirlwind was not of our making, nor had we gone deliberately into the midst of it. But, finding ourselves there, we made the best of it. Memories are precious. I would not have missed the Paris vistas of those years. It is a blessed thing to have in one's mind the long lines of adverse circumstances and difficulties and anxieties on either side if at the end is hope realized. And I have my own tangible Hope, a child whose merry, sunny nature is living proof of how Paris was at home in the whirlwind.

CHAPTER XXIII
SAUVONS LES BÉBÉS

"M-M-M-MADAME m-m-must not be f-f-frightened; he said so!"

My Bretonne cook came to me pale and stammering.

"What is the trouble, Rosali?"

"P-p-policeman at the d-d-door s-s-says he m-m-must see you!"

A spick and span agent came into my drawing-room. He took the cigarette offered him, and explained the reason for his visit.

"My chief sent me around to ask madame to help. It is a baby case. We came here because the mother said she got a layette at madame's studio. Her name is Mlle. A——; do you remember her case? If madame could come—"

In a few minutes we were walking up the Rue Delambre to the police station of the Fourteenth Arrondissement. Mlle. A—— had come to me for baby clothes before she went to the hospital. The child's father was at the front. When the mother appealed to him to recognize the child, with the desperate way of a man who is in the trenches facing death, he replied,

"What's the use! How do I know that the child is mine?"

Before going to the hospital the girl begged me to think of something to do. When the baby was born we had him photographed and a copy sent to his father, we wrote, "The baby looks like you as you can see from this photograph. If you tear up the card or throw it away, the next shell will kill you."

At the police station, in the stuffy little room where the plain clothes men sit close to the door leading to the office of the Monsieur le Commissaire, I found Mlle. A—— and her baby.

"O Madame," she cried, "Jean got our card. He was sitting in a little circle with some comrades eating dinner. The mail arrived. His name was called. He rose and walked over to the vaguemestre and, oh, Madame, just then the shell came. It exploded where Jean had been eating his dinner, and all his comrades were killed. He says the baby, pauvre chou, looks like him and saved his life."

The agent came with papers. "Will madame sign here?" Jean was recognizing little Pierrot and was applying for permission to marry the baby's mother.

An old woman sitting nearby held in her hands a livret de mariage. "Quel beau bÉbÉ!" she exclaimed. "Is it a girl?"

"No, madame, a boy," replied mademoiselle, smoothing the baby's swaddling blanket and pinning it tighter around Pierrot's little tummy.

"That's it, that's it," cried the old woman. "I came here to get a certificate myself. My daughter had a baby born this morning. It's a boy, too. It was like that in Soixante-Dix. Nearly all the babies born in war time are boys. O la, la, madame, what a baby! His father is fighting so he won't have to carry a gun." Here she pulled out a handkerchief.

The poor help the poor, when it comes to moral, as in everything else. I was sitting in my studio interviewing women who came for baby clothes. A white-faced girl sat down in the chair at the opposite side of the table.

"What can I do for you?" said I.

"A little white dress—" she sobbed. "Could you give me a little white dress?"

"Certainly I'll give it to you, and lots of other things too."

"I don't need anything else," she said softly, "My baby died this morning. They did everything at the hospital to save her. She was born three weeks ago and they let me stay on. They wrapped her in a little piece of sheeting. I can't stand it to bury her like that!" She put her head down on the table and wept.

"Shall I give madame a little white dress?"

The twenty other mothers sitting there answered "Yes, give it to her."

To some the tears had come. Others, dry-eyed, clutched their babies.

"And flowers?" said one.

"Yes, she must have money for flowers." I hardly knew what to say to the girl, but soon the other mothers were talking to her. They were the best comforters.

How did amateur relief workers get the strength and energy to face the awfulness of the situation? What we did was not "wonderful." Relief work was a debt we owed to life. Fatigue could never be thought of. When my apartment is in a mess from front door to kitchen, straightening looks hopeless. It used to be discouraging until I pretended I had blinders on my eyes and began with the nursery table. I took off everything that didn't belong there and replaced the things that should be there. I finished the table to the last detail before making the bed. I tried to work in a leisurely frame of mind without too many glances at the clock. After a bit one whole room was tidied. Kiddies were requested not to go in there "till Mama says so." Then I tackled the next room, and so on—and so on. In relief work, too, you must begin to work on one atom of the problem. You must put blinders on your eyes to shut out all the other atoms. It is fatal to let your imagination run away with you, fatal to envisage the accumulated woe.

Once in the Rue Servandoni days an Englishman came to ask Herbert to bury his baby. He told me the story of how the baby died, and I cried all night thinking of the mother. Herbert remonstrated with me for trying to bear the whole of another's grief. Christ did that and it broke His heart. His broken heart could save humanity; but as for little me I could do nobody any good by breaking my heart over them. Relief work must be constructive with respect to the patient and instructive with respect to the worker. You have to exercise self-control of emotion and help yourself to poise by quickly concentrating your mind on what details of the problem you are fitted to cope with. You learn after a while that your enthusiasm and sympathy will not do it all. You accept the fact that you are not indispensable. You realize that you can put a person on his feet but that to carry him is beyond you. You are not the only influence for good that is touching his life. This attitude keeps you both happy and humble. And so you develop confidence in life and confidence in time. In relief work both life and time are good allies.

My work started in a modest way in my studio in September, 1914. I wanted to help mothers of newborn babies, and so I called my oeuvre SAUVONS LES BÉBÉS. I wrote to friends for money and layettes, and depended—as all American women in France did—upon the personal correspondence with individuals and organizations in America to maintain and develop the work started. I had no committee, and, during the three years I worked for the babies, only one associate. The French wife of an American artist joined me in 1915. From Princeton, Germantown, Philadelphia, Pittsburg, New York, Brooklyn and Boston people I knew and my readers sent me money and boxes through the American Relief Clearing-House. My best aids were always and invariably the police, who sent cases to me and guarded me against imposition. It soon became known in the Fourteenth (my own) Arrondissement, and the neighbouring Sixth, Fifth, Thirteenth and Fifteenth Arrondissements, that an American woman in the Rue Campagne-PremiÈre gave layettes to expectant mothers, and sometimes helped with medicines, milk, vacations, clothes and shoes for other children. I did not need to advertise or hang out a sign! In less than three years four thousand mothers of five thousand babies found their way to the Rue Campagne-PremiÈre. Sometimes I was swamped, badly swamped, but I managed to get around to all in the end. I remember one time, however, that babies were several months old before I could give their mothers a complete layette.

There was nothing unusual about my oeuvre, in its size, its singlehandedness, or its spirit. Every American woman in France did what she could from the very beginning by taking up work as she saw it at hand—in her own home or neighborhood. Many did much more than I. There were others in Paris looking after the new-born babies.

In the summer of 1917 we Americans resident in France had to give up, all of us, the individuality of our oeuvres. This meant that most of them went out of existence. When the rumor ran from mouth to mouth in the American colony that the Red Cross insisted on taking over everything and would starve out the stubborn individualists, there was consternation. Since the Red Cross was a Government organization and controlled shipping, it was possible for them to tell us that we should receive no more cases of supplies after September first, even if friends at home kept on sending them. Some were furious; some were offended; some would give a generous slice of their fortune to fight the injunction; some laughed. But the charities' trust had come to stay, and started in to handle things and ride rough-shod over people in a way that I fear is typically American.

In the early stages of war fever, the Y.M.C.A. and the Army showed the same symptoms as the Red Cross in France. There was the idea that the American way is always and exclusively the right way; impatience with and resentment against existing organizations; a thirst for sweeping reforms; and the determination that Americans who had been on the ground from the beginning must be eliminated. The way our splendid Ambulance at Neuilly was absorbed by the army is a story of Prussianism pure and simple. The Red Cross men and their wives did not seem to get it into their heads that we had been at war for three years. I attended a drawing-room meeting one day, where a hundred women were gathered who had been sacrificing themselves in relief work ever since the day France mobilized. More than one had lost her son in the war. A new Red Cross woman, fresh from America, lectured on what the Red Cross was going to do. She smiled at us, and her peroration was this: "Now you must realize that we are at war, and that we are going to put you all to work, all to work!"

When the excitement cooled down a bit, we realized that these Red Cross volunteers meant well, that they were devoted and capable, and that we could not take too tragically their ignorance and inexperience. We realized that we were tired, that we needed a rest and change, and that the Red Cross, with its enormous funds and abundant personnel, was in a position to realize many of our dreams. Our initial resentment was in part dismay at seeing newly arrived compatriots making the same mistakes some of us had made in the beginning, and partly their obtuseness in failing to get the French point of view. Contact with suffering such as they had never seen before soon mellowed most of the Red Cross volunteers and they realized that America was coming, as my husband put it, "not to save France, but to help France save the world."

Outside of hospitals, where there was a reason for it, we had never worn uniforms: but we got accustomed to seeing them as the A.E.F. grew although we never could master the meaning of many of them. One morning a woman in uniform, with service cap and Sam-Browne belt (not forgetting the nickel ring for hanging a dagger from), appeared in my studio. From her pocket she took a crisp new loose-leaf notebook, the like of which could no longer be indulged in by ordinary folks. As she unscrewed and adjusted her fountain-pen, she said,

"I've been sent to inspect your relief organization."

"You come from the Children's Bureau?" I asked.

"No, Civilian Relief. How do you handle the matter of investigation?"

"Well," I answered, "I cast my eye over the person, size her up, and give her what she needs. I cannot afford to investigate. You see, I have no overhead charges and I need all the money I can get for materials and all the time for handling them. The only expense is for sewing. Even that money goes to my own women. I give the sewing out to mothers on my list so they will not have to go out to work. This encourages them to nurse their babies themselves instead of sending them to a nourrice."

"People begging," said my visitor, "are splendid actors, you know."

"Few women who are just about to have a baby are likely to act the impostor," I answered, "and then I do not consider my women as beggars. I'm sure that nine out of ten are not. They wouldn't need any aid if their husbands were not in the trenches earning five sous a day. For the first two years it was only one sou a day. You can generally tell the difference between a shifty woman looking for a chance to get something for nothing and the shattered little mother, unaccustomed to charity, whose children would go without winter clothes were it not for some form of outside help. Most of the women who come here look on me as a neighbor who loves babies and who keeps flannel in her cupboard. I'd rather give away an occasional layette to a dead beat than bruise the feelings of timid souls at bay. If you could see them as they come in here!"

"But you know really that there can be an immense amount of waste of good material if you don't investigate."

"I may have wasted material, but I've never failed to help. Nobody investigated me when my baby was born in a Turkish massacre. If they had, I couldn't have stood it. Of course I have faced the question. I figure that if I put in one column the number of layettes I give out and their cost, and beside it what I would spend in time and taxi fares to investigate, I should find that the price of a badly-placed layette or two would be less than the cost of investigation."

The inspector took full and rapid notes. Folding them neatly into her pocket with one clap of her notebook, she left me.

Three days later a young man appeared. He said, "I am here to represent the Red Cross. Would you mind telling me about your baby work?"

"Are you from the Children's Bureau?"

"No, I am Vital Statistics."

After the Refugees Bureau sent two inspectors to look into my activities, the Children's Bureau finally did come. They "took over" my work, which meant that no more babies in my quarter of Paris received layettes from the United States.

When I finally handed over my oeuvre to the Red Cross, the interview with the husky well-fed football player of a doctor was refreshing. He was full of enthusiasm, and I felt instinctively that he was an able man with broad vision and an open mind. But, like all the men at 4 Place de la Concorde, he did not give the French credit for having already thought of and worked out many of the problems he wanted to solve. His attitude towards the French put them in what Abe and Mawruss would call the "new beginner" class in the matter of baby welfare. He cheerfully told me of organizing plans for saving French babies, plans which, compared with what we had been doing, were Kolossal. But the plans included some things which I knew would not go and others which the French had already worked out more successfully than my own compatriots. Puericulture is an advanced science in France, where baby lives are more precious than anywhere else in the world. I had tried some of the things he wanted to do and had run up against a stone wall. So had other American women. I started to sputter, but stopped short of speech. For I had a lightning vision of how parents must feel when their children, grown to manhood, plunge into work and do things they might be saved from if only—. I felt motherly towards this capable young man who was as old as myself. But something about him gave me confidence that he would work it out all right. And I knew that he was in no frame of mind to benefit by my experience.

CHAPTER XXIV
UNCOMFORTABLE NEUTRALITY

THE following letter was in my husband's mail one day:

"A young American came to Paris about twenty-five years ago, lived for a time in the Latin Quarter, and then, following the loss of his income, obtained a minor position in the office of an importer of American goods. He liked his work, rose to a place of responsibility, eventually went into business for himself, and developed the business to a prosperous issue.

"He held the theory that the few Americans living and working abroad formed the nucleus of American overseas industrial expansion and that they were regarded by Europeans as representative of their fellow-countrymen. He felt that it was his duty to conduct his business and social activities in such a manner as to merit the confidence and respect of his hosts. Had he been indifferent to these responsibilities or had his patriotic fire ever burned low, his association with the active members of the American Chamber of Commerce in France and the American Club in Paris would have surely recalled and revived them. Every one knows of the results attained by these organizations in their effort to maintain the feeling of sympathetic understanding between the two great sister republics during the long and difficult period of 'watchful waiting.' Such services enter into the realm of practical diplomacy and could have been rendered efficient only by men of high standing and of the highest order of patriotism.

"I wish to call your attention to the editorial page of an American weekly, which boasts of millions of readers, where we see a vicious attack upon ourselves. I quote textually: 'Things had reached a point among our expatriates, the fifty-eighth and lowest form of cootie, that in home circles to be pro-American was really bad form.'

"Is this the general opinion in America? Is it shared by people of intelligence? The editorial in question apparently adds another high authority on public opinion to the previous judgment rendered by Mr. Wilson when he classified us as 'unpatriotic Americans living abroad.' I am interested in knowing the true facts. Must we admit that we are held in small esteem by friends at home because we live in France?

"Sincerely yours,
"ONE OF THE COOTIES."