The soul of the "C.R.B." A French view of the Hoover relief work

Front matter

O . if

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Chapter I

An Evening with the C. R. B i

April, 191 7 — 'A Franco-American drawing-room — Comments on the entry of the United States into the war — Moving pictures of the war.

The American delegates to the Commission for Relief in Belgium.

A delegate's story — His crossing — Eight hundred Germans on board captured by a French patrol boat.

Berlin in the first days of the war — German theories — Old grievances — The ideal of domination.

Last days at Antwerp — ^The refugees — Impressive entry of the German armies — ^The strength in numbers of the Germans — Spiritual strength of Belgium and France — The art of Flanders — The soul of Flanders — Belgium, a bending yet resisting reed during the war.

Testimony of French writers as to German thought — Murderous idealism — National pantheism — Germany deifies and worships herself.

To this destructive doctrine the United States opposes her ideal of justice.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER II The Americans in the First Days of the War 78

Their impressions of Paris — Evening scene — September 8 at Notre Dame.

History of the Relief Commission — Scarcity of food in Belgium and France — First appeal to London — Mr. Hoover — Formation of the commission — Propaganda — Installation of the American delegates in Belgium and France — Their relations with the Belgians, the French, and the Germans — Discussion as to the method of relief.

Life of the American delegates in the invaded districts — Forced labor — Deportations — " Punitive measures."

Last interviews between German officers and American delegates — The United States declares war.

The American delegates leave the invaded districts.

CHAPTER III With Our Friends in the Liberated Country 170

Mr. Hoover visits Noyon after the German retreat in 191 7 — Journey to Senlis — Memories of the German occupation — The death of M. Odent — Breakfast at Noyon — ^The mayors of the liberated communes thank the committee for saving the people of the invaded districts from famine — Visit to the liberated communes — Destruction of trees — Ruined landscapes — How the Germans fell back — Carrying off of the last men able to work, and of women and young girls.

CONTENTS xi

The battering-ram — Systematic destruction of villages — Old Eustache's story.

The cemetery — Thoughts on the dead — ^Visit to the ruined chateau of B. — Impressions of the Americans — ^They recall their faith in justice, liberty, and peace, and oppose it to the idea of domination by force — How principles so different grew in two great nations, and necessarily came to an issue — Return to Noyon — Night in the forest of Ourscamp.

Mr. Hoover goes back to the United States to take charge of the apportionment of food — Farewells at Havre — Mr. Hoover announces speedy and powerful aid from America.

ILLUSTRATIONS

German thefts of factory equipment in northern

France Frontispiece ^

FACING PAGE

Herbert Hoover, President of the C. R. B 44

Distribution of rations to the civil population in a

town of devastated France 88

Steamship South Point in the North Sea, February 27,

191S iJ^o

Trees cut down by the Germans at a crossroads at

Champien, Oise 154

Pines cut down by the Germans in the park of the

chateau of Pont-Saint-Mard, Aisne 174 ,

Battering-ram for knocking in the walls of houses,

found at Margnies-les-Cerises, Oise 198

THE SOUL OF THE C. R. B.

Chapter I An Evening With The C. R. B. The Confession Of An Ex-neutral

I

T was two years ago — ^let us go back in order to be sure of our starting-point, and be able to judge how much we have accomplished — ^yes, it was two years ago, in April, 1917. That spring of 1917 weighed heavily on French hearts. From its outset the character of the Russian revolution showed clearly that we had nothing to expect from it but disaster, and we were still in suspense as to the final decision of the United States.

For the third time Spring, as she passed over the fields of France, felt her wings weighted down by blood.

But one evening, in the pretty blue-and-

gold drawing-room of our American friend,

Mrs. Felder, the tension was relaxed; we held

out our hands to each other cordially and

THE SOUL OF THE C. R. B.

there was gladness in all our eyes — the United States had finally decided to go into the war.

There were about thirty of us there, Americans and French; yesterday friends and to-day allies. These Thursday teas of Mrs. Felder's were a meeting-ground for some French men and women who knew America, and some Americans who knew and loved France. Writers, journalists, lecturers, professors, sent from one shore of the Atlantic to the other, charitable women, apostles of American generosity, found there an opportunity to express themselves and to reach each other.

Why were we all at war ? What had caused it ? How had France, occupied with social and labor problems, and fairly fermenting with pacifism, been able to spring to her feet, all differences forgotten, and face her foe? Why had the United States been merely observant for so long, watching and judging the blows as they fell ?

We had much to learn, on one side and the other. Like Narcissus bending over his own image, the old peoples of the world, looking into the old rivers of history, saw only their own reflection.

That evening Mr. William Sharp, the

American ambassador, came in for a few moments. I can see him now, leaning on the chimney-piece; his grave smile was even graver than usual, and his eyes, always serene, seemed brighter; they shone with quiet satisfaction. And, alluding to other meetings when we French had endeavored to impart to our American friends our own fervor of conviction, he said in his even, courteous voice: *'Well, the time of the propaganda IS up.

The expression of his face was slightly ironical, although full of sympathy. He perhaps felt that our impatient zeal had sometimes doubted the motives of the United States, or, rather, had misunderstood that long course of serious thought during which the great nation had weighed its duties, not its opportunities. And yet, all through that autumn and winter of 1916-1917 our guests and our friends had repeated: "You will see — ^America will go into the war within six months" — or four, or three. They were never tired of making for our benefit an exact and almost astronomical calculation, to prove that their intervention was inevitable.

''It will come," said John Felder. "Good

THE SOUL OF THE C. R. B.

God !" he cried, striking the table hard with his fist, "within three months you will see American regiments in France!"

I may acknowledge now that there were those among us who doubted, who thought his words a sympathetic opinion, but nothing more. How could it be possible that America, leaving her own rich and peaceful country, would side with French ideals rather than with German realities, and would come to our desolate fields, where death was the only harvest ? Was it possible that any mere order could improvise an army from one day to the next, and transport it in a mighty fleet across the ocean despite the menace of German ruthlessness ?

We were like unbelievers to whom a coming miracle has been announced. We hoped and at the same time we doubted, both hope and doubt springing from our infinite longing. Yes, America would help us — ^from afar — ^but would she not be like that other admirable neutral, the moon, which shed her light on our night-watches and our sorrows ?

And yet the fateful hour had struck — Justice has her dial as well as her scales.

Our friend, John Felder, beamed with silent satisfaction. (When one speaks of Americans the word "silent" comes often to one's lips.) His charming wife, from one of the Southern States, offered us tea with gestures and movements even more graceful and rhythmical than usual, and an almost mysterious friendliness shone in her eyes, while her little Southern feet, in their gold slippers, peeped from under her short black frock, tracing upon the carpet a suggestion of some sacred triumphal dance.

As the April afternoon drew toward its close the scent of horse-chestnuts and acacias was wafted up into the room from the street below, together with the subdued noises of Parisian life in spring — ^the muffled roll of automobiles, bearing belated pleasure-seekers toward the budding foliage of the Bois, the happy cries of children playing under trees starry with flowers. A small group of us were leaning on the balcony, filled with new thoughts and, notwithstanding the war with all its mourning, feeling the peace of the approaching evening, and of the great golden clouds sailing slowly across the clear sky; listening to the children's voices — ^the voices of our hopes for the future — ^becoming less and

THE SOUL OF THE C. R. B.

less frequent as the shadows fell, like the twittering of birds in the branches when twilight closes in.

Our talk was of the one great fact. Like all other French people, we took possession of it as if it had been a victory. America had entered the war ! The distant beautiful moon had come down to our bleeding earth and was going into battle by our side — ^but why ?

The old butler, Jean, long past the age of any possible mobilization, went to and fro among us with his tea-tray, his thin lips parted in a beatific smile : he looked discreetly proud, Hke a family servant at a weddingfeast.

"Well," said a voice, "do you believe at last ? America is as she was in Christopher Columbus's day — she was foreseen and guessed at then, and you will see that she will again re-establish the equilibrium of the world."

It was a woman's voice, clear and full, with a ringing American accent. It was Daisy Folk — "our Daisy," as we called her, who had been in France for two years, one of the first emissaries from the friendship of America.

And if we had sometimes doubted, she, Daisy, had always believed.

Her mission lay in a little French village, destroyed by fire, a tiny village of Lorraine, on the edge of the forest of Parroy. A generous friend had said to her, "Choose for me, in devastated France, the poorest and most badly wrecked village that you can find," and, as she might in former days have sought our most precious ornament for this same Californian friend, she had now sought out and chosen the village of Vitrimont, and was rebuilding it, stone by stone, living meanwhile among our Lorraine peasants.

"Yes," said this philosopher, "the Old World made us, and now you will see the reflux of the New World upon the Old, in strength, in mental energy, and in affection. And since you have spoken of the moon in referring to us, you will have the phenomena of the tides. You will be sorry that you ever doubted," she went on, "and you will see that, thanks to us, this mystery of war and death will be cleared up."

A flame of faith shone in her eyes. "But it is thanks to you," she added, "that we feel ourselves to-day a nation. Time and history are the only judges who can tell how much each of us has given to the other."

While she spoke I saw again the last evening which I had spent with Daisy, in the rough chamber which she had improvised for herself in the little charred village. We had dined out-of-doors, under a slight shelter of planks which our peasants had put up for her, and as we talked we looked out at the line of the forest waking to life at the touch of Spring. She wore that evening a thin cloak of red gauze over her dark dress, and with her shining black hair, folded close to her head, her clear-cut features, and her determined black eyes, she seemed a strangely picturesque shepherdess for her little Lorraine flock ! She took her violin and played an old tune, an air by Rameau; she looked very happy as she said, "I like to play this French music on French soil,'' while her foot pressed the earth as if she wished to take root. "I love everything in France, her past, her present, and," pointing to the charred and crumbling stones, "the hope which springs from these ruins.'' And again she said: "I am building new houses for my good people here on the places where their old ones stood; they say I bring them something, but on their side they give me a treasure. I have my heart's desire."

By going into the war would America have her heart's desire ? It was permissible to think so as we watched the look of rejoicing and almost of relief on the faces of our new allies. Our hosts on that April evening, who had seen and known the war, had felt neutrality to be an oppression.

Just then Jean appeared at the door with his proud and timid smile, asking us if we would be pleased to go into the long room. There the lantern was being lighted to show the moving pictures, for propaganda by this means was one of our war institutions. We could not claim to have invented it, but during the winter those who had organized the service tried out in the Felders' apartment the films which were to give America true pictures of the war and of France. The long room was already full, the ladies seated, while the men were patiently resigned to standing against the wall. It was a mixed audience, both French and American: young officers and professors just returned from their missions overseas; American nurses, of widely different types — some of them very striking in their military uniforms.

Mrs. H. was there, in a long cape of the same horizon-blue as our soldiers; a very long veil of the same shade fell in straight folds from a linen band around her head, and from under it her hair made a golden haze on her brow; her full red lips smiled with the pride of youth; she was an archangel of nurses.

Near her were more modest mortals. There was Miss D., hidden in a shadowy corner. *'You know her/' said Daisy. Yes, I recognized her sweet, ascetic face, with its clear, soft eyes. "You know," Daisy went on, "she has rented and left her delightful house and has come to France to offer herself, with all her resources, for war work, but don't ever speak to her of it, or you will displease her; she only wants to be an anonymous 'sister."* Here is a young woman journalist, much to the fore, who has, by her own account, millions of readers whom she instructs as to our social work; she is a pronounced and redoubtable feminist, and has made the round of the Mediterranean — Italy, Roumania, the Greek islands during the campaign of the Dardanelles; she has almost fought, and has been torpedoed, swimming for her life (and for her newspaper) in the eddies among the wreckage of her steamer. She wears a Napoleonic cocked hat, is dressed in dark cloth of a simpie and masculine cut, and carries a stout stick in her wiry hand. She is very different from the beautiful archangel, but still it is another form of energy. Close to her is one of her colleagues, a very white and meagre little creature, with pale eyes and a sharp profile; she has sometimes bored us by her obstinate wish to go to the front — she is certainly thinking of it now.

One thing always strikes us in our new allies: one American woman is not in the least like another, except for a trait which they all have in common — their determination to reach the goal which they set for themselves. These birds of passage have strong wings; they know where they are going.

Suddenly it is dark and silent, save for the sharp click of the machine; one scene follows another, as we rehearse, for the benefit of our friends in America, their simple object-lesson. First of all comes Alsace, and let us hope that our friends will trace with a finger, as children do, the outline of the pictures we show them. But, after all, what can they know of our mourning for Alsace and Lorraine, and of our just claim to them } Here is the landscape — forests of young pines smothered in snow.

mountain streams leaping and bounding down into the valleys; villages, one just like another, crowding piously around their churches, chalets with their high cross-beams, and on the steeples and the roofs of the houses, stiffly upright on their nests, those faithful and dear friends, the storks.

Then glimpses of the old French life of Alsace; the entry of the kings of France into Metz, and afterward into Strasbourg; other time-honored proofs that Alsace and France were one; old French names graven on the stones of their cemeteries. After the dead, the living; we see Alsatians who had lived through the rending apart of their country in 1870. From its hiding-place behind the panels of the old wardrobe they take out the flag of France, which has been waiting there through four and forty long years; they shake out its sacred folds, and, almost blinded by emotion, they s^e it float upon the breeze of France over their liberated valley. We see an old woman, all bent and wrinkled, taking from its worn case the likeness of her husband, a French soldier killed in the war of 1870. She gazes on it, seeming to be listening the while to the deep growling of the cannon disputing over her frail life and her Httle chalet, scarcely more solid than the stork's nest on its roof. And now we have the entry of the first detachment of French troops into the village; happy groups embrace each other under the exultant flag, and we can almost hear their joyful shouts. The crowd parts, the soldiers are drawn up in line, and General Joffre appears. He salutes the flag, and gives the kiss of France to the little Alsatian girl who comes forward timidly, her face shadowed by her big black head-dress.

The machine still turns, and now we have pictures of the war: the chasseurs Alpins in the Vosges, sliding over the snowy slopes on their skis, or leading long lines of sleds, harnessed to teams of dogs who seem to delight in their work. On the outskirts of a wood big guns lift their heads as if they were trying to get the enemy's scent. It is an impressive sight when two of them belch forth their shells at the same moment. After a quick recoil they slide forward again on their carriages to their former positions, and far away we see a terrific explosion; the earth heaves violently upward and falls back again, while dense, black smoke rises slowly in thick spirals until it is gradually dispersed and absorbed into the heavy air, where the clouds hang low under a brooding sky. This forward leap of the guns is like the bound of some huge, keen-jawed hound — ^it is equally supple, equally alive and dangerous — and also equally obedient.

The pictures go on, one after another, until the sharp click of the machine gets upon one's nerves. Now it is a dreary sequence of ruined villages, wrecked churches, dead towns, desolate fields; at a spot where three roads meet a Christ hanging on his cross is alone in the uptorn and deserted countryside. After that we have the sea — ^the Atlantic Ocean, with its long, slow swell. On the horizon a black dot appears, very small at first, but growing gradually larger, and followed by a trail of smoke; we can make out a steamer, rolling and pitching, but steadily going on. It is the Rochester, the first vessel to leave America after the infamous German announcement that every keel afloat, without exception, would be torpedoed. All the German sharks, warned of her sailing, are lying in wait for her under the waves, but she manages to elude their jaws, going on and on until at last she enters the port of Bordeaux, to be greeted by cheering, and formally welcomed by an official committee, largely made up of bright-faced girls bearing great bunches of roses. The young captain stands smiling, evidently amused, and shakes the hands outstretched to him vigorously; we can see him laugh. To him the sensational crossing has clearly been good sport.

All this passes quickly, with the jerky staccato movement of the cinema, and now we have Salonica, a white city crowned with cupolas, and, to all appearance, smiling and happy, as all Mediterranean cities are when seen from that enchanted sea. On its waterfront French and English regiments are marching to the music of their bands. And now we are in the valley of the Vardar, and in the olive-orchards and under the huge cork-trees the big guns recoil, leap forward and bark, as they did under the pines of Alsace. The same explosion, the same black spirals, the same acrid smoke slowly dispersing in the clear eastern light; the dry Greek earth shows the sinuous line of trenches. How much alike all war is ! Always the same soldiers, in blue or in khaki, working at the same tasks, like a new order of humanity, devoted only to the new world-business of warfare; always the same holes in the ground, the same growling of guns, near or distant, the same proud groups around generals who give decorations to their men and kiss the flags.

The earth is a great globe turning at our touch as the show goes on. Here is a crowd of diminutive Japanese, working like ants in one of their munition factories; again we have myriads of shells, neatly piled, while the guns roar over the heads of small soldiers belonging to a race which we used to look upon as the most astonishing playthings in the world, often diverting and sometimes mysteriously menacing. Now they are our allies, working and creating with us the mighty rhythm of the European War. In the little wooden houses, behind the paper windows, the women of Nippon, crouching on their spotless mats, follow the story of the war in the English newspapers.

Now the landscape is all white; there are ice-floes in gray water; the sky is pale and cold, and again we see steamers, this time pitching and rolling in a heavy and half-frozen sea. They will land shells, always more shells.

on the Murman coast, the black smoke rises lazily from the engine waiting for them on the little railway. And at the end we are back again in America; in the virgin forests negro wood-cutters sing as their blows fall; the mighty trunks, which have held their own against the storms of centuries, shiver throughout their length and bow themselves with a sound of cracking and rending, until at last they crash to the ground, as if astonished that they must die. It is war carried into the very sanctuaries where we were used to worship the silent and everlasting forces of nature.

Memory carried me back to Africa. I saw again the wide yellow sands, the sun-baked fields, hedged with cactus, the stretches of plain where a scanty growth of corn struggled for life, the welcome groups of trees, so few and so beautiful that one saw them from afar across the rolling stretches of bare earth, waiting to soothe the weary traveller in the purple shade at their feet. In the still air, palpitating with heat, the great aloe plants lifted their fantastic flowers, as tall and regular as Jacob's ladder; flocks of storks sailed by; biblical shepherds played on slender pipes, making a sound as thin and clear as a bird's call.

Yet war is there also, arousing a people who seemed to us to be sunk in a never-ending slumber, dreaming only of the joys of their paradise. These scenes, as I say, were reproduced for me by the cinema of my memory. Could it be that in those remote Moroccan villages, whose inhabitants seemed as ignorant of the mighty drama of history as a hive of bees, there was weeping and lamentation over sons and bridegrooms summoned to the war in far-off France, from which they might never return ? Would little Ladife never see her Miloud again ? Was the Musulman cemetery not to be the everlasting resting-place of the Moroccan soldier fallen in the fields of the Ourcq ? And yet he wore a powerful talisman around his neck, and his old mother had made long pilgrimages on foot, and had hung bags full of prayers on the branches of the sacred olive-tree. The majestic Lebanon, which we had seen in other days bathing its historic slopes in the Mediterranean, and lifting its triumphant crest against the Asian sky — was it also shaken by the convulsion of war ? Could it be true that the smiling and gentle tribes, smoking their narghilehs while they waited confidently for the aid of France, had been forced to feel the choking grip of Turkey and Germany, and to suffer famine and death ? Was it possible that all around this flower-garden of the Mediterranean, intended for the world's delight, men and women were in the grasp of sterner emotions than those caused by the sudden enchantment of spring, or the heavy perfume of orange-flowers and tuberoses ?

Happy are they who have seen, or at least imagined, the real face of our Mother Earth — to whom the names of oceans, of rivers, and of countries are not merely words printed on a sheet of colored paper. What we have seen our eyes possess forever, and can enjoy until all light goes out from them — and perhaps thereafter.

The cinema has stopped; the object-lesson of the war is over; we have seen what it was well for us to see, as children are told as much of life as is good for them to know; in both cases the darker secrets are withheld — ^we have not seen death, nor even acute suffering. The lamps are lit again. There are newcomers, women and girls in khaki, with short skirts and felt hats, masculine even to the chin-straps. Strength, strength again — their eyes meet ours as frankly and coolly as those of young soldiers; their hand-shake is short and businesslike. Miss S. tells me that she has charge of a motor ambulance belonging to a hospital where all the staff, both surgeons and physicians, are women — "all women — ^no men,'' she repeats, with a touch of pride. Yes, a touch of pride — and yet I could not help feeling within myself a slight and half-unconscious resistance. I could not help thinking: "They may all be 'women' at the hospital, but there is something not quite 'woman' in the clean-cut features at which I am gazing; they seem to have been turned out, at one stroke, by the hand of a skilful artist. Miss S. has the impeccable precision of an instrument which is well-made, carefully polished, and adjusted to form part of a great machine — ^but it is an instrument after all." And so we men and women look at one another; our hearts are open to a new friendship, we stretch out our hands — and then sometimes, for no real reason, from the merest trifle, a chance word, even a glance, we come up against some old prejudice, some ancestral idea, reaching back to the twilight of time. In our minds we have long exalted two different types of womanhood — ^the woman capable of loving with all her heart, and the Madonna — each on her own altar. These modern girls have stepped down from the altars on which sacrifices were offered to women — and on which they were often themselves sacrificed. All is broad daylight in these young heads, full of democratic and liberal ideas, and yet this new type is in its turn dragging and pushing the ponderous machine of life in time of war. "Will you introduce me to Mrs. B. ?" said a young French priest, the Abbe F. He wore around his neck the chain and cross of the French military chaplains, and on his head a police cap with two rows of braid. Of Irish extraction, he is to start to-morrow for the United States, in order to speak to Irishmen on^ behalf of France. He is taking down the names of bishops to whom he may have access, and makes a special note (with a view to his possible conversion) of a dignitary of the church, who, being under the influence of Bernstorff's agents, denounced France in the Catholic cathedral of New York City as "the sink of the world.''"

The Irish question, according to the Abbe F,, does not concern England only, for in the United States the Catholic clergy, whose ranks are largely recruited from the Irish, are active and influential. During the two years and a half that American neutrality lasted, German propaganda had the field almost to itself and sowed many mines therein, trusting to their exploding later; there is great need of mine-sweeping, which is not an easy job, as the Germans were careful to foment the political and racial hostilities which have existed between England and Ireland for centuries, while France was condemned as irreligious, being represented to Catholic Americans as a light woman, who had thrown her Phrygian cap to the winds, and renounced the principles and traditions of her family in order to plunge into vice. The chastisement which awaited her, according to these good prophets, was that of Don Juan. Her courage was not to be denied, but it was the courage of the atheist before the Commander's statue, mocking and defiant. To corroborate this verdict a few of our loosest novels (largely written for the foreign market) were distributed as tracts and our Puritan judges were virtuously shocked. The Commander (who was, of course, the Kaiser) would force the atheist, step by step, to his death. The picture was easy to draw, and at a distance of three thousand miles all the complicated strokes which go to make up a true image are invisible.