® THE 3
HOUSE OF
THE GOOD
NEIGHBOR

ESTHER LOVEJOY
wu aii

3 1924 084 524 812
THE HOUSE OF THE GOOD NEIGHBOR
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
NEW YORK « BOSTON + CHICAGO + DALLAS
ATLANTA * SAN FRANCISCO
MACMILLAN & CO., Limrrzp
LONDON + BOMBAY - CALCUTTA
MELBOURNE

THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Lrp,
TORONTO
Tesns uLopTeury Burysol st pue ssoip UBOLIOMIY ue sey TNA SSI aT] sty,
«ALINYAAOOH AHL,

 
THE HOUSE OF
THE GOOD NEIGHBOR

BY
ESTHER POHL LOVEJOY

NEW EDITION
WITH A FOREWORD
By HERBERT HOOVER

jQew Pork
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1920

All rights reserved
CoPpyYRrigHtT, 1919
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

 

Set up and electrotyped. Published November, rgr9.
New Edition, with a Foreword by
HERBERT HOOVER
April, 1920
CONTENTS

PAGE
Foreworp By HERBERT Hoover ... .. . ix
CHAPTER

I One of THE MANSIONS. . ..... dL
II THE Open Door ........ 16

Il] Freepinc tue Muytitrupes. . . . . . 30
IV OurSaints . . ....... . 44
V Two EncuisH Women Aa GENERATION FROM
“HOME” =. a & @ ow « oe ow « 459
VI Tue Fatuinc BirtH-RaTE. . . . . . «67
VII Tse tInrant Inpustry . . .. . . . 80
VITT_ A Fountain or Lire . . .... . 99
IX Cuitp SatvaceE. . ...... . 1217
X Tue CHRISTENING OF ACRECHE . . .. . 129
XI War Wipows ....... . . 137
XII THe DeatH Dirck. ...... . 142
XIII War Tourists . . .... . . . 153
XIV Evian. . . . . . eC «7
XV THe War Buicnot . .... . . =. 176
XVI Tue Convertep Casino. . .... . 191
XVII THE INTERNATIONAL BuryINGc GrounD . . 197

XVIII Five Women nA CAMIONETTE. . . . . 203
XEX~ BINTS) ce). See. ae ap Ge cas Ge ae SL.
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

“The Hoovermite”? . . . . . . . . Frontispiece

FACING
PAGE

Girls’ Day on the Boys’ Battlefield. . . . . . 19

Soldiers of France . . . 1. 1. 1... (OY
House of the Good Neighbor Monday Morning. . . 16
Saint Matilde Instructing the Monitresses . . . . 16

Bebes Frangais Perissent Chaque Annee. . . . . 70
The American Woman Physician . . . . . . 121
Salvage io Ws) gouk- GS Se Re Ce Ge EL
The Creche Dwellers. . . . . - . . . . 134
Rapatriés . . . 2. 2. 2 6 © we se 2 IM
The Military Discard. . « « - « « « « «174
War Babies a el Wales GR cg te ay ee tg ae el 80
FOREWORD BY HERBERT HOOVER

The citizens of this country have deep interest in
any question of the protection of children. We have
long since realized that the true building of democ-
racy is accomplished by public and private care of
the children, generation by generation. The Great
War has intensified the realization of the significance
of the child life with us, as well as touched our hu-
manity.

This work is a direct individual account of a trained
and interested American woman of the growth of a
house of social service, from its small beginnings
through valiant service during the war. It portrays
the splendid spirit of the bereaved French women
during the four and a half years of their war suffer-
ing, and the protection extended to the children of the
workers. The analysis of the aid given to young
mothers during the war, the personal reflections of
these women regarding their duty to their country,
evidences the sacrifice of bearing children at a time
when the support of themselves and their family de-
pended on their earnings, and brings home the very
foundations of child life.

For the American man or woman who wishes to
have the material and spiritual facts with which the
French women must rebuild their children’s in-

heritance, set forth without bias or sentimentality, as
ix
x Foreword

well as an understanding account of the gallant efforts
of the French women for their own war-relief, Dr.
Lovejoy’s “House of the Good Neighbor” comes as
an admirable document.

HERBERT Hoover.
THE HOUSE OF THE GOOD NEIGHBOR

CHAPTER I
ONE OF THE MANSIONS

TEMPERATURE is a determining factor in all forms of
life. Knowing the peculiarities of a species the tem-
perature can usually be depended upon to lead us
straight to his habitat. This simple law made it easy
to locate the American population in Paris during
the winter months through the four long years of war.
Those who knew the way to France, and had gotten
there without government assistance, were accustomed
to summer heat the year round, and could usually be
found in the hotels where there was plenty of hot
water and the radiators had not been affected by the
war.

The hotel where I lived in the beginning catered to
my country-folk. The radiators radiated regularly,
and this was strong evidence that a large quantity of
coal was being consumed to add to the comfort of the
transient population. There was hot water in the
pipes every day of the week and on Sundays, to be
used by the guests in any quantity by merely turning
on the faucet, and if the food commissioner had come
to that hotel seeking evidence of national famine it

certainly would not have been found. The rates were
1
2 The House of the Good Neighbor

very high. They were more than I could afford.
But who can afford to be cold and hungry when heat
is for sale, and all kinds of food except grape-fruit,
griddle-cakes and corn on the cob are to be had for
mere money?

It was hard to leave that warm hotel and face the
cold French world. The habits of a comfortable life
bound me to that hostelry. But Mademoiselle Marie-
Jeanne Bassot had offered to take me to a French so-
cial center, a neighborhood house in Levallois, and
by making a virtue of this opportunity it was easier
to give up my nice warm billet and move to that chilly
factory district on.the outskirts of Paris.

The home of Mademoiselle Bassot and her asso-
ciates had two names. It was known officially as the
Residence Sociale, but the people of the locality had
given ita better name. Because of what it had meant
to them for so many years, they had unofficially chris-
tened it, ““The House of the Good Neighbor.”

This house was the most wonderful house in the
world to me. It was not large or pretentious in ap-
pearance, but it had taken fifteen years to build it.
The structure was not merely a building of brick and
stone, three stories high and covering a definite num-
ber of square feet of the earth’s surface, but a per-
vasive influence that modified and ennobled the
characters of the people it voluntarily served. No
material limits of extension could be placed on the
House of the Good Neighbor. It was more than a
house. Our Father’s House has many mansions, and
this was one of the mansions of our Father’s House.
It was a spiritual essence that reached as far as any
One of the Mansions 3

susceptible child that ever came within its radius
might wander, and then reached out through him to
worlds unknown.

The House of the Good Neighbor was founded on
faith in humanity, and its soul was sympathy. It
was sustained by the good will of the community, and
strengthened by tender childhood memories in the
minds and hearts of strong young men and women
who no longer needed help, and who were returning
with usury the loving kindness they had received dur-
ing their years of need, and unconsciously requiting
their obligation by giving in many directions and in
multiplied measure of the strength and helpfulness
developed in them by their early connection with the
House of the Good Neighbor.

Compared with the hotel where I had been staying
the house was cold and dark in one way, but warm and
light in another. There was no heat or light to be
turned on or off at will, but the place radiated the
social spirit in a warm and cordial way that outshone
anything I had ever experienced. It did not seem in
the least like the headquarters of a city board of char-
ities, although much of the organized charity of the
city passed through it under a more gracious name.

Mademoiselle Bassot and some of her assistants
lived in the house all the time. They slept there, ate
there, prayed there; and having no other life apart,
they made the life they were living attractive. They
were sensitive women. They had not developed pity-
proof epidermis as a result of work among the poor.
They shared the joys and sorrows of their neighbors.
These were family affairs. And the whole sad busi-
4 The House of the Good Neighbor

ness of relieving distress was conducted with an air of
sisterly solicitude and personal concern that took the
keen edge off the humiliation that is usually felt by
unfortunate people who are obliged to ask for help.

This was a house of joy as well as sorrow. A hos-
pitable social life was maintained for the community
at this center. The place was “home” to the neigh-
borhood. Here the children came to play in the gar-
den after school hours, the young people for com-
panionship and entertainment in the evenings, and the
working mothers for social afternoons with their sew-
ing in their hands.

French women are either saints or sinners, at least
that is what I was told by an Anglo-French woman of
broad experience, and while I cannot claim the slight-
est acquaintance with the sinners, I have enjoyed the
privilege of knowing some of the saints intimately.
Several of them lived at this social center, and the self-
less spirit of devotion to good work which they exhib-
ited in their daily lives was a revelation to me. In
many respects they reminded me of French sisters I
had met in hospitals in different parts of the world
far away from France.

From the standpoint of the sisterly spirit and its:
practical application they were sisters—sisters of hu-
manity: a very serviceable kind of sisters who had not
retired from the world, or made any vows except to
themselves. On the contrary they had left the seclu-
sion of comfortable homes and braved the dangers of
the world for the sole purpose of making it a better
and happier place to live. Their chosen sphere was a
limited section just beyond the old walls of Paris be-
One of the Mansions 5

tween Neuilly and Clichy. Their duties were well
defined. Their procedures were along rational lines,
and so far as they were able to reach they certainly
were doing fairly well in their efforts to turn this vale
of tears into a smiling landscape.

Mademoiselle Bassot and several other women in-
terested in social welfare established this center in the
factory district of Levallois about fifteen years ago.
These women were among the first to engage in this
kind of work with the idea that the greatest good could
be accomplished by living in the poor quarters of the
city and developing connections with the different
communities based upon personal association, com-
mon interest, sympathetic understanding and affec-
tion.

At that time this was a shocking idea. Some of
their families were shocked. The social circle in
which they had been running around.and around for
years without getting anywhere was shocked beyond
the ordinary usage of words, and registered its disap-
proval in eloquent expressions of countenance and
censorious undertones. Certain ecclesiastical digni-
taries, professional expounders of the golden rule,
were astounded when confronted with this literal ap-
plication of their teachings, and it was whispered that
the forebears of several of these visionary young fe-
males figuratively sat up in their family tombs in
Pére-Lachaise and protested.

For young French women of established social posi-
tions to go off on such a preposterous tangent, disre-
garding precedent, recklessly steering away from the
charted course of female existence and mapping out a
6 The House of the Good Neighbor

new one for themselves, was conduct that would inevit-
ably lead to disastrous consequences. Nothing was
left undone to save them from their folly, but with
incomprehensible tenacity of purpose they refuse to
be dissuaded and finally set out on this mad career.

The difficulties in the beginning were grievous, but
fervent spirits inspired with high motives grow strong
under adversity, and sharpen their lances on opposi-
tion. The ridicule and prejudice they encountered in
their ingenuous efforts to be helpful to their fellow
men convinced them of the great necessity for their
work. In the eyes of their advisors their course was
unseemly. Women should be sheltered in home or
nunnery, and the more of this kind of discouragement
they met, the more precious the privilege of living
their own lives became.

The struggle was hard at the start, but the breath of
freedom was exhilarating, and it was not long before
they realized that the exclusive circles from which
they had escaped had succeeded in excluding the best
part of life. They were tired of being protected. A
protectée lives a large part of her life by proxy. She
becomes weaker and more dependent as the years go
by. Without protection she is lost. If Fate deprives
her of one protector, her only hope is to find another.
These young women were ambitious. They wanted to
be able to stand alone if necessary. They longed to
feel their own strength. They wanted to be strong
enough to help themselves and to help others, and
they realized that the only way to grow strong and
self-reliant was to exercise the faculties with which na-
ture had endowed them. They had had enough tea
One of the Mansions 7

and macaroons to last forever. From the windows of
their dolls’ houses they had glimpsed the wonders of
the world, and its activities—its work and play, its
joys, sorrows, even its dangers had called them out.

The dangers of the world challenged their brave
souls. They had been warned so often about these
dangers that they were anxious to meet and overcome
a few of them. They had led sheltered lives but they
were of good stock and surely they were as strong as
the unprotected women of the world. They recog-
nized their inexperience and did not count on immedi-
ate success. They expected to stub their tender toes
and stumble, but they had faith that they would be
able to catch themselves and totter along, and hope
that in time they would learn to walk alone. Mistakes
were anticipated, but in a vague and indefinite way
they realized that no price was too great to pay for
the privilege of making and correcting one’s own mis-
takes. Besides, since the world was so wicked it was
clearly their duty to go out and help to reconstruct it
along better lines. Failure could not be predicated
upon such premises. Their one inexhaustible re-
source was enthusiasm, and this had increased with
the passing years.

The fight against established custom which these
women had made for their own freedom of action, the
right of self-determination and self-development, fitted
them admirably for the task in store for them.
Strange as it may seem they were willing to grant to
the least of mankind the independence of thought and
action they had demanded for themselves. Their
plan of work was based on the theory that “charity”
8 The House of the Good Neighbor

is not charity; that dole creates dependents, encour-
ages deception and is morally harmful to the recip-
1ent.

Our common duties to the sick, the young, the old,
and to the mothers of little children, who are incapac-
itated for work by the greater service they are giving
to the world, have always been dominant themes in
the House of the Good Neighbor. Every effort has
been made from the beginning to help unfortunate
people help themselves; to afford them relief in emer-
gencies; to increase their chances of health, happi-
ness and success by well directed education; to incul-
cate and encourage a spirit of self-respect and respon-
sibility, and to teach that in a personal way life’s
greatest achievement is the strength, ability and will
to do one’s share of the work of the world, and that
the unforgivable sin is the sin of leaning upon others
and sharing their earnings without adequate reciproc-
ity in service.

Levallois was an excellent field for putting this
plan into operation. It was a factory town—a hive of
industry. Few drones lived there. The manufac-
ture of perfumes and automobiles were among the
chief industries of this community before the war.
Large numbers of women were employed in those
plants, and the “Perfume of Araby” is merely a fig-
ure of speech compared with the world-renowned pro-
ducts of Levallois.

Flower petals were gathered from the gardens,
fields and wild woods of all countries, and their subtle,
seductive odors, calculated to delight a diverse and
discriminating sense of smell, extracted and bottled
One of the Mansions 9

for the market. Suddenly the magic wand of war
waved over France—and presto! instead of extract-
ing the fragrance of flowers to titillate the olfactory
nerves of mankind, these places were grinding peach-
stones, extracting cyanides and other noxious fumes
to be turned on their nation-killing neighbors, and
the automobile factories were running day and night
making munitions and aéroplanes.

The work at the House of the Good Neighbor had
started in a small way. A Garderie Scolaire was
opened for the care, instruction and entertainment
after school hours of children whose mothers were em-
ployed in the factories. The children of the neigh-
borhood found the place so attractive that they flocked
to it of their own free will, and were not only bene-
fited and kept out of mischief while their mothers were
at work, but became a friendly medium between their
parents and their chosen resort. No startling innova-
tion was attempted, but this service of love naturally
extended to the young boys and girls who had reached
the wage-earning age, and finally to the mothers in
the vicinity.

Year after year the work undertaken by these
women increased and extended. By the exercise of
tact and devotion they gradually won the confidence
and the love of the community. Their achievements
in the realm of social service and character building
had attracted official attention, and it naturally fol-
lowed that much of the war relief work was placed in
their hands by the government and also by private
agencies. Societies were organized for the ameliora-
tion of every evil incident to warfare, except the an-
10 The House of the Good Neighbor

guish of heart and soul which allocations could not
alleviate. ‘The benefits provided by some of these
organizations were dispensed through this center, and
in many instances personal grief seemed to be as-
suaged by the spontaneous sympathy of the women
engaged in this work.

In connection with a scheme for improving the liv-
ing conditions of the less fortunate people in the dis-
trict, a Rent Deposit Bank was opened in the modest
dining-room of the House of the Good Neighbor, and
did a steadily increasing business from the start.
There were no competitors in this field. A bonus was
paid to those families who saved and deposited their
quarterly rent in advance, and a prime bonus was
given to depositors with large families, and to wid-
owed mothers. The maximum bonus was not fixed.
It was on a sliding scale. The bigger the family and’
greater the need, the larger the bonus might:be. This
plan encouraged thrift and enabled the “bankers” to
keep a supervising eye upon the lodgings of their
depositors, and made it possible to improve conditions
which predisposed to ill health and immorality be-
cause of over-crowded, unsanitary or otherwise unde-
sirable surroundings.

In ante-bellum days it had often been difficult to get
landlords to do the fair thing by their tenants, but
during the war the shoe pinched the other foot. Asa
protection to the families of soldiers a law had been
passed at the time of mobilization, forbidding the evic-
tion of a family with a member in the army. Before
many months had passed most families had members
One of the Mansions 11

in the army, and paying rent became a custom more
honored in the breach than the observance. This law
was hard on landlords, but tenants were so pleased
with the plan that it is doubtful if the old practice of
paying rent can be restored and popularized after the
war.

Before the war tenants about to be evicted from
their homes used to come to the House of the Good
Neighbor for help and intercession, but the situation
had been reversed. Landlords had become the sup-
pliants. On one occasion I was present when one of
these gentlemen called and implored Mademoiselle
Bassot to intercede in his behalf, and for the sake of
the honor and future welfare of the nation to persuade
his tenants to regard rent paying as a moral obligation.
And the greatest testimonial I can offer to the right-
eous power of this remarkable woman, is that in a
large percentage of cases she was able to induce peo-
ple, landlords or tenants, to be half decent in these
matters and not to take unfair advantage of each
other.

The employment office conducted in connection with
the “Rent Deposit Bank” rendered valuable service
during the industrial dislocation immediately follow-
ing the invasion. Through this agency many women
whose husbands had been called to the colors were
able to secure sewing from the war department of the
government which enabled them to support their
households without leaving home and depriving their
children of personal care. This office was in corres-
pondence with many employment bureaus in and
12 The House of the Good Neighbor

about Paris and it was usually possible to find suitable
work for refugees and others seeking positions with-
out loss of time.

The House of the Good Neighbor was a clearing
house for people in distress, giving immediate help in
emergencies, and codperating with other agencies and
organizations for the relief of human suffering. It
was in touch with hospitals, dispensaries, maternities,
pre-natal and post-natal homes, creches, canteens, milk
and supply depots of different kinds.

The little boy whose mother worked in shop or fac-
tory and who therefore could not hear his cry for
mother-help, came running with a splinter under his
finger-nail. He knew just where to come, and he also
knew that he would get a chocolate to ease the painful
process of relief, and for this reason minor accidents
were not regarded as unmitigated hardships by the
juvenile constituents of the House of the Good Neigh-
bor. The man, woman or child with toothache was
given a card to the American Red Cross dentist in
service overseas. Nurses were sent from this center
to people with sickness in their homes to help them
during their troubles, or to take the stricken one to
the hospital where he might receive the best possible
care.

Through codperation with a society organized to
supply layettes and furnish the additional linen and
special equipment made necessary in a household by
the advent of a new baby, the prospective mother un-
able to bear this expense was relieved of anxiety and
responsibility in this connection. This maternity
equipment was afterward returned to the organization,
One of the Mansions 13

and carefully washed, sterilized and made ready for
the next parturient woman in need.

On account of the national shortage of fuel the
homes of most women were cold, damp and unfit for
them to remain in during the period of their confine-
ments. These women were taken to the maternity
hospitals and on their return were helped with the
care of their babies, and given food, milk, or what-
ever was required and it was possible to secure for
them.

There is a tragedy which not infrequently befalls
unprotected and inexperienced girls which they usu-
ally suffer in silent despair, and at a cost of greater
agony and additional danger conceal from their moth-
ers and other members of their families because of
the shame involved. When obliged to confide in
somebody, they seek a confidante away from their own
homes, hoping to escape the consequences of indiscre-
tion and somehow save their people from reflected dis-
honor. Such girls sometimes came to the House of
the Good Neighbor and always found help and protec-
tion.

The war seemed to increase these cases. Mar-
riages were delayed. The safeguards thrown around
young women were less effective. Life was uncer-
tain; social order unstable, and the primal impulse of
poor mortals with death brooding over them in the
springtime of life, was to drink deep of love lest the
cup be withdrawn from their lips. In many cases the
whole cost was borne by the survivor—and the sur-
vivor was the woman. These women were encour-
aged to take up the burden of double parenthood and
14 The House of the Good Neighbor

carry it as their badge of redemption. After their
accouchements suitable employment was found for
them, and if they could not earn enough to support
themselves and their babies, their earnings were sup-
plemented by ways and means provided by societies
organized for that purpose.

The Mutualité Maternelle, a philanthropic and pa-
triotic society, which insured married women in case
of the birth of children, and thereby increased the
population by inciting in the minds of their policy
holders a desire to collect the indemnity, conducted a
milk depot at the near corner of the street. About
one hundred and fifty babies were supplied with milk
at this place, and for the sake of these little ones, as
well as others in the district, Mademoiselle Bassot
opened a children’s dispensary with the financial as-
sistance of the American Red Cross. An American
woman physician was in charge of this dispensary,
and was assisted by the French visiting nurses from
the House of the Good Neighbor. One of these
nurses had taken some training in the United States
and sympathized with the American point of view.
This combination was an advantageous one. The
place was not only a dispensary for children, but a
get-together school of French and American—lan-
guage, psychology and medicine.

The training of monitresses in connection with the
service of the infirmary and the House of the Good
Neighbor, was one of the far-reaching phases of this
work. The plan possessed great possibilities for so-
cial betterment. One evening a week was devoted to
elementary instruction on the subject of health preser-
One of the Mansions 15

vation and practical care of the sick. This class was
made up of the higher and more intelligent types of
girls engaged in the factories and other industries.

After a course of study each young woman
“adopted” a family, and became responsible for re-
ports regarding the health and general well-being of
this household. Juvenile delinquency had increased
enormously in France on account of demobilized
homes. The fathers were in the army, the mothers
in the factories and the children in the streets.

The families of soldiers were usually chosen for
“adoption,” and it was the duty of each young moni-
tress to fraternize with her “family.” She studied
the needs of her “children,” took them to the country
on holidays and helped their mothers care for them.
She made reports to the head of this service regarding
unsanitary conditions affecting her “home” which pre-
disposed to sickness, and called attention to defects
which might prevent the normal development of her
“children,” and to indications of weakness or ill-
health in any member of her “family” in order that
special precautions might be taken before it was too
late.

The purpose of this plan was not to train nurses,
but to help the working people and their children, and
at the same time to develop the monitresses in order
that they might be good, efficient mothers themselves
in case they married, and useful women of value to
any community in which they might afterward chance
to live.
CHAPTER II

THE OPEN DOOR

Tue House of the Good Neighbor never closed its
doors. It was open at all times to people in distress.
Every day in the week was reception day for the
friends and neighbors who needed help, assistance and
encouragement.

Monday was mother’s day, and in the morning the
working mothers came for the week’s allotment of the
government sewing. This work consisted chiefly of
garments—shirts and pajamas, to be made for the sol-
diers. These articles were cut by a military cutter
and delivered by the thousands to the House of the
Good Neighbor for distribution in the district. Sev-
enty centimes (about fifteen cents) was paid for the
making of each garment, and about three thousand
francs a month was disbursed through this center.
These poor women could not work in the munition
factories because their children needed attention at
home, but they had the Allocation Militaire from
the government, and with this extra work they were
able to eke out a living for their families.

Their husbands were at the front, and many of them
never returned. A large number had already given
their lives for France and for the world. And they
came to the House of the Eacd Neighbor, those wives
 

SAINT MATILDE INSTRUCTING THE MONITRESSES
The Open Door 17

and widows, leading little children and bringing the
bundles of finished work for the week.

I had been in France about a month before I met
those sweet faced women with their bundles. I had
become accustomed to the maimed and the mourning,
but a new shock was in store for me. Think of thou-
sands and thousands of pairs of common pajamas,
beautifully made by hand because the women who
made them have no sewing machines. It is the same
all over France, and from the standpoint of a woman
the greatest need of that country is for sewing ma-
chines and washboards.

On Monday afternoon when the assignments had all
been made and the women paid for their work, there
was a social and educational hour during which house-
hold economics, care of children, sanitation and other
matters of practical interest to housewives, and there-
fore of value to the nation were discussed.

Through the president of the National American
Woman’s Suffrage Association I had become ac-
quainted with Madame de Witt Schlimberger, the
president of the National French Woman’s Suffrage
Association, and that gentle woman with a French-
German name, and an ardent French soul came one
Monday to meet the mothers at the House of the Good
Neighbor.

In a kind, persuasive way, she delivered a mild,
ante-bellum talk on the subject of woman suffrage,
carefully restraining and modifying any opinions she
considered too radical for her audience. They were
poor women. Not one of them wore a hat, but at the
conclusion of the address, when a general discussion
18 The House of the Good Neighbor

ensued, the progressive opinions expressed by those
young working mothers astonished the president of
the national society. War had taught them to think
straight, and the president afterward told me that she
was getting old, and she feared that she was not keep-
ing abreast of all the phases of the woman movement,
and when I repeated this to Mademoiselle Bassot she
lifted her saintly eyes, and, with an inimitable shrug
of her expressive shoulders, remarked that the move-
ment had outrun us all.

The Réformés No. 2 usually came on Tuesdays,
although.they were welcome at the House of the Good
Neighbor whenever they chose to come. The class
known officially as Réformés No. 2 was made up of
men who had been incapacitated for military service
by sickness, usually tuberculosis, and discharged from
the army without a pension. This designation dis-
tinguished them from the Réformés No. 1 who had
been incapacitated by wounds received in the service
and discharged with a pension. Aside from the money
allowance the man who had lost an arm or a leg was
much better off than the one who returned to his home
with an incurable infectious disease which endangered
his family as long as he lived.

A national society, known as La Protection du Ré-
formé No. 2, had been organized for the purpose of
helping these men and their families. The Levallois-
Perret applications for aid were made at the House of
the Good Neighbor. The assistance provided was of a
meager and wholly inadequate nature, but everybody
felt that these men had suffered an injustice and the
small allowance made by the society to the House of
 

SOLDIERS OF FRANCE
The Open Door 19

the Good Neighbor for distribution was eked out in
every possible way. Great pains were taken to teach
these men how to protect their families, and to prevent
the spread of the disease from which they were suffer-
ing. They were wholly incapacitated in many in-
stances, but when they were able to do any work posi-
tions were found for them which they could fill with
the smallest possible danger to the public.

Wednesdays were reserved for the entertainment
and instruction of little girls: Ouvroir des Futures
Femmes de France. On Thursdays the older girls
came in the morning and the boys in the afternoon.
The future men and women of France had been flock-
ing to that place for years. A path had been worn
by their little feet from the corner of the street
straight up the stone steps to the door. On some
occasions there were so many of them that they
literally overflowed into the walled garden at the rear
of the house.

That diminutive garden tried its best to be a play-
ground for hundreds of children and did remarkably
well for its size. War was the only game worth
while. It was declared against the Germans every
Thursday afternoon when the boys between eight and
twelve years of age assembled. To and fro they
marched and counter-marched, giving and taking
orders, charging with fixed bayonets, and crying,
“Vive la France,” and “Vive f Amerique,” whenever
they saw me at the window.

The first Battle of the Marne was fought and won
over and over again on that little backyard battle
field. The hosts of the enemy marching on Paris for
20 The House of the Good Neighbor

their Christmas dinner of 1914 were met and put to
flight. The great retreat was always a feature. With
hanging heads, but furtive, hopeful glances, they
marched slowly backward from the rear wall toward
the house which represented the prize city promised
to the Hun. And from a window in a room on the
second floor back the world looked on with bated
breath while the fate of mankind hung in the balance.

Would they never turn? There was no need for
worry. They would turn at the right time or con-
tradict the history of France. The French are a
spiritual people. They wait on inspiration which
never fails—and those were French boys. A coup
d’éclat could be depended upon at just the right mo-
ment. During the retreat a brilliant military tactic
was taking form in the mind of the commanding gen-
eral. The psychic impulse was transmitted to the
entire army. Everybody felt it—even the spectators.
Something was going to happen!

They had reached the tree near the back door.
Trees have always figured conspicuously in great
movements for liberty: witness the Charter Oak, and
the Oregon Spruce preserved by Fate to furnish planes
for the allied forces. The goal was in sight. The
enemy was overconfident. The world at the window
trembled.

“Halt!” The command was sharp and incisive.
The whole army came to attention. “Retreat no
farther, but die here for France!”

“Charge!” Around and around the tree they went,
surging forward and backward. The enemy stag-
gered, broke, turned and retreated in wild disorder,
The Open Door 21

“Vive Foch!” Down with the Boche! The rout
was complete. The imaginary cry of “Kamarad!
Kamarad!”’ was heard above the sound of battle, but
no quarter was given. The invading army was cut
to pieces, and the remnant that escaped annihilation
clambered over the rear wall, with the smell of the
savory flesh-pots of Paris in its nostrils, and beat it to
Bingen, or some other place beyond the Rhine, while
the victorious heroes marched proudly back and re-
ceived their decorations without delay in the court of
honor established on the rear steps of the House of the
Good Neighbor.

These children are natural actors. They have
artistic temperaments and vivid imaginations, other-
wise the sham battles would have been impossible, for
the very good reason that not one among them was
willing to play the Boche. The German army was an
imaginary army. The French boys would not repre-
sent the fighting men of the enemy. Naturally, they
all wanted to play Foch, but there was no difficulty in
filling the French ranks; poilu or commanding officer,
what did it matter,-so long as they were on the right
side. Indeed, it was a pretty fine thing to be a big,
hairy poilu. There isn’t a real boy in the world who
wouldn’t rather be Esau than Jacob, and there isn’t
an honest-to-goodness French boy who would play the
Crown Prince for a fortune.

The American uniform was very popular with those
young soldiers of France. Levallois was not in the
line of march toward the front, and when an American
soldier got out of the beaten path, or drifted over from
the American Ambulance Hospital at Neuilly, into
22 The House of the Good Neighbor

that town of famous perfumes and no bath tubs, he
found himself not without honor. Indeed, he was
apt to have more honor showered upon him than he
wanted. To the inhabitants he possessed all the at-
traction of a new type of hero, and no matter how
private and personal his visit might be, he gathered a
following of kiddies and arrived at his destination
with an escort that varied in number according to
whether it was before or after school hours.

This was a greater tribute than if the Mayor and all
the dignitaries had met him at the gate. It was a
spontaneous expression from the heart of the people
of the town. Whatever the fathers and mothers of
the world say in the privacy of their own homes, their
children repeat in public, and the attitude of the
French children toward the American soldier was the
best possible index of the feeling of the whole nation.

The American soldier in France during the last year
of the war looked mighty good. He looked very much
as the French soldier used to look in the United States
about 140 years ago. In addition to all of his other
attractions he had the charm of distant lands where
wonderful candies grew in war time, and by hanging
around when the mail was delivered the sugar-starved
children managed to get a substantial share of the
sweetmeats sent to their friends in the American
military and civil forces.

This friendly stranger from a strange land where
things are done on a colossal scale aroused great
expectations. Nobody knew just what he was going
todo next. His possibilities were limited only by the
imagination of a very imaginative people, and those
The Open Door 23

little hero-worshipers followed him with wide ex-
pectant eyes, confidently predicting miracles which
it was up to him to perform.

On a certain festive occasion a children’s enter-
tainment with a rather pretentious program was staged
at the House of the Good Neighbor. It was an all-
star production. The most talented youngsters avail-
able were doing their bits. The final and most
effective number was a tableau, “The Prince and the
Sleeping Beauty.” The Prince (aged nine) had just
discovered the Sleeping Beauty (aged eight) and had
struck the pose he had been practicing for at least
three weeks, when who should walk up to the door but
a Y. M. C. A. man who had just come to Paris from
the American camp near Chalons.

A man who came socially to the House of the Good
Neighbor was always an occasion for tea and cake.
An extra ration of sugar was slipped surreptitiously
into his cup in order to encourage him to return. But
this man was more than an event. He was a sensa-
tion. I should have been startled myself if I hadn’t
known that there was such a striking appearing man
in the world. He was six feet four inches tall,
straight as an arrow, and the fact that he had lost an
arm added to the effect. Standing in that seven foot
doorway he certainly presented an impressive appear-
ance. As a model for heroic militarism that Y. M.
C. A. man in uniform might successfully have com-
peted with any military figure the world has ever
produced, from Richard the Lion-Hearted to Marshal
Foch.

The tableau on the stage was instantly outclassed
24 The House of the Good Neighbor

and stopped short. The Sleeping Beauty awoke with
a start and sat up wide-eyed. The Prince lost his
pose and took on a far more interesting one that he
had not practiced. A real giant had suddenly
stepped into their fairy tale and no prince or princess
could compete with a giant for juvenile interest.

The show was over, and the children, actors and
audience, surrounded the giant from over the sea.
They examined his legs in order to be quite sure that
those tall, sustaining columns were real. They
climbed upon chairs to reach his face with their little
hands, and scrutinized the mystic triangle on his empty
sleeve, lamenting the loss, gloating over the slaughter
of the enemy that must have occurred at the time of
the sacrifice, and confidently wagering that he could
clean up a whole Boche company with one arm.

There had never been such a day at the House of
the Good Neighbor. The children refused to dis-
perse. They hung around the door until the hero
came out, and then danced at his heels down the
middle of the street because the sidewalk was not
wide enough for the company. There was no candy
or near-candy to be bought in Levallois, but every
shop on the line of march sold out all its nuts, fruits
and near-cakes, and the last we saw of that Y. M. C. A.
man in khaki, he was going toward the street-car at the
head of a troop that looked for all the world like the
procession of the Pied Piper.

Prior to April, 1917, the French were not saying
much about Americans, but after that epoch-making
month they could not say enough. How Lafayette
saved America was the favorite theme of orators from
The Open Door 25

the primary grades in the public schools to the Cham-
ber of Deputies. And, since there are “tongues in
trees” if that big tree in the little back garden at the
House of the Good Neighbor had been able to speak
our language it might have told a lot about our revolu-
tionary war. The older boys were primed on this
subject and there was a star orator among them, a
regular four-minute man about twelve years old, who
had evidently been chosen by his fellows to educate
any Americans who might chance to come their
way.
On and off the platform he was always on the job.
The American uniform was never allowed to pass
without the salute of as many voices as happened to be
in the group. “Vive l’Amerique!” those youngsters
would shout on the appearance of an American in
khaki, quickly surrounding the astonished audience of
one or two as the case might be. Then the orator
stepping briskly forward and bowing in a formal
fashion would begin at the beginning and deliver his
regular charge to Americans. The speaker’s admir-
ing compatriots were always attentive and respectful,
punctuating his periods, and sometimes anticipating
his impassioned climaxes with enthusiastic applause.

That speech usually precipitated a discussion of our
Revolutionary War, and after listening to it several
times I began to wonder what part Americans had
actually taken in the birth of our nation. I could not
understand Frencii very well, but I comprehended
what was being said. I could scarcely believe my
ears. For the first time I realized that certain phases
of the war that gave us a free and independent gov-
26 The House of the Good Neighbor

ernment are not emphasized at our regular Fourth of
July celebrations.

In America I had heard the American side, and at
the House of the Good Neighbor I heard the British
side from a highly qualified British woman of mili-
tant proclivities, and the French side from the boy
orator, who, on account of his tender years, could
frankly express the opinions which his elders might
be prompted by a sense of delicacy to withhold. We
were given full credit for starting the Revolution, but
according to young “Mirabeau” we didn’t have much
to do with the finish. The French slant on the Battle
of Yorktown sounded like an American newspaper
report of the activities of our forces on the Western
Front during the winter of 1917-18. Nothing French
was left out.

George Washington was not mentioned, but that
was our part of the story, and the Americans who
heard that speech had no doubt that he was there.
Ah, that was an epoch making French victory, and
there was nothing that delighted our souls more than
the news of a French victory. We were glad to hear
that the French forces under Lafayette and Rocham-
beau, supported by the French fleet, won the Battle
of Yorktown, thereby saving America and all the
world.

This was the grand climax. It was always received
with enthusiastic applause, in which those of us to
whom the speech was familiar joined heartily in an-
ticipation of the peroration in which we knew he was
going to say that the fate of mankind was again in
the balance, and after a hundred and forty years
The Open Door 27

Americans a million strong were crossing the ocean
in the opposite direction to pay their debt of gratitude
with interest. The finish was a eulogy of everything
American, and after listening to it the least we could
do was to waive all claims to the glory of Yorktown
in favor of the soldiers of France who crossed the
sea so long ago in slow, slow sailing ships, and died
that Liberty might live.

There was nothing in the history of the allied na-
tions that seemed to give such general satisfaction
during the recent war, as the outcome of the American
Revolution. It appears that everybody won. From
a French standpoint, the French won. According to
a new light in the British Empire, the best spirit of
Britain won, and from a purely American point of
view, every man and woman born in the United States
of whatsoever lineage, is perfectly certain that we
won.

The war had changed everything. There was
nothing old under the sun. The Monroe doctrine
had been extended to include both hemispheres and
the intervening high seas. The illusion of isolation
upon which we had been resting in fancied security,
had been knocked higher than Gilderoy’s kite, and
strange to say, we were all glad of it. The Battle
Hymn of the Republic was being sung in St. Paul’s
Cathedral, and in that French munition town the
American eagle was screaming at the top of his voice
to the tune of the Marseillaise.

That boy was a joy to Americans, but there was no
compensating comfort in the views of that soft voiced
British militant. She was a fascinating, disquieting
28 The House of the Good Neighbor

creature. She kept me mindful of my P’s and Q’s.
She referred quite casually to the American Revolu-
tion, as the victorious campaign of 1775-1781 in
the World’s War for liberty, which began in the year
one and might possibly end in the year 1920. She
always connected it with Armageddon and Runnymede
and other incidents of history too numerous to re-
member, and from her standpoint our Declaration of
Independence was a sort of supplement to Magna
Charta.

This English “cousin” of mine was a mild man-
nered woman—terribly meek, and whenever I looked
at her I felt quite certain that the meek would inherit
the earth. In a passive, immovable way she main-
tained that Washington, Pitt, Jefferson, Fox, Henry,
Hamilton and Burke, all good Britishers, were really
fighting on the same side, and that the loss of the
American Colonies was a just penalty which Britain
paid for following after strange gods. She said that
George III, the Hanoverian king of England, was
afflicted with the selfsame, hereditary, divine-right
disease that had broken out in a more malignant form
in his distant relative Wilhelm II and last, and inti-
mated placidly that George and his Junkers had led
the Huns of the eighteenth century, and that the
Hanoverians, Hessians, Hohenzollerns, Hapsburgs,
Hindenburgs, and all the H’s representing hell on
earth had been arrayed against mankind just as they
were in the current war, and that it was a lucky thing
for England and all the world, that there was enough
true blue British blood in the American Colonies to
The Open Door 29

give them a good drubbing which served them jolly
well right.

This kind of talk in a mild form was gratifying in
the beginning, but after I had heard it from every
direction and gotten the French and British varia-
tions I began to feel concerned. The outcome of the
present war gave me no uneasiness. I knew we were
going to win, but there were times when I felt that as
a nation we had better keep our wits about us or we
might lose the Revolutionary War yet.
CHAPTER III

FEERING THE MULTITUDES

Wepnespays and Thursdays were happy days at the
House of the Good Neighbor.’ Some of the children
had suffered grievously, but childhood sheds grief
and holds joy, and so they came with tripping feet,
the future men and women of France—the fathers
and mothers of twenty years from now. But where
were the fathers and mothers of to-morrow, the chil-
dren who played at the House of the Good Neighbor
twelve or fifteen years ago?

They were all fighting for France: the boys in the
army and the girls in the munition factories. The
House of the Good Neighbor had sponsored no
slackers. The young men and women who had grown
up in that atmosphere were doing their duty, and
many of their mothers and wives and widows came
to the weekly receptions that were held Saturday
afternoons.

Bons were served at these functions instead of tea
and cake. And what was a bon? A bon was a bit
of printed cardboard which could be exchanged in
the market for necessities according to the denomina-
tion of the bon. There were bons for meat, milk,
vegetables, shoes and clothing. Life was hard in
France during the war, fut the system of bons and
Feeding the Multitudes 31

bonuses, creches, canteens and allocations, made it
possible to survive.

Some of the visitors needed bons for almost
everything, and they were issued at times for strange
commodities. I recall a family consisting of a
father, mother and two children, who came for bons
for a wedding trousseau. This trousseau included a
coat for the bridegroom, a warm winter dress for the
bride, shoes and stockings for the two children and a
layette for a new member of the family who was ex-
pected in the near future. A wedding trousseau had
been provided for this same family a year before
when the winter was coming on, and this time the
House of the Good Neighbor added a marriage license
and sent a representative to the wedding.

It was sometimes my privilege to assist at these
receptions and pass bons to the visitors. One of
the most popular bons called for twenty centimes
(five cents) worth of chopped horse-meat, but owing
to personal predilection and prejudice it was im-
possible for me to pass this particular bon to a
French woman impoverished by the war, without
registering abject apology in every outward and in-
ward aspect.

Those horse-meat bons kept me awake at night.
During the day while my mind was running in a semi-
scientific rut, I realized that horse-meat was nutritious,
and argued with myself that my aversion to it was due
to silly sentiment and provincial addiction. Prefer-
ence for special diet was merely a national habit that
should not be encouraged when food was scarce.
This seemed perfectly clear. There was no other way
32 The House of the Good Neighbor

of accounting for the strange things people eat in the
different parts of the world.

Several years ago I lived at a pension in Berlin
where purple sauerkraut and pet rabbit was served
with painful regularity. Every new American was
pleased with the appearance of this unknown deli-
catessen, and accepted a generous portion, after which
he felt like reporting the matter to the health depart-
ment and suing the house for obtaining money under
false pretenses.

That high colored kraut looked so toothsome and
tasted so reactionary that it destroyed our faith in the
things made in Germany. It was surrounded by a
lovely purple liquid that always awakened delectable
memoriés in the mind of at least one person to whom
Fate had been kind and whose fortunes had been cast
in a new country where the woods were full of wild
huckleberries in summer, and the delights of real
huckleberry pie were among the many blessings.

The thought of huckleberry pie in Berlin was al-
most impossible. It required a violent stretch of the
imagination. But the vision was worth the effort, and
while the natives were consuming large quantities of
that combination of cabbage and rabbit, with mani-
fest evidence of great relish, the aforementioned per-
son indulged consoling memories and entertained an
uplifting hope for the future.

The kraut looked good. The color scheme was
perfect, but it tasted like decayed gherkin, and it is
doubtful if any of the Americans who lived at that
pension ever think of that particular indelicacy with-
out an involuntary spasm of the epiglottis, and a con-
Feeding the Multitudes 33

current feeling that whosoever was raised on such
pabulum must be “fit for treasons, stratagems and
spoils.”

But Berlin is not the only place where people eat
queer things. The conduct and cuisine of all coun-
tries is more or less queer from the standpoint and
established tastes and customs of other countries.
Rational consideration of the epicurean idiosyncrasies
of nations, expressed in bird’s nest soup, and other
alien edibles, together with anxious reflections, re-
curring with each German victory, on the fact that
the cats and dogs and all the rodents which infested
Paris were consumed during the siege of 1871 before
the city was forced by starvation to surrender to the
Prussians, tended to reconcile my mind to horse-meat
as a regular ration, but my stomach steadfastly re-
fused to capitulate to any kind of argument.

While the guests at the fine hotels in Paris were
taking on weight the country at large was hungry.
The adulteration of foods, which had formerly been
regarded as an art to be practiced in such a way as to
avoid detection on pain of penalty, had become a
patriotic necessity, and all that was left of some of
our dearest delicacies was the outward and visible
form.

On one occasion I discovered some Jordan almonds
in a most unlikely place. They were perfect in ap-
pearance: smooth, delicately tinted, and the full, al-
mond shape so clearly outlined was a thing for the
eye to feast upon. Nobody was looking, so I snapped
up the entire stock with the unworthy intention of
hoarding for the winter. In the privacy of my own
34 The House of the Good Neighbor

room I put my tooth into one of those decoy candies,
and the disappointment has destroyed my faith in
appearances forever. The outside of this imitation
sugar-coated almond was made of gelatine, but it is
doubtful if a food chemist could have determined the
precise nature of the roughage with which that fair
seeming capsule was filled. Everything that looked
good, looked bad after that. Human confidence is
easily destroyed. One taste of bitter aloes and the
weaning babe regards the fountain that has nourished
him for nine months with a longing lack of confidence.

Food was shipped into France in concentrated form
and the roughage was added locally. There was no
shortage of roughage. The saw-mills were running
night and day, and saw-dust was plentiful. It was
not necessary to add agar-agar to the porridge. And
the horses were probably wondering why they got so
many splinters in their gums, and felt so full but
hungry after meals.

My scientific training had not been entirely lost.
It sometimes helped a little. I knew quite well that
a dietary composed of articles containing hydrogen,
oxygen and nitrogen in the proper proportions, plus
certain carbonaceous substances, was capable of yield-
ing energy, rebuilding tissue, and sustaining life no
matter how they tasted, and war time was no time to
humor a fastidious appetite.

Under the circumstances my distaste for horse-meat
was inexcusable. It was nothing less than unpatri-
otic. Some of the people who came to the House of
the Good Neighbor were regular boarders at the
municipal canteen where horse-meut was served twice
Feeding the Multitudes 35

weekly. The food had not injured them, and in
order to conquer a rebellious stomach which craved
favors and indulgence in the face of famine, and to
acquire a comprehensive and sympathetic understand-
ing of what horse-meat meant to other people of pro-
nounced prejudices, I resolved to go to that canteen
and eat a dinner of horse-meat ragoit for the sake of
discipline and personal education.

In the middle of the day when my courage was at
its zenith I set out in secret so that no one might wit-
ness the possible failure of my project. The experi-
ence certainly was educational and disciplinary. In
both these respects it surpassed my expectations, and
as a triumph of pure reason over all the revolting
forces of habit and instinct, I suill maintain that horse-
meat is nutritious. I did not need anything more to
eat that day. Knowing the value of horses in France
I could not help wondering what that animal had died
from. Whether it had been killed by accident, or
had succumbed io an infectious or non-infectious dis-
ease, which as a matter of nutrition did not make the
slightest difference. The idea that an animal must be
specially slaughtered for human consumption was an-
other foible which presented itself like the last straw
at the very moment when it was most apt to turn the
scale. The meat was tough, sweetish and hard to
swallow. It tasted like imported mule. During my
conscious existence I have never eaten mule, but in
some previous incarnation I must have had that ex-
perience, because I recognized the taste instantly.

The food was prepared behind a counter in full
view. The woman who served the ragoit hot from a
36 The House of the Good Neighbor

cauldron that held about a ton, spotted me at once
and gave me the lion’s share. “Unto every one which
hath shall be given, and from him that hath not, even
that he hath shall be taken away,” and in accordance
with this tenet of injustice that female dispenser of
the city’s bounty cut down the portion of the hungry
man and woman next in line. I tried to exchange
with my fellow sufferers and although their eyes were
covetous, my lack of language and their plaguey
F i politeness prevented them from accepting my
offer.

Their patient endurance of injustice made my mis-
fortune the harder to bear. They did not resent this
flagrant show of favoritism. My portion was nothing
less than monstrous. I had twice as much as any of
those poor hungry people. I felt like the dog in the
manger, or a bloated plutocrat caught with the goods,
at least, what I think I would feel like if I were one.
Those good people tried to explain something, but I
could not understand them, and I did not find out
until afterward, that the canteen served enough for
two meals at one time, and that patrons were supposed
to come in pairs, or take half of their portions home
with them for the next meal.

My position at that table was embarrassing. There
I sat with the evidence of depriving that poor couple
of their just dues piled up on my plate, painfully con-
scious of malfeasance, but utterly unable to right the
wrong. I tried to look honest, hungry and uncon-
cerned, but a tenderfoot is a tenderfoot in Klondyke
City or Levallois-Perret, and nothing but actual ex-
perience can ever make him anything else. It was
Feeding the Multitudes 37

impossible to deceive anybody. I could not even
deceive myself. A still, small, disconcerting voice
mocked me from within.

That was a memorable meal. Whenever I think
of it I hold heroically to the thought that it was good
—and it must have been, for all my messmates on
that occasion relished it hugely. Lacking their pres-
ence and encouragement the power of mind over
matter might have failed me after the first nibble, but
with hundreds of eyes cast in my direction it was a
case of conquer or die—perhaps both. So far as the
process was entirely voluntary it was a success. It,
was easy to chew, but hard to swallow. Like Ban-
quo’s ghost it would not down. Rather, it would not
down without great difficulty.

That dinner was a foolhardy undertaking. No
conscientious cannibal ever had more qualms about
eating his favorite missionary. My decision was
irrevocable, my will resolute, but the rest of my sys-
tem was uncertain. That great sea of faces somehow
took on the undulations of the ocean. There were
waves and waves of them. Many of the men had
whiskers and the girls long hair. I felt sea-sick. In
that hazy, horsey atmosphere, the rapid growth of
whiskers seemed visible to the naked eye, and it was
easy to fancy the aspect of that multitude changing
as it does in dreams and moving pictures.

After Jack London’s “Call of the Wild,” every-
body was “harking back” to prehistoric ages, and I
had an unlettered friend who liked the idea, but did
not get the word just right. He used to “hike back”
and since that time in all imaginary excursions into
38 The House of the Good Neighbor

the dim and distant past I have preferred to “hike.”
On this occasion I “hiked back” about ten million
years without the slightest effort and imagined myself
seated among my bewhiskered forebears at a tribal
barbecue—the feast of the hippophagians.

That place was redolent of horse-meat ragoiit.
Whenever I passed it afterward I could smell it for a
block. Other kinds of meat were served there, but it
was always horse to me, and I cannot even write about
it without experiencing a sympathetic salivation due
to that self-afflicted outrage against my established
sensibilities. But there is no doubt that horse-meat
will sustain life. Every logical cell in my cerebrat-
ing system argues on the affirmative side of this ques-
tion, while something stronger than logic or reason—
an insubordinate power with a center of control lo-
cated in the hypogastric region takes the negative and
sticks to it with a tenacity which must have its origin
in instinct. Hippophagy and anthropophagy are
manifestly related words. They look equally bad on
paper. And to a person who has enjoyed the loving
companionship of men, women, and horses, a hippo-
phagist seems well on the way to cannibalism.

That restaurant was operated by the Maire and
served about two thousand meals a day at less than
cost. There was a charge of eighty centimes (twenty
cents) for two meals, luncheon and dinner, when
people could pay that amount, and if they had no
money they were not turned away without food. This
double portion was served at one time, and patrons
were not permitted to take one meal at half the price.
Feeding the Multitudes 39

Children were the favored class. Their parents were
permitted to provide for them at a fifty per cent. dis-
count. A stream of women and children passed in
and out carrying away family portions in pans and
buckets. Food purchased in this way cost less than
the amount of fuel which would be required to cook
it in their own homes. The menu at this canteen was
varied. In addition to the piéce de résistance there
was always soup, bread, vegetables, rice, and salad or
fruit to be had for a small extra charge.

The Socialists were running an opposition canteen
on the same street, known as the Restaurant de la
Maison Commune (Syndicat Socialiste) Confédéra-
tion Général du Travail, and if I have omitted any of
the title under which this eating house was operated, it
is not because I have the slightest desire to favor the
establishment conducted by the city government. My
sympathies were with the Socialist Canteen. I had
not eaten there. The Femme de Charge—lI refer to
the acting female major-domo—said that the food
was much better than that served at the municipal
canteen and offered to prove it, but I had inside in-
formation regarding that place and a comparative
test was not necessary to convince me of the truth of
her assertion. Besides I was loth to prove the matter
personally. One experience was enough. Her
statement was reasonable. It would be poor politics
for the Syndicat Socialiste to permit the city to give
more for the money than it was doing. This would
be fatal to all its hopes and ambitions for the future.
What would be the use of changing parties and per-
40 The House of the Good Neighbor

sons in power, if on the very face of existing condi-
tions it was a case of six of one and half dozen the
other?

It was not horse-meat day at the Socialist Canteen.
That was an unfair advantage. The major-domo
pointed with pride to her shining cauldrons, and delv-
ing to the bottom of the largest with a big ladle,
brought up real mutton stew containing onions, carrots
and other luxuries. An appeal to abstract reason
may be good politics in places where the inhabitants
have had enough to eat for so long that they take food
for granted as they do water from the mountains, and
their unsatisfied desires are chiefly academic. But
where primitive needs have not lost their pinch, and
people think straight from hand to mouth, mutton stew
with carrots and onions is a very convincing argu-
ment. Those canteens were not far apart, and they
ought to be good places to board for about a month
before elections.

The Cantine Ecole des Garcons was supplied by the
municipal restaurant, but I did not know this and
my prejudices were not aroused when the serving
woman came into the dining-room of a large school
for boys with an immense pot full of beef ragoiit.
The dinner call was sounded and the boys came crowd-
ing in, exchanging vigorous nudges, elbow thrusts,
friendly kicks and other evidences of fraternal feel-
ing. They were a pretty cheerful looking crew in
spite of the somber black coveralls, which they were
surely compelled to wear to protect their suits, for no
boy would wear a pinafore from choice. Each one
had a school-bag strung over his shoulder containing
Feeding the Multitudes Al

his plate, spoon, bread, beverage, and in some cases,
fruit. There were a few bottles of milk which must
have been prescribed by a physician, because milk
was hard to procure except for babies, but most of
the boys brought sour cider, or some kind of cheap
wine.

The ragoiit was manifestly made according to Huck
Finn’s favorite recipe: a sufficient quantity of all the
alimentary materials necessary for growth, heat and
the replenishment of the normal waste of tissue had
evidently been put into the pot and boiled together
with appetizing condiments. There was great joy
when the lid came off and the room was filled with
ragoiitant, mouth-watering odors. Some of the best
parts of the stew volatilized charging the atmosphere
with invisible particles very gratifying to the olfactory
nerves of most of those present. The air seemed rich
and satisfying and the boys took long inhalations with
unmistakable exhibitions of approval. They were
hungry and the combination seemed to strike them
just right. It was highly nutritious, and it certainly
possessed a savor and flavor rarely developed by the
most fastidious preparations of food.

The culinary art for which France is justly famous
had not been reduced by the war to ragoiit and nothing
but ragoiit. A few real chefs who had survived the
hazards of their profession to the ripe old age of
military superannuation (fifty-five years) were still
running cookstoves in cuisines instead of forges in
munition factories.

These kitchen treasures served only in very select
places where people who were not averse to employing
42 The House of the Good Neighbor

large private means for the purpose of gratifying per-
sonal appetites could actually procure a roast pheasant
setting on little baked potatoes and other delicacies
in gravy, garnished with its own gorgeous, bright
hued wings outspread, shining glass eyes, and head
up-stuck on a flexible wire, “au naturel’”—so much
so indeed, that the first impulse of the novitiate was
to seize the bird lest it fly away.

Nothing in peace times ever looked or tasted half
so good as such a pheasant served in a warm room to
an accompaniment of sweet sounds. Of course it was
unfair to feel warm in a country where most people
were shivering, and to eat pheasant where most people
were hungry, but it was certainly very agreeable in a
purely personal way. Unfortunately, worldly experi-
ences, no matter how promising, are not apt to assay
one hundred per cent. bliss, and like the offending fly
in the ointment some of those feathers had to drop off
and get into the gravy.

The few places that still catered to the gourmet
represented a very small phase of life in France, but
the canteen was a national institution. It was not
provided with broilers and divers cooking conveni-
ences; boiling required less fuel, and ragoiit was the
strong staff upon which it leaned in foul or fair
weather. There were all kinds and conditions of
canteens in every part of the country: canteens for
the soldiers; canteens for the officers; canteens for the
school children; canteens for working women at the
factories; canteens for prospective and nursing
mothers; municipal canteens for Tom, Dick and
Feeding the Multitudes 43

Harry, their wives, widows and all their family con-
nections.

With the advent of the American Red Cross and
the Y. M. C. A., luxurious canteens were opened
where the French poilus ate oysters and other deli-
cacies for a change occasionally. Canteens, mobile
and stationary, followed the American Expedi-
tionary Forces, serving American sandwiches, hot
cakes, canned fruit from the Pacific Coast, and
finally, to meet the last need of a highly developed
service, the Salvation Army appeared in the War Zone
bringing the homey doughnut, and life in France
from a canteen standpoint was complete.
CHAPTER IV

OUR SAINTS

On All Saints’ Day our saints all went to church be-
fore the first gray streak of dawn. Our saints were
real saints in spite of their protestations to the con-
trary and their single-hearted devotion to mundane
matters, or rather, because of this consecration. Se-
clusion was not conducive to their kind of sainthood.
It was perfectly safe for them to be out alone. In-
deed, they were apt to be out alone at any time of the
day or night when anybody was in need of help, and
early in the morning on Sundays and other holy
days, they could be heard groping down the stairs on
their way to church. One by one they might have
been seen gliding swiftly and silently along the murky
streets by the cold stone walls, if the darkness and fog
had not concealed them so completely from view.

When such women leave their warm beds and go
to a cold church before six o’clock on a dark winter
morning with a shawl over their heads, they go for
religious reasons. They go to pray—and their
prayers are answered. They are given the spiritual
strength to answer them themselves. Our saints
prayed for France in her darkest hour, and then they
went out and worked for France and their strength
and endurance was far more than physical.

On All Souls’ Day, the day set apart for religious
Our Saints 45

commemoration and intercession for the souls of the
faithful departed, our saints, no doubt, said a special
prayer for their own dead. They were all in mourn-
ing. A glance into the Notre Dame and other cathe-
drals on that day gave one an idea of the extent of the
bereavement of the nation. Thousands of women
knelt in the dim aisles with bowed heads, their long,
black veils falling around them to the floor. Mothers
were praying for the souls of their sons, widows for
their husbands, sisters for their brothers, sweethearts
for their lovers, and many a woman with a babe in
her arms, unmindful of her own great need, saluted
the Madonna and child and prayed for the father of
her little one.

Saint Matilde, the chief of the visiting nurses at
the House of the Good Neighbor, had no official patent
of saintship. She will not be eligible for beatifica-
tion until after she dies. But a saint is a saint re-
gardless of ceremony, and I recognize one the instant
I see her working with the sick. Our head nurse had
a Mona Lisa smile, a mortal beam in her eye, and
other outward and visible signs of an understanding
soul. She systematically fluoroscoped everybody,
including her friends, and smiled sympathetically as
though she loved humanity because she found it so
human and full of faults of flesh and spirit, and so
ready to be redeemed by the right kind of a redeemer.

Perhaps Matilde was ambitious. Who knows?
Ambition takes such strange and varied forms. Some
women are ambitious to scintillate socially. They
spend real energy on this futility. Others would be
central stars in the movie sphere. Many long for
46 The House of the Good Neighbor

wealth and power, and in her secret soul Matilde may
have been a climber. I hope so. The static
temperament is so dull and monotonous. Climbers
are always dynamic, and I strongly suspect that Saint
Matilde was ambitious to climb to heaven itself.
Suffering humanity was her chosen ladder, and at
every step she seemed to pause while she pulled her
ladder up with her.

She was a cheerful, comforting sort of a saint, and
in the reconstruction of the world which is to follow
the war it is to be hoped that there will be more like
her. Orthodox saints are a sorry looking lot. They
seem so repentant. Their pictures probably do them
injustice. Perhaps the sins of the artists are immor-
talized in the beautifully penitent faces of the saints
they paint. This is unfair. It is impossible to look
at some of these masterpieces without living over our
transgressions, and wondering what the artist had on
his conscience which he expressed in the face of a
perfectly innocent saint.

Saint Matilde was a delicate woman and I used
sometimes to take her slender wrists in my strong
hands and hold her so that she could not move just to
exhibit my superior strength,—but she had real
woman power. In the daily endurance test she was
always on duty long after I was exhausted. Her
work was never done. Her hours were like the hours
of the mother of a large family: all day long, and
subject to call whenever any one needed help at night.

Her eyelids were usually weary at the late dinner
hour, but when she raised them, there was the twinkle,
the beam, the radiant spark of a blithe spirit.
Our Saints 47

Heroism in the different branches of human service
is largely a matter of habit and fidelity to duty. It
is part of the day’s work. Saint Matilde knew that
the tubercle bacillus is the most deadly enemy of man-
kind, and yet she went without fear into all the nests
of tuberculosis reported at the dispensary. Her life
was spent amid the mortal wreckage of this disease,
and in order to help these unfortunate people and to
teach them how to protect the uninfected members of
their families, she lived among them exposed to all
the dangers from which she would safeguard them.
The other nurses were as faithful, but she was the
head, the inspiration, the teacher and leader of the
visiting nurses in the anti-tuberculosis work. She did
not direct these activities from a safe place—she led,
and I sometimes followed ‘into abodes of wretchedness
that words cannot describe.

The House of the Good Neighbor had naturally
engaged in the anti-tuberculosis crusade. _In trailing
the sick and unfortunate this disease had been found
at the end of every blind alley. It is a cruel agent of
death. It does not kill in a clean, straightforward
way like meningitis, or a swift obliviating bullet, but
leads its victim step by step through every grade of
human misery that ends at the Potter’s Field. It
gradually saps his strength and reduces him to
poverty. Instead of the proud supporting member
of his family, he becomes a burden and a danger to
them in their hard struggle. Love rarely stands the
test. It usually turns to dread in their eyes and his
cup of bitterness is full when he realizes that they
want him to get well or die. He moves from com-
48 The House of the Good Neighbor

fortable quarters steadily down the line from
wretchedness to greater wretchedness, spreading this
insidious pestilence along the way. Without means
of a fair living he cannot shake it off, and before it
finally lets him go, it fastens itself upon some other
members of his household, making the process con-
tinuous. Did I say that his cup of bitterness was
full? Well, it overflows when this happens and he
goes to his death knowing that he has lived long
enough to destroy his family.

So many tubercular people were coming for help
to the House of the Good Neighbor that it was found
necessary to open a dispensary and this was done
under the supervision of Doctor Louis Guinon, one of
the most distinguished specialists in France, who gave
his services two mornings every week.

There were about sixty patients at the dispensary
on the day it opened. Those examined and found to
be tubercular were given the best treatment possible
under the circumstances. Medicines were of little
value. The need was for food, sunshine, rest, free-
dom from anxiety, and segregation of the sick to pre-
vent the disease from infecting others. It was an
impossible task.

In connection with this service we visited six homes
on the following day. The history cards suggested
the places where the need for help was most urgent.
In each of these nests of tuberculosis one or more
persons had died from the disease, and one or more
cases had developed from these sources of infection.
These poor people were living and coughing and ex-
pectorating in crowded quarters. They shivered at
Our Saints 49

the suggestion of a draft. Fresh air was cold and
damp, and there was no fuel available in France to
heat these dank and mildewed habitations. Many of
the large buildings had not been dried out since the
beginning of the war. The cold stones seemed to
sweat and the moisture ran down the walls. Body
heat was too precious to be wasted through the win-
dows, and the close personal contact between the sick
and the well, together with undernourishment and
overwork, made these hutches regular breeding holes
for this fair seeming plague that has survived
cholera, small-pox and other comparatively kindly
allies of more hideous outward mien.

The sanitary conditions surrounding most of these
places were unspeakable. There were no plumbers
or carpenters to keep old tenements in repair. Such
places were bad enough before the war, and with most
of the men and women of value at the front or in the
factories these buildings went to rack and ruin in
very short order. Drainage from ordinary household
operations ran down the outside walls and through the
courts into the street gutters, and there were reeking,
leaking open toilets that it was impossible to approach
without soiling one’s shoes. The filth was indescrib-
able and the flies had evidently developed a resistance
to winter weather, for they were swarming and active
in spite of the lateness of the season.

In, perhaps, the worst rookery we visited, one child
had died of pulmonary tuberculosis, another of
meningeal tuberculosis, a third, suffering from Potts’
Disease had been sent to a sanitarium, a fourth ex-
hibited a withered leg and an ankylosed ankle, due to
50 The House of the Good Neighbor

tubercular arthritis, and a fifth poor little wraith of a
child was still uninfected. This family lived in one
damp, dirty room, and long suffering had evidently
crushed the spirit of the mother and left her indiffer-
ent to her surroundings and to anything that Fate might
have in store for her in this world or the world here-
after.

The next place was cleaner and drier but the out-
look was about the same. The difference was the
difference between the beginning and the end of such
a scourge. A young mother and six children were
living intwo rooms. This woman was the widow of a
Reforme No. 2, who had contracted tuberculosis in the
army and had been sent home for that reason. It was
a pity he had not been killed in action. But luck
was against the poor fellow. He lived a year, re-
duced his family to abject poverty, and left them as a
legacy, not the Croix de Guerre with its reflected glory
and accompanying pension, but the peste de guerre
that he had brought home from the trenches.

One little boy was hopelessly infected, and his
sister, a picture of health, who had been sent to a
preventorium in the country six months before had
just been returned to the nest. This entire family of
seven slept in the larger of the two small rooms, and
the mother who occupied the bed with the sick child
had become infected.

In another of these tubercular homes there was a
family of nine living in three small rooms. This
apartment was in a foundation. It was more com-
fortable and better in every way than the other places
described. The father of this family was a tuber-
Our Saints 51

cular Reforme No. 2. This man had tuberculosis
when he joined the army and as soon as it was dis-
covered he was sent home. The mother, who was
probably the source of infection, had the lingering
form of this disease. She had been suffering from
hemorrhages and was very pale, feeble and emaciated
in appearance. Eight children had been born to
these people, and they must have enjoyed a special
immunity, for although they had lived all their lives
exposed to this contagion they had miraculously es-
caped infection.

Three times three is not always a lucky number. In
the Rue Pasquier there was another family of nine, the
father, mother, uncle and six children crowded into
two small damp rooms. Filth and misery was their
portion. One of the men had been blinded in battle.
He had a book printed in relief, the Braille method,
and was trying to learn to read by the sense of touch.

As a human habitation this place was the last word
in wretchedness. It opened on a foul court behind a
public wine shop. Drainage from the building flowed
through the court into the street. One of those
antique toilets of “old Roman construction” which
served the patrons of the saloon and also the tenants
of the building in the rear, stood at the front and only
entrance of this incredible hutch. The place cannot
be described. From a sanitary standpoint it was a
revelation. Picking my way from cobble-stone to
cobble-stone I resolved to be more frugal in the use
of the superlative. It should be carefully conserved.
In making reports on sanitary conditions the time is
apt to come when it is badly needed, and the ensemble
52 The House of the Good Neighbor

of that ungodly hole proved how mistaken were my
previous conclusions that some of the others were the
worst possible.

Those plague spots were very populous. Flocks
of children followed us through the narrow alleys.
The more unsanitary and dangerous to life and health
the places were the more children were in evidence.
Poor kiddies! The world is very cruel to its help-
less little ones. No wonder the death-rate among
them in all big cities is so high. Under existing con-
ditions the average couple cannot afford a family.
Children inevitably drag them down to the lowest
depths of poverty, and it naturally follows that the
largest families inhabit these unlivable holes. Pru-
dent, voluntarily sterile couples are not found in these
wretched places. So long as they have no children
they are able to live comfortably on their earnings.
Of course their lives are impoverished in another way,
but they are not obliged to watch their babies suffer
and die. Children should bring joy to their parents
—joy that more than compensates for the sacrifice in-
volved in their care. But a family reduced to living
in a sty on a wholly inadequate stipend cannot be
happy or healthy, and it soon begins to adjust itself to
its environment by dying off. And meanwhile men
—comfortable men,

“In fair round belly with good capon lined,
With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws and modern instances,”

sit on commissions and seriously consider the alarm-
ingly low birth-rate, and high death-rate among chil-
Our Saints 53

dren. The cause and remedy are so obvious that they
are hard to evade. It is difficult for these gentlemen
who are so well supported by their brothers, to nega-
tively disclaim responsibility for their brother’s chil-
dren, in the fatuous or sophistical reports and recom-
mendations that are made from time to time. One of
the measures suggested in France to encourage the
birth-rate is to bestow a medal upon the heads of large
families. But a medal won’t pay the milk bill, and
when every child that is given to a nation becomes a
step up the social ladder for the family, as it ought
to be, instead of a step down toward poverty, sickness
and death, that nation will not need to worry about
its birth-rate.

Saint Matilde loved these poor little ones, and they
instinctively sensed the sentiment and flocked around
her striving to touch her hand, or kiss her cheek when
she leaned toward them. As an expression of affec-
tion, personal contact seems necessary to the French
temperament. The children kiss and caress each
other, and while this evidence of tenderness is touch-
ing, a sanitarian cannot help feeling that this prac-
tice may be a factor in the spread of disease.

A preventorium was conducted at Dinard Bay in
connection with this work where anemic children
from tubercular families were sent for the purpose of
building up their constitutions, augmenting their
strength and resistance and in this way decreasing
the probability of the development of the disease.
The effect of this treatment tended to demonstrate that
tuberculosis is largely a matter of fair living, for the
children grew strong and rosy at the preventorium
54 The House of the Good Neighbor

where they romped and slept in the open, and had
plenty of wholesome, nutritious food, and declined
very soon after they were returned to their wretched
homes. Whenever it was possible the parents of these
children contributed a pittance toward their support
at the preventorium. The amount was not sufficient
to swell the budget, but it had a tendency to stimulate
a family sense of responsibility for the health of its
members. In the cases of mobilized fathers the chil-
dren’s allocations were contributed.

Terrestrial saints are usually serene, self-subjugated
souls. They conquer personal pride, but this incen-
tive to worldly achievement is not lost, it simply suf-
fers a “change into something rich and strange.” It
often takes the form of institutional pride, and crops
out quite frequently in municipal and national mani-
festations. I had seen the worst part of Levallois,
and perhaps that was the reason I was led around to
the Mairie—the pride and glory of the city.

It was a fine stone building at the head of a street.
The setting had been carefully selected and embel-
lished. Architectural dignity and artistic harmony
had not been sacrificed for the sake of economy of
space. This was the center of municipal activity, and
the perfection of the plan was in keeping with the
magnitude of the purpose.

Coming from the abyss of poverty and humiliation
I found it impossible to approach this impressive edi-
fice without steadily dwindling in my own estimation
at every step. No wonder people suffered without
complaint. No wonder they came to the House of the
Good Neighbor in their distress. Why should a mere
Our Saints 55

individual, a unit, less than a unit, a cipher, worse
than a cipher, a liability, a figure on the wrong side
of the ledger, consider himself of sufficient importance
to ask for personal attention at such a place. This
was the cold heart of the great city, the streets leading
out in every direction were arteries, and the stream
of people were mere corpuscles carrying life to every
part of the system.

The affairs of the town were administered at this
building. A long line of women, approximately two
hundred, were waiting for their sugar, coal and bread
cards—for official permission to purchase their lawful
allowance of these articles. Coupons were attached
to these cards and torn off by the grocer at the time of
purchase and kept as a record to show that sales had
not been illegally made.

At the Bureau de Bienfaisance a large number of
people were waiting for relief of different kinds al-
lowed by the Mairie. At one of the windows stood a
line of women soon to become mothers. They were
waiting for the pittance, one franc fifty centimes daily,
provided by the city for indigent women unable to
work, for four weeks prior to their confinements.
There is usually difficulty regarding this benefit as it
is contingent upon the applicant quitting work, and it
is impossible to foretell just when the expected birth
will take place, and therefore difficult to procure data
that will satisfy the bureaucrat on this point.

The patience of Job was a perfectly human mani-
festation. He was sadly afflicted, and forbearance
comes with affliction. Many of those people in the
Mairie had been waiting for hours, but there was not
56 The House of the Good Neighbor

the slightest sign of impatience. Time is the stuff
that life is made of, and the deliberate manner in
which the French official kills the time of the people
he is employed to serve, seems nothing less than cold-
blooded murder to an American.

The Grand Salle des Fétes was an attractive recep-
tion hall. There was a stage at one end for speakers,
and an official looking platform for marriages and
other ceremonies at the opposite side of this salon.
My attention was particularly directed to the ceiling
decorations, and I gazed rapturously upward and en-
deavored to simulate just the right degree of appre-
ciation to save myself from being classed with the
untutored American savage who still exists in the
French mind. Those decorations may have been
good or bad. They certainly looked good to me, and
in view of the fact that they were on the ceiling of a
great reception hall of a public building in France, it
is quite safe to pronounce them good.

But the plumbing—words fail me. My com-
panions were loth to show me the plumbing of that
fine building, and I was obliged to resort to subterfuge
in order to find out whether or not it ranked with the
frescoes. In point of antiquity, I think the plumbing
should be given precedence. The frescoes were
probably copied from some of the works of the Renais-
sance, but the plumbing fixtures were of the classical
old Roman pattern, such as I vaguely remembered
having seen on exhibition in the museum at Pompeii.

France is rich in treasures of art, and whenever the
conversation at the House of the Good Neighbor took
a turn that placed my country at a disadvantage, I put
Our Saints 57

on the armor of sweet humility and endeavored tact-
fully to introduce the subjects of plumbing, wash-
boards and sewing machines. These are the things
wherein our genius is expressed and our women in-
cidentally saved from drudgery. This is where we
shine. The only fourteenth century cathedrals we
-have to boast of, are those we left on the other side
of the Atlantic, but we certainly can point with pride
to our twentieth century plumbing, and every person
who has served in France will cheerfully bear.witness
that we have something to be proud of.

American plumbing was my strength and my weak-
ness. It sometimes stirred me to indiscreet enthu-
siasm. It is easy for a person who is obliged to bathe
in a dishpan to develop a perfectly fine frenzy over
our bathroom fixtures. Reticence is an effective
guard and shield, but when plumbing was mentioned I
occasionally lost control of my tongue and risked the
imputation of American boastfulness.

As a nation we surely are boastful. In this respect
we are like the countries we sprang from, but our
boasting takes a new form. Age exhibits strange de-
light in the things of the past, and boasts reservedly of
ruins and catacombs, while the joyous voice of youth
proclaims the skyscrapers of the present and the still
greater skyscrapers of the future. Men might boast
of commercial supremacy, or military prowess but I
boasted woman-fashion of the great American Electric
washing machine, a mechanical contrivance for sav-
ing women from the back-breaking, soul-shriveling
drudgery of washing clothes by hand.

The story of Aladdin’s Lamp did very well for an
58 The House of the Good Neighbor

age when miracles were a matter of the imagination,
but this is the age of real miracles, and to women in
France where knuckle-washing is still practiced, the
story of standing on a ranch in the wild west, or in the
frozen zone of Alaska, and pressing a button and
having the washing done, puts Aladdin’s Lamp away
back behind the Pyramids where it belongs.
CHAPTER V

TWO ENGLISH WOMEN A GENERATION FROM “HOME”

THE occupants of the House of the Good Neighbor
were not all saints. There was one English woman
to whom casual reference has already been made.
She was called “Brother Wolf’ after the savage wolf
of Gubbio converted by St. Francis of Assisi. This
wolf, a terrible man-eater, decimated the population.
of Gubbio until St. Francis went out to meet him and
brought him home, tame and gentle, to spend the rest
of his life with the brothers in the monastery. He
was christened “Brother Wolf” and died some years
later after a holy and edifying life.

The trouble with our wolf was that she had never
been converted, and as for her leading a holy and
edifying life, well, discretion is the better part of
valor, and this is the point where self-preservation,
the first law of nature, prompts me to hold my tongue
in the side of my cheek. She recognized me in-
stinctively and assigned me a place among the animals
with herself and the prime minister (the tiger).
Because I had the habit of pacing up and down, and
my coat was brown with a tawny breast, instead of
striped or spotted, she put me in the panther class.
Our dens in the menagerie were adjoining and for

several months we did our best to live up to our totems.
59
60 The House of the Good Neighbor

She was an exasperating person, with a frail body
and the dauntless soul of a suffragette. I was very
fond of her—at times. She was quite harmless ex-
cept when she seemed so. Suave politeness is a
danger signal in one of English blood. I know the
breed. Whenever she manifested an affirmatively
meek attitude, I was on guard. The tone of her voice
was soft and caressing at such times, and the genteel
inflection with which she pronounced the word “bour-
geois” carried a subtle personal intimation which al-
ways made it difficult for me to control the risible
muscles of my tattle-tale countenance. She was deli-
cate, obdurate, and had many of the irritating old
English peculiarities which were part of my own in-
heritance, plus the French phobia for drafts. Her
lineage was half French, and although she had lived
in France the greater part of her life, England was
still “home.”

I was English too, it seemed, in spite of my protes-
tations to the contrary. My mother was from Ports-
mouth and my father from Kent. That settled it.
What is a mere matter of locality in which a person
happens to be born, live and vote, compared with the
generations that have given him blood, bone and
brain? A woman might be born in Timbuktu and
exercise citizenship in that benighted place, but that
would not make her Timbuktuese. Kipling was born
in India—and was there ever such an Englishman?
There was no chance for argument; no question of
nationality. I was English, and ought to be dashed
glad of it. There were times when I felt like a poor
relation—a rapatrie. She recognized me as a fellow-
A Generation from “Home” 61

countrywoman, accepted me as such, and proved her
good-will by ill-treating me as one of the family.

While she was tolerant of my Americanisms, she
conscientiously rebuked them, gently, subtly, insist-
ently, and her constructive criticism indicated that
she hoped to restore my hereditary type in all its
perfection. This experiment was not a success, but
the lady did not change her mind regarding my nation-
ality. As time went on her original opinion was more
than confirmed, and she finally concluded that I was
“steeped to the knees in pigheadedness” and so true
to type, so impossibly English that I was a hopeless
“Yank.”

She felt quite certain that my fresh air madness
would be the death of her before the end of the
winter. Every evening before going to bed I opened
my window and a gale blew in. During the entire
night this dank, miasmatic air whirled around my
room seeking whom it might enshroud. Most of it
went up the chimney, but a tempestuous gust all too
frequently escaped under my door, swept the inter-
vening corridor and invaded her private chamber
through the key-hole and the narrow but extensive
chink that surrounded the entire entrance.

This was dangerous and she protested repeatedly.
We argued the matter in good old English, family
fashion. My father was from Kent and my mother
from Portsmouth, and these genuine British felicita-
tions reminded me of my childhood and awakened
the inherited instincts which probably originated
away back before the time when King Cnut sat on
the beach at Ramsgate and disputed with the tide.
62 The House of the Good Neighbor

Finally we agreed that no consistent protagonist of
self-determination could deny the inalienable human
right of committing suicide in the manner most agree-
able. My “Brother Wolf” conceded this cheerfully,
but she contended that it was a prerogative which by
no means carried the additional privilege of endanger-
ing others incidentally.

As an affirmative expression of outward respect for
opinions regarding which I entertained private reser-
vations, I endeavored to control the atmosphere in
my apartment. But so long as the breeze was ad-
mitted, wanton whiffs continued to escape into the
hall, and one day I heard a tapping, a tapping at my
chamber door accompanied by a soft recurring cough,
and peeping out I discovered a Reforme No. 2 with
hammer and tacks, who had sealed every crack and
cranny of my door and that of my neighbor with strips
of felt, and from that time on I had all “the rheumy
and unpurged air” admitted through my window for
my own exclusive use.

“Brother Wolf” was the last surviving member of
a family that had been prominent as revolutionists
and reformers. She was the final genealogical flicker
of a light that had burned with a steady flame of
beneficence through successive generations. Out of
the dissolution of the house of her fathers there re-
mained a remnant of a fine library, a few pictures,
several pieces of furniture, and some rare bits of
bric-a-brac. She herself seemed part of the
reliquiz: an isolated human fragment — the last dis-
connected segment of a family that had been identified
A Generation from “Home” 63

with the history of England and France for a long,
long time.

She was not interested in social work except the
great social work that her forefathers had helped to
plan and execute. The letters of Garibaldi to her
grandfather, which were carefully preserved in an
antique cabinet with communications of equal mo-
ment to her great-grandfather, meant far more to her
than the important current correspondence between
the House of the Good Neighbor and different agencies
working for the present and future of the French
people. She conceded the value of this service, but
the cost was too high. Her family history, confirmed
by years of personal observation of the self-sacrifice
of the beautiful Marie-Jeanne and her co-workers,
was convincing proof that mankind amounted to just
one perverse and crooked generation after another.
Ingratitude was the inevitable reward of such devo-
tion, and the thing to do was to beat the Boche, and
then let the rest of the world go to perdition, each and
every individual by his own personally selected and
particular route.

Hidden away on the second floor back of the House
of the Good Neighbor, in that wretched street where
poverty looked out of every window, there was a little
treasury of a room where “Brother Wolf” served tea
in dainty cups that like herself had seen better days,
but never better service. Her affluent patronesses,
and all sorts of persons, took after-dinner coffee, and
with scant appreciation of the blessings of belonging
to the first generation recruited from the ranks, cast
64 The House of the Good Neighbor

furtive, yearning glances at the unmistakable evi-
dences of hereditary upper-tendom.

We were glad that the House of the Good Neighbor
gave so many dinners to rich people in the interest of
the poor. This joy was not on account of their com-
pany, although they were good company; nor on
account of reflected social prestige, for in this respect
we were without ambition. Lineally speaking, the
lady with the pedigree had run the gamut socially, and
was well on the way back to the point beyond which I
had never ascended. But we were glad of these din-
ners because we were a hungry pair of animals and
the regular fare was nothing to boast of; but for days
after these special repasts, particularly when our
lucky stars were in the ascendant, and some of the
expected guests failed to appear, we lived like princes
on the fat of the land, or rather like Lazarus on the
leavings of the rich man’s table.

Mademoiselle Bassot had the soul of a French
“sister.” She was inspired with that fervent, single-
hearted devotion to an ideal that has led so many of
the gentlest women of France to the uttermost ends of
the earth. Her ruling passion was the welfare of
little children upon which the fate of any nation de-
pends. Experience had convinced her that in order
to help a child it was necessary to begin with its father
and mother as early as possible and to work with-them
intimately and with boundless love even as they
worked with their children. To this end she hoped to
be able to establish social centers evolved on the idea
of the House of the Good Neighbor in every poverty
stricken arrondissement of Paris.
A Generation from “Home” 65

Such ambitious plans required funds, and in the
interest of the poor and disinherited, our lady gave
dinners to the rich and influential. These dinners
were served in the combination-room: the reception-
room, dining-room and audience chamber where at
other times the unfortunates who came for help and
counsel were received. On these festal occasions the
procession of misery made up of Réformés No. 2,
helpless widows with their fatherless children, and all
kinds of people sick and in distress, was temporarily
deflected. The windows were opened, the atmosphere
was changed and there was nothing to indicate the
common usage of the banquet-room, except the germs
of disease that in the mind’s microscopic eye could
easily be discerned clinging to the walls and draperies
with tooth and toe-nail.

Far be it from me to affirm positively that our lady
was wholly actuated by a high ulterior motive. But
those of us who lived in the House of the Good
Neighbor knew the theme of her existence and we
knew that it ran through every variation of her life.
Several French, English and American women of
wealth had contributed toward the fulfillment of her
heart’s desire and she was grateful to them. She
liked to have them come and bring their friends.
These were new “prospects.” On such momentous
occasions she personally supervised the cooking of the
dinner and washed the spinach with her own hands,
and while she graciously served her guests the best
food that could be provided, ten thousand hungry
children pleaded through her wistful eyes.

Not all of these people were kind. Some of them
66 The House of the Good Neighbor

had stony faces. They ate the bread of orphans and
their hearts were not touched. This always roused
the original ferocity in the soul of “Brother Wolf,”
and our mutual instinct was to go out and stalk them
at some dark place. Indeed on these occasions I felt
quite sure that her precious pedigree was no better
than mine. Something stirred within me, and while
I lacked the loot to prove it, the deep ancestral urge
that prompted me to go out and hold up those people
gave me an exalted feeling of having descended—
descended is the right word—in a direct line from
Robin Hood or one of his associates in that delight-
fully romantic age when plutocrats carried their capi-
tal with them. In those good old days big business
was done between taverns on the turnpike, and the
conscientious qualms of wholesale operators were
assuaged, even as now, by bestowing a modicum of
the booty on the poor.
CHAPTER VI

THE FALLING BIRTH-RATE

One of the wonders of the war is the way in which
women have lifted the burden of labor from the
shoulders of men and set them free to fight. There
is an atavistic suggestion in this achievement. In the
ages when tribal existence made it necessary for men
to devote their energies to fighting and hunting, women
did all the work. As civilization advanced men laid
aside their arms and relieved women of the heavier
tasks of life. The industries were gradually taken
from the homes and hands of women and developed
along all lines. Seemingly separate spheres were
created for the sexes. But men and women cannot
advance or retrograde without each other. Wherever
they go they go together, and while women had not
been actively engaged in many of the industries, they
had marched sympathetically along by the side of
their men, and they possessed the latent ability to do
the work of the world. It takes ages to evolve from a
lower to a higher state, but it seems that reversion can
be accomplished over night. Like a world of demons
men suddenly relapsed to barbarism on a colossal
scale, and with amazing aptitude women took up their
old, new load and staggered along.

The outbreak of the ae was followed by general
6
68 The House of the Good Neighbor

industrial disorder, and the people who depended
upon their daily labor were temporarily destitute.
Men were called to arms, and women were called to
take their places where it seemed physically possible.
This was comparatively easy for women without chil-
dren, but the readjustment was very: difficult for the
mothers of families. These women were confronted
with a choice of evils. If they worked in the factories
their children were neglected, and if they did not
work their children were hungry. In this crisis there
was no class of women who needed work so much as
the mothers of helpless children, and no class had
such a hard time getting appropriate employment.
Their double tasks naturally resulted in relative in-
efficiency. They were always the last chosen and the
first dismissed. A prospective or nursing mother was
at a great disadvantage. No working woman ad-
mitted that she was enceinte so long as she could con-
ceal the fact, because she was usually discharged, or
given less important work with smaller pay. The
wives of soldiers had the military allocations, but
the cost of living was so high that these small allow-
ances did not go very far.

Fecund nature can be depended upon to operate
under almost any handicap, but there is a point at
which she lies down and gives up the ghost, and that
point had been reached in France by the third year of
the war. The price of motherhood had become pro-
hibitive. Women could no longer afford to pay it.
And the birth-rate began to indicate a general revolt
against the age-long injustice that the mothers of men
have suffered. The war and what the war meant to
The Falling Birth-Rate 69

women was the last straw. They had quit their great
natural jobs. Fifty per cent. of them had walked out.

For several years prior to the war, the birth-rate in
France had not been so high as to alarm the Mal-
thusians, and the inadequate man supply was un-
doubtedly due in large measure to voluntary sterility
maintained for the purpose of escaping the unequal
social responsibility, the suffering, danger, personal
sacrifice and economic burden incident to child-bear-
ing and child-rearing. The war had increased the
force of these inhibiting influences, and created others
far more restraining in their effects. Food was
scarce; milk was hard to obtain; and fuel was out of
the question. The bare necessities of life were pre-
carious, and the future so uncertain that prudent
women—the kind that make good mothers—were un-
willing to leave well paid positions and face the
inevitable tragedy of helpless motherhood.

The man power of the next generation was a prob-
lem for the nation to ponder, and some perfectly won-
derful plans for increasing the population had been
evolved and submitted to the government. From the
standpoint of the State it was imperative that children
should be born in larger numbers. But from the
standpoint of the average woman this involved a per-
sonal calamity and a crime against the unbegotten too
terrible to contemplate.

Women were taking no part in the public discussion
of this mooted matter, but they had a great deal to say
in private. They were not considering the national
needs or the abstract ethics of the question. That was
a philosopher’s business, and they were not Ph.Ds,
70 The House of the Good Neighbor

those women to whom motherhood had been a tragic
personal experience, and the possibility of its repeti-
tion was a dreadful menace.

This vital topic was discussed by men as an abstract
national problem, but a prospective, over-burdened,
or bereaved mother was not likely to get the national
point of view. She knew from experience that the
nation did not share the suffering or responsibility.
That was her problem, and there was nothing abstract
about it. On the contrary it was concrete, and when
it had to be met and solved, she would be obliged to
meet and solve it alone, at the time of her weakness
when the function for which she was primarily created
had left her helpless and handicapped.

These women were not mathematicians, but they
knew just how much money they could earn while
they were well, and just how much was required to
support their families. They also knew that if they
were sick or disabled their incomes would be lost and
the children they already had would go hungry. And
so they took a limited, feminine view of this grave
question that was treated in a broad, abstract way by
men of means to whom it was a problem of impersonal
patriotism. But to the poor women who sustained
the economic injury, suffered the pre-puerperal dis-
tress, the agony and danger of parturition, carried the
handicap and paid the bills, this was a concrete and
painfully personal matter.

They did not argue this proposition. The evi-
dence indicated that they had arrived at a unanimous
decision, and were maintaining a conspiracy of silence
in this respect. Perhaps it was merely that their side
The Falling Birth-Rate 71

     

Visé.Paris N° 824

A wv
NM | S

80.000
BEBES FRANCAIS PERISSENT CHAQUE ANNEE
72 The House of the Good Neighbor

of the question was so clear, intimate and well under-
stood, that argument seemed fatuous and foolish. It
was the common every day theme of their existence
and when they spoke on the subject they usually re-
lated some personal experience, and their simple state-
ments of the facts as they existed would surely have
silenced Socrates himself.

When a bereaved mother says, “My baby died from
the effects of cold and hunger,” she can scarcely be
asked to inflict life on another helpless little one with
no better chance of survival. And so the majority
of women who made munitions devoted themselves ex-
clusively to that work, and children were not being
born in numbers necessary to support the life of the
nation.

Among the civil population the death-rate was
greater than the birth-rate. More people were going
out of the country than coming into it. Half the
yearly increase had already been lost and the birth
barometer was falling steadily. The direct damage
of all Germany’s infernal machines had not been so
great. National extinction was foreshadowed on the
horizon, and a commission was appointed to study the
question of depopulation, “the other catastrophe which
at this moment threatens the French nation.”

When a commission is appointed to study a ques-
tion everything connected with it becomes more alarm-
ing. The rule held in this case. Statisticians were
called to the task. Native and alien they volunteered
in large numbers. This was an opportunity of a life-
time. With that peculiar alacrity which distinguishes
the monomania of specialists, they conferred together,
The Falling Birth-Rate 73

got out their pencils and figured the nation off the
earth.

This was good measure. It was more than any-
body wanted. But why worry? Those experts were
not prophets, they were scribes. They had received
- no revelations. Their forecasts were based on arith-
metic. They were men of little faith, and that little
faith was in the ten digits and the combinations thereof.
They put no trust in men or nations. They believed
in figures, and if it be true that figures do not lie,
then, let us prepare for the worst. According to exact
mathematical calculations, France, beautiful, viva-
cious France—fighting France that seemed so much
alive to the unlearned, was in reality expiring. Her
days were numbered. She was passing away. And
savants of different nationalities were sitting at her
death-bed, counting her fluttering pulse and waiting to
sign the death certificate. Carefully computed on a
basis of eons and ages, the right and scientific way
to determine the length of the life of a nation, France,
figuratively speaking, was drawing her last breath, and
would soon be “one with Nineveh and Tyre.”

The decline and fall of a nation is a titanic catas-
trophe. It cannot occur spontaneously. Vicious
causes of corresponding magnitude must be respon-
sible. “The love of money is the root of all evil”
and the crimes which had undermined the vitality of
the nation had not been committed for pleasure, but
for profit. Find the profiteer. That was the prob-
lem. But it was not so easy. The case was com-
plex. The testimony was conflicting. All the forces
of evil were privately indicted and pleaded, “not
74 The House of the Good Neighbor

guilty”; even the lowly midwife was accused, and
while it was impossible to fix the responsibility, it was
generally agreed that whosoever and whatsoever was
to blame should be exterminated forthwith root and
branch.

These matters were discussed in whispers and secret
conclaves. The forecasts of the investigators were
disquieting. Suppose the soldiers should get hold
of them. What would happen to the morale of the
army? The written reports on this subject were care-
fully censored and many of them pigeon-holed for the
good of the nation. If it became generally known
that France was going to die so soon anyhow, men
might question the wisdom of giving their lives to save
a practically defunct country.

The precautions taken to prevent inside informa-
tion regarding the impending catastrophe from leak-
ing out and disaffecting the forces of the country
were unnecessary. Fighting men had lost confidence
in figures. The war had disproved all the theories
previously promulgated by the wise men of the world,
and a redeeming faith was surging in the souls of
those who had grown strong in suffering—a faith in
the future of France that figures could neither blast
nor sustain.

France is the land of the coup d’éclat. You can
never guess what she is going to do next. She has the
habit of astonishing the world. The unexpected thing
is her natural manifestation. Let us wait awhile and
withhold our bodements. As a token of thanksgiving
after the defeat of the Boche her next surprising ex-
ploit may be a bountiful birth-rate.
The Falling Birth-Rate 75

This is a pleasant prophecy, and it is to be hoped
that it will in no way offset the good effects of the dire
predictions of the official and unofficial forecasters of
calamity. A healthful undercurrent of consternation
was created among tle elect of the land by this arith-
mancy. The signs and portents pointed out with
such precision were viewed with alarm in the right
quarters. These prognostications of national decline
got under the pachydermic sensibilities of people who
had reason to suspect themselves of indirect responsi-
bility, with the result that efforts were being made in
the right direction to prevent the impending eutha-
nasia.

The solons of the nation were called upon to solve
this problem and the cat was out of the bag. Solons
cannot be trusted with talking material. Shame for-
bids me to pursue this subject except in reference to a
foreign country. The duties of solons are to talk,
debate questions, create laws and appropriate funds,
and there can be no doubt that each and every repre-
sentative of France “seen his duty and done it” to the
best of his ability.

All nations are tolerant of talk, but the official ex-
penditure of funds must be carefully considered with
reference to returns on the investment. An unsuc-
cessful experiment had already been made in the mat-
ter of subsidizing the infant industry. As early as
1913 a law had been passed allowing an absolutely
helpless woman one franc daily for a period of four
weeks immediately preceding and following the birth
of her child, and although this amounts to about ten
dollars more than a woman gets in any other country
76 The House of the Good Neighbor

under such circumstances, no increase in the birth-rate
had followed the granting of this allocation.

This was discouraging. The members who had
doubted the wisdom of voting money to prospective
and nursing mothers were justified in the stand they
had taken by the failure of the experiment. They
all conceded the importance of a large, native-born
constituency, and would gladly have passed laws
creating a surplus population. But, how to enforce
them. That was the question. It was a difficult
problem; a quandary; a subject for Solomon, or some-
body with large experience and understanding of the
psychology of women.

Women were keen regarding other phases of the
national service, but toward this particular branch
they were exhibiting an abnormal and unpatriotic
apathy. Something would have to be done to arouse
their dormant sense of responsibility; to awaken their
national pride. Would they like decorations?
Medals were cheap. They might be cast of base metal
in large quantities at small cost. It was reported that
Germany had been bestowing iron crosses upon the
mothers of future soldiers with gratifying results.
Germany’s success in getting things done certainly
amounted to genius. But the mind of the French
woman had not been molded to serve a national plan.
Her tastes were individual and as varied as her
capabilities. She was nothing less than a “minister-
ing angel” in the singular, but “uncertain, coy and
hard to please” in the plural.

Things were looking pretty gloomy when somebody
was inspired with a saving thought. All French
The Falling Birth-Rate TT

women had one characteristic in common—love of
country. Appeal to their patriotism. This was the
most promising plan, and the orators of all parties
and professions lifted up their voices and called for
babies in the name of the nation.

Give us babies or we perish—nationally. This
was a strong plea, but the women were silent, while
echo seemed to answer in minor mother-tones, if we
give you babies they will perish, and from away
beyond the world came the faint wailing cries of the
children who wanted to stay and had never ceased
calling to their mothers’ hearts.

Depopulation was a dismal prospect. There was
little use winning the war, if there was to be only a
remnant of the race to rejoice in the victory genera-
tion after generation. The impending catastrophe
could and would be averted. The plan which might
finally run through the whole social fabric, could be
stated in four words: encourage the infant industry.
And all patriotic citizens to whom this was an im-
personal matter seemed willing and anxious to pro-
mote the good work.

Whenever two or three scientific looking men, or
well-fed, well-groomed, prosperous appearing gentle-
men beyond the military age, were gathered together in
earnest and solicitous communion of thought, the
chances were that they were discussing the birth-rate.
This is a favorite theme for moralists who have passed
the Songs of Solomon and reached the Ecclesiastes.
How lucky it is that wisdom comes with age when it
can’t do much damage!

For some reason deep rooted in the masculine con-
78 The House of the Good Neighbor

sciousness maternity is a moral obligation which
obtains regardless of conditions; a sort of vicarious
atonement for the sins of the world—and maybe it is,
for it is the price Mother Eve paid for the love of
Adam, and the market has been steady ever since.
The price is altogether too high, but every woman has
to find this out for herself, and by the time she realizes
it Fate has given her mother-love, which more than
makes up for the disillusionment.

In a hazy, limited way, a few super-souled men
were beginning to glimpse what motherhood meant to
self-supporting, self-respecting women, and disregard-
ing all precedents these men were making practical
recommendations that had already reached the ex-
travagant proportions of five francs daily to be paid
for a year after the birth of a child to a woman who
had given up a position in which she could support
herself for the sake of propagating the species.
These recommendations were made boldly over the
weight-carrying signatures of their proponents, such
men as Professor Pinard and Charles Richet. They
were not afraid of pauperizing a nursing mother or a
new born babe. Perhaps they realized that nature
and society had already pauperized this pair. That
they were obliged to depend upon extraneous support,
and in view of the fact that the woman had relin-
quished a regular salary, and was serving the state to
the extent of helping to save its life, it was no more
than fair that the state should reciprocate.

When God endowed woman with the creative func-
tion involving such endless possibilities for good or
evil, He gave her a help-mate (what did Adam need
The Falling Birth-Rate 79

a help-mate for?) to do the “chores” of the world and
provide her with food while she was engaged in the
wonderful work of building a human being. The war
had taken her help-mate, and it naturally followed
that her primary function was suspended.

There is probably no industrial occupation for
which women cannot qualify, but they have a more
important calling. By virtue of a divine function
coupled with human intelligence they have the power
of giving or withholding the life of nations.

This is God’s supreme commission. Man is
woman’s great work. Cell on cell she builds him up
and delivers him to the world at the risk of her life.
His survival depends upon her sacrifice, and God gave
her mother-love to make that sacrifice a joy. During
his infancy she nourishes him at her breast. This
service is its own reward. Life holds nothing half so
sweet. Did you ever see a mother look down at her
nursing babe? He is her treasure. He is the hope
to which she has dedicated her life. Throughout his
childhood she guards him and cares for him according
to her light, and if he dies love’s labor is lost, and
her heart is buried with him. But when he lives and
grows and his mind unfolds, and he finally reaches
man’s estate, this is the consummation of her great
work—the fulfillment of the law of love and life.
Did you ever see a mother look up at her son? He
is her finished product. He is her gift to the world.
CHAPTER VII

THE INFANT INDUSTRY

WHATEVER else may be said of the average French-
man, he loves France with all his soul. A Frenchman
who isn’t willing to give his life for his country isn’t
a Frenchman. But the gift of life is not the supreme
test of loyalty. Many a man who would be willing
to risk his life would turn away sorrowfully like the
rich young man if asked to give his fortune. The
man who gives his fortune is the true, hundred per
cent. patriot. And while it would be hard, except
among the lowly, to find many that would register
one hundred per cent. plus, on such a test, the necessi-
ties and revelations incident to the war had developed
a good many people in France who ranked very high
in this respect.

Gleams of hope were coming from all directions.
Philanthropists were springing up in expected and
unexpected places, and beginning to give back some
of the money they had gathered from the poor.
Millionaires were coming out of their self-afflicted se-
clusion and voluntarily offering their mite. Manu-
facturers were considering the advisability of dividing
the spoils. And the clear-minded men who had pre-
visioned the inadequate man-power of the nation away
back in ante-bellum days, and as a practical expres-
sion of foresighted patriotism for peace or war, had

80
The Infant Industry 81

established “foundations” for the benefit of large
families, were hailed as true prophets and benefactors
of the race.

Many of these “foundations” took the utilitarian
form of apartment houses, with comparatively well
built, comfortable quarters, at low rates, for families
of three or more children. No others need apply.
But the mere matter of birth in regard to the qualify-
ing member, was not an unconditional requirement.
Many infants came to these places just in time to be
born. ’

Apartment houses of this kind had been opened in
practically all of the hand-to-mouth arrondissements
and environs of Paris, and in many other French cities
by different individuals, families and benevolent
groups of men and women. The one in which the
House of the Good Neighbor conducted an anti-tuber-
culosis dispensary was a fair example of the average
type.

There were thirty-five “model” apartments in this
building. That is, they were “model” as apartments
for poor people go in France. They had running
water and separate plumbing. An untraveled Amer-
ican will not understand the significance of the last
sentence, but a native born citizen whose foreign serv-
ice has involved a reversion to the pre-plumbing pe-
riod of human development will appreciate the luxury
of such an arrangement. From the standpoint of
comfort and convenience these places would scarcely
measure up to a “model” American apartment in a
modern building run on a diametrically opposite plan,
where people with children are not wanted.
82 The House of the Good Neighbor

In addition to running water and separate plumb-
ing there were baths in the basement and a dry court
provided as a playground for the privileged tenantry.
The total cost of housing in this “foundation”’ was
about five dollars a month, and for people with two
children there was luck in the figure three. It meant
cheaper rent and better quarters. And as soon as
they were able to qualify they were permitted to move
in and save money if they were fortunate enough to
find such an apartment empty.

The tenants in these apartment houses enjoyed col-
lateral advantages as well as low rent. Their land-
lords and landladies were a decent, responsible class
of people. They seemed conscious of an obligation
which transcended the collection of the rent. They
were interested in the welfare of their tenants and this
interest practically guaranteed steady employment.
Besides, if anything happened that made it impossible
to pay the small monthly assessment, there was help
at hand instead of eviction.

These establishments were expected to pay the cost
of upkeep, but not to yield anything more than nom-
inal dividends. They were not built for profit.
They were designed to increase the man-power of the
French nation. The economic theory of race-suicide
was being tested in a practical way. France had long
since passed the stage where ignorance and irresponsi-
bility could be depended upon to maintain the birth-
rate. Normal creatures naturally long for offspring,
and under anything like normal conditions this long-
ing is sufficient incentive. But reproduction had be-
come voluntary to a large degree, and the records in-
The Infant Industry 83

dicated unmistakably that the risks and sacrifices were
considered too great to warrant the undertaking. In
a small way these “foundations” were meeting the
great national need. They were relieving the pres-
sure of poverty, and the results seemed to demonstrate
that money could produce men.

And since money could produce men, and men
could produce money, why not link up this endless
chain and let it run in a smooth, natural way, instead
of appointing commissions for the purpose of studying
the subject of depopulation in the forlorn hope of find-
ing some artificial remedy. Studying depopulation
may be an interesting pastime, but the sensible peo-
ple were running “foundations,” creches and ma-
ternal canteens and getting results. They were not
sitting on commissions. Do commissions sit or set?
Anyhow they don’t often hatch anything, and the
“foundations,” creches and maternal canteens were
showing some pretty good broods.

Since the beginning of the Christian era, and be-
fore, perhaps, many of the greatest Christian experi-
ments have been successfully conducted by Jews.
They are an imaginative and practical people. One
of them imagines a good thing and another is imme-
diately found with sense enough to put it into prac-
tice. Some of those practical French patriots may be
Gentiles, but those I met were manifestly of Semitic
. origin.

These people seemed perfectly satisfied with what
they were doing. They were good business men and
they knew when they were getting their money’s worth.
By endowing their “foundations” some of them had
84 The House of the Good Neighbor

arranged to beat the game of life. They had planned
to extend their humanitarian activities beyond the
allotted span. They had purchased immortality. It
was a wise investment. There was nothing better in
France, and as a letter of credit it may have some
value on the other side of Jordan. Who knows?

At any rate everybody knows that the ordinary
legal tender of this world cannot pass that boundary.
Here and now is the time and place to use it, lest it be
lost. Invested in humanity it improves the quality of
the race, and yields an increasing dividend as the
years go by, which neither moth nor rust can
corrupt. But hoarded and allowed to accumulate it
clogs the social machinery, creating morbid congestion
and stasis, deteriorating and devitalizing the breed of
nations, and inevitably reacting upon the wrong-doers
by deadening their sensibilities, and producing physi-
cal, mental and spiritual dropsy.

Finally these misguided people die. This helps
the world a little, but leaves the deceased poor in-
deed. Their losses are so great. They suffer more
than death. They are bankrupt. Here is where
death has a sting, and the grave a victory. Reduced
to the lowest level they cross the line in their spiritual
poverty as naked as the Kaiser and nobody ever hears
of them again.

Amid the general giving, the common service and
sacrifice, and the resultant spiritual uplift in France
during the war, the blind treason of avarice was con-
spicuously exemplified by a wicked old man who had
secured a great fortune to the damage of the country
by operating an absinthe plant. He did not know that
The Infant Industry 85

he was a scoundrel. He had always paid his taxes
and he thought that was the test of a good citizen.
France had prohibited the sale of absinthe, and he felt
so injured because his particular still had been shut
off, that he refused to give his empty plant to the
government for war work. Of course it was taken
without his consent and he was execrated by the whole
nation. But from his point of view he had been
deprived of a profitable business, and a hundred pro-
hibition propagandists could scarcely have accom-
plished as much for their cause as resulted from the
adverse reactions produced by this one deluded old
person going about sincerely protesting and complain-
ing of his wrongs.

The ground floor of the Stern Foundation was util-
ized entirely for public service. Part of it was given
rent free to the Dispensaire d Hygiene Sociale et de
Prophylaxie, conducted in connection with the House
of the Good Neighbor, and the rest was used for the
Cantine Maternelle maintained and operated by the
family that established the foundation.

This was a great convenience to the qualified tenants
in the building. The prospective and nursing moth-
ers took their meals at this canteen whenever they were
so inclined. Some of them were regular guests of the
foundation. The food was better than they could
afford to buy for themselves, and if they needed ad-
vice or care, it was the duty of the matron to procure
it if possible. A small dispensary for the pre-natal
care of women, and for nursing mothers and infants,
had formerly been conducted in this connection, but
the medical attendant had been called away by the
86 The House of the Good Neighbor

war and the work had been discontinued for that
reason.

This was an uncommonly good canteen. It was
listed in the “Federation des Cantines Maternelle” but
it was financed wholly by the “foundation.” It was
part of the original plan and was installed when the
building was constructed some time before the war,
and was therefore well appointed. It was clean,
light, warm, well-drained and dry. And that meant a
great deal in France during the war. There was a
large sink with good plumbing and facilities for plenty
of hot water. The dining tables, metal ware, and
kitchen utensils were shining clean and bright. The
food was wholesome and appetizing. It was a good
place to eat, and those to whom its hospitality was not
extended often cast a longing eye through the window.
The menu included soup, meat, bread, potatoes, vege-
tables and pudding, but no horse-meat. This queasy
article of diet might have exerted a queer pre-natal in-
fluence. Alcoholic beverages were not provided, but
the idea that pure water is a healthful drink had not
gained general credence in France, and as a harmless
concession to popular demand, a decoction flavored
with cocoanut was served instead of wine.

Another maternal canteen was financed by this
family in a crowded section of the Thirteenth Arron-
dissement within the walls of Paris. The rooms em-
ployed were not well adapted to this purpose. They
had been used for a shop before the war. They were
close, gloomy and unattractive, that is, they were unat-
tractive to people accustomed to light and air and the
ordinary comforts of life. But comforts and con-
The Infant Industry 87

veniences are relative, and compared with the home
hutches of the women who lived in that district, these
quarters were palatial. They fairly radiated good
cheer. They were heated by the kitchen range, sup-
plied with seats and tables, and were altogether so
comfortable and attractive that the women were in-
clined to linger on cold days and turn the place into
a neighborhood living room. The food was good.
It was the same as that served at the Levallois canteen.

The “Federation des Cantines Maternelle” was con-
ducting canteens and consultation centers for prospec-
tive and nursing mothers and their infants, in all the
thickly populated arrondissements of Paris and in
many of the outlying districts. Two meals were
served daily at these places: luncheon from eleven un-
til one o’clock, and dinner from six to eight in the
evening.

Great tact and delicacy was observed in the enter-
tainment of the guests. No discourtesy, brusque serv-
ice, or impertinent curiosity was permitted on the part
of attendants. Women were not required to give
their names or addresses, nor encouraged to volun-
teer any personal information. One question only
was asked, and that was the vital question. The plan
seemed almost too human to be possible. We looked
around for the impecunious female with influential
connections and patronizing disposition who is usually
to be found drawing a salary in such places, but there
was no such person. Nursing mothers were self-evi-
dently eligible and many of them brought their babies
with them. These women were encouraged to come
without a thought of fear or favor. The places be-
88 The House of the Good Neighbor

longed to them, and unless they used them freely the
system would be a failure.

These canteens were run on rational lines. The
fact that the prospective mother is abnormally shrink-
ing and hyper-sensitive was well known to the manage-
ment, and that this embarrassment was augmented in
many instances by irregularities incident to the war,
was no secret. Every effort was made to make the
women feel that the dignity of motherhood resided in
that state, and did not depend upon a social code form-
ulated for the general welfare of the nation, and con-
tingent upon the exigencies of war. The time had
come when every baby was more than welcome, and
its mother was a national benefactress provided she
did not shirk her duty to her child. “Be a good
mother’ was the motto of these places:

“Honor and shame from no condition rise,
Act well thy part, there all the honor lies.”

And the réle of devoted motherhood is a part that
the French woman is temperamentally fitted to act
with all her fervent soul. Perhaps one of the reasons
why she avoids this responsibility so assiduously is be-
cause she knows the complete self-abnegation it in-
volves. She may not want a baby, but when it comes
—farewell, a long farewell to other interests. They
all become subservient. France is the land of
“Fantine.” Where else could Victor Hugo have
found such a woman? He did not create her. He
merely put her on paper. She was there under his
eyes—and she is there still.

Jean Valjean is there also: the man whose soul has
The Infant Industry 89

awakened. In a world of sharks, shysters and social
slackers he actually feels the throbbing pain of suf-
fering humanity, and realizes the agony of the moth-
ers of little children during this era of death and
destruction. These canteens were organized to serve
such women. They were a sort of national guarantee
underwritten by responsible individuals, that no child-
bearing woman should want for food while it could
be procured. About three million meals had been
served since the beginning of the war at a cost of ap-
proximately four hundred thousand francs a year.
Subscriptions had been made to this work from widely
different parts of the world. Through the good offices
of a French newspaper published in San Francisco,
generous contributions had been received from Cali-
fornia.

Some of the homes maintained for the care of
women before and after their confinements were in sad
need. I recall particularly one “home” on the Boule-
vard Montparnasse where women were received dur-
ing the last month of pregnancy to await the ordeal—
the agonizing, life-risking purgatory through which
they were obliged to pass in delivering a human being
into the world, and entering the high estate of mother-
hood.

This house had accommodation for forty women,
but forty-five had been crowded in and were awaiting
their accouchements, while ten others had been tem-
porarily billeted at a creche near by, because it was
impossible to make room for them. These were all
young, unmarried women, and there is no human need
so great, important and appealing, as the need of a
90 The House of the Good Neighbor

woman about to become a mother and who has no
home. Still, business is business, and the landlords
were not inspired with a humanitarian spirit. A
more profitable use for the house had been found,
and notice had been served upon the society main-
taining the “home” to vacate at an early date.

The committee in charge of the work was at its wits’
ends. There was no place to take the patients, and
the society was practically at the end of its resources.
The president told me that unless help could be found
somewhere it would be impossible to support these
young women and others continually applying for ad-
mission, during the winter.

The house had a fine walled garden, and was well
adapted to the purpose it was serving. It was near
the large maternity hospital and was visited daily by
the obstetrician in charge, or one of his assistants,
usually a midwife. Dinner was being served when
we visited the place, and the women were crowded so
close together at the table that they were manifestly
uncomfortable. The food consisted of a sort of mac-
aroni and lentils. No alcoholic beverages were in
evidence—light wines or cider such as are commonly
used in France. The place was cold, the women were
scantily clad, and there were not enough bedclothes
to keep them warm at night.

This was one of the many emergencies where the
American Red Cross stepped into the gap and saved
the situation. Another place was found and the Red
Cross furnished beds, bedding and enough money,
added to the amount raised elsewhere, to support the
home for two years.
The Infant Industry 91

The president of the Parisian War Creches was
chairman of the committee in control of several of
these pre-natal and post-natal homes. Among the
post-natal homes for mothers and infants into which
she introduced me, there was one beyond the walls that
it was a pleasure to visit. The mothers and babies
looked uncommonly well, and therefore I suspect that
there was some patron saint in human form, angels, I
think they are sometimes called, who was favoring
this place in a financial way.

The building was a ramshackle structure of bar-
racks architecture, with a central court, that had been
used away back in the era before the war as a Kneipp
Sanitarium. Of course it was a modified Kneipp.
In a wholly artificial environment it was utterly im-
possible to get back to nature, but it was easy to make
believe and perhaps that had a curative effect upon the
imaginary ailments of the patients.

Near the village of Worishofen in Bavaria, where
this beneficent “back to nature” movement had its in-
ception and got such an impetus, there were broad
meadows unposted with trespass signs, where the knee-
deep grass was sprinkled with dew over night and
ready for use in the morning; there were inviting pud-
dles with foot-easing, toe-tickling mud that oozed up
between horny, distorted and much damaged digits,
producing delightful sensations and effecting results
greatly to the disadvantage of the chiropodists; there
were little green frogs and wiggle-waggley polliwogs
warranted to produce glad childish laughter if there
was so much as a strain left in a desiccated old soul;
there were lovely ponds fringed with smiling water-
92 The House of the Good Neighbor

lilies, and rippling streams that babbled through the
wild woods and in their pensive moods became deep,
dreamy pools, finally flowing out and meandering
through the meadows in search of unknown waters;
there were hills and dales, glades and dells, groves of
trees and sweet wild flowers in the springtime.

Who wouldn’t get well in an environment of pure
delight? Who wouldn’t grow young and sportive?
Who wouldn’t discard conventional attire, and gambol
through the woods, smocked or unsmocked, in order
to be ready at all times to wade the delightful shal-
lows, and plunge through the deep pools? The joys
of life are spontaneous. They lose their first fresh
flavor if they must wait on preparation. The poor
mortal who couldn’t imagine himself a faun, and sit
on a mossed rock and play the Pipes of Pan in such a
place, must be a born floor-walker.

These charms of nature had been feebly imitated
in this Paris Kneippery by a shallow cement cistern
in the center of the court which was formerly fed by
a fountain connected with the city waterworks. The
artificial forest consisted of several trees, and the
health-giving meadows were represented by the grass
that used to grow on the lawn around the cistern.

Here was the fountain where the water once flowed.
Here was the court where the grass once “growed.”
But the fountain was dry and rusty around the faucet,
and if there was so much as a blade of grass in that
whilom green expanse it was covered with a small
square of bird’s-eye linen, or other such material be-
longing to an infant’s layette. Lines were stretched be-
tween the trees along which quaint little shirts, bind-
The Infant Industry 93

ers, slips and pinning blankets were strung in irreg-
ular, zigzag formation, which suggested the notes of
a sand-man’s song, and somehow reached down
through the cobwebs of my subconsciousness and
brought up nursery rhymes and rondelets that were
stored there and forgotten many years ago. The rim
of this wading cistern was decorated with diapers dry-
ing in the sunshine. To what lowly uses are the won-
derful works of men sometimes reduced!

That place had a dual effect on me. There was
such a contrast between its present and past activities
—the contrast between fact and fiction; between genu-
ine service and psychological flim-flam, a dangerously
fascinating subject. No effort had been made to pre-
serve the former atmosphere of this Kneippery, but it
was still as stimulating to my imagination as the blue
haze of Napoleon’s Tomb might be to some mute, in-
glorious militarist traveling all unrecognized with a
company of Cook’s tourists.

Hidden away from ridicule and criticism in the
closed cabinets of our private consciousnesses we have
vague, fantastic hopes and ambitions, doubts, fears,
unanswered questions, riddles and enigmas, puzzles
upon which we work in secret, and games of solitaire
that we play and play,,but never win. As a pet
mania, witchcraft is a highly entertaining and inex-
haustible theme. The world is well supplied with
witches and wizards, mostly wizards, and whenever I
cross the trail of a real “wiz” operating in the med-
ical field, envy actuates me to stop and try to find out
what system of hypnosis, or psychological suggestion
is employed in the enterprise,
94, The House of the Good Neighbor

In the wash-house where the patients formerly stood
over a floor drain while gentle showers fell upon them
from the fountains above, women were washing baby
linen without soap and using their knuckles for a
washboard. Talk about the Song of the Shirt, or
whatever it was that working women used to sweat
over, well, French working women are still singing it
while they wash the clothes of France with their un-
aided hands. A certain French writer of about a hun-
dred years ago mentions women standing “in tubs”
washing clothes. An American reader naturally mis-
takes this for a misprint and thinks it should read
“at tubs”—but they are still standing “in tubs” in
order to keep their feet dry, along all the streams in
France, washing clothes in the cold water without
soap. This may be the reason that so many old
women are bent double. Perhaps they stand in these
tubs leaning over the water for so many years, that
the crook in their backs becomes fixed and permanent.

The American people are a clean people person-
ally. They wear clean clothes washed with the help
of machinery. But if the clothes in the United States
had to be washed by our women without so much as a
washboard or soap—lI was going to say that we would
change about once monthly instead of daily, but on
second thought I believe we would invent paper clothes
and throw them away after wearing.

The washtubs used at the Kneippery were nothing
less than Louis Quinze. Placed in the right shop they
would bring a high price as antiques, in which tall
paims might appropriately be planted and stood be-
fore some stately mansion with artistic effect. They
The Infant Industry 95

were rare old tubs, but altogether too massive and
monumental in architecture for the average woman
single-handed and alone to move from place to place
and empty down those unique floor drains. There
were doubtless many other interesting evidences of
former activities about the place, but everything was
draped in baby clothes and hidden from view.

Several years had passed since Kneipping had
been practiced in that central court, but the thought
of highly respectable and affluent citizens who had
reached the age of discretion, and were conspicuous
chiefly for pomp, circumstance and dignity of bear-
ing, augmented by generous embonpoint, disporting
themselves in that central wallow, and then coming out
and ambling through the grass on all fours, sans rai-
ment in foul or fair weather, seemed in retrospect to
be conduct unbecoming a gentleman, which nothing
less than the achievement of the highest possible de-
gree of health and physical perfection could justify.

The president of the society sustaining and control-
ling these homes and creches was a charming type of
French woman. She was taking tea at the House of
the Good Neighbor and bubbling over with joy, which
she expressed with her hands, eyes, and shoulders,
supplemented by a few words in Anna Held English,
because a great power for good, the American Red
Cross, had answered her prayer and saved the home on
the Boulevard Montparnasse, thereby insuring shelter
and care to many unfortunate young women, during
the next two years.

Her heart was overflowing with gratitude and she
didn’t know where to pour it out. It is hard to deal
96 The House of the Good Neighbor

directly with an impersonal power. She could not
hang a wreath of immortelles on the Red Cross. She
had sent flowers to the high officials who had approved
her petition, but it was like putting flowers on a grave.
No sign indicated that they had been received. Sti-
fled, unexpressed emotion of this kind is painful, and
in view of the fact that I had first reported the place,
and was the only Red Cross woman available in the
flesh, she poured out her gratitude to me.

But words were not sufficient. There should be
a token—something for somebody to wear in order to
commemorate this good service. La! what a pity
madame, the doctor, had not served in the war zone
and been exposed to danger—just a little danger that
was quite safe, then it might be possible to secure a
decoration, and American women are fond of decora-
tions, n’est-ce pas?

Ah, well, here was her luck ring. It was mone
than a decoration. This talisman had been given her
by an Arab when her husband was a young lieutenant
stationed at Algiers. “Good luck and long life” was
inscribed upon it in Arabian, and she took it off her
finger and wished it on mine.

“Good luck and long life!’” Perhaps it was a real
luck ring. It almost seemed so. She had worn it
eighteen years and those years had been kind to her.
Luck she had in large measure, and a full, abundant
life. She was well over forty, but she looked scarcely
older than she must have been when the Arab gave
her the talisman.

I was loth to take her luck ring, lest she lose her
luck. She had worn it since her husband was a lieu-
The Infant Industry 97

tenant in Algiers. He was a general in France when
she gave it to me, and her two sons had served since
the beginning of the war, and she was not wearing a
long, black veil. Her bright, cheerful appearance re-
lieved the somber effect produced by the presence of
sO many women in mourning, which the general be-
reavement had gradually made the national costume.

The sparkling personality of this woman made our
tea seem like a supper after the opera. This is a
severe test. Anybody who can animate a five o’clock
tea possesses a high order of genius. I had little to
say. I was busy listening and looking. Her clothes
fascinated me. They were just right. And nowa-
days the apparel far more often proclaims the woman
than the man. A man has less latitude—less chance
to give himself away. His conventional dress is an
effective disguise. Men look so much alike that if
they sit still and hold their tongues it is hard to find
them out. But the apparel proclaims the woman in-
stantly,

““And they in France of the best rank and station,
Are of a most select and generous choice in that.”

I knew the price of simplicity in dress; the price
of style; the price of Worth—what a name for a man
who gets so much for nothing! His place on the Rue
de la Paix had not been converted into a munition fac-
tory, but his war creations cost more than a machine
gun. The nearest I was able to get to any of these
was to the point of asking the price. And knowing
the price my conscience disapproved of Worthy look-
ing costumes during the war.
98 The House of the Good Neighbor

The president’s gown suggested the Rue de la Paix
and led me into temptation in spite of my patriotic
principles in this respect. It was blue charmeuse
with a dear little orange vest and a dainty white chif-
fon collar. She looked like a golden-breasted blue-
bird with a white ring around its neck, in a flock of
ravens. And her hat—her hat was her crowning
glory.

Her whole costume was a manifestation of wicked-
ness and selfishness for which I felt conscientiously
compelled to develop a fine feeling of disapproval, but
the nearest I could get to it was furtive admiration and
a sort of guilty prescience that I should duplicate her
offense, especially the hat and gown, if the opportu-
nity came within my reach. These conflicting senti-
ments must have shown in my face as I glanced surrep-
titiously at the effective ensemble in an effort to mem-
orize the details. Where did she get that hat and
gown, and what did she pay for them? This was the
double question I dared not ask.

Most of our conversation had been about money and
clothes. These are things we cannot get along very
well without. We had talked through an interpreter
about the cost of running the home for two years, and
about clothes for the women, layettes for the babies,
and bedding for the house. But the president’s cos-
tume and the cost thereof was an impossible subject.
Finally I developed the courage to ask the name of
her modiste, and she smiled deprecatingly and an-
swered: “I have no modiste. I make my gowns and
my hats myself.”
CHAPTER VIII

A FOUNTAIN OF LIFE

BETWEEN the pre-natal and post-natal homes in Paris
stands the maternity hospital, particularly that time-
honored establishment on the Boulevard Port Royal,
through which the women who are cared for in these
homes must pass. These institutions are maintained
in all the large European cities. They are a last ref-
uge to thousands of women who have no other places
to go for their confinements, and as practical schools
of obstetrics are of inestimable value to society.
Every day, every night, everywhere in the delivery
rooms—the torture chambers—of these great materni-
ties, large numbers of women are expiating woman’s
first disobedience and bringing forth children in pain
and sorrow. Who can measure the aggregate of
agony that has been endured in these places? No ef-
fort is made to relieve pain unless some abnormal con-
dition exists which calls for medical interference.
Money charges are not made for care in these hos-
pitals, but that does not mean that the women do not
pay. A wealth of maternity “material” is available
at the great medical centers in Vienna, London, Ber-
lin, Dublin, Paris and other cities, and students from
all over the world flock to the places where “mate-
rial” is plentiful and cheap, to study the art of mid-

wifery. Here the midwives and nurses from the
99
100 The House of the Good Neighbor

training schools get their clinical experience for noth-
ing which they afterward sell for money. Here the
general practitioner from everywhere comes for “spe-
cial courses” and tries his prentice hand, and the
skilled obstetrician develops and tests his theories be-
fore using them on any of his private patients.

Exorbitant fees are often paid to distinguished ac-
coucheurs. In wealthy families the honorarium
thankfully bestowed upon the attending physician
after the delivery of an heir to the house, not infre-
quently amounts to a small fortune. And who pays
for this proficiency that brings so high a price in such
quarters? The man of wealth who has collected the
money from the world and his wife, in the usual indi-
rect way, or the women whose tortured bodies are the
source of the knowledge and skill worthy of so high
areward? It is merely a matter of the way one looks
at this question, and there are people who never go
into the delivery-room of a public maternity hospital,
without feeling that the women in these “eleemosy-
nary institutions” are paying the price of skilled care
for all the mothers in the civilized world.

Surgical styles change from year to year like wom-
en’s hats, and one perfectly wonderful operation after
another, which may, in turn, have been all the rage,
“falls into abatement and low price” and finally reach-
ing its proper place as a surgical procedure, is per-
formed by operators of good judgment and a high
sense of human ethics, only in those cases where
known results justify the risk involved, and where they
themselves, were the circumstances reversed, would
be willing to take the place of the patient.
A Fountain of Life 101

A tidal wave of Czsarian Section has just passed
over the surgical world and is happily on the ebb.
For a time it looked as though nature had made a mis-
take, but as a choice of evils the physiological process
will probably not be entirely abandoned. Great
things were formerly expected of the child who came
in the manner of imperial Cesar, but the experience
has become so common that it is now regarded merely
as an evidence that there was something wrong with
his mother.

Such a child and his “deliverer” is no longer the
chief subject of conversation among the women of a
neighborhood. This is stale matter. But delight-
fully refreshing tales are told in different communi-
ties of certain little tadpoles who came blinking into
the brilliant electric light of a surgery, just in time
to escape excess of zeal and save their mothers from
a section.

What a pity people do not come into the world
equipped to receive and record impressions! How in-
teresting they would be! Fancy the first impressions
of one of the aforementioned tadpoles. Out of the
darkness he came, in the wee small hours of the morn-
ing, into the strong, white light of a surgery. The
room was white, illuminated by electricity which
seemed lighter than the glare of day. The furniture
was white, the basins were white, even his mother in
whom he instinctively had confidence and for whom
he was about to begin snoozling around, was covered
with a white sheet.

Strange creatures, disguised in white masks and
long white robes, looking for all the world like a
102 The House of the Good Neighbor

corps of the Ku Klux Klan waiting to initiate a new
member, glowered at him ghoulishly. He hadn’t
done anything, or said anything, and without the
slightest provocation one of them seized him by the
legs, and holding him upside down like a rabbit for
sale in the market, slapped him viciously several times
in rapid succession on his tender spanking-place,
with the manifest approval of every person in the
room, except the one who was under anesthesia
and therefore unconscious of the great drama being
enacted in which she was no less than the leading
lady.

The spanking was an all too realistic foretaste of
what the future had in store for him, but he set his
gums resolutely together and uttered no sound. Thus
foiled, the creatures adopted new tactics. The one
who smoked an overcured, corncob pipe blew in his
face repeatedly, adding insult to injury for the pur-
pose of provoking retaliation, and goading him to his
first fight in self-defense. But he turned the other
cheek. The creatures were frustrated. The one who
held him by the back of the neck and the buttocks, lost
his head completely and began working him to and
fro as though he was an accordion from which a tune
might be forced, and, failing, plunged him suddenly
into a pan of cold water on which he yelled lustily
for help, and his mother woke up and told them to let
him alone.

There was another side to this situation which no
tadpole however precocious could possibly appreciate.
There had been a movement in that room, a faint, in-
definite flutter, and a suppressed chuckle not emitted
A Fountain of Life 103

by that infant or his mother. The physician-in-chief
looked around smilingly to see who else was smiling
and mark the offenders for future punishment. But
they were not so easily caught. The poise of every
assistant was perfect. Perfection is sometimes a
fault. Even the face of his brother practitioner and
competitor in their chosen field, who had been invited
that he might witness the realization of a high hope,
a triumph in modern and ancient surgery, and the in-
cidental inflation of the “bubble reputation,” wore the
noncommittal expression of a plain, white dinner
plate. Every adult person in that room was affirma-
tively innocent. Not one of them had chuckled. Oh,
no! It must have been Puck and the Stork, a sleazy,
irresponsible pair, who escaped through the transom,
leaving the echo of that suppressed chuckle in the cor-
ridors of the hospital where it lingered for many a
day.

The question was, who pays for proficiency in the
field of obstetrics, and I was about to cite a pertinent
case, when this tidal wave of Cesarian Section carried
me off the course. Several years ago I attended a
clinic in a city in central Europe where a woman was
delivered of a child by this method, in the presence
of a large class made up principally of American
physicians who were paying well for the clinical ad-
vantages and instruction they were receiving. The
operator spoke good English and lectured on this in-
teresting subject while he worked. The patient, he
said, had contracted and deformed pelvic bones, due
to rickets in childhood from lack of proper food. It
was impossible for her to bear a child in the normal
104 The House of the Good Neighbor

way—and this was the fourth Cesarian Section he had
performed upon her.

She was very poor. She was not seeking an heir
for her wretchedness. She could not support a child,
and if any survived they must inevitably have become
wards of the government and subjects for the chil-
dren’s clinic. There was a woman present who was
interested in humanity as well as science, and she was
shocked into asking the eminent professor in the pres-
ence of his admiring colleagues, why he had not ster-
ilized the poor creature the first time, and saved her
from this danger and suffering. This was a straight
question and it got a straight answer. “She is a good
case for my class,” he replied with unconscious
cruelty. “She comes into my clinic every year.”

It was not a matter of ethics, and he did not pretend
that it was. It was merely a matter of good “mate-
rial” for his clinic. He was an excellent operator, a
gifted teacher, and his honesty was admirable. For
most men engaged in hellish work, claim Heaven as
an ally.

That woman did not write any checks to cover the
cost of those Czsarian Sections. She did not have
any money. She was lucky if she got a real dinner
on Christmas and was alive to eat it. But she paid
a price so great that it cannot be put into words. And
what did she pay for? Not for herself or her child,
but for the safety of other mothers and their children
in distant parts of the world. No doubt she was grate-
ful to the wonderful professor who had saved her life
so many times, but perhaps some day she will realize
that she and her Cesarian-born babies were merely
A Fountain of Life 105

“material”—that they were of those who suffer and
die that others may be saved. And if the people
blinded and distracted by affliction ever set up a guil-
lotine in that city, and she does not sit in the square
and knit a record of the heads into her sock as they
fall, then God has blessed her with a Christlike, for-
giving spirit.

There were about twenty beds in the delivery ward
of the Maternite on the Boulevard Port Royal, and the
continuous activity in this reception-room might easily
have led a casual observer into the error of believing
that the national anxiety regarding the birth-rate was
due to the surplus population with which the country
was being flooded from this particular fountain of life.
Patients were not admitted to this room until they were
in active travail, and the moans of so many women,
the maternal cries characteristic of the different stages
of parturition, mingled and alternated through the
night, producing a weird, never-ending antiphony of
pain.

This port of entry is never closed. A continuous
procession of the native born, direct from no man’s
land, has been passing through into France for over a
hundred years. Many war babies have been deliv-
ered at this maternity hospital. Not only those of
1914-1919, but the war babies for over a century, in-
cluding the Napoleonic issue, and those born during
the inhuman siege of 1871. The chances are that
wee Cosette came in by this gate, and a large propor-
tion of the little Gavroches that have infested the
banks of the Seine for generations arrived by this
route.
106 The House of the Good Neighbor

Here is the midwife in all her glory. The Sage
Femme (wise woman) as she is called in France—and
sometimes she is a wise woman. The mother of Soc-
rates was a Sage Femme—a wise woman. Perhaps
that had something to do with the wisdom of her
son. Valuable literary contributions on the subject
of obstetrics have been made by some of these
women.

Marie Bourgeois, the midwife of Marie de Medici,
wrote a delectable treatise on the subject of midwif-
ery for the use of her daughter and other midwives in
the practice of their profession. Only a few copies
of this book are extant. There is one in the United
States and it is held so precious that it is not allowed
to leave the library. It is a rare volume replete with
valuable instruction, practical philosophy and good
advice. With a mother’s earnestness and a special-
ist’s pride, she exhorts her daughter to devotion to her
high calling, emphasizing the importance of personal
worthiness, and sounding a solemn warning against
the moral and professional danger of the incoming
male midwife.

This shameful innovation menaced the modesty of
woman, and jeopardized the professional standing of
all natural-born, heaven-appointed midwives of the
rightful gender. There was no foretelling where this
breach of the decencies might lead, and with all the
fervency of a practitioner in possession of a rich field,
she called upon the righteous, recognized, and per-
fectly ethical female midwives, to stand together and
resist this assault upon the established order in the
practice of midwifery.
' A Fountain of Life 107

How could a man be a midwife? This was self-
evidently impossible. The idea was an offense
against nature and morality. Man was not made for
that vocation. He was either no midwife or no man.
Out upon the unmannered perverts who would profane
a lady’s chamber with their presence at such a time.
She had barely escaped an unpleasant encounter with
one of them, and the circumstances of this near-calam-
ity are related with intense feeling. The patient was
a princess of the blood. The case was an obstinate
breach, and against her protests an infamous man-mid-
wife had been sent for post haste. But with the help
of God and a strong right arm, she delivered the con-
trary infant before the “pest” arrived, thereby saving
her own honor and the life of her royal patient.

The fears of this far-seeing feminist were not with-
out foundation, for in less than two hundred years the
man midwife had become so firmly entrenched that
he was actually writing just such screeds against the
incoming “hen-medic.”’ The spirit of these compara-
tively recent protests was about the same as that which
moved the royal midwife, but the language was far
less piquant and picturesque.

Marie Bourgeois was a woman of good sense and
high ambition. She evidently hoped that the mantle
of Royal Midwife which she had worn so worthily
might fall upon the shoulders of her daughter. In the
train of Marie de Medici there was the Keeper of the
Royal Robes, the Holder of the Royal Mitten, the
Mistress of the Hair-brushes and Fine-toothed Combs,
and other small fry with exalted titles, privileges and
emoluments hanging about the court and battening
108 The House of the Good Neighbor

upon the country. The law of supply and demand
was holding in chrysalis the pornophoric variety of
moths that were usually to be found fluttering around
the high lights fulfilling their destinies by singeing
their wings, for the King was under age, and to his
mother a caterpillar was a caterpillar, and she pre-
ferred the insect in its crawling form. All the soft
billets were naturally filled with these larve just as
they are at the present day and age, but the position of
Royal Midwife was a real job—the most important
appointment in the Kingdom. She attended the
women of the reigning family in their confinements,
and there undoubtedly were times when the fate of the
nation depended upon her judgment, skill and loyalty.
The tender life of the future king was delivered di-
rectly into her hands. It sometimes hung by a thread,
and in these cases the succession itself was determined
by the Royal Midwife.

There were two outstanding personages in the reti-
nue of Marie de Medici: Marie Bourgeois, the Royal
Midwife, and Richelieu, the secretary of state. These
two spoke for themselves. They had neither time nor
disposition to curry favor with the court chroniclers.
They were busy. Here is where sagacity met sagac-
ity, and it is not at all unlikely that that wise man
and wise woman played effectually into each other’s
hands.

The Sage Femme in France to-day works in perfect
harmony with the members of the medical profession.
Indeed, she is an important part of this profession.
She is trained in obstetrical schools and hospitals, and
the requirements for admission to these institutions
A Fountain of Life 109

are rising gradually. The practice of midwifery is
almost entirely in the hands of these women, and the
death rates are not higher than they are elsewhere.
What they lack in skill they probably make up in pa-
tience. They are hired by the week, and there is no
incentive to rush a case in order to get away to an-
other. The possibilities for damage are lessened by
the fact that they are not permitted to use obstetrical
forceps to hasten a delivery, and they do not attend
contagious diseases and are less likely on this account
to be carriers of infection.

The Sage Femme is popular with the French people.
She will probably never be replaced but will grad-
ually evolve into the French woman physician, just as
the “leech” and barber of times gone by evolved into
the modern physician and surgeon. The midwives
have not so far to go. Many of them are highly
qualified already. The woman physician is merely a
step forward and upward, and the confidence the
French people have in their midwives will help rather
than hinder the process.

The night at the maternity had been a profitable one
to France, to the student midwives, to the mothers it is
to be hoped, and certainly to the two nurses and my-
self from the House of the Good Neighbor. The
work had all been done by women. There was not a
man in the delivery ward. There were no medical
students in search of “material’’; no doctors from for-
eign countries examining one poor sufferer after an-
other, with not so much as by your leave. France had
called her men. There was a man’s job for every one
of them, and very few were to be found sitting in the
110 The House of the Good Neighbor

anterooms of childbirth chambers waiting to tie an
umbilical cord. Practically the only men still occu-
pying women’s jobs were those incapacitated by age
or infirmity.

There had been a large number of cases, and sev-
eral very interesting ones. The women in attendance
had been instructed by the best obstetricians in France,
and they were doing their work in accordance with the
methods taught and practiced in the country. This
fountain of maternity information was drawn upon
from time to time by the nurses from the House of the
Good Neighbor, and the night’s experience had added
materially to our professional stock. This valuable
acquisition was easy to carry away. It did not need
to be viséd, and in the future it could be given to the
poor or sold to the rich according to our inclinations
and opportunities.

An identification tag was attached to the wrist of
each newcomer immediately on his arrival in order to
prevent his being lost in the crowd during the initial
ceremony of ablution, and returned to the wrong
mother. People are so fussy and unreasonable about
these things. In this respect we are ruled by instincts
like the lower animals. The normal hen will have no
chicken but one she has hatched herself, unless she can
be deceived into accepting a poor little fluffy waif.
The other animals have the same instincts, and a nor-
mal woman would rather have her own baby with a
club foot than the production of another woman regis-
tered a hundred per cent. plus by the Better Babies’
Association. As a concession to this universal senti-
ment, great care was taken to insure the return of each
A Fountain of Life 111

child to its own mother, but accidents occur in the
best regulated hospitals.

To err is human among nurses, midwives, and even
doctors, as well as among professional delivery-men,
and everybody knows that in spite of the greatest pre-
cautions, trunks and packages all too often go to the
wrong houses. Many thrilling stories have been writ-
ten about the exchange of infants, but most of these
tales are untold. And the only absolutely safe way
in a crowded maternity hospital is for a mother never
to let her baby out of her sight unless it has a hare-lip,
or some other positive mark of identification.

This reminds me of the night revels in a central
European maternity hospital where I served some
years ago. The place was a regular humanity mill.
During rush hours a large number of infants accumu-
lated on the table in the center of the delivery ward,
where they were afterward weighed, measured and
put through the first degree. They were all wrapped
in hospital swaddling clothes and looked as much
alike as a line of infant mummies.

That table, and the nightly grist of the proletariat
deposited thereon, was a constant source of specula-
tion to me. Its potentialities were fascinating.
There was always the possibility of a Spartacus, but
absolutely no way of recognizing him if he should
come. The chances of that table were not lost on the
poor mothers, who did not dare say their souls were
their own, and a glance down the ward would often
show them lifted on their elbows anxiously watching
with wistful mother-eyes the wee little bits of human-

ity for which they had paid so high a price.
112 The House of the Good Neighbor

On one occasion I tried to suggest tactfully to the
physician in charge of the ward, that there was danger
of the babies getting mixed, and in a casual, matter-
of-fact manner he replied that they probably were
exchanged at times, but with so many to look after this
accident was inevitable, and it was of little conse-
quence anyhow, because they all belonged to the same
class.

During the earlier midnight hours it seemed as
though these little “tenderfeet” had heard the call of
France and were striving to beat each other into the
country. But the minute they arrived each and every
one of them had registered his disappointment, and
loud cries to heaven had been raised from different
parts of the room inevitably suggesting that “man is
born unto trouble as the sparks fly upward.” The
boys yelled the loudest. They always do, and they
should be given credit for their spirit of protest. It
moves the world.

Toward morning there was a lull. The moaning of
the mothers was low in the ward. The cases were all
first stage, and nothing of special interest would occur
for several hours. Some of the infants had been
taken away, and the wails of those remaining had
subsided. They had seemingly accepted their first
defeat. The head midwife was writing the records of
the night, and others were snatching a wink of sleep.
There was a long wait ahead, and I casually expressed
what I thought was a futile desire to go home.

Both the nurses from the House of the Good Neigh-
bor had evidently been entertaining the same thought,
and the one who had been lame all her life promptly
A Fountain of Life 113

seconded my suggestion, adding that it would not take
much more than two hours, and that would be better
than waiting until traffic was resumed in the city.

At about two o’clock in the morning we set out to
walk from the opposite side of Paris to Levallois-
Perret, a distance of approximately six miles. The
streets were dimly lighted and the landmarks fog-
shrouded, but those girls knew the way, and before we
had covered many kilometers I realized why the chief
of our visiting nurses was so ambitious to have a bi-
cycle for the use of the dispensary. There were no
taxicabs to be had at that hour, besides the women who
lived at the House of the Good Neighbor were very
conscientious regarding the use of gasoline, and when
it was necessary to go anywhere they naturally started
out in the good old primitive way on their feet.

Straight toward the heart of Paris we trudged,
wasting but little breath on words as we went. Those
French nurses looked neither to the right nor the left.
They had a fixed objective and they were going toward
it without deviating from a direct line. French
women had long since given up hope of help in petty
undertakings, and had learned to conserve every unit
of physical energy for the task ahead. But American
women do not walk very much. Peace or war,
France, England or Italy, somehow they manage to
ride. I hadn’t the slightest intention of walking to
Levallois-Perret if anything on wheels appeared in the
street, that could be bribed, pressed or cajoled into
service.

I had kept a sharp lookout through the fog, momen-
tarily expecting something to turn up, but we had not
114 The House of the Good Neighbor

met a soul, not even a policeman, and I was beginning
to feel discouraged when a figure on horseback loomed
in the square ahead, which afterward proved to be
Joan of Arc, or some other warrior of old. I was un-
able to positively identify that bronze celebrity.
Those girls would not wait to investigate. They were
like a pair of homing pigeons and they would not
have swerved from their course for all the statues that
had ever been raised to misrepresent war.

Three years of service among widows, orphans, and
the mutilated remains of men, plus the memories of
the boys whose fair bodies were enriching the fields
of Northern France, had left them without enthusiasm
for heroic statues. The need of the present and the
anxiety for the future was so urgent that they had no
time or inclination to gloat over the victories of the
past. They did not care whether that was a statue of
Joan of Arc or Louis the Gentle. All they wanted was
to get home. But I hadn’t had so much war, and the
thought of the militant Maid of Orleans was a helpful
inspiration. My spirits rose several notches and I
began to hum the American Joan of Arc, which
amused my companions and proved an excellent tune
to march by:

“Joan of Arc, Joan of Are,

Do your eyes, from the skies, see the
foe?

a on see the drooping Fleur-de-
is?

Can’t you hear the sobs of Nor-
mandy?

Joan of Arc, Joan of Arc,

Let your spirit guide us through;
A Fountain of Life 115

Come lead your France to victory,
Joan of Arc, we are calling you.”

Under normal conditions it was about the time in
the country when Chanticleer is supposed to make his
first call to the Sun, and the garbage gatherers have the
right of way in the city streets. With these important
facts in mind I had been looking backward while we
marched cheerfully forward, secretly hoping that my
silent prayer for an ash cart going in our direction
might be answered. A ride in such a cart through the
Place de la Concorde would be an experience not with-
out distinguished precedent, and the farther we walked
the more desirable this possibility became. But noth-
ing half so recherche was in store for us. A rapidly
approaching glimmer finally appeared through the fog
in the rear, and as we were marching in the middle
of the street we simply turned around and stood shoul-
der to shoulder to prevent it passing without parley.

It was merely a belated taxicab, and I turned away
to conceal my nationality, lest the driver regard the
emergency in the light of a windfall, and endeavor to
recoup any losses he might have sustained during the
month. My base suspicions were wholly unwarranted
in this instance. The man was going in our direction,
and although he could not take us beyond the walls of
the city, when he learned that the girls were nurses he
offered to give us a lift gratuitously as far as his
garage.

One of the nurses explained this to me in English,
and we enthusiastically expressed our approval of this
unique taxi driver, looking him over carefully and
116 The House of the Good Neighbor

noting his number, 539, in order that we might recog-
nize him in the future. This admiration was mani-
festly mutual. He smiled upon us in a most friendly
way and then joined casually in the conversation. He
did not say anything startling, but the familiar idiom
of his English constrained me to ask where he had
acquired it, and I was not surprised to learn that he
had spent five years on the Yukon in the early Dawson
days.

The world is small, and there is luck in odd num-
bers, may be trite expressions, but on that occasion
they seemed true. That good old Klondiker on a
Paris taxicab shortened our distance about three miles,
and put us down near the Porte de Champerret. This
was not more than two kilometers from the House of
the Good Neighbor, which we reached before the break
of day after a night’s experience that had added to our
worth in the world, and cost us exactly nothing.
CHAPTER IX

CHILD SALVAGE

Our Uncle Sam played the big brother to the children
of France during the war. It is safe to say that every
community from the Atlantic to the Pacific contributed
to their support in one way or another. Children
were starving in all parts of Europe, but the cry of the
French child reached the heart of America. Business
men subscribed liberally, women’s clubs voted their
quotas, school-children gave their pennies, organiza-
tions and individuals became sponsors for the Father-
less Children of France, and many a sorry bachelor,
looking out of his club window as the sons of other
men marched by under the Stars and Stripes, saw
himself for the first time as others always see him, and
realizing that his scant, gray hair was without honor,
straightway adopted a French orphan, that he might
have a youngster to call his own, even if it were a
proxy child of a foreign land and language.
Children were adopted by our soldiers in France.
The plan usually followed was for companies, detach-
ments, groups or individuals, to select an orphan and
guarantee its support for a year by contributing five
hundred francs. Photographs of candidates for adop-
tion wece frequently submitted, and one company find-

ing it impossible to make a selection from the pictures
117
118 The House of the Good Neighbor

of a family of five children, finally sent word that it
would adopt “the whole darn family.”

This god-parent scheme proved a great impetus to
the study of the English language. The guardians of
these orphans saw at once how important it was for
them to be able to communicate with their benefactors,
and many interesting letters have been written by these
little tikes, with the help of their teachers, perhaps,
to their paternal regiments, and their more personal
god-parents across the sea. Here is one of the com-
pany communications:

“My dear Godfathers:

“T send you this letter to tell you how I am. Well, I
am well, and I hope you are the same. I must thank you
once more for your kindness. Mother bought a nice pair
of shoes for me and I keep them for Sundays, and wear the
old Sunday ones every day, so that I always have nice boots
on, owing to you. Mother says that she will buy all that
is necessary for us every month, and we are having much
nicer food. My dear Godfathers I wish I could know you;
perhaps I shall have that pleasure some day. In the mean-
time am always thinking about you and talking about you
with mother. My little brother and sister and I earnestly
wish that no harm may come to you on the front, and that
you may be victorious and drive away the wicked Boches,
who are spoiling our country. Mother wants me to say
that she is very grateful to you, and I send you, dear God-
fathers, my fondest kisses.”

Not all of these new relationships were so distant
and impersonal. Some strong attachments were
formed. Engrossed in the affairs of life a man may
forget, but the love of a little child is very enduring.
No matter what changes come as the years go by, there
Child Salvage 119

is one person his gratitude always remembers, and
that is the man who gave him a nice pair of boots
when he was six years old.

The war is over and most of the American soldiers
have returned. Their home attachments will quickly
efface the memories of friendly associations that re-
lieved the loneliness overseas. But so long as the
present generation of childhood lasts, there will be
children in France looking wistfully over the water,
wondering where their godfathers are, and if they will
ever return. After peace is established our common
interest in life on the other side will naturally wane,
and many an adoptee who has been the source of an
unearned income to a family, and who has enjoyed
special privileges on that account, will find himself
of no more importance than a common child.

A great many Americans have wanted to bring their
adopted children home with them, but France will not
allow these little ones to be taken out of the country.
This ruling is doubtless good for the nation, but hard
on individuals in some instances. One devoted
youngster, who had evidently read thrilling tales of
the sea, and who did not intend to permit a little thing
like a national law to interfere with the divine right of
self-determination, bade his godfather a fond fare-
well, after which he managed to get aboard the ship
and stow away behind somebody’s state-room trunk.
When the ship was in mid-ocean he emerged from his
hiding place looking wan and sea-sick, but with the
glory of triumphant love shining in his eyes.

The American Red Cross took an active part in the
different branches of child welfare work. This or-
120 The House of the Good Neighbor

ganization cooperated with many of the French socie-
ties, helping to finance their plans, and directly and
indirectly caring for thousands of children. Hos-
pitals were operated, dispensaries established, nurs-
eries and homes financed, and an educational cam-
paign was conducted that reached every part of
France.

The Child Welfare Expositions were the most dis-
tinctively American phases of this work, and the pub-
lic interest aroused in health matters cannot fail to be
of permanent value to France. The Traveling Expo-
sition was an effective forerunner of these notable af-
fairs afterward staged in the different cities.

The health camionette with its traveling company
of hygienists going through the country and stopping
at certain towns, attracted as much attention as the van
of a circus with the pictures of the animals painted on
the outside. Wherever it stopped to give an exhibi-
tion crowds gathered to gratify curiosity, and stayed to
get information on a vital subject presented in an
entertaining way. The literature and posters were
striking, whimsical and inoffensively instructive.
There were short talks and long interesting films with
good health morals, showing innocent children in-
fected with disease by unhygienic habits, and others
saved by the observance of simple sanitary rules.

Our national genius for advertising found a virgin
field in this connection—a new world to conquer that
would have delighted the ingenuous soul of an honest-
to-goodness ad-man. Of course it was not called ad-
vertising. A®sculapius forfend! Business men ad-
vertise with a commercial motive, but physicians and
  
   

 

ot BMS OR, Ber a ee
THE AMERICAN WOMAN PHYSICIAN

Dr. Margaret Farwell, center of this group, was decorated by the
French government

 

 

 

 

 

SALVAGE
Child Salvage 121

welfare workers develop a public psychology for the
purpose of making people believe they want things
that are good for them. The distinguished difference
is in the motive. That camionette worked wonders.
It actually made people believe that they wanted fresh
air to breathe and pure water to drink.

This is incredible but true. France has an abun-
dant supply of fresh air and good water, free and to
be had for nothing. The water is used for fountains,
canals, and other artistic, commercial, domestic, and
agricultural purposes, but since the passing of wind-
mills and sailing ships there has been little use for
the fresh air.

The opening of the Child Welfare Expositions in
big cities were important social functions in which the
high officials of Church, State, Labor, and representa-
tives of other phases of national life participated.
The attendance ran into the hundreds of thousands and
the public interest in the different exhibits increased
from day to day. At the City of Lyons large play-
grounds were established near the entrance of the
exposition and groups of boys and girls were taught
American games which develop leadership, team-play,
initiative and codperation. The enthusiasm created
by these games was augmented by the use of stereop-
ticons showing lantern slides, and stereophotographic
presentations of colored views of recreational work in
America.

The examination of infants attracted the mothers,
and the dental clinics where many children had the
luck to get their teeth cleaned and repaired demon-
strated without words why the American soldiers had
122 The House of the Good Neighbor

such good teeth. The theme, the motif, of these ex-
positions was good health, and consequent long life.
Even the Punch and Judy shows that seemed equally
amusing to the old and the young, had a vital public
health aspect that nobody overlooked.

This campaign was launched in the old City of
Chartres with appropriate ceremony. France de-
lights in ceremony. It is a gracious heritage. In
art, business, politics or welfare work, the Land of
the Fleur-de-lis appreciates the value of an impressive
approach. In personal and public matters the courte-
sies of life were not disregarded even in war time.
Half the joy of an undertaking may be the outcome of
a felicitous beginning, and the ultimate success of an
enterprise may hinge wholly upon the helpful spirit
engendered by the exchange of compliments, and the
public expressions of good will with which it is inau-
gurated.

A special train left Paris at eight o’clock in the
morning with French officials, and a large number of
Red Cross workers who were interested in this project,
and also in the fourteenth century cathedral and
other sights in the old City of Chartres. Whenever it
was possible to get two birds with one stone the oppor-
tunity was not overlooked by the average American in
civil service on the other side.

I had the luck to miss that train and to meet a be-
lated little French girl from the Red Cross Headquar-
ters, who was looking down the track disconsolately
and bemoaning a similar fate. We had our tickets
and our passes. There was only one thing to do.
The regular train was just leaving and we squeezed
Child Salvage 123

into the nearest coach, regardless of the protests of the
conductor, or the smiling welcome of the poilus with
which it was crowded to the guards.

There were no seats in that car. It was built with
standing-room only, and was so tightly packed with
humanity that it seemed impossible to force another
human unit through the door. But the poilus were
hospitable. They contracted their persons, stretched
upward a trifle and the feat was accomplished.

That ride was worth more than a snap-shot of the
Chartres Cathedral in the morning sun. In three
hours’ time I got a slight idea of what it must mean
to men to stand on their feet in that way and ride from
the north to the south of France. Packed in with
poilus, I was able to appreciate the comfort I had
missed in that special train ahead. What luck! If
we had caught that train, I should have been sitting on
a velvet cushion not so much as asking myself what I
had done to earn the privilege. But standing cheek
by jowl with the men who ride in cattle-cars and shar-
ing their discomfort, I realized the value of a seat, and
found unworthy consolation in the paradoxical fact
that my personal friends who were riding de luxe in
the special train ahead were unconscious of their
blessings, and therefore not actually enjoying the bene-
fice bestowed upon them by an unfair Providence.

It was cold outside and there was no means of
warming our car, but nobody complained. Those
poilus created a lot of heat. They were physiological
radiators and taken all together emitted about as much
steam as a French locomotive. This clouded the win-
dows and made it impossible to see through them, but
124 The House of the Good Neighbor

there was nothing on the outside, anyhow, half so in-
teresting as the company within.

Those soldiers had seen three or four years of
service. They were used to killing people, and yet
they were such mild mannered men. There was
every reason for protest, but they did not murmur.
They had the strength to take possession of the first
class carriages and ride like human beings, but it
probably did not occur to them. Their forbearance
was amazing. They stood like lambs without so much
as a bleat. Perhaps they were going home on fur-
lough. At any rate they were happy, smiling, and
their attitude indicated a high degree of satisfaction.
Some of them were tired and went to sleep on their
feet without any danger of falling, and they did not so
much as raise their weary heads when the train
stopped at Chartres.

Two thousand people had assembled in the theater
and many had been turned away. Our high and
mighty brothers, French and American, sat on the plat-
form looking very serious and not altogether at ease.
Considering the importance of the occasion they de-
ported themselves with becoming modesty, especially
the Americans. Let us not claim undue credit for
this; it was probably due to a very general lack of
language. But one of our representative countrymen
delivered an address in French and we all felt proud
of him. We gloried in his courage. We were not
qualified to criticize his French, but we had faith in
his intentions. His French confréres, who were prob-
ably sponsored by the Sorbonne, nodded their heads
automatically. This increased our confidence in his
Child Salvage 125

performance, although we were uncertain whether
these signs indicated comprehension and approval of
what he was saying, or were merely a national expres-
sion of politeness to a distinguished foreigner. In
either case his speech had one high merit which we
all understood and appreciated. It was brief.

There were protracted speeches by distinguished
Frenchmen, which were doubtless well worth hearing,
but it was clear that the audience was chiefly interested
in the picture show, and the large crowd of Americans
present. On the completion of the program we vis-
ited the old cathedral, the towered gate, and the pic-
turesque mill-race which cuts through the center of the
town. Many of the Red Cross people remained in
Chartres over night, but some of us took the evening.
train for Paris, reaching there just in time to catch the
last subway, the chief and most reliable means of
traffic within the city walls.

Unfortunately, my sense of direction underground
runs contrary to all reality, and I naturally rushed
into the last train going the wrong way, and did not
notice the mistake until several miles had been added
to the distance from home. This error was partially
corrected by transferring to a train running back
toward the center of Paris, and from there I walked to
Levallois.

Several taxicabs passed, but I knew my way home,
and I had had too much experience with taxicab driv-
ers in the day time to take any chances with a strange
one at that hour of night. As a choice of evils, a long
walk was less hazardous. There was nothing unusual
in the appearance of a woman groping through the
126 The House of the Good Neighbor

dark streets, and so long as I held my tongue no one
would be likely to take the slightest notice.

Within fifteen minutes of the time the metropolitan
stopped running the streets were deserted. Silence
gradually supervened. Paris went to bed. The
night was too quiet. It got on my nerves. There is
no stillness like the stillness of a sleeping city, and no
darkness like the darkness of an unlighted street.
The stilly midnight hours belong to the heart of a
metropolis. There are no friendly night sounds, no
woodsy smells to soothe the soul, no lights or shades,
except the dense shadow of the buildings rising sheer
from the ground and creating a dark cafion with
caves on either side.

Here the lineal descendants of the original cave men
have perfected the first housing plan. Here they live
and breathe and have their congested being. Phew!
What effluvia! When the eyes and ears are incapaci-
tated by darkness and silence, the nose takes on a high
protective function, and the sense of smell becomes a
guiding instinct. The air was dank and heavy with
an odor strongly suggesting a well populated zoologi-
cal garden, but I knew there were no bear dens in that
section of the city. Community life among men and
animals have certain characteristics in common, and it
was man, gregarious man, my own species en masse,
and never again will I sniff at helpless animals held in
captivity.

No wonder Paris produces and uses so much per-
fume. She needs it. No wonder her poets sing of
violets and the sweetness of the spring’s wild flowers.
Even I, pussy-footing along in the middle of the street,
Child Salvage 127

lest some rapacious cave creature reach out his hairy
paw from one of those dark caverns, turned my nose
from one reeking gutter to the other, held my breath
while passing the gas belching sewer-traps along the
way, and carefully keeping a true course toward the
House of the Good Neighbor, lost my fancy in the
“continuous woods where rolls the Oregon,” and sweet
wild currants bloom in May.

There was nothing startling about this after mid-
night tramp except the startling statues here and there
along the route. Mythical and military statues in
menacing poses are all very well for broad daylight
in piping times of peace. But when a naturally timid
person gliding fearsomely through the dark streets of
a strange city in a warring land, silently turns a corner
and is suddenly confronted by “Perseus” with up-
lifted dagger, or some other bronze immortal as easily
mistaken for a present day apache, or a Hun, the
experience is disquieting.

My last and least fear was the guard at the gate.
My knowledge of French was scarcely sufficient to ex-
plain why I was passing from one city to another at
that untimely hour. The guard was in his niche, and
far be it from me to accuse him of dozing on duty. I
did not wait to see. The rubber heels which had
muted and comforted the miles, carried me through
the city gate without so much as by your leave.

It was darker still in Levallois, but the cafions
were not so deep, and encouraging signs of life glad-
dened my listening ears. The silence was broken by
the hum of the factories, but not so much as a gleam of
light betrayed their positions. It was almost a mile
128 The House of the Good Neighbor

to a rough garden wall, and at this point I turned
three blocks to the left, crossed the street, and fifty
feet to the right brought me to the House of the Good
Neighbor.

Night calls for help were of frequent occurrence,
and I expected to creep in without the knowledge of
anybody except my friend, the maid. But there must
have been something wrong with my knock, for Made-
moiselle Bassot, herself, with a candle held above her
head, looked down the stairs and caught me in the act.
A moment later she came to my room manifestly ex-
pecting an explanation. The explanation was unsat-
isfactory. Instead of praising my prowess she ques-
tioned my judgment, pointing out dangers that I knew
not of, and finally left me with a lot of good advice
for the future and a hot water bag for my feet.
CHAPTER X

THE CHRISTENING OF A CRECHE

IN anticipation of the French law requiring manufac-
turers to provide creches (nurseries) for the young
children of their women employees, a group of muni-
tion makers in Levallois-Perret and Neuilly had co-
operated in the construction and equipment of a model
creche and the christening of this new institution was
an event of social and national importance. Made-
moiselle Girault, chief of the visiting nurses, repre-
sented the House of the Good Neighbor at this func-
tion, and I got in on an official invitation sent to the
American Red Cross.

Everybody was not there. The capacity of that
beautiful baby house was limited and only those who
were requested to come were admitted. M. Loucheur,
ministre de ’ Armement, was master of ceremonies,
and Senators Strauss and Thomas, M. Lagage, mayor
of Levallois-Perret, and several others participated
in the program.

The manufacturers were there in force and a strong
looking group of men they were. There is something
distinctive about the business men of the world; some-
thing they have in common; a cosmopolitan air per-
haps, and to a casual observer these alert appearing
munition makers might easily have passed for a com-
mittee of Rotarians frou any big city in the United
130 The House of the Good Neighbor

States. But it certainly would be hard to imagine the
leading business men of our nation and the represent-
atives of our national government participating in a
ceremony incident to the opening of a nursery.

A prominent munition maker, who promoted the
creche and raised the funds for its construction, spoke
for his associates who had joined in financing this in-
novation in the interest of women and children. The
place had cost a mint of money, and its sponsors
seemed proud of having anticipated and surpassed the
requirements of the government. The knowledge
that their competitors would be obliged to follow their
lead may have been an additional source of satisfac-
tion. The speaker was not an orator—but words
from him were superfluous. He did not need to
speak. “By their fruits ye shall know them”’ and that
place spoke eloquently for the manufacturers of
Levallois-Perret.

Senator Albert Thomas, who was closely identified
with the development and codrdination of the muni-
tion manufactories of France, was the principal
speaker. Mademoiselle Girault said he was a unified
socialist. This was interesting, but it was not so easy
for me to elicit exact information regarding the po-
litical peculiarities of a unified socialist. She spoke
very little English and I spoke very little French, but
in spite of this disadvantage we were usually able to
exchange ideas, and unless I misinterpreted the signs
and sounds employed to convey this information, a
unified socialist is a stand-pat, straight-ticket social-
ist—anyhow, Albert Thomas is one, and this fact
speaks well for the party.
The Christening of a Creche 131

That unified socialist has the gift of tongues—a
divine gift that transcends the limitations of human
language. The Americans caught the gist of his
speech on the needs of the nation, and wept in spirit
because they could not understand it all. Grouped
together in the outer darkness, intent on every sugges-
tive sound, and every scintillating gleam of light, we
sympathized with each other and tormented Mademoi-
selle Girault for interpretations—as though Albert
Thomas could pass through an interpreter without
losing his identity. We felt so helpless; so deaf, dumb
and blind, that we resolved to acquire French and to
do so without further loss of time.

Christenings are fascinating ceremonies. They are
as old as funerals, but they seem as new as the dawn
of day. A christening is a great event. It is a
public acknowledgment of existence; the official
launching of a new individual, entity or enterprise
with a title all its own under which it immediately
begins to establish relationships. The future waits
upon these formal rites presenting vistas of infinite
variety.

I once stood sponsor for a helpless infant and was
prepared to be father and mother to that child. But
when the officiating clergyman turned to me suddenly
and demanded: “Dost thou in the name of this child
renounce the devil and all his works?” I hesitated.
There sat the friend of my soul with a twinkle in her
eye and an impish quiver at the corners of her mouth.
I looked at the infant. It was a puckered up, unprom-
ising appearing mite, but it had all the charm and mys-
tery of an acorn from which a mighty oak might grow,
132 The House of the Good Neighbor

My choice was made instantly. Casting a sad, ab-
negating glance into the eyes of my fair friend, I
answered resolutely, “I will.”

Christenings are rich in reminiscences. They
bristle with anecdote, but never in any. part of the
world had I witnessed a ceremony of this kind that
presented as many interesting phases as that novel
affair at Levallois-Perret.

This creche was christened with large quantities of
champagne. It was a full and remarkable day,
unique in many respects, and manifestly exhilarating
to at least one American who had come from extra dry
territory. A glance in his direction and we sought
out the water faucet at the risk of creating comment.
No matter what we did we were sure of quiet, kindly
criticism. If we drank water when wine of the finest
vintage was offered in hospitality they would think it
strange and almost unappreciative. And if we drank
wine and exhibited the usual signs and symptoms,
their disapproval would show plainly in their faces.

As a people we seem so strong physically that the
French wonder at our weakness in this respect, our
unstable equilibrium that can be so easily upset.
And they seem so frail, comparatively, that we won-
der at their strength. They cannot all afford wine,
and in preference to water they drink an acetic acid
combination made from sour apples and mother of
vinegar that would destroy a native American by cor-
roding his internal machinery with verdigris.

The plans and specifications of this unique build-
ing had been perfected by Doctor LaSage, who led the
admiring throng through the three pavilions, consist-
The Christening of a Creche 133

ing of about thirty rooms, explaining the various fea-
tures designed for the comfort and well-being of the
infants who may have the luck to be placed in that
institution, instead of in one of the makeshift day
nurseries of the district.

Baby life was expressed in the construction of this
creche. The architecture and decorations did not so
much as suggest the existence of mature man, and the
fittings and furnishings were made particularly for
baby use. Doctor LaSage was a physician, an artist,
and a far-seeing man, but he could not see quite far
enough. Knowing the impossibility of finding a
French woman who could be trusted to open the win-
dows and let in a current of air, he had taken the pre-
caution to have all the glass panes for that creche
specially cast with polka-dot perforations about two
inches apart, and looking into the future it is easy to
see those remarkable windows with little pledgets of
cotton stuck in every hole.

That beautiful baby house equipped for the use of
150 infants could not be conveniently adapted to the
entertainment of 200 grown people. We seemed like
a horde of giants in a Lilliputian environment. The
place was amply furnished, but we stood against the
walls for the reason that there was nothing adequate
to siton. There were plenty of chairs, tables, settees
and couches, but they were made for little folks. The
only provision for grown people was for the attend-
ants that the creche would require.

The building consisted of three long, low pavilions
built on the edge of the square practically surround-
ing the central court, where there were overflowing
134 The House of the Good Neighbor

sand-bins, buckets, shovels and all the necessary im-
plements for raising pyramids and other structures of
equal importance.

This creche was so lovely that we could not help
contrasting it with others we visited at times. All
kinds and conditions of baby homes, private and pub-
lic had sprung up in France since the women of the
country, including the mothers of little children, had
rallied to the defense of the nation and were serving
eleven hours a day in munition factories. Those who
were disqualified by age or other infirmity for gov-
ernment service were often intrusted with the most
important government service—the care of children.

Some of these creches adapted from old shops, and
other ground-floor, back-alley tenements, were squalid
cribs. Here the shortage of fuel was felt—the fuel
that was consumed in large quantities in fashionable
hotels for the comfort of strong people. Few of these
rooms had been thoroughly dried out and aired for
over three years. They were cold, damp, dark and
without proper plumbing. The walls were sweaty
and mildewed and the windows were rarely opened.

Into these places the mothers who served in the
munition factories brought their babies before the
break of day, and called for them twelve hours later
when the night had come. These children were rest-
broken and fretful, and their exhausted mothers car-
ried them to cold homes, cared for them during the
night and brought them back in the morning. Moth-
erhood is the fundamental military service, and these
women were doing double duty for France. They
belonged to the battalion of Life and Death. Life to
 

THE CRECHE DWELLERS
AI mone
The Christening of a Creche 135

their country and death to its enemies. They had not
won the Croix de Guerre to wear upon their breasts,
but they had carried the Cross of War for over three
years and it was stamped on their bodies and souls.

During the last two years of the war these conditions
gradually improved as a result of an effort to conserve
child life. There seemed to be a national awakening.
The reaction was pronounced. Laws were passed
compelling manufacturers to install creches where
working mothers could nurse their babies at proper
intervals. In some instances the extravagant plans
for the care of infants of women who had hitherto
been deprived of the necessities of life, indicated that
the pendulum was swinging from the point of poverty
and its attendant dangers, far beyond the center of
comfort and safety.

In one of the big factories that had anticipated the
creche law, we met an employer who had developed a
paternal pride in his family of sixty infants. Noth-
ing was left undone that might add to their comfort
and welfare. The nurses were required to have their
finger-nails carefully manicured so they could bathe
these precious babies without danger of scratching
their tender skins.

This man had a hobby-horse worth riding. He
knew just how much his babies ought to gain each
week. He watched their records as though they were
baseball scores, and if they did not make their aver-
agés somebody had to explain. From wretched mites
of skin and bone they had grown roly-poly and rosy
in their healthful quarters. They had developed dim-
ples in their knees, and one of them had a tooth. All
136 The House of the Good Neighbor

of those over three months old knew him for a friend,
and whenever he came into the creche they cooed and
smiled up into his face as though they were grateful
because he had not taken their mother’s milk from
them and turned it into money.

Responsible fatherhood is the highest purely hu-
man development, and those little babies were devel-
oping a high type of human being. That munition
maker had found the blue bird of happiness in his
own factory. He had made a wonderful discovery.
He did not need to leave this world in order to get to
heaven. The Kingdom of Heaven on earth is the
kingdom of little children, and he had created a
heaven for himself. He had come to believe that
those babies were a blessing to the whole plant. He
was so fond of them that he was beginning to dread
the passing of their infancy, and in order to prevent
the necessity of their moving away to a less salubrious
place he was planning a nursery with playgrounds for
older children.
CHAPTER XI

WAR WIDOWS

ONcE a month there was a special reception for War
Widows at the House of the Good Neighbor. From
one to two hundred usually attended. It is not hard
to remember their costumes. They were all in black,
and they all wore long crépe veils. A distinctive
atmosphere prevailed on these occasions, but it was
not an atmosphere of gloom. A hundred and fifty
young women in widows’ weeds certainly did suggest
bereavement, but there was a glory in their grief that
lifted them above the common reactions of humanity.
A war orphan is like any other orphan, but a young
war widow wears a crown of love and glory forever.

One of our visiting nurses was a war widow, and
through her I saw the compensation in the sacrifice in-
volved. Three years had passed since her young hus-
band had won immortal life at Verdun, and she had
aged, but he was still twenty-five. Time can never
touch him. Though she live a hundred years, and
fade and stoop and wither away, he will be just twenty-
five, so strong and brave and true. No matter what
life has in store for her the love of her youth is safe.
It will always be a warm, bright flame in her heart that
can never change into the charred cinders of middle
age. Her illusions are patted: and permanent. God
138 The House of the Good Neighbor

is love in her exalted conception, and her posthumous
child created in the image of his father is a gift direct
from Heaven.

Life must be very sweet to a man at twenty-five. It
is toa woman at that age. But there were times when
I looked at that war widow and wondered whether
there were not men in the world who would be willing
to die in their youth for the sake of living forever in
the soul of such a woman.

At one of those receptions there were four sisters
between twenty and thirty years of age whose hus-
bands had all been killed. Naturally they resembled
each other and their lovely faces seemed beatified by
an inward spirit of grace.

Some of these women had suffered terribly, espe-
cially those who were left without means to support
their children. There was one with four children
whose husband had been killed in the first drive. The
village where she had lived was occupied and al-
though she was enceinte she was taken away and her
child was born in captivity. Proper food was out of
the question and she nursed her baby at her breast
for thirty-two months in order to keep him alive.
She was obliged to work from dawn until dark to pro-
vide for herself and little ones. They subsisted for
months upon a mixture of corn and wheat which she
milled together by hand, adding one egg daily at a
cost of two francs. She was repatriated with her
children in 1917, and went to work in a factory. It
was impossible to earn enough to support herself and
her babies, and she finally accepted soul-money from
a “friend,” and when she became enceinte she gave
War Widows 139

up the fight and with her youngest child in her arms
threw herself into the Seine. She was taken out of
the river and brought to the House of the Good Neigh-
bor, cared for until after this fourth child was born
and provided with employment afterward that made
it possible for her to live with her children as a mother
should.

There was a very pretty woman from the Départ-
ment de [’Oise, whose husband and six brothers had
been killed during the war. Her house was burned
by the Germans, her father was shot and her mother
went mad and was removed to an asylum in Germany
where she died. This young woman was taken into
captivity and treated brutally. At last a German sol-
dier at considerable risk to himself helped her to
escape and she got back to her village, which was soon
after taken by the English.

The following story has recently been sent to me
from the House of the Good Neighbor, and any woman
who cannot bear even to hear of the pain that other
women have experienced personally had better not
read it.

At the beginning of the war when Madam B *s
husband was killed, their only son was a child fifteen
years old. He was called to the colors during the
last year of the war and killed in action just before the
signing of the armistice. After hostilities had been
suspended his mother went to find his grave, and this
is what she wrote to our lady at the House of the Good
Neighbor:

“T got down at Soissons and walked for two hours before
I reached Lassigny. I lifted up the helmets and coats on

 
140 The House of the Good Neighbor

the graves but could not find my son’s. At last coming to
some cross roads I met a man who told me to ‘take a path
through the woods. I followed this path and first came
upon the grave of a German soldier whose feet stuck out.
I went on and came to the grave of my poor little one, which
was surrounded by water so that I had to wade in knee-
deep to reach it. My poor little one’s body was in the
ground but uncovered from the knees to the feet. His
clothes were in rags and his poor flesh was picked and
gnawed by the crows and foxes,’ so that I could see his
bones. Nearby there was another grave and the body was
uncovered from the waist to the knees and gnawed to the
bones. Many other bodies were in this condition. I did
so want to give my poor little one a coffin, but they wanted
to charge me 675 francs for four planks, and I could not
give so much. The Americans have managed to bury their
children, who are side by side in the cemetery like brothers,
even as they went to the battle.”

There was more in this letter, but this is enough.
The attention of the proper authorities was called to
this matter and the condition was corrected in so far
as it was possible, and one war widow and bereaved
mother is happier because her “poor little one” has
been given a grave to himself.

The brightest, yet most pathetic, group that assem-
bled at the House of the Good Neighbor were the war
widows who had never been wives—the young girls
who had been robbed of their birthright by this war of
wars. They came on Tuesday evenings after their
work was done in the munition factories. They were
sweet, pretty creatures. Many of them had lovely
voices and they sang instinctively like linnets in the
spring-time. They did not realize that their mates
War Widows 141

were dead; that their songs would never be answered
and their nests would never be built.

These girls were consoling and supporting their
mothers and sisters who had lost their husbands and
sons. They were not old enough to comprehend what
the war meant to them. They will never lose their
husbands or sons. They will never have any to lose.
They have lost the heart of life. Love itself has died
on the battlefield, and the earthly immortality that
comes through wifehood and motherhood is not for
them. Theirs is the great loss. They will never
understand the longing in their own souls. They will
fight a losing fight. They will never say to their chil-
dren, “Carry on!” Their race is run. Like neuter
blossoms they will fall from the tree of life, and be
blown willy-nilly across the waste, leaving nothing to
bind them to the earth.
CHAPTER XII

THE DEATH DIRGE

THE great munition factory on the Quai de Javel is
well and favorably known in America. It is the one
the war tourists all tell about. This factory was a
credit to France and when the divers and sundry com-
missions, touring the country in military motor cars,
consuming precious “petrol,” wanted to look into the
munition factories of France in order that they might
go home and disseminate information, this was the
place most frequently exhibited. A normal individ-
ual or nation naturally puts her best foot forward, and
France was perfectly normal in this respect.

During the first year of the war England came to
France for ideas on munition factories, and in the
third year France returned these visits with advantage
to herself. France excelled in the initial emergency,
but the taciturn Islanders were stronger on the long,
steady pull. With France the beginning of the war
was a sprint for life, but with England it was a Mara-
thon from the start. While the rest of the world were
making short time guesses, Lord Kitchener predicted
“three years” and Great Britain prepared accordingly.

The plant on the Quai de Javel was modeled after
the best that had been developed on the Island, with

French modifications to meet national conditions. It
142
The Death Dirge 143

was a wonderful factory and a great show place dur-
ing the last year of the war, but it did not represent
the munition manufactories of France any more than
an up-to-date steam laundry (if there was such an
institution in the country) represented the laundry
business.

France reacted instantly to the invasion, and her
response to the demand for munitions in the beginning
of the war was as brilliant an exploit as the Battle of
the Marne. Her output of war materials during the
first year was an achievement nothing less than mirac-
ulous. The annual commemoration of the Fall of the
Bastile on July 14th, 1914, was as serene as a silver
wedding. People were peacefully plying their
friendly trades, but within a few months the industrial
face of the nation had changed. The country was
literally bristling with munition plants, and modern
woman had found her place in modern warfare.

Practically all of the factories that had been run-
ning at an easy pace, producing commodities for the
comfort and well-being of mankind, had been quickly
converted into war mills. Day and night, Sundays
and holidays, the machines were racing at a furious
speed, creating death-dealing devices with which to
protect the country against its mortiferous, treaty-
breaking neighbors. Some of these peace-time plants
had been easily adapted to the manufacture of muni-
tions; others presented greater difficulties, and casual
visitors from foreign countries were not invited to
inspect the places where the one great credit was the
credit due a high quality and high quantity output
under seemingly insurmountable obstacles.
144 The House of the Good Neighbor

Every metal works, foundry, and ramshackle black-
smith shop had become a munition factory. Accord-
ing to the report of a special commission sent by Great
Britain to France in November, 1915, there were 1800
of these work shops in the Paris district alone. Many
of these small places were family affairs, and as the
men were called to the army, their women, their wives
and mothers, assumed their duties at home.

A woman with a son or husband at the front was
never too tired to work, and a large number of these
women exhausted themselves in a very short time.
These small producers turned out good work, but their
fervent spirit of self-sacrifice often defeated its own
object. One instance will exemplify this general
tendency. As superintendent in one of these shops a
certain woman worked herself to death, and her loss
was considered so great that her husband was recalled
from the army to take her place.

During the first two years of the war it was easy to
count the dead on the battlefield, but it was utterly
impossible to estimate the indirect damage that re-
sulted from self-immolation, deprivation and exhaus-
tion. The whole social system had been suddenly dis-
organized. The strong young men had been with-
drawn from their usual occupations and women sub-
stituted in many instances. Personal considerations
were inhibited by the common danger. There was
but one thought, one incentive—France.

“Munitions! Munitions!” This was the war call,
and every patriotic heart in the land responded. The
temperament of this people had much to do with the
first year’s output. The life of the nation hung in the
The Death Dirge 145

balance and a united effort was made to turn the scale.
Inexperienced women entered all sorts of industries
and their loyal, ardent spirits made up in part for
their lack of training. There was a sort of religious
fervor in their service. They worked and prayed like
French nuns during a cholera plague. The mothers
of families had a triple incentive: their country, their
husbands and sons at the front, and their hungry
children at home.

The French astonished the English’ with their
prompt and phenomenal output of munitions, and al-
though the English temperament is quite different, if
London had stood in the place of Paris, perhaps the
English would have astonished the French. With a
murderous burglar at the window it is hard for a
household to sit serenely down to dinner. No matter
how hungry the members are they cannot think of
food. And so they worked, these delicate, soft-
fibered, unprepared women. There were no special
arrangements made for their comfort. They ate
where they could, and slept when they could. And
after long, exhausting hours they went home and tried
to care for their children.

It is said that during the great retreat which was
miraculously turned into the Victory of the Marne,
the French soldiers slept while they marched, and
therein was their salvation. Among the munition
makers exhausted women often fell asleep at their
work, and some of their dauntless souls took flight
unconquered from bodies too frail for the task.

But these women were uncomplaining. The places
where they worked were not always healthful and
146 The House of the Good Neighbor

sanitary, but the trenches were not healthful and sani-
tary. There was no place to rest comfortably and
safely at the front, and while the men of France were
meeting hardships, danger and death with heroic for-
titude, her women were willing to share their fate in
so far as it was possible.

Compared with the usual apprenticeship period of
a beginner in the different industries, these women de-
veloped remarkable efficiency in an unbelievably
short time. There were things they could not do as
well as men, but in most of the details of munition
making it was about six of one and half a dozen of the
other, and in some special processes that required
delicacy of touch they exhibited a higher degree of
skill. After all, housework with its various phases
is pretty good industrial training. It gives a woman a
sleight-of-hand which may in an emergency be turned
to other uses. In one of the big factories that spe-
cialized on the manufacture of seventy-five millimeter
shells, the manager told me that ninety per cent. of the
work was done by women.

Plans for production had been quickly formulated
at the beginning of the war, but no scheme for con-
serving the vitality of the producers, and a great waste
of precious human health and strength resulted from
this oversight. Thousands of men were lost at the
front because France was not prepared to resist the
sudden onslaught of the enemy, and thousands of
women collapsed under the heavy burden they were
called upon to bear in this emergency, who might have
served continuously under better conditions.

That there is nothing to be gained by overwork is a
The Death Dirge 147

lesson that the world has paid a high price to learn.
France had no choice in the beginning. She was
obliged to pay the price and we have profited by her
experience. The recommendations to arsenal com-
manders and other employers, contained in General
Orders No. 13, issued from the office of the Chief of
Ordnance, tended to discourage overtime and exhaust-
ing labor especially among women and children.
There was an urgent call for an increase in the vol-
ume of production of practically every article re-
quired for the conduct of war, and in order to insure
a continuous output it was fundamentally necessary to
safeguard the health and strength of the workers.

The women of France were as brave as her men.
The soul of their watchword was “Carry on.” The
only thing that mattered was the war. If a man fell
at his gun, his place was filled and the fight went on.
If a woman failed at her lathe, her place was filled
and the work went on. Men might die and France
might be lost, but not for the want of munitions if her
women could help it.

Day and night in every city, town and village
throughout the land, the varied and significant strains
of the national symphony of war could be heard.
There was the low hum of whirling wheels; the stac-
cato tat-a-tat of the automatic hammer, like the sound
of a machine gun at a distance; there was the buzz of
mechanical drills, and the concomitant hiss and rattle
of machinery, as though ten million serpents were
coiling for a spring.

It was the Song of the Seventy-five; the Death Dirge
to the invaders that the women of France were chant-
148 The House of the Good Neighbor

ing. There was no loud music; no sudden explosions
of wrath like the bursting of bombs at the front.
There were no silent intervals. It was a low, menac-
ing sound, a constant grind—the grind of death. And
it carried the conviction that “the female of the species
is more deadly than the male.”

The vital participation of women in this war means
that war must cease between nations, or men must fall
lower than beasts. There is no beast that will attack
the female of its own species, and the successful con-
duct of future wars means the wholesale killing of the
women of the enemy as well as the men.

In all her glorious history France has no greater
glory than the service of her women during this war.
They seemed inspired with the spirit of Joan of Arc.
The strength of the civilized world was required to
overcome the demoniac militarism of Germany. The
first terrible onslaught was met in large measure by
France, and every man who stood in a trench had a
woman standing behind him passing him the stuff to
fight with.

Think of poor Russia compared with France and
England in this respect. The Russians were brave
soldiers, fighting without arms, and with the handicap
of the Romanoffs. ‘They were betrayed at every step.
If that nation had been rid of her autocratic incubus,
and her women with any kind of faithful leadership
had stood behind their men, as the women of France
and England stood, they would not have been slaugh-
tered by the hundreds of thousands like helpless ani-
mals without means of defending their lives.
The Death Dirge 149

This was not the fault of the Russian women.
Their souls were aflame with desire for service, but
the nation was confused, and lacking leadership some
of these women finally formed battalions and flung
themselves desperately into the fighting lines.

The wonderful emergency work at the beginning of
the war was done under all kinds of conditions.
Time favored the Allies. As the months and years
passed there was a general improvement. The great
munition factories were rapidly developed. France
settled down to the business of war, and a grim busi-
ness it was. The changed industrial aspect of the na-
tion had become stabilized by the time the United
States joined the Allies. Almost a million women
were employed in actual war work, besides all the vol-
unteers in the field of fancy.

The Field of Fancy was a big field during the war
and it was not “worked” entirely by women. A great
many men rendered conspicuous service in this field
and practically all of the positions of honor and
emolument were filled by the stronger sex—but this is
another story. Most of the real industries depended
more or less upon the work of women, and efforts were
being made to maintain their efficiency under the strain
of long hours and hard labor. These women working
shoulder to shoulder by the thousands were a revela-
tion to the world. Deluded gentlemen of the old
school addicted to alcoholic beverages and pseudo-
chivalric twaddle of the post-prandial variety could
scarcely believe their newspapers. What was the
world coming to?
150 The House of the Good Neighbor

The foot that rocked the cradle could also run a
wicked munition machine, and the dainty hand that
embroidered a pinning blanket was deft and naturally
adapted to caulking ships at six dollars a day in the
United States, and filling explosive bombs at about
eight francs a day in France where food had to be
imported, and coal was sold by the kilogram.

In perhaps the greatest munition factory in France
on one occasion I was going down a flight of stairs
leading to a floor where there were at least a hundred
strong looking women driving spikes of some sort with
heavy, short handled sledge-hammers. They all
looked up curiously because my clothes were foreign,
and therefore interesting to women, and I noticed that
they did not miss a stroke of their hammers, nor did
they miss a detail of my costume. Without looking
at what they were doing they used their sledges with
force and precision, and the popular fallacy that a
woman cannot drive a nail was plucked from my men-
tal cabinet and scrapped instantly.

The women of France were making shells, loading
them and packing them for shipment. They worked
on all kinds of trench warfare supplies, and general
armament from hand grenades to marine mines, and
from fuses to aéroplanes. Men were wearing gas-
masks at the front to protect themselves from German
gas, and women were wearing gas-masks in the muni-
tion factories to protect themselves from the poisonous
fumes of T.N.T. and other fulminating combinations
they were preparing to shower upon the invaders.
Many of the materials used in the manufacture of
munitions were deadly poisons, the emanations from
The Death Dirge 151

which toxicated the atmosphere and affected suscep-
tible persons.

There was a double danger in working with high
explosives. Most of this work was done by women.
Their care and dexterity reduced disastrous accidents
to a minimum, but unfortunately they seemed more
sensitive to these poisons than men. Some of them
developed toxic jaundice and other fatal maladies, and
in many cases the skin and hair of the T.N.T. workers
turned bright yellow, although they were not incapaci-
tated for duty. In England these women were nick-
named “canaries” on account of their startling color.
These “Golden Girls” should all have been decorated,
for no greater courage was exhibited during the war
than that required to face a mysterious danger of this
kind.

Levallois was a factory town. Practically all of
the plants were engaged in war work. Thousands of
women were employed, and many of these women
came to the House of the Good Neighbor when
they were sick and in distress. The endurance of
women afflicted with chronic ailments was beyond
understanding. I remember examining a woman who
was suffering from one of the most distressing dis-
eases incident to the maternal function. She was liv-
ing at one of the foundation apartment houses. Her
husband was a soldier and she had three little girls
to support. This woman was absolutely unfit to be
on her feet at all, but back she went to her lathe in
spite of her condition. Her children needed the
eight francs a day she could earn, and like other
mothers of her type she would work until she dropped
152 The House of the Good Neighbor

at her task. The House of the Good Neighbor ar-
ranged to give her government sewing, and to make
up the difference in what she could earn doing light
work at home instead of heavy work at the factory.
CHAPTER XIII

WAR TOURISTS

Tue American Medical Women’s National Associa-
tion had authorized me to make a survey in France
for the purpose of determining what American women
physicians might advantageously do in the way of
relief work for French women and children, and about
the first thing this survey revealed was that France
‘was tired of surveyors. Mine was a thankless job.
The French people were very polite, but they were
weary of being investigated. All the world hates an
investigating committee, and as a choice of evils self-
respecting man would rather go hungry than have the
entire length of his digestive tract scrutinized and its
innermost secrets revealed, discussed and officially
recorded.

For three long years France had been fighting for
her life. Her wounds were deep and her nerves were
raw. She was sadly in need of help, but she was tired
of having her social system turned inside out and the
seams examined. From the beginning of the war the
whole world had been clamoring for first hand infor-
mation regarding every phase of French life. In an-
swer to this demand commissioners and representa-
tives had been sent from organizations and colleges,

and all kinds and conditions of news-gatherers from
153
154 The House of the Good Neighbor

the ends of the earth had been combing that hungry
country and consuming food and fuel without com-
punction during the process.

France had suffered two invasions. The invasion
of her enemies and the invasion of her friends. The
Hun was at the gate—the front gate. And we were
at the gate—the back gate, with excellent intentions
and ravenous appetites. The defenders of the front
gate knew just what to do, but the diplomatic corps at
the back gate was at its wits’ ends. It was impossible
to differentiate between a good American and a paci-
fist, and the pretexts of the tourists traveling to gratify
personal curiosity were so plausible as absolutely to
defy detection.

In accordance with the precedent established by the
Royal House of England in discarding its German
name, every friend or enemy who wanted to get into
France changed his name if it had the slightest Teu-
tonic taint. The glory had departed from the proud
prefix von in all countries save the “fatherland.”
Something had happened to the vons. They were
no longer in evidence. They had either been .
scrapped or changed to vans. A rose by any other
name may smell as sweet, but the French olfactory
nerve was supersensitive, and an American with the
prefix von attached to his name would have experi-
enced difficulty getting into France during the war.

This sentiment against the vons was pure preju-
dice. The agents of the enemy were careful about
their names. They selected inconspicuous and inof-
fensive cognomens. As a matter of fact the friends
and enemies of France looked, dressed and acted so
War Tourists 155

much alike that it was impossible to tell the difference
between them, and the only safe course was to take
precautions against them all.

The enemies of the nation insinuated themselves
into her confidence, searching out her weak points in
order to betray and destroy her, while her friends
were just as actively engaged searching out her weak
points in order to support and defend her. Their
methods were identical, but their purposes were as far
apart as life and death. It was very confusing, and
the lack of a common language added to the difficulty.

Notices were posted in all the railway stations and
public conveyances warning the people to beware of
strangers who might be spying out the land. The
enemy never sleeps; his eyes and ears are always
open; stop, look, and listen, but hold your tongue,
was the gist of this official advice.

A better understanding of these difficulties may be
possible if we try to imagine ourselves in the position
of the French people. It is hard for an American to
visualize imminent national annihilation in the form
of a destructive military force only a few miles away;
it is harder to imagine our beautiful country maimed,
bleeding, destitute, and in need of the assistance of
the people of friendly nations; and it is still harder to
think what we would do under such circumstances.

We would know just what to do to our enemies—
but our friends? What would we do with or without
our friends? Without them we would starve. And
with them—well, suppose we were short of food and
fuel, and they came flocking in from France or Eng-
land with appalling appetites, and a consuming mania
156 The House of the Good Neighbor

for bathing their persons separately in large quanti-
ties of hot water. Suppose their journalists, doctors,
social workers, statisticians, and all the voluntary aids
of these well wishers, nosed through our houses, man-
handling our children, lifting their hair in ostensible
admiration while furtively glancing behind their ears
for nits. Suppose we were hoping for immediate
help, and after looking under our beds, inspecting our
back-yards, searching every nook and corner and ex-
changing remarks in a language we did not under-
stand, these good people merely smiled enigmatically
and went away to make reports, recommendations and
plans for our benefit which we had no means of know-
ing anything about,—what would we do?

Think of the French Relief Commission on a tour of
inspection passing lightly over our excellent plumb-
ing, and pausing non-commitally before some of our
works of art. Could anything be more harrowing?
Think of all the other commissions! Think of
Charles Dickens, Harriet Martineau, Rudyard Kip-
ling and Maxim Gorky, on friendly visits in times of
peace. In view of the shortcomings of every nation
in the eyes of every other nation, how would we like to
read the translations of the confidential reports of
investigating committees to the different organizations
they were representing? Would we bear with be-
coming fortitude the constructive criticism of the Re-
lief Commission of the Italian Benevolent Society, or
would we consign it promptly and without regard for
consequences to the limbo of good intentions?

What would we do? No one can answer that ques-
tion. But if we had suffered as much as the French,
War Tourists 157

perhaps we would be a patient, long-suffering people.
In token of a national soul unconquerable we might
lift up our heads in dauntless weakness and smile de-
fiantly in the face of our enemy, while we said to our
friends in sweet humility, give us help, give us bread,
but please do not investigate our habits and institu-
tions at this time.

By September, 1917, there was no dearth of
agencies through which assistance could be offered to
the people of France. Several American societies
were already known throughout the country for their
good works, and the open sesame through which in-
formation regarding the probable value of special
service could be gathered without giving offense, was
through one of the established organizations which had
already won the confidence of the different communi-
ties.

Within a few days of my arrival in France I had
joined the medical staff of the Children’s Bureau of
the American Red Cross and my duties in connection
with this organization and with the House of the Good
Neighbor gave me unusual opportunities of observing
the effects of warfare upon women and children.

After three months’ service in the Paris district I
applied for work nearer to the front. The continuous
round of suffering without the slightest excitement to
vary the monotony was getting on my nerves. I loved
the House of the Good Neighbor and everybody in it,
but I did not go to France solely for the sake of peace
and quiet. I had a ranch in the western woods espe-
cially provided for this purpose, where I expected to
spend my declining years garrulously telling over the
158 The House of the Good Neighbor

events of the world’s war, and three months had passed
and I had not seen so much as a sky rocket.

The appalling effects of war were all too apparent.
It was impossible to evade them. Wounded, maimed
and blinded soldiers walked the streets. Impover-
ished refugees crowded the rookeries. The human
stream -circulating through the surface and subter-
ranean arteries of the city was made up largely of
men in uniform, women in mourning, and orphans
without regalia to proclaim the supreme misfortune.

The American Ambulance Hospital at Neuilly was
only fifteen minutes’ walk from the House of the Good
Neighbor, and there it was possible to see en masse
the effects of warfare upon men who had been disabled
by wounds. ‘The loss of arms, legs and sight was ter-
rible enough, but the destructive face wounds seemed
most tragic. The men so maimed are permanently
deprived of the normal means of expression. Their
faces are hideous masks for their thoughts. In fight-
ing for life and liberty they have lost in large measure
the possibility of happiness—the most precious privi-
lege of mankind. Human happiness depends so
much upon the reactions we produce upon each other,
and when a man has been rendered so repulsive that
every one turns from him, and he shrinks from his
own reflection, and shudders at the sound of his own
voice, which has become a weird whistle, or an unnatu-
ral hiss, his chances for happiness are limited to the
possibilities of his lone, imprisoned soul.

The woman power of the Paris district had stirred
my imagination. I had watched the munition makers
turning out shells, bombs and hand grenades, and I
War Tourists 159

wanted to hear some of them explode. Dynamic
energy was gathered, primed and loaded at this point.
This was the source of the cataclysm—the death, dev-
astation and all the horrors of hell turned loose at the
front. The city of Paris was an active volcano with
destructive surface eruptions all along the line from
the North Sea to Switzerland, but it seemed so quiet,
tense and tranquil. Nothing spectacular occurred.
Not so much as an air raid had taken place for months.

Fortunately some things come to those who wait
and watch and pray, and test everything that looks like
opportunity, if they keep at it long enough, and finally
my time came. A Red Cross woman was wanted to
go to the United States bearing a message regarding
Red Cross work in France, and inasmuch as I had
been authorized to make a survey for the Medical
Women’s National Association, and this action had
been indorsed by the representatives of many of the
national organizations of American women assembled
at the call of the Woman’s Committee, National Coun-
cil of Defense, I was selected for this double service
and instructed to make a report through the Woman’s
Committee, National Council of Defense, to the na-
tional organizations of American women, and to be
prepared to speak for the Red Cross in the United
States.

I was familiar with the Red Cross work in the Paris
district, and in order that I might gather information
regarding the different phases of this service in other
parts of France, I was sent from place to place during
the following two months.

When first notified of this plan it seemed too good
160 The House of the Good Neighbor

to be true. There was just one insect in the ointment:
the natural dread that I might be mistaken for a war
tourist, and although appearances were against me at
times, lack of opportunity kept my conscience clear.
Everybody in service hated the war tourist. The gen-
eral sentiment was expressed by the Salvation Army
man, who was asked to lead in prayer one fine Sunday
on a liner bound for Bordeaux, and he prayed aloud
in an earnest manner that the passengers might be
inspired with a fervent desire to render real service,
and that certain groups aboard might not be going for
the purpose of junketing through the war-stricken
countries as seemed most likely. ,

There were men and women who worked for months
within a few miles of the most interesting points along
the front without getting so much as a peep at the
things they were dying to see, and their disappoint-
ment was constantly aggravated by the sight of war
tourists flashing by in military machines, with gas
masks hung on their necks and shrapnel helmets on
their heads.

The contemplation of my impeccable itinerary is a
joy in retrospection. This evidence of rectitude gives
me a great advantage and whenever I hear a war tour-
ist talking about Verdun or Rheims (especially a
woman) and pronouncing it “rans” instead of
“reemz,” I can ask myself with the consciousness of
a blameless schedule what he was doing there. “But
conscience doth make cowards of us all,” and that
psychological inconvenience compels me at this mo-
ment to acknowledge that the credit for my record in
War Tourists 161

this respect is due to the regulations, and an utter
inability on my part to circumvent them.

I tried to work one little side trip, but lacked the
necessary pull. There was a town on my list only a
few miles from Rheims, and when I timidly suggested
this slight deviation from the direct line of duty, the
Red Cross man whose business it was to secure per-
mits from the French military authorities for Red
Cross people to travel, barked at me savagely as
though I had offered him a bribe to betray the govern-
ment, and said he wasn’t running a tourist’s office. _

The man had evidently suffered a lot. My humble
appeal must have been the last straw, for he turned
loose and poured out a flood of pertinent impreca-
tions upon the helmeted heads of all kinds and con-
ditions of sight-seers that infested the country, nosing
through the war zone on one pretext or another into
places where they had no business, killing the time of
perfectly good soldiers who were assigned to take
care of them, increasing the danger to the places they
visited, and wasting gasoline—the very life-blood of
the nation.

His arguments were convincing. It was clear that
no honorable person would even think of going to
Rheims except on important business, and I re-
proached myself for the imprudence which had led
me into betraying such unworthiness of spirit.

Several weeks later I was obliged to wait about five
hours at the station of this little town for a train, and
I naturally passed the time wishing I could go to
Rheims, and wondering how far I would get if I
162 The House of the Good Neighbor

started on foot without a military pass. The adven-
ture appealed to me. It seemed so harmless. It
would not involve the killing of any soldier’s valuable
time, or increase the danger to the cathedral, or waste
any of the nation’s vital fluid. Besides, I might never
get so near to Rheims again.

The history of that fascinating old city beckoned
me, and the desire to see the ruined cathedral grew
stronger as the minutes wasted. It was there that
Charles VII was crowned indirectly by the hand of
Joan of Arc. This was the beginning of the end of
the Hundred Years’ War. What a pity Joan’s angel
did not tell her to seize the crown for herself. Such
a course might have saved France from the later day
Louis’ and prevented the Revolution.

This treasonable train of thought was cut short by
the arrival of a French nurse who had walked twenty
miles, getting an occasional lift along the way, in
order to bring me a message. She did not seem ex-
hausted, and her performance impressed me favor-
ably. It made getting to Rheims look easy. She
spoke English fairly well, and with such a companion
anything seemed possible. She had already come
twenty miles, and an extra ten was a very short dis-
tance in view of the reward at the end. Strange to say
she was shocked at the idea. We had no business at
Rheims. That settled it so far as she was concerned.
The French people were as conscientious about get-
ting in the way and clogging the war machinery, as
patriotic Americans were about eating meat on Tues-
days.

Our plans had been changed on account of a short-
War Tourists 163

age of gasoline in the district from which she had
come. There was no “petrol” to be had in the coun-
try without a military requisition, and when the local
well in any district was running dry, civil affairs had
to wait. Gasoline was a precious commodity. Work
was limited by the lack of it. Madame Curie, the
most distinguished woman scientist in the world and
the discoverer of radium, told me that her inability to
get around, resulted in a distressing loss of time that
ought to be saved for her scientific work, and asked
if it would be possible to secure a small allowance of
gasoline through the American Red Cross.

Americans living in France and visiting the country
on different missions enjoyed exceptional privileges.
Most of us ate without saying “grace” and asking
ourselves frankly why we should have plenty of food
while the people in the country went hungry, and we
rode in automobiles without a thought of the gasoline
that should have been saved for the use of those
capable of rendering greater service.

Unfortunately, the average individual judges the
world by his personal experience, and many an Ameri-
can left France feeling that conditions were not so
bad, simply because he had had plenty to eat, a warm
room, and a car at his disposal, when as a matter of
fact it was difficult for the population to get food, im-
possible to get fuel, and in many places the people had
reverted to walking just as they used to do before the
advent of trains, trams and automobiles.

The French nurse had started back to her station
hoping for good luck and a ride at least part of the
way, and I had settled down unresignedly for another
164 The House of the Good Neighbor

long wait, when a train arrived and a distinguished
looking group of my countrymen descended from the
first class carriage. Guess who they were. They
were members of the American Food Commission on
their way to Rheims.

Their presence at that point impressed me pro-
foundly. It is quite possible for me to think of the
Rheims Cathedral without thinking of the American
Food Commission, but since that disappointing day I
have never thought of the American Food Commis-
sion without a concurrent thought of the Rheims Ca-
thedral. Normally, naturally, and by all the rules of
order, this commission should suggest food conserva-
tion, substitution, balanced rations, caloric values,
canteen menus, including imitation beef steaks and
horse-meat, and by contrast, all the dietary delights of
home. But things in this world do not always happen
according to orderly rules and regulations. I did not
meet the American Food Commission in the Munici-
pal Canteen sampling a dinner of horse-meat, I met
them on the way to Rheims, and being human and
therefore limited largely by personal observations and
reactions, the American Food Commission always sug-
gests the Rheims Cathedral to me.

The members of that commission had no doubt
been carefully selected. They looked as if they
knew a lot about food. They were manifestly men
of parts, and built on generous proportions. The
minute I saw them I felt that my prayer had been
answered, for Solomon himself said, “the liberal
soul shall be made fat,” and there was only one lean
and hungry looking member in the party. He must
War Tourists 165

have been the hired man, the publicity man, for he
spoke to me quite naturally as one American should
speak to another in a foreign land, and I felt certain
that he was going to invite me to go with the company
to Rheims.

He was a pleasant spoken man and I think his in-
tentions were hospitable, for he went over and talked
to the more important appearing persons, while I
stood by the window exultantly humming, “Hail!
Hail! The Gang’s All Here!” under my breath, and
hoping, Hoping, HOPING, for them to come and
ask me to go with them.

Be it remembered in extenuation that they were
large and heavy in the aggregate. They required
much space. The car and the passengers together
must have weighed about three tons. This observa-
tion revived my waning hope. It takes such a lot of
gasoline to haul three tons, that my light weight
would not have made any difference, and I might
easily have sat on the folded roof behind the ton-
neau. But they did not ask me. They did not even
look in my direction. They drove away and left me
smiling at grief, and feeling that the last door lead-
ing to Rheims had been closed.

During the monotonous hours that followed, the
interesting possibilities of the side trip I didn’t get,
passed through my mind one after another. Perhaps
the car would be commandeered and those members
of the American Food Commission would be stranded
at Rheims and compelled to live in the crypts under
the cathedral with shells bursting all around them.
Such an adventure would be enough to retire on. It
166 The House of the Good Neighbor

would furnish talking material for the final score of
life. Perhaps they would be obliged to put on their
steel bonnets and gas-masks and make their escape,
ducking from one mud-puddly shell-hole to another,
and dodging shrapnel along the road. This was a
thrilling thought, and I stopped to make a wish on
my luck ring. I wished the hired man might get
away. Then envy suggested a last, comforting pos-
sibility and a joke on the enemy. Perhaps the
Boches would get the others and have to feed them
all winter.
CHAPTER XIV

EVIAN

At the House of the Good Neighbor I had met ra-
patries who had been evicted from their homes in
the northern provinces, sent into southern France
through Switzerland, assigned to the Paris district,
and finally drifted to Levallois. These people told
strange and tragic tales which prepared me somewhat
for the colossal exhibition of misery which I after-
ward saw at Evian les Bains, the small town on Lake
Geneva, near the Swiss frontier, through which the
intermittent streams of human war wastage that had
passed through the military mill in the invaded prov-
inces was emptied into that part of France “still unoc-
cupied.”

There was no difficulty in securing permits to travel,
for the Red Cross maintained a bureau with official
intermediaries who vouched for accredited applicants,
and saved the French military authorities the trouble
of investigating each case separately. There were no
sleeping cars going to Evian, but when my permit and
ticket were passed to me I was told just how to secure
a couchette in order to travel comfortably during the
night.

The plan was very simple. It was merely a matter
of passing twenty Prats. to the conductor surrepti-
168 The House of the Good Neighbor

tiously, and asking for a couchette. This was a sort
of a near-sleeper. There were four of these bunks in
the compartment to which I was assigned and the other
three were occupied by American soldiers. This was
a suspicious circumstance in view of the fact that the
eighty francs we paid for those couchettes proved such
a poor investment.

Those boys must have had clear consciences and
good digestions. A few minutes after stretching out
on their diminutive couches they were sound asleep.
They were fine, clean looking young men, and their
presence made the compartment seem like home, sweet
home. The place was dark; the window was open; the
air was fresh; four pairs of friendly appearing Ameri-
can shoes were lined up under the lower couchettes.
I felt very fortunate indeed, but such felicity was not
to last. We were less than fifty miles from Paris
when the conductor came rushing through the car,
flashed a lantern into our compartment and ordered
everybody out, but made no reference to the couchette
fund. That was confiscated. “C’est la Guerre.”
The car had been commandeered, so he said, and we
were hustled into the darkness with our baggage in our
hands. This coup was so sudden that we scarcely
realized what had happened until we saw our costly
sleeping car shunting off toward a side track, and then
we said farewell to our couchettes and to each other
and went our separate ways through the regular
coaches hunting any kind of a seat that might be
vacant.

My new traveling companions were five French
officers in a six passenger compartment. They were
Evian 169

all smoking cigarettes and the first glance into that
little cubby-hole vaguely suggested an impressionistic
picture I had seen somewhere—a maze in horizon
blue. Their‘ uniforms were horizon blue; the atmos-
phere was horizon blue; and their figures merged so
imperceptibly into the surrounding medium that my
first impression was a hazy confusion of horizon blue.

The vacant seat was near the window. This would
naturally be the last place chosen for night travel, for
no matter how well a window is made a current of air
may sift in around the sash. There is nothing more
terrifying in all France than a current of night air.
The fear of drafts is a national obsession, which is
expressed in a special tax on windows, and the law
which prohibits the raising of a window in a car if
one present objects. A soldier straight from the
trenches dreads a draft as much as a civilian, and the
minute he enters a place that can be closed he proceeds
to make it snug, air-tight and home-like.

Those officers were unquestionably brave men.
One of them wore the Croix de Guerre. But when I
raised the window they looked at each other and
shivered apprehensively as if they expected a gas
attack, and one of them actuated by a desire to do me
a service and to protect every one in the compartment,
gently but firmly closed the window and warned me
against the evil effects of night air, especially on
trains.

In that little section, which was about 6 x 7 x 8, six
of us spent the night, and not another breath of fresh
air did we get until morning. The intentions of my
comrades were so kindly that I could not complain,
170 The House of the Good Neighbor

and so I leaned my head in the corner and went to
sleep. Later in the night my dreams seemed crowded,
and I vaguely sensed a rhythmical wave of garlic that
seemed closer, more intimate, and stronger than the
atmosphere itself, and raising my eyelids ever so little
I discovered my seat-mate sound asleep with his head
resting peacefully on my shoulder. My first impulse
was to withdraw the support, but when I noticed that
he was unconsciously serving his brother officer in a
similar manner, and that the soldiers three on the
opposite side of the compartment were sustaining each
other manfully, and doing effective teamwork in co-
operation with Morpheus, I felt that such an act would
be unworthy of a friend and an ally.

As soon as the sun was up in the morning the officer
who seemed to be in command opened the window and
took in a supply of air, just as the engineer might take
enough water to last for the rest of the run. When
this was accomplished the compartment was closed,
and a few minutes later I changed cars for Evian les
Bains.

Winding down grade toward Lake Geneva I became
conscious of a pleasing combination of our national
colors along the shore. Rows of red-topped white
buildings on the edge of the blue lake produced the
effect of a red, white and blue border. Evian les
Bains nestled at the foot of the slope on the French
side of the water directly opposite the Swiss City of
Lausanne. The day was delightful. The outlook
was all loveliness—a marvelous stretch of beauty and
a joy forever. A majestic range of mountains over-
shadowed the lake at one point, and just beyond a
Evian 171

bend the Castle of Chillon, with its suggestion of suf-
fering, was hidden from view.

Before the war Evian was a popular pleasure resort.
During the war it was more popular. In ante-
bellum days it was a place where well-to-do people
went for rest and relaxation. For the last two years
of the terrible scourge it was the gateway to France
from the land beyond the trenches. And the gateway
to the mother-country had become a pleasant prospect
to helpless thousands living in duress, in the occu-
pied provinces, under the harsh rule of the “father-
land.”

Prior to the invasion Evian was frequented by peo-
ple to whom fortune had been kind, but subsequently
it was the place where thousands and thousands of
those who had sounded all the shoals and deeps of
misery found relief and drew their first free breath
after more than three years of suffering and oppres-
sion. The town is beautifully situated. As a setting
for a pleasure resort the site is perfect, and the extrav-
agant equipment, designed to attract the patronage of
people with the means of gratifying luxurious tastes,
was easily adapted to the uses of those who had not
where to lay their heads. |

The hotels were crowded with the guests of the na-
tion—the sick and the helpless who had been robbed
of their homes in the northern provinces and literally
dumped into France at this point. The American Red
Cross was using one of the finest hotels as a children’s
hospital for contagious diseases, and another large
building that had been purchased a short time before
the war by an enterprising American for the purpose
172 The House of the Good Neighbor

of opening a hotel, had been turned into a hospital for
parasitic skin diseases—a delousing station.

The town had practically dedicated itself to the
service of the rapatries. A fashionable boarding
school of former days was used as a home for the
aged who had survived the hardships of the invasion,
and the Casino, that seventh heaven of the sporting
world, where the devotees of baccarat formerly assem-
bled, faro was the pass-word, and the roulette wheels
were running overtime, had become a Temple of
Thanksgiving where the ceremonies welcoming the
rapatries to the free provinces of the mother-country
were conducted every evening after the train arrived.

These rapatries were people of no military
value. That is why they were sent out of the northern
provinces by the dictators temporarily in control.
The plan was the last word in practical warfare. It
must have been devised by an efficiency expert.
Under military authority the invaders were sifting and
sorting the people of the occupied territory as though
they were cattle instead of human beings. Those
without military value were robbed of their earthly
possessions, evicted en masse from their native towns
and villages, herded together, and finally deported by
a circuitous route through Belgium, Germany, and
Switzerland, and dumped into the open arms of
France at Evian, from which point they were assigned
to the different departments of the country.

Those with military values were detained by their
conquerors. And this suggests the question, what are
military values? Are they not fighting values, labor
values and breeding values?
Evian 173

The rules governing the separation of families in
the provinces subjected to the Prussian process of se-
lection are worth analyzing. No strong boys over
fourteen years of age were sent to Southern France;
no strong girls over sixteen; no strong young women
unless they had more than one child. Why?

There must have been some military reason. Why
were the boys of fourteen and their sisters of sixteen
detained, while their sisters of fourteen went into the
discard and were deported from their homes in the
northern provinces with their mothers and the younger
children? | Is it possible that it was because a young
girl of that age is usually delicate and unable to per-
form hard labor, and if she has a child it is apt to be
a weakling?

What was the reason for the ruling under which
young women with one child were detained? Was
there a double reason? Was it because a young
woman with only one child had a labor value greater
than that required for the care of the child, together
with the fact that for three years the young Frenchmen
from that territory had been either in the French army
south of the trenches, or in some German prison camp,
and therefore the child was probably the child of a
German? :

Whatever the reasons may have been, these were
some of the rules. At the time I was at Evian the
convoys of military culls were arriving with regular-
ity. From a thousand to twelve hundred of the de-
spised and rejected of the enemy were sent in daily—
and who were these? These were the people who
could not produce as much as they consumed, and
174 The House of the Good Neighbor

who were, therefore, a burden to a nation at war. By
dumping them on France, Germany lightened her war
load, and increased the war load of France to just
that extent. These poor people were the very old and
the very young, the cancerous, disease-bearing, de-
generate, insane, and the living remains of women.

There was always a large number of aged men and
women with the mixed convoys. Some of these
broken families had from one to four grandparents,
and prior to the installation of the Red Cross Ambu-
lance Service women with little children clinging to
their skirts were sometimes obliged to drag paralyzed
grandparents in a hand cart.

The journey was long and exhausting. It took
three days and nights, and fortunately many of the
aged died from prostration on the way, or soon after
their arrival. The attitude of some of these old peo-
ple was very pathetic. They seemed to begrudge
themselves the little food they ate, because they were
taking it from France and unable to give anything in
return.

The most interesting old man I met in France ar-
rived with one of these convoys. He was an Ameri-
can citizen and he did not lose any time making it
known. It had been a long time since he had spoken
English and he halted a little, but there was something
in his choice of words that smacked of the Golden
Gate. He introduced himself at once and told me that
he had lived many years in San Francisco—“‘the only
city in the world,” he added, with all the pride of a
native son, and I knew that the Bay City was the home
of his heart,
 

?

RAPATRIES

 

THE MILITARY DISCARD
Evian 175

He had served in the Franco-Prussian War and had
left France to avoid a repetition of that terrible expe-
rience, but after many years he had returned and mar-
ried a woman at Neufchatel. On her account he had
remained, although he had a home in San Francisco
and had always wanted to go back to it. She dreaded
earthquakes, the poor sick woman. La! La! The
earth had quaked around her for the past three years,
and now she was anxious to go. But it was too late.
She would never see San Francisco, “the only city in
the world.” A terrible malady had overtaken her.
She was slowly dying from cancer.
CHAPTER XV

THE WAR BLICHT

It is impossible to think of the women who came
with those convoys, the mothers of families and other
wretched, over-worked, under-fed, ill-treated, worn-
out women, without deploring the waste of womanhood
the war involved and mentally contrasting its widely
different effects upon the women who lived in the
invaded. provinces and actually experienced the prac-
tical application of the plan designed to conquer the
world, and their sisters who had the luck to live on
the free side of the trenches and fight with the de-
fenders of democracy.

The French women who spent the war years south
of the battle-line grew strong and self-reliant in service
and honorable sacrifice. The streets of Paris are
black with women who wear their weeds in dignity and
solemn pride. But the women who had been sub-
jected to the imperializing process, and afterward sent
from the invaded provinces with a “safe conduct”
which carried no guarantee of safety en route, showed
their sorrow, not in their strength and pride and re-
galia of grief, but in their bent figures and dead faces.

The brand of the beast was on them. They had
passed through the hand of the enemy and his bloody

finger-prints had marked thetr souls. Their senses
176
The War Blight 177

were benumbed. Their eyes had been blinded by
the glare of horrors they were powerless to prevent.
Their ears had been deafened by the sound of roaring
cannon turned against their sons, and the frenzied
“mother” calls of their daughters led away by their
masters, the military police.

The exploitation of many of these women seemed
complete. Not a spark of life or a unit of energy
that the system could extract and utilize for profit or
pleasure was in evidence. For over three years they
had worked and starved and suffered. Indignity had
been their portion. Their souls had been strangled
and they seemed dead to everything that makes life
worth living. Coming from the train they somehow
suggested ambulating corpses, but the free atmosphere
and the sound of French music apparently revived
them. They did not respond at once, but here and
there, with the first strain of the Marseillaise a
spirit flamed, and those of us who recognized the
miracle felt that we were standing in the presence of
a resurrection.

About fifty per cent. of this influx of wretchedness
was made up of children between three and fourteen
years of age. There were fatherless children, moth-
erless children, and many little children who had been
lost by their parents in the confusion of war, and who
did not know who they were or where they belonged.
Comparatively few of these little ones were less than
three years of age. This was undoubtedly due to the
military ruling in the invaded provinces which pro-
hibited the repatriation of any strong young woman
with but one child. There were some children less
178 The House of the Good Neighbor

than three years of age with the incoming families,
and in all too many instances these were the misbegot-
ten babies of the Boche.

Poor little poachers at injured mothers’ breasts!
The sins of their fathers will be visited upon them by
all save the women against whom those sins were com-
mitted. The milk of human kindness may be denied
them, but the fact that they were alive proved that the
milk of motherhood had not been withholden from
their lips. The fact that they were alive proved that
the mother instinct is stronger than human laws or
conventions. It is stronger than hate or love—it is
mother-love, an instinct that the human female has in
common with the females of the lower animals. This
is the power that forces a little rabbit to stand between
a lion and her young, and a woman is no more ac-
countable for it than she is for the color of her eyes.
It has nothing to do with reason, it is instinct pure and
simple incorporated by nature into the very being of
the normal female for the preservation of the species.

Provision had been made at Evian for taking these
babies out of French families and bringing them up as
orphans. Fortunately there were not many of them,
for this matter always involved a heart-breaking strug-
gle—the struggle of reason against instinct; the agony
of mother-love divided against itself—the love of a
woman for her older children contending in her heart
with the divine pity she felt for the helpless babe at
her breast. The nurse in charge of this service told
me that some of these children were left at Evian, but
most of the mothers refused to give them up. In this
connection it must be remembered that the women in
The War Blight 179

whom the mother instinct was undergrade did not
bring any infants to Evian. Their war babies died
soon after they were born.

One woman who refused to leave her baby ex-
plained that the welfare of her entire family, three
children and her old father and mother, depended
upon her attitude, and that she was not responsible for
the war. Her future could easily be foretold. She
had a boy of thirteen, and when some one spoke to him
about his brother he answered scornfully: “It is my
mother’s baby, but it is not my brother, it is a Boche.”

Another poor mother who had been persuaded to
give up her baby went to the station with her other
children to join the outgoing convoy, but before the
train arrived she turned suddenly and rushing down
the hill to the place where she had left the child,
snatched it up and carried it away with her.

The most tragic and lasting phase of the war was
the outraged motherhood it involved. The whole plan
of social life was disrupted and the supporting mem-
bers of most families called away. What were the
dependent ones to do? The women who had been
most carefully protected by their husbands and fa-
thers were the most helpless. History simply re-
peated itself. Under such circumstances there is a
constant and increasing pressure to which large num-
bers of women have always been compelled to yield.
The cumulative power of fear and want is harder to
resist than violence. The German women in their
own homes have not escaped this evil, and the women
of the invaded countries have been its greatest victims.

War babies are the living evidence of a force far
180 The House of the Good Neighbor

greater than violence or deliberate villainy. They
are the issue of war, and the changed conditions and
relationships resulting from war. They are the by-
products of individual protectorates temporarily es-
tablished. In an environment of inhumanity compas-
sion is a Godlike quality that the heart of woman was
not made to resist. The brutal soldier who breaks
down the door of a house with the butt of his rifle is
not so dangerous to the honor or happiness of that
household as the one whose pity is really awakened by
the distress of a woman whose personality appeals to
him, and who comes in kindness with a loaf of bread
for her children and who actually affords her pro-
tection against all save himself.

Warfare is much worse for women than for men.
Men have the right of death and they die fighting
gloriously for their ideals. But women must live and
’ be confiscated with the goods and chattels. A woman
without children meets death like a man, but a woman
with children clings to life with her last breath, as
though she dares not die and meet her Maker with her
duty left undone. There is nothing a normal woman
will not sacrifice for the sake of her children; there
is nothing she will not suffer; there is nothing she will
not resort to, and her last resort is herself.

Personal charm is the double-edged weapon with
which women through all the ages have been obliged
to meet their conquerors. This was the sword in the
hand of Judith; the means with which Esther “found
favor” and saved her people; the armament with

which Cleopatra held back the legions of Rome. In
 

WAR BABIES
The War Blight 181

times of war this rule has reached from the Queen
to her lowliest subject. The price of “favor” in a
conquered country has always been rapacious and
women have usually been compelled to pay this price
to their military masters.

War, Famine and Plague are natural allies—three
in one; a hell-born trinity. When the dogs of war
are loosed, hunger, cold, over-crowding and disease
can be depended upon to add to the havoc. These
forces never fail. The women in the war-stricken
countries have sacrificed everything women hold dear
to save their children from suffering and death, and
their sacrifices have been in vain. The inhumanity of
this war to little children and their mothers cannot be
described. It involves a series of horrors surpassing
the possibilities of human language. Had it been
reported that any country had stood a million little
ones against the death wall and shot them one by one,
the world would have risen instantly to put an end to
such barbarous outrages forever. But the little chil-
dren in the war swept countries were not treated with
such consideration. They were gradually starved and
died by thousands and hundreds of thousands and
perhaps millions before their mothers’ eyes.

The daily convoys of rapatries were very much
alike. They differed chiefly in degrees of wretched-
ness, and their condition was a fair index of the treat-
ment which had been accorded them in the towns from
which they had come. Special convoys of children
were sometimes received. Orphanages in the north-
ern provinces were lifted by the mailed hand and
182 The House of the Good Neighbor

shaken out at Evian. On one occasion a convoy made
up of the inmates of an insane asylum was brought
through and politely passed to France.

A band with a trumpeter met every train, and the
reactions of the children to the French bugle call, and
the strange sights and sounds and friendly offices, dif-
fered according to their ages. For more than three
years they had lived in a circumscribed hell created by
their enemies. The world and all its joys had been
closed to them. But those who were old enough to
remember the happy days before the war, had faith
that there was a heaven on earth that had not been
invaded, which their fathers and big brothers who had
marched away so long before were still fighting to
defend.

These children responded instantly to the new en-
vironment. They had reached the frontier of the
promised land. All their troubles were over. Of
course they were weary, stunted, diseased and covered
with vermin. That was the customary condition of
people where they came from. But at Evian the
mountains were white, the lake was blue, and the sky
was clear though it rained pitchforks, because there
was no Hun on the horizon, and they were going to
have all kinds of good things to eat for dinner.

It is said that the oppressed soul finds expression
in music and maybe it does. Perhaps that is why
those youngsters had such an astounding repertoire of
catchy, waggish little war songs, dedicated disrespect-
fully to the Kaiser and his “kult.” Many of those
songs embodied treasonable sentiment, and the one
which seemed most popular ended with an incriminat-
The War Blight 183

ing refrain to this effect: “We never will be happy
*til his head’s cut off!”

Those dear little dare-devils had all committed the
heinous crime of lése majesté in addition to lesser
offenses against the imperial government. There was
no doubt about it. They gloried in their guilt and
confessed it openly. In secret and dark places they
had made faces at the high officials—and they were
still making them. With abysmal disrespect for
the despotic source of the official orders pasted on the
front walls of ruined houses and other places in their
home towns—orders which, perhaps, forbade hens to
lay eggs clandestinely and without the knowledge of
the military authorities—these young rebels had deco-
rated the back walls with pictures of insubordinate
chickens, and caricatures of the Crown Prince and
other conquering heroes, confronted with figures
standing at attention with their thumbs suspiciously
near their noses, some of which strikingly resembled
the original reliefs found in the Tombs of the Ptole-
mies.

Poor little bundles of skin and bone and brain!
They had been starved, brow-beaten and intimidated
in every way. Nothing had been left undone to make
them loyal, Kaiser-loving subjects. But they were in-
corrigible. They belonged to a perverse race and
generation. There was no gratitude in them. And
the fact that they had learned these songs, passed them
along and popularized them under conditions care-
fully calculated to put fear into the hearts of men,
proved conclusively that the Prussian system was alto-
gether too humane to be effective, and that the only
184 The House of the Good Neighbor

way to conquer such a people was to exterminate it
root and branch.

The younger children who had no memories but the
memories of war and horror were not so responsive.
They were dumb and apprehensive in manner. Dread
and distrust of strangers developed with their baby
teeth. Strange men in uniform suggested the Boche,
and they shrank away and clung to their mother’s
skirts—when they had any mothers. They were a
fear-bred children. They had always lived under
the ban of silence and they could not so readily cast
it off.

“Hush! Hush!” had been their mother’s admoni-
tion from the beginning, and they were too young to
understand what had happened, and why their mothers
changed so suddenly and told them to sing. One
little girl who was glancing furtively about as the com-
pany was marching down the hill from the station, was
asked if she knew the song the boys were singing, and
she answered cautiously: “Yes, but we should be
careful, THEY MAY HEAR US.”

Those children have been irreparably injured.
They have suffered the war blight. Their bodies
have been permanently modified by malnutrition, and
their minds and characters permanently modified by
the conditions under which they have lived. The psy-
chological effects of this war are far reaching. This
is a fascinating field for speculation. Think of the
new, blank mind of a little child registering grief,
fear, horror and almost nothing else for its first four
conscious years!

Thousands of those little ones had never learned to
The War Blight 185

play. They had never had enough to eat. Horror
had been their common experience, hunger their
habitual state, and fear their constant companion.
They did not remember anything else. The weak had
starved and died. Only those of greatest vitality had
survived.

They did not grieve for the joys they had never
known, but they dreaded a repetition of the sorrows
they had experienced. Their greatest fear was sepa-
ration from their mothers or other relatives left to
them. This was the supreme tragedy they all under-
stood so well. Their fathers had been taken away;
their big brothers had been taken away; their sisters
had been taken away; some of their mothers had been
taken away into the vast unknown, and this was the
most terrible fate that the mind of a little child could
apprehend.

This fear of separation amounted to a war obses-
sion. The older children were somewhat the same
in this respect. The members of those broken fam-
ilies dreaded nothing so much as losing each other.
They were willing to endure privation if they could
endure it together. This made it very difficult to
segregate those with contagious diseases. They put
no faith in the promises of men. All men were liars.
They could not be trusted, and no prudent child would
let his mother out of his sight.

I shall never forget a boy of about twelve years of
age with a bad case of lupus, who came in with his
grandmother. This dreadful disease covered his
hands and part of his face. He was a hideous sight
and a danger to those with whom he was traveling.
186 The House of the Good Neighbor

It was impossible to take that boy to the hospital
without taking his grandmother. They clung together
desperately, and the child cried out in anguish that
they had taken all the rest of the family, but even
the Boche had left him his grandmother.

The incoming convoys were always met at Evian by
the American Red Cross Ambulances, and by the
nurses and members of the different French societies
organized to aid and comfort the rapatries. Every
effort was made to make them feel that their home-
coming was an event, and that they were more than
welcome. We all tried to register joy and gladness.
The attempt was a pitiful failure. Who could look
happy in the presence of such abysmal grief? The
only genuine note of joy was the heart-breaking joy
of deliverance expressed in one way or another by the
people themselves. They had reached the bottom of
the bottomless pit, and the only direction in which they
could look was upward.

The very old people were always exhausted by the
long trip, and many of the young children developed a
special disorder during the journey due to sitting for
so many hours with their legs hanging over the edge of
a hard seat. Their legs were congested, swollen and
very painful from the knees down, but no permanent
injury resulted. All these cases and others unable to
walk were taken in the ambulances, while the rest of
the rapatries followed the band on foot from the
station to the Casino.

The patience with which those people accepted their
afflictions was a lesson in fortitude to some of us
unreconciled to relatively small misfortunes. With
The War Blight 187

weary, ill-shod feet they marched along, keeping time
to the national airs they had not heard since the inva-
sion. It was sucha joy to hear a national air! With
every reason to weep they sang. It was a privilege to
be able to lift up their voices and sing the songs that
were in their souls. Some of them tried to dance, but
there was no delight in the spectacle. The incongru-
ity somehow suggested the gruesome dance of the hob-
goblins.

The Casino was used as a clearing house for these
unfortunates, where the business of receiving, register-
ing, and assigning them to the different departments of
France was done in a gracious, ceremonial way. The
first need to be met was the need for food. Every
morning and evening tables were set for five or six
hundred in the large reception hall, and the incoming
rapatries took their first meal in their own free
country.

The room was decorated with the flags of the allied
nations and there were so many of them that no one
but an expert on ensigns could have told to which
countries they belonged. This was confusing. The
people had known nothing of the war except that Ger-
many was winning. Was it possible that there were
so many nations on the face of the earth, and that they
were all fighting for France? This news was better
than the dinner. Those liars and assassins would
soon be exterminated.

Patriotic music was played during this meal in the
evening, after which the Prefet delivered an address
of welcome. Before the war people were not admit-
ted to the Casino reception hall unless they were in
188 The House of the Good Neighbor

evening dress. The Prefet had the habit. He always
came in formal dress, and he looked old fashioned
and out of the game. His intentions were kindly, but
it seemed a pity to remind those poor people of what
they had suffered at a moment when forgetfulness had
come to their relief. He spoke of their sons who had
died for France; of their fathers and husbands who
had been killed, maimed or taken prisoners of war;
of their young boys enslaved, and their girls held by
the enemy—and the people bowed their heads and
wept.

Most of the old men and women, the mothers and
children, who sat at those tables and listened to the
Prefet’s speech of welcome, had lost every earthly pos-
session human creatures hold dear. They had lost
their homes, their fathers, husbands, sons and daugh-
ters. They had been stripped of everything except
the scant covering on their bodies. But as the Prefet
spoke of the glorious traditions of their country, and
the national promises for the future, their sad faces
gradually lighted up and indicated that no sacrifice
was considered too great to make for France.

There was never a dissenting expression on any of
their faces, and considering their wretchedness and
physical weakness their response to the Marseil-
laise, which immediately followed, was astonishing.
With the very first strain they arose and commenced
to sing. To the old men the song seemed sacred. It
was a hymn, and they sang it with their hats in their
hands and a look of reverence on their faces. To the
older boys, all under fourteen years, it was the glori-
ous war song of France. It stirred the fighting soul
The War Blight 189

of youth within them, and they waved their caps and
sang with a spirit that showed quite clearly that they
already felt the call of their country and were waiting
impatiently until they were old enough to answer.

But what did the Marseillaise mean to the mothers
whose sons had died in honor, and whose daughters
were living in—in the hands of the enemy? What
did it mean to the women who had watched their little
ones fade and die of privation? Was it not a song
of sacrifice? Whatever it meant to them they were
not silent. With a fortitude of soul that made them
seem like blessed martyrs, they lifted up their voices
and sang the Marseillaise, and their song was a sob
that would wring the soul of the world.

When those women spoke of their sons who had
died for France, they raised their sad faces and
smiled. There was a compensating glory in the sac-
rifice that made it possible to bear. But when they
spoke of their daughters who were living somewhere
in the hands of the enemy, their heads were low and
their voices were the voices of women whose souls had
sounded the deeps beyond despair.

We have commemorated the death of Edith Cavell.
She was an embodied spirit sent to help save the
world. Hers was a glorious fate. She was shot in
the open like a soldier, and her soul went home to
England and raised an avenging army of a million
men within a few weeks. What woman would not
choose to die like Edith Cavell?

The supreme marytrs of this cruel war are not the
honored dead, but the living who have suffered and
are still suffering more than death. If any American
190 The House of the Good Neighbor

woman whose son of twenty-five has died on the battle-
field, thinks she has drained the cup of war, let her
imagine that same dear boy at five years old, standing
at her knee and begging for food with the faith of a
child in his mother’s power to grant his prayer. Let
her visualize him growing paler and weaker as the
days go by, and finally dying of privation. This is
what warfare means to women. There are millions of
such women and children in Europe to-day—and the
war is not over for them.
CHAPTER XVI

THE CONVERTED CASINO

In regular order the rapatries left the dining-room
and passed to the Information Bureau adjoining.
Eight hundred thousand records had been compiled
from information secured from friends and relatives
of people who were living in the occupied provinces
at the time of the invasion, and were kept on file, to-
gether with letters, messages and sometimes money, in
case the person in question should pass through Evian.
About eighty per cent. of the wayfarers had found
friends through this bureau.

The recording system was very effective. It was
devised and put into operation by Mademoiselle Philo-
mene Goossens, a young woman who had never done
any work of this kind before, and is merely another
instance of the adaptability of women to new occupa-
tions, which proved of such value in the warring
countries.

Mademoiselle Goossens reached at random into a
file of letters addressed to possible rapatries and
drew out one containing twenty francs, and another
offering a home to a friend of better days. There
was a supernatural suggestion in the coincidence that
about sixty per cent. of the letters delivered through

the bureau were written by friends in France during
191
192 The House of the Good Neighbor

the three days that the recipients were making the
journey from Belgium to Evian. We were told that
the writers of the letters were not notified, and had no
means of knowing that their friends were en route for
this point. Everybody in the bureau wondered at
this strange phenomenon, which surely indicated that
there are things in heaven and earth not understood
by men.

The bureau was simply an extensive double counter
arranged on temporary trestles in the center of the
room. A hundred and fifty young women were em-
ployed there. The sections were lettered from A to
Z, like a post office, and this made it possible for the
people to find their places promptly, where their rec-
ords were taken and any letters or messages were de-
livered. They were all eager for personal news and
a letter or the lack of it made a great difference to
their homecoming.

Before the war some of the rapatries had been
rich and others had been poor; some proud, and others
humble. The acid test of war had been impartially
applied to them. From a military standpoint they
all belonged to one class—the worthless. They all
belonged on the wastage dump, and that is where they
found themselves.

Northern France and Belgium had been rich and
thrifty countries, and many of those people had been
accustomed to all the comforts of life, but when they
reached Evian none of them had available means, that
is, money with an actual purchasing value, although
some of them carried thousands of francs in the war
currency of the districts in which they had lived.
The Converted Casino 193

This currency was issued to cover the money that
had been removed from these places, at the time of
evacuation. During the years of occupation it had
been used as a local medium of exchange. It was
certified at Evian when the holders passed through,
and the nation assumed the responsibility of redeem-
ing it gradually.

At the Bureau of Certification where a large num-
ber of people were usually waiting I noticed one
woman who presented four thousand francs. The
money gave her but little advantage over those with-
out means. One hundred and sixty francs (one hun-
dred for herself and thirty each for her children),
about twenty-nine dollars, was redeemed at once.
This was the maximum allowance for a woman with
two children. Her currency was certified and under
the national arrangement she would be permitted to
cash one hundred and sixty francs monthly in any
part of France. The next woman waiting in line had
not so much as a franc to call her own. She also
was given an allowance for herself and children,
which was supplemented by other means available at
Evian.

To the casual observer the great and distinguishing
difference between the rapatries was the difference
between those who voluntarily sought out the public
baths at the Casino, and those who said they did not
need a bath. These baths had been installed at the
instance and insistence of a woman who had lived in
the war zone, and knew what it meant to live without
bathing.

Warfare makes people acquainted with strange bed-

,
194 The House of the Good Neighbor

fellows, and where large numbers were herded and
billeted together vermin increased and multiplied, and
swarmed alike on the clean and the unclean—and
some people could never get used to them. Cooties
of all kinds dug in and became so firmly established
that it was impossible to remove them by hand. A
high degree of heat, strong parasiticides, and special
machinery was necessary for their extermination.
All of these conveniences had been installed at the
Casino baths. The fame of this institution had spread
beyond the border, and while some of the rapatries
preferred to bear the ills they had, rather than risk
the effect of a bath in the middle of the winter in a
strange place, the more adventurous made a straight
break for the bath-house, in order to get the first
chance at the towel. This rush was unnecessary.
There were plenty of towels and soap and hot water.
Those poor people could scarcely believe that such
luxury was meant for them. And wonder of wonders,
while they were scrubbing and being scrubbed, their .
one and only suit of clothes was put into a mammoth
steam sterilizer under high pressure, and came out
dry, warm, and without a living thing in the seams.
Boys are not partial to bathtubs, but those urchins
had great sport at that place where ten or fifteen of
them pranced together like so many water imps, under
the big fountains. All white boys look alike with
their clothes off, and as they glanced mischievously
backward over their bare shoulders, they seemed so
much like home youngsters out for a frolic, that we
half expected to see them dive from the platform into
the “swimmin’ hole” on the opposite side, and the
The Converted Casino 195

only reason they did not do so was because the “swim-
min’ hole” had been left out of the scheme.

From the Bureau of Information the procession
passed to the Salle de Baccara—at least that is what
was written over the entrance in letters of gold. The
ceiling and dome of this hall were decorated with
spades, clubs, hearts and diamonds. But instead of
the baccarat players of former days, a long line of
little children were passing in single file before the
medical inspectors of the American Red Cross.

In another part of this hall the grown people were
interrogated by the French military police, and those
who were regarded with suspicion were detained for
further examination. Some of the spies sent through
with the convoys had been detected in this way.

War and Pestilence are boon companions, and those
children had all kinds of diseases from scabies (the
seven-year itch of the good old days when men fought
with sword and shield and were limited in their capac-
ity for damage) to lupus on the surface of their
bodies, and everything from ascarides (intestinal
worms) to tuberculosis on the interior.

The monotonous repetition of contagious skin dis-
eases was varied occasionally by the detection of an
insidious case of diphtheria, measles or scarlet fever.
Sometimes a fine, healthy child, clean and well nour-
ished, would come along the line, and we knew in-
stantly that his poor mother had found some way of
circumventing the system. On one occasion a lank
youth of about nineteen appeared, and when the in-

spector asked what was the matter with him, he
laughed and said that he had deceived the German
196 The House of the Good Neighbor

medical authorities by simulating tuberculosis. He
was in good health and enlisted immediately in the
French army.

The children with parasitic skin disorders, includ-
ing bad cases of pediculosis (lice), were sent to the
Gordon Annex, a delousing hospital with accommoda-
tion for about two hundred cases. Those infected
with scarlet fever, diphtheria, and other contagions
which were likely to become epidemic, were isolated
at the American Red Cross Hospital for Contagious
Diseases, and non-contagious cases of a minor nature
were treated at the dispensary.

“The French physician in charge of the medical
service at Evian assigned the children’s work to the
specialists provided by the American Red Cross.
Several hundred examinations were made daily. A
great many cases of scarlet fever, diphtheria, measles,
and whooping cough were detected—and each case
was a potential epidemic nipped in the bud.

These children were detained at the hospital, which
was formerly the Hotel Chatelet, one of the finest
hotels in this town of fine hotels. Its broad sun
porches built for poor little rich girls and boys and all
their relations served very well for poor little poor
children recovering from contagious diseases. And
the spacious gardens with hide-and-seek shrubs, climb-
able trees, and lovely primrose paths winding toward
the shore of Lake Geneva, were delightful play-
grounds for convalescent children who had almost
forgotten how to play.
CHAPTER XVII

THE INTERNATIONAL BURYING GROUND

My next move was a move from grief to glory—from
Evian les Bains to an American camp in the War
Zone. I had seen the dire results of war in and about
Paris, but at Evian there was an endless procession, a
continuous exposition of the first fruits of the World’s
War—the soul-sickening effects of the holocaust upon
non-combatants, especially women and _ children.
After that visit the Allied soldiers looked different to
me, and our boys were more than soldiers—they were
American Crusaders come to save the world, and
above the head of their columns it was easy to imagine
an angel with a flaming sword.

“I have read a fiery Gospel writ in burnished rows
of steel,” and there is a terrible inspiration in it.
After Evian I could never look at our marching troops
without a sense of religious exaltation, and a feeling
that our nation had been ordained by God to be the
determining factor in the final war of the world.

It seemed so clear. In the mysterious scheme of
things a continent had been reserved as a refuge for
the men who would be free from every part of Europe.
There they had built a nation with a soul of liberty,
and with the blood of every European country flowing

in its veins. Such a nation would naturally fight for
197
198 The House of the Good Neighbor

the freedom of the world and then endeavor to estab-
lish permanent peace between its mother countries,
Victory was inevitable, and triumphant democracy
fighting against itself afterward was unthinkable.

We American women in France felt so proud of our
soldiers. They were so clean and young and strong.
The pity of it all was that even one should be called
to die in his youth as a sacrifice to the selfishness and
folly of men.

The boys who made such a glorious record during
the war were a high credit to American women, for
their care and training had been largely in the hands
of women. It was part of the Prussian system to take
their boys from their women teachers at an early age,
lest they become effeminate, but there had never been
anything about our boys that had suggested the need
of methodically developing masculinity. As a nation
we have not been interested in building a war machine,
but results have demonstrated that we have done fairly
well in making men. Our military experts have not
been fussing over-much about the birth-rate and en-
deavoring to increase it willy-nilly, although we all
recognize that motherhood is the fundamental military
service. We have heard a great deal about unprepar-
edness in our different departments of war, but there
was one branch of the service that was prepared.
When the war call came the mothers of America were
ready with millions of the finest sons that ever made
up an army.

This war has disproved many pet theories, and it
has proved to the military observers of all the world
that women-taught men can fight. Our boys have not
The International Burying Ground 199

been beaten and brutalized. They have not been
taught to look up and salute and look down and boot.
They have not been systematically militarized, but
they certainly can fight, and when they occupy con-
quered territory the women and little children will
have nothing to fear.

The soldiers of the world have never had a better
interpreter than Kipling, and after studying our troops
he said that the American soldiers were peculiar in
that their sense of delicacy had been outraged by the
incidents of the war. This is the greatest compliment
that has ever been paid an army. Soldiers engaged
in the bloody business of war are not supposed to
have a sense of delicacy. And one of the things we
have learned is that a man with a chivalric soul and
an outraged sense of delicacy is a dangerous man
to meet. A converted “conscientious objector” from
Tennessee made the greatest personal record of the
war. This is not surprising. Men with high ideals
have always been the best fighters in a just cause.
The nearer men get to the angels the better they fight
the devil.

The part of France known as the War Zone and
north and south of it, for that matter, has never been
anything but a war zone. From the beginning of re-
corded history it has been the marching, camping and
fighting ground for the hostile hosts of Europe. At
Chalons, within a stone’s throw of the above mentioned
American camp, and not far from Chateau-Thierry,
Attilla, the Hun, with a million followers, met his
“Waterloo” after having ravaged Europe and exacted
tribute from Rome. Here Clovis, the Frank, defeated
200 The House of the Good Neighbor

the remnant of the Roman forces at Soissons, and the
armies of Charlemagne afterward made peace with the
sword.

William the Conqueror crossed from the War Zone
to England and was absorbed by the natives as a
harmful, extraneous germ is absorbed by protecting
phagocytes, and his English descendant, the Black
Prince, returned a few generations later and practi-
cally cleaned up the country. Warfare at that time
had an appealing personal touch, and in the distribu-
tion of loot that followed one of his victorious battles,
the Black Prince plucked the three plumes from the
helmet of the King of Bohemia, motto (Ich dien) and
all, and stuck them in his own crown, and from that
day to this these feathers have constituted the armorial
bearings of the Prince of Wales.

The mission of Joan of Arc culminated in the
crowning of Charles VII at the Rheims Cathedral.
She was a saint to the French and a witch to the Eng-
lish and so they burned her at the stake in this zone of
their military activities. Napoleon’s legions marched
triumphantly through the War Zone to Berlin, and
subsequently to defeat at Waterloo. After Sedan the
Prussians goose-stepped through this territory to Paris,
but their second visit forty-four years later was cut
short by the Battle of the Marne. Following this a
trench was dug through the War Zone which divided
the world, and here the defenders of democracy met
and defeated the final forces of autocracy.

The nations of Europe have not been at war all the
time. There have been intervals of peace necessary
for the national neighborhoods to prepare for war.
The International Burying Ground 201

During the ages of slow communication, considerable
time was required to make treaties, celebrate royal
marriages between selected males and females of the
ruling houses in order to cement these treaties, read-
just national boundaries, reconstruct ravaged terri-
tory and reproduce soldiers, after which hostilities
were invariably resumed.

There was never any delay on account of a technical
cause for a declaration of war. The different coun-
tries kept lists of unrequited wrongs on hand. The
crying need was always for soldiers and as soon as
there was a new crop of young boys ready for slaugh-
ter, they were sent to the War Zone and killed. This
has always been a burying-ground for the boyhood of
Europe, and now that we have added our quota surely
the cup of fury has been drained to the dregs.

Close your eyes and mentally visualize the millions
and millions of soldiers of all the centuries marching
and countermarching, wearing different uniforms and
bearing different banners. Generation after genera-
tion the mettle of new men and new armies have been
tempered in this fiery furnace, and the Expeditionary
forces of the United States have been the last to take
this test triumphantly.

Tomes and tomes have been written about the bat-
tles fought upon this small section of the earth. From
Pepin the Short to Pershing the Tall, the fighting men
of the ages have been going to it hammer and tongs,
fire and sword, burning pitch and boiling tar, on this
terrain. Here Charles the Fat, Francis the Fair, and
Louis the Grande himself have had their innings.
Here the standards of the nations have been unfurled
202 The House of the Good Neighbor

to the breeze, and the lions, unicorns, single and dou-
ble-headed eagles, and all the birds, animals and rep-
tiles embellishing the banners, crests and shields of
misguided.men and nations have lain down peacefully
together.

A camouflage of holiness has always been created
for these unholy sacrifices. The legions of Charle-
magne marched under the Blue Hood of Saint Mar-
tin; the hosts of England at a later date under the
Red Cross of Saint George; the forces of France under
the Oriflamme of Saint Denis, and the armies of Ger-
many under the Black Cross adopted by that nation.
It has been a saintly business. Generation after
generation the hosts of mankind have shed their blood
and buried their dead (when time permitted) in this
aceldama. No wonder the poppies are red. It is
good poppy soil. For ages and ages of time untold
it has been enriched by the blood and bodies of boys.
CHAPTER XVIII

FIVE WOMEN IN A CAMIONETTE

A cHaINn of dispensaries with a hospital at Toul and a
center at the lovely city of Nancy in the Meurthe-et-
Moselle was operated by the American Red Cross, and
by visiting these places with the women engaged in the
work I got a fair idea of the country and what was
going on at that time.

The scene painters and stage carpenters had been
busy in the war zone along the Lorraine front. The
roads were screened with filmy draperies that waved
in thin air like floating, unsubstantial clouds conceal-
ing military movements from the falcon of the enemy.
French and American troops were constantly moving,
and trains of camouflaged cannon and camion crept
along the highways like mammoth chameleons. The
whole country was bristling with arms, but viewed
from above it must have been literally a picture of
rustic innocence.

Rumors to the effect that the enemy was preparing
for a decisive drive were bruited through the country,
and preparations were certainly being made to resist
it. There were disquieting signs and portents. The
United States was an unknown quantity and quality
on the other side of the submarine. Russia had gone

to pieces. Italy had suffered a crushing defeat.
203
204 The House of the Good Neighbor

What next? No one admitted a doubt, but many a
thoughtful eye was looking westward across the ocean,
and instead of peace on earth the awful idea of a con-
tinuous war between continents was forming in the
minds of men.

But in the Christmas month at the darkest hour the
Star of the Allies rose in the East. Jerusalem was
taken by the British forces. This was no great mili-
tary advantage. But if ever there was a divine sign
given to men to uphold their faith at a time of need,
the giving of the Holy City into the keeping of the
Allies was a sign from God Himself that the war cry,
“Gott mit Uns,” was a sacrilegious assumption on the
part of the enemy.

I shall never forget the morning when this news
came into Nancy. Our camionette was standing in
front of the headquarters of the American Fund for
French Wounded. It was the only sign of life in the
Place Stanislas, that magnificent square that teemed
with life before the war, and looked like a tombless
cemetery afterward.

A German plane had been brought down a few days
before and was lying beside the central monument.
It was a sorry wreck—the deadest thing in that dead
square. It looked like a great bird that had just been
killed. Its body was crushed, its wings broken, and
a tangle of fine wires connected its different parts as
though the sensitive fibers from its spinal cord, torn
from their sheaths still held to the lacerated surface
tissues.

As a subject for speculation it presented intensely
interesting possibilities. Who was this enemy avi-
Five Women in a Camionette 205

ator whose romantic career in the clouds had been so
suddenly cut off? What was his record? Who had
brought him down? Which one of our boys was
wearing the life of this Lucifer, as a star, in his mili-
tary crown? All these questions and many others
might have been suggested by that tragic scrap heap—
but not one of them entered my head.

The German war cross painted on the green wing
of that mechanical corpse fascinated me. It looked
like the Cross of the Hospitalers, the Cross of Mercy,
emblazoned on that merciless bombing plane, and I
was wondering at this strange violation of the fitness
of things, and what sort of a national mind lay behind
these incongruous manifestations, when the girls came
out to the camionette and called me. The mail had
arrived. The English daily newspaper printed in
Paris was opened, and there on the front page was the
thrilling headline: “JERUSALEM HAS FALLEN.”

The man who wrote that headline would have been
capable of painting the Cross of Mercy on a bombing
plane. A glance down the column showed us that
Jerusalem had risen. After a thousand years’ occu-
pation by the Turks, the Holy City had been given to
the Allies. The prayer of the Christian ages had been
answered. The goal of the Crusaders had been won.
And it was easy to imagine the shades of Godfrey of
Bouillon, Richard Ceur de Lion, and all that knightly
crew standing at attention when General Allenby rev-
erently accepted the keys of the city and entered at
the Jaffa Gate.

This victory was celebrated in our camionette that
morning. Our morale reached one hundred per cent.
206 The House of the Good Neighbor

at the first reading and kept mounting upward as we
skidded along toward Pont-a-Mousson, where the Red
Cross operated a dispensary within a stone’s throw
of the trenches.

There were five of us—five women in a camionette,
and we certainly had the “Three Men in a Boat,” who
made such good reading a few years ago, beaten at
every point except the telling of the story.

Our conveyance was camouflaged in the green, rus-
set and gray shades of the autumn landscape. This
was very effective for the fall of the year, but we
should have changed colors gradually with the seasons
like the animals who depend upon this subterfuge of
nature for survival. White lead and imitation icicles
was the proper coat for December, but paint was
scarce. A passing airman would have spotted us in-
stantly and smiled at the spectacle of a moving object
that looked like a stray section of a bosky dell gliding
swiftly over the white expanse of country.

But we were not worrying about airmen; we were
rejoicing in the good news, and breaking spontane-
ously into the Holy City every few minutes. We
could not remember all the words of the anthem, but
those we were able to recall must have been inspired
for the day of deliverance:

“Jerusalem! Jerusalem! Sing for the night is o’er,
Hosanna in the Highest! Hosanna for ever more.”

The machine was skidding frightfully and several
times we caught our breath and stopped in the middle
of a verse to thank our little chauffeuress for a narrow
escape from death. Her driving was not such as to
Five Women in a Camionette 207

inspire confidence, but women ambulance drivers were
still on trial in the war zone, and we felt in duty bound
to give her all the encouragement we could without
compromising our consciences or losing our lives.

She was a brave little girl and as pretty as a pic-
ture. In fact she was a picture in her blue uniform
with its scarlet lined cape thrown back over her shoul-
der in a way to leave her wheel arm free. Her ruling
passion was to make good as an ambulance driver in
the war zone, and barring accident there was no rea-
son why she should not win a decoration for con-
spicuous service if opportunity came her way.

There were times when we secretly wished that her
arm was as strong as her spirit, but she possessed the
compensating advantage of being able to extract “es-
sence” from a French military garage that had long
since been reported dry to civilians. She never whim-
pered about the weather, and so long as she was sit-
ting on the front seat braving the storm, the least we
could do was to give her a fair word and trust to luck.

Passing through Pompey, one of the border towns,
we noticed a crowd of women, children and old men,
following after a very active, strong-lunged cripple,
who was yelling some sort of information at the top
of his voice. His message was evidently causing ex-
citement. Our first thought was bombs and shells,
and we involuntarily glanced around for an abri, but
a moment later we learned that he was our advance
agent, the town crier, officially informing the people
that the American Red Cross was to open a dispensary
in that town on the following day.

On the following day we were there, and so was the
208 The House of the Good Neighbor

mayor, and the head school teacher, and all the in-
habitants of the town who were free to come. It was
a regular christening. These affairs are conducted
in France like weddings and funerals with all the
pomp and circumstance suiting the occasion.

The people who came to the regular clinics were not
all sick. Some called because they were sociable,
and when they were asked what was the matter they
answered naively: “We are not sick, madame, but
we want to see you.”

They were interested in Americans, and life was so
deadly dull in some of the towns near the front that
even a medical clinic was a welcome diversion. There
were no other amusements. The picture shows had
been closed for almost four years. The war news was
meager. Existence had been reduced to just one
enemy air-man after another, and during these noc-
turnal visits the people groped to their cellars and
tried to talk about something human in order to keep
sane in a maniacal environment.

The inhuman order of life was more than normal
creatures had been created to endure. The monotony
and tragic routine was maddening. It is easy to think
of men engaged in battle. This is history repeating
itself. Adult males of different species have a fight-
ing instinct. But it is hard to visualize little children
whose ears have been trained by terrible experience
for the sounds of war, detecting the hum of the enemy
motor and disappearing into the nearest abri like so
many little chickens when the hawk is on the wing.

Among the houses that had recently been destroyed
there was one where a mother and two children had
Five Women in a Camionette 209

been killed. The father of these children had been
serving in Salonica for two years. He had been
granted “permission” and returned home all unknow-
ing to surprise his family, arriving just in time to
attend the funeral.

Pont-a-Mousson had been bombed and bombed until
it looked like old Pompeii. There was one house with
the walls standing and an outside stairs that I climbed
and looked in from the second floor. A bomb had
been dropped through the roof and had exploded in
the basement, tearing the heart out of this house. The
kitchen utensils had been:blown up from the lower
floor and scattered about the sleeping room. In the
center of the wall at the head of the bed there was a
picture of the Virgin Mary hanging between a framed
marriage certificate and a photograph of a young
couple in their wedding finery. The foot of the bed-
stead hung over the yawning crater in the floor, and
on the opposite side there were two little cribs upset,
that mutely testified to the issue of this marriage.
The life of this household had evidently been ar-
rested at this point.

The trenches opened from the gate of Pont-a-Mous-
son, and the familiar notes of the different guns and
shells were instantly differentiated by the residents.
They referred to them casually, as we might say, ah,
that is a robin or a lark or perhaps a wood-pecker
when the machine gun was peppering away. Some
one remarked the note of the anti-aircraft gun and I
went out to see. Sure enough, an observation plane
was passing high in the clouds, and following each
report a little puff of white smoke appeared in the
210 The House of the Good Neighbor

vicinity of the plane showing where the explosion had
occurred.

There is a cemetery on the hillside across the river
which cuts through the center of the town, where the
Prussians buried their dead in 1871, and during the
great offensive at this point at the beginning of the
present war, the skeletons were literally shelled out of
their graves and participated in the general mélée.

On this occasion the Kaiser himself in a new white
uniform is said to have stood on the hill beyond the
German trenches, and gazed covetously upon fair
Nancy while waiting for his troops to clear the way
for his triumphal entry. But Nancy, the coquette,
drew the line on the Kaiser. She did not flirt with his
men. She did not serve them macaroons, the deli-
cious confection which is given to all welcome visit-
ors, because it originated in Nancy. The immortal
Twentieth Corps helped her to receive them, and after
the reception she washed her dainty hands.
CHAPTER XIX

FINIS

Merry Christmas at the American camp was a joy
that had been growing daily in anticipation. The
Christmas season always brings its train of trooping
ghosts that reverse the reel of Time’s mighty film
showing pictures of past seasons. There were East-
ern Christmas times and Western ones, and Christmas
up near the Arctic Circle, but this was to be the great-
est Christmas of all: Christmas at the American camp
in the War Zone—the first Christmas after the taking
of Jerusalem.

I had “supped full with horrors” and was beginning
to feel uncomfortably “fed up” and the festivities in
prospect promised diversion and delight. Nothing
but the landscape would be lacking to make it a home
affair. The prevailing colors would be our colors,
red, white, and blue arranged in stripes—the Star-
Spangled Banner and all that means to an American.
Thousands of merrymakers would be wearing the
American uniform. There would be American boys
and American girls, American songs and American
dances, an American Christmas tree, and last but not
least an American dinner.

France is famous for her cuisine, but France had

other things to think about in those dark days, besides
211
212 The House of the Good Neighbor

my tastes had been acquired at home and the only food
that seemed just right to me on the other side of the
ocean was that which I found at the American camps.
Great preparations were being made for the coming
Christmas. This was to be an occasion to be remem-
bered and lived over and over as long as life lasted.
In order that I might participate, some of my friends
had secured a request for me to return to the camp
and assist with the program and I fully intended giv-
ing myself that pleasure. Knowing my ruling weak-
ness these. same friends had sent a menu on which I
had feasted my home hungry eyes. There was to be
turkey and cranberry sauce, sweet potatoes, green
peas, mince pies, plum pudding, Oregon apples, Cali-
fornia peaches, Texas nuts, candy made of sugar, and
white bread—white bread with raisins in it, such as I
had had at that camp before.

All these joys of anticipation were mine and nothing
could take them from me, but when the time came I
was sick with bronchitis and sciatica. Pain and dis-
tress naturally suggested the House of the Good Neigh-
bor, and I went direct to Paris, arriving at the refuge
quite unexpectedly on Christmas eve.

There was no one at home but Madam Fleuret, the
cook, and she was pleased to have company and gladly
shared her dinner with me. It was rabbit stew, but in
war times we were thankful for small blessings, and
at least the purple cabbage of execrable memory,
which has always been subconsciously associated with
rabbit stew since my sojourn in a central European
city several years ago, did not offend my eye on this
occasion.
Finis 213

The cook’s generosity was its own reward. She
gave me her rabbit and still had it, while I sat think-
ing of the American camp and all the glories I had
missed. Heaven in France was with the American
troops, and what had I done that I should be shut out
on Christmas? Why should I be afflicted with bron-
chitis and sciatica, and be obliged to limp back to the
House of the Good Neighbor?

Madam Fleuret was solicitous. It was a draft—a
current of air that had done the damage. Traveling
on trains was so dangerous. There were always ma-
lignant currents of air rushing through the open cor-
ridors. People were so careless. They often lifted
the windows or opened the doors in direct violation
of the law prohibiting these indiscretions. They
should be punished. Why should an innocent per-
son suffer bronchitis or sciatica because of the crim-
inal carelessness of a fellow traveler?

In rebuttal of my feeble defense of atmospheric
currents, she admitted that in America the elements
might be benign, and currents of air salubrious, but in
France the wind from the northeast was likely to be
fatal. How could it be otherwise? It came from
Germany. It was “geschlecht.” Even the language
was harsh and terrible.

Madam Fleuret spoke German fairly well. She
had lived in occupied territory for over three years
with enemy soldiers billeted upon her house most of
the time, and she had learned their language in order
to understand and circumvent them as much as she
possibly could. My knowledge of French was prac-
tically nil, and she usually spoke German to me in a
214 The House of the Good Neighbor

low tone so that no one in the house might suspect us
of conspiracy.

She hated the Germans collectively, comprehen-
sively—not so much on account of her personal suf-
fering, but because of the evil they had inflicted upon
her loved ones. She hated them in the name of her
beloved son who had been killed in the Battle of the
Marne. She hated them in the name of her dear hus-
band who had perished while a prisoner of war. She
hated them in the name of her poor little boy who had
died from hunger and exposure in an open court
where they had been locked for five days and nights
without food or warmth during the final evacuation of
their native town. But all the enmity she bore them
in the name of the dead was love compared with the
mother-hatred she held against them in the name of
the living daughter they had taken into captivity.

There was something elemental and titanic in that
woman’s capacity for hatred. As I watched her she
became the living embodiment of the protest of
womankind of all the ages against war and its hideous
train of lust and cruelty. She had borne all its ter-
rors of suffering and outrage and death, silently for
the most part, as if all her strength of soul and body
were consumed in mere endurance. Tears and sobs
and curses were for lighter woe than hers. Before
the majesty of her grief futile words of consolation
died unspoken. Her dark eyes repeated the wail of
the prophet: “Is it nothing to you, all ye that pass
by? behold and see if there be any sorrow like unto
my sorrow?”

The room was lighted by a solitary candle supple-
Finis 215

mented by a reluctant fire in the grate and the feeble
flames made wavering, fantastic shadows on the wall.
My storm coat was hanging on the hat-rack in the
corner. It was surmounted by a German helmet
showing a bullet-hole, which the American boy who
gave me the helmet said was made ,by an American
bullet. In the flickering half light this helmet above
the storm coat strongly suggested a German sentry
standing guard over us. Madam Fleuret remarked
this, and taking down the helmet she examined it
curiously, observing with satisfaction that the bullet
hole indicated that the dead “Bouche” was going to-
ward Berlin when Death overtook him.

With a terrible, passionless murmur of words which
suggested the imprecatory psalms, she gathered up the
remains of this strange Christmas dinner and carried
away the tray, leaving me alone with that German
ghost in the corner regarding me from the shadows as
if he were trying to enter his personal protest against
her indictment.

As the fire burned lower his features seemed dimly
outlined. He did not look like a Hun. There was
nothing about him to suggest Bismarck or Von Hinden-
burg. I had seen so many boys in the War Zone that
boys were on my mind and heart. Perhaps that is
why he looked so young, so like an innocent boy pro-
testing against a cruel fate that had marked him for
this sacrifice. He was dead—cut off in his youth
when he had just tasted life and found it sweet, and
somewhere beyond the Rhine, this Noel night was
bleak and blank to his mother. No, he was not a
Hun. He was just a boy, an average type of the un-
216 The House of the Good Neighbor

counted millions of the boys of different nations that
had died in that same zone during the succeeding ages
of war.

That fireplace always drew one way or the other.
When it drew in the right direction all the heat went
up the chimney, and when the process was reversed
most of the smoke came down. That night it was
alternating. The elements were contending and
making strange music in the flue. From such a flute
Wagner might have caught some of his weird strains.
Gusts of smoke filled the room, but it was the only
fire in the house, and Madam Fleuret came in and
crouched on the hearth, holding her cold, hard hands
over the fitful flame. Knowing her history and sens-
ing her pain I tried to speak in the spirit of the season,
but she was preoccupied, and her abstraction rebuked
my unintentional impertinence. Finally she looked
up and said quite simply:

“To-morrow is Christmas, and I should be happy if
I knew that my little girl was with her father and her
brothers. She is seventeen now—if she is living.
She was very beautiful. She had brown eyes like her
father’s.”

In the different parts of France, and up and down
the ages, I had been seeing war and the fruits of war.
I had read it in histories. I had seen it in pictures.
At Evian I had watched the stream of human war wast-
age that the military authorities in the occupied prov-
inces were pouring into southern France. I had heard
the low, despairing voices of the mothers whose sons
were dead and whose daughters were detained by the
enemy. I had seen thousands of these non-combatant
Finis 217

victims, and knew how the last unit of energy that
could be utilized to increase a military force had been
exacted from those too old or too feeble to fight. But
most terrible of all I had come to understand that this
wicked war was a war on children. They were not
taken, these little ones, and shot against the wall.
Nothing so humane was done for them. They were
slowly starved to death before the eyes of their heart-
broken mothers.

In the War Zone I had seen boys—our boys, on
parade in all their strength and beauty of youth, be-
fore participation in hostilities, and afterward in the
hospitals. In the Lorraine District I had seen the
graves of those who were first to die fighting under the
Stars and Stripes. I had heard the roar of battle in
the distance, the rattle of machine guns, the hum of
the bombing plane, and the shriek of the whistle in the
war town warning people to seek safety in the nearest
abri. In the munition factories along the second line
of defense I had seen the woman-power of France
carrying a burden of labor that seemed beyond the
strength of woman.

Naturally I thought I knew, so far as it was possible
to know abstractly, what war meant, especially what it
meant to women. And sitting before that wretched
fire in the House of the Good Neighbor on Christmas
eve, I suddenly realized that War crouched before me
epitomized in the bent figure and broken heart of that
one woman robbed of everything that made life worth
living and carried so far beyond despair that her
Christmas hope was the unnatural hope that her little
girl was dead. The picture was painful and I raised
218 The House of the Good Neighbor

my head to look away, and there in the corner stood
War—not the martial figure of Mars as it is usually
depicted, but a fair young boy cut off in his youth
when life was very sweet.

And this is war. Death to manhood, and worse
than death to womanhood. But in the presence of war
on the anniversary of that blessed eve when the Man
of Peace was born to Woman, there was an exaltation
in the belief that our war was a war for Peace, and
that we had received a divine sign to uphold our Faith.
Even while the enemy was celebrating his victories,
the Star of the Allies had risen in the East, the Holy
City had been given us as a token that the Lord of
hosts was with us, that right should prevail and that
Peace should be established upon the Earth.

THE END

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