Home Fires in France Part 10

"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, coa.r.s.e 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 'Ma.r.s.eillaise.' 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 a.s.sembled 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 crus.h.i.+ng 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 hards.h.i.+p 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 pa.s.sengers. 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 sc.r.a.p 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 sc.r.a.p 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 'Ma.r.s.eillaise,' 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 'Ma.r.s.eillaise' went up in an indomitable shout.

"'_Allons, enfants de la Patrie._'

"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."

A LITTLE KANSAS LEAVEN

Between 1620 and 1630 Giles Boardman, an honest, sober, well-to-do English master-builder found himself hindered in the exercise of his religion. He prayed a great deal and groaned a great deal more (which was perhaps the Puritan equivalent of swearing), but in the end he left his old home and his prosperous business and took his wife and young children the long, difficult, dangerous ocean voyage to the New World.

There, to the end of his homesick days, he fought a hand-to-hand battle with wild nature to wring a living from the soil. He died at fifty-four, an exhausted old man, but his last words were, "Praise G.o.d that I was allowed to escape out of the pit digged for me."

His family and descendants, condemned irrevocably to an obscure struggle for existence, did little more than keep themselves alive for about a hundred and thirty years, during which time Giles' spirit slept.

In 1775 one of his great-great-grandsons, Elmer Boardman by name, learned that the British soldiers were coming to take by force a stock of gunpowder concealed in a barn for the use of the barely beginning American army. He went very white, but he kissed his wife and little boy good-bye, took down from its pegs his musket, and went out to join his neighbors in repelling the well-disciplined English forces. He lost a leg that day and clumped about on a wooden subst.i.tute all his hard-working life; but, although he was never anything more than a poor farmer, he always stood very straight with a smile on his plain face whenever the new flag of the new country was carried past him on the Fourth of July. He died, and his spirit slept.

In 1854 one of his grandsons, Peter Boardman, had managed to pull himself up from the family tradition of hard-working poverty, and was a prosperous grocer in Lawrence, Ma.s.sachusetts. The struggle for the possession of Kansas between the Slave States and the North announced itself. It became known in Ma.s.sachusetts that sufficiently numerous settlements of Northerners voting for a Free State would carry the day against slavery in the new Territory. For about a month Peter Boardman looked very sick and yellow, had repeated violent attacks of indigestion, and lost more than fifteen pounds. At the end of that time he sold out his grocery (at the usual loss when a business is sold out) and took his family by the slow, laborious caravan route out to the little new, raw settlement on the banks of the Kaw, which was called Lawrence for the city in the East which so many of its inhabitants had left. Here he recovered his health rapidly, and the look of distress left his face; indeed, he had a singular expression of secret happiness.

He was caught by the Quantrell raid and was one of those hiding in the cornfield when Quantrell's men rode in and cut them down like rabbits.

He died there of his wounds. And his spirit slept.

His granddaughter, Ellen, plain, rather sallow, very serious, was a sort of office manager in the firm of Walker and Pennypacker, the big wholesale hardware merchants of Marshallton, Kansas. She had pa.s.sed through the public schools, had graduated from the High School, and had planned to go to the State University; but the death of the uncle who had brought her up after the death of her parents made that plan impossible. She learned as quickly as possible the trade which would bring in the most money immediately, became a good stenographer, though never a rapid one, and at eighteen entered the employ of the hardware firm.

She was still there at twenty-seven, on the day in August, 1914, when she opened the paper and saw that Belgium had been invaded by the Germans. She read with attention what was printed about the treaty obligation involved, although she found it hard to understand. At noon she stopped before the desk of Mr. Pennypacker, the senior member of the firm, for whom she had a great respect, and asked him if she had made out correctly the import of the editorial. "_Had_ the Germans promised they wouldn't ever go into Belgium in war?"