"WAR LETTERS OF AN AMERICAN WOMAN"—IN BLEEDING FRANCE
Experiences in the Siege of Paris
By Marie Van Vorst, Distinguished American Novelist Residing in Paris
These letters present a singularly vivid chronicle of an American woman's experiences during the Great War. She was living in Paris, but brought her mother to London for safety. Here she went through a course of Red Cross lectures and returned to become a nurse at the American Ambulance in the Pasteur Institute in Neuilly, then under the control of Mrs. W. K. Vanderbilt. Her brilliant intellect and sympathizing heart are brought out in her letters to friends in America. Her whole soul is in the cause of the Allies and in her letters she tells many beautiful stories of her experiences in Paris, London, Nice and Rome. To read her impressions as she wrote them down for her friends is to recapture the thrill and the uplift, the sorrows and the hopes, the high resolves and unshakable purpose of those that will live forever in history. Several letters are reprinted here by permission of her publisher, John Lane Company, London and New York.
I—STORY OF ROBERT LE ROUX
To Miss Anna Lusk, New York.
Paris, Nov. 7th, 1914.
Dearest Anna:
In the contemplation of the great griefs of those who have lost their own, of those who have given their all; in the contemplation of the bravest country in the world—Belgium—ravaged from frontier to frontier, laid barren and waste, smoked, ruined, devastated and scarred by wholesale massacre of civilian women and children, our hearts have been crushed. Our souls have been appalled by the burdens of others, and by the future problems of Belgium, not to speak of one quarter of France. Much of the north has been wiped out, and the stories of individual suffering and insults too terrible to dwell upon, you will say.
One of my old clerks in the Bon Marché has had his little nephew come back to him from Germany—a peaceful young middle-class man pursuing his studies in a German town—with both his hands cut off!
The other day in the Gare du Nord, waiting for a train, there was a stunning Belgian officer—not a private—he was a captain in one of the crack regiments. His excitement was terrible, he was almost beside himself with anguish and with anger. In a little village he had seen one woman violated by seven Germans in the presence of her husband; then the husband shot, the woman shot and her little baby cut in four pieces on a butcher's block. You can hardly call this the common course of war. He was a Belgian gentleman, and I should consider this a document of truth.
But there are so many that I cannot prolong, and will not—what is the use? Every now and then a people needs to be wiped off the face of the earth, or a contingent blotted out that a newer and finer civilization shall prevail. Certainly this is the case with Germany. They say here that the Emperor and Crown Prince will be tried by law and sentenced to death as common criminals, the Emperor as a murderer and the Crown Prince as a robber, for his goods trains were stacked with booty and loot. Think of it, a Prince! Everywhere the Germans pass they leave their filthy insults behind them, in the beautiful châteaux and in the delicate rooms of the French women—the indications of their passing, not deeds of noble heroism that can be told of foes as well as of friends, but filthy souvenirs of the passing of creatures for whom the word "barbarism" is too mild!
Here is a more spiritual picture.
Robert Le Roux, jun., was buried yesterday. You will have read in the previous pages here the story of his exploits on the battlefield—the closing of his young life in bravely leading his troops up the hill to certain death. And yesterday I went to St. Germain to his funeral.
The last time I had seen young Robert he was a little boy, in short breeches and socks. His mother brought him to Versailles and he played with us in the garden there—a strong, splendid-looking young French boy. Now I was going to his funeral, and he was engaged to be married, with all his hopes before him, and on this same train was his little fiancée, in her long crêpe veil, broken-hearted; and his little sister, and the father, who had followed his son's campaign with such ardor and such tenderness; and his uncle, Dr. D., of whom I spoke previously—the splendid sergeant-major whose only son had just been killed by the enemy. A train of sorrow!—and only one of so many, so many.
The church at St. Germain is simple and very old. The doors were all hung with heavy snow-white cloth, and before the door stood the funeral car drawn by white horses, all in white, and instead of melancholy hearse plumes there were bunches of flags, and over all hung the November mist enveloping, softening, and there was a big company of Cuirassiers guarding the road.
We went in, and the church was crowded from the nave to the doors, and all the nave and the little chapels were blazing with the lily lights of the candles. It was all so white and so pure, so effulgent, so starry. There was an uplift about it, an élan; tragic as it all was, there was ever that feeling of beyond, beyond!
Before the altar lay the young man's coffin—that leaden coffin that had stood by his father in the fortress of Toul for three weeks, waiting for the dead. It was completely covered by the French flag, and the candles burnt around it.
Beside me was a woman with her husband. She wept so bitterly through the whole service that my heart was just wrung for her, and her husband's face, as his red-lidded eyes stared out in the misty church, was one of the most tragic things I ever saw. I wept, of course, and I have not cried very much since the war broke out, but her grief was too much for me. Finally she turned to me and said: "Madame, I only had one son, he was so charming, so good; he has fallen before the enemy, and I don't know where he is buried!" Just think of it! There she was, at the funeral of another man's son because he was a soldier! Link upon link of sorrow and suffering—such broken hearts....
The whole service was musical, nothing else but violins and harps. It was the most beautiful thing I ever heard, so quiet and so sweet; and that little group touched me profoundly—Le Roux with his daughter and the little fiancée—and that was all. In that coffin lying under the flag Bessie had placed at Toul her little silk pillow for the young soldier's head, and his love-letters in a little packet lay by his side. Around his arm he had worn a little ribbon taken from the hair of his sweetheart, and at the very last when he was dying and the hospital nurse was about to unknot it—I don't know why—the boy put up his feeble hand to prevent her; of course they buried it with him, and, as you think of it, you can hear that unknown voice on the battlefield, that, as the stretcher-bearers came to look for the wounded, called out: "Take him, he is engaged to be married; and leave me."
Oh, if out of it all arise a better civilization, purer motives, less greed for money, more humanitarian and unselfish aims, we can bear it.
I think of America with an ever-increasing love; I am proud to belong to that young and far-off country, but if our voice is raised now in encouragement for Belgium, encouragement for the Allies, and in reprobation of these acts of dishonorable warfare and cruel barbarism, I shall love my country more.
How superb the figure of the Belgian king is, standing there among the remnant of his army, and surrounded by his destroyed and ruined empire, and the cries of the people in his ears—a sublime figure....
II—STORY OF A SCHOOL TEACHER—AND A GARDENER
To Mr. F. B. Van Vorst, N. Y.
Nov. 20th, 1914.
My Dear Brother,
I wonder, as I sit here, in one of those rare, quiet moments that fall in a nurse's day, whilst I am preparing my charts, what they are thinking of in this silent room.
This group is singularly silent. They do not talk from bed to bed, as some of the more loquacious do. Directly opposite is one of those fragile bits of humanity that the violent wind of war has blown, like an unresisting leaf, into the vortex. Monsieur Gilet is a humble little school teacher from some humble little village school in a once peaceful commune, where in another little village school his humble little wife teaches school as he does. He is so light and so frail that I can lift him myself with ease. He has a shrapnel wound in his side and they have not found the ball. His thin cheeks are scarlet. He is gentleness and sweetness itself. What has he ever done to be crucified like this? Monsieur Gilet is not thinking of his burning wound. He is thinking of the little woman in the province of Cher. How can she come to see him? She has no congé. When will she come to see him? For his life is all there in that war-shattered country. She has a baby twelve weeks old, born since he went to battle. That's what he is thinking of. When will she come?
On his right is a superb Arab, with an arm and hand so broken and so mutilated that it is hard to hold it without shuddering when the doctors drain it. On his head I have carefully adjusted a bright yellow flannel fez. His mild, docile eyes follow the nurse as she does for him the few little things she can to make him more at ease. For every service done, he thanks her in a sweet, soft voice. Just now, when I left him to come over here and sit down before my table, his eyes filled with tears. He can say a few words of French. He kisses my hand with Oriental grace. "Merci, ma mère."
On Monsieur Gilet's left lies a man whose language is as hard to understand, very nearly, as the Arab's—almost unintelligible—a patois of the Midi. He is a gardener, used only to the care of plants and flowers. He is a big, rugged giant, and so strong, and so silent a sufferer that since his entrance to the hospital he has not made one murmur or one complaint, or asked one service, and excepting when spoken to, he never says a word. Then he gives you a radiant smile and some token of gratitude. They operated on him to-day. There is shrapnel in his eye. He will never fully see his gardens again, and he is so strong and so patient and so able to bear pain, that they operated on him without anæsthetics, and he walked to and from the operating room—a brave, silent, docile giant, singularly appealing.... He is thinking of his gardens, trodden out of all semblance of beauty, for he had been working in the north before the heel of the barbarian crushed out his flowers for ever and blotted out his sight.
III—STORY OF THE BOYS WHO SING "TIPPERARY"
To Mr. F. B. Van Vorst, Hackensack, N. J.
Paris, Dec. 4th, 1914.
My Dear Frederick,
To-morrow will be my last day at the hospital, as I start in the evening for Nice, on my way to Rome. I have lately found myself sole nurse in a ward with nine men....
It is full of English Tommies, and unless you nurse them and help those English boys, you don't know what they are. They are too lovely and too fine for words. One perfectly fine young fellow has had his leg amputated at the thigh—his life ruined for ever. Another is blind, staring into the visions of his past—he will never have anything else to look at again. The chief amusement of these fellows seems to be watching the funerals, and they call me to run to the window to see the hearses covered with the Union Jack or the French flag, and they find nothing mournful in the processions. One Sunday afternoon, as I sat there, leaning against a table in the middle of the room, a few country flowers in a vase near by—for Miss Hickman asks for country flowers for country lads—I asked them if they wouldn't sing me a song that I had heard a good deal about but had never heard sung. "What's that, nurse?" asked the boy without a leg. "Tipperary"—for I had never heard it. "Why, of course we will, won't we, lads?" and he said to his companion, only nineteen, from some English shire: "You hit the tune." And the boy "hit it," and they sang me "Tipperary." Before they had finished I had turned away and walked out into the corridor to hide the way it made me feel, and I heard it softly through the door as they finished: "It's a long way to Tipperary." I shall never hear it again without seeing the picture of that ward, the country flowers and the country lads, and hearing the measure of that marching tune....
I have seen Mrs. Vanderbilt constantly. She seems to be ubiquitous. Wherever there's need, she is to be found—whether in the operating-room, the bandaging-room, or in one of the great wards where she has charge. I have found her everywhere, just at the right moment: calm, poised, dignified, capable and sweet. But none of this expresses the strength that she has been to the American Ambulance since its foundation—the heart and soul of its organization; and her personal gifts to it have been generous beyond words. I don't know what we shall do when she finally returns to America. She animates the whole place with her spirit and her soul....
IV—STORY OF THE "MIRACLES" OF THE BATTLES
Madame Le Roux, New York.
Paris, June 15th, 1915.
Dear Bessie,
Lady K. told such a beautiful thing, out at Bridget's, that I forgot to tell you before. She said that it was bruited in England that there had been a miracle wrought when von Kluck's army so unexpectedly turned back from Paris, which without doubt they could have taken. She said that it was rumored—and not only in the ranks, but among higher men—that there appeared in the sky a singular phenomenon, and that the German prisoners bore witness that a cavalcade like heavenly archers suddenly filled the heavens and shot down upon the Germans a rain of deadly darts. As you know, this was long before the use of any asphyxiating gas or turpinite; but on the field were found hundreds of Germans, stone dead, immovable, who had fallen without any apparent cause. You remember the armies of the old Scriptures that "the breath of the Lord withered away."
Lady K. said that the rumor that the woods of Compiègne were full of troops when the Germans made that famous retreat was absolutely untrue. There were no troops in the forest, and what they saw were, again, celestial soldiers.
No doubt these tales come always in the history of war. But, my dear, how beautiful they are—how much more heavenly and inspired than the beatings on the slavish backs of the German Uhlans, of the half-drunken, brutish hordes! Everywhere is the same uplifting spirit. When I speak of Paris being sad, it is; but it is not depressing. There is a difference. If it were not for the absence of those I love, I would rather be here than anywhere. In church on Sunday, the Bishop said that at one of the services near the firing line, when he asked the question: "How many of the men here have felt, since they came out, a stirring in their hearts, an awakening of the spirit?" as far as he could see, every hand was raised. And men have gone home to England, without arms and without legs, maimed for life, and have been heard to say that in spite of their material anguish they regretted nothing, for they had found their souls....
I ought to tell you that all credulous and believing France thinks that the country is being saved by Jeanne d'Arc. You hear them say it everywhere. Just think of it, in the twentieth century, my dear, when the war is being fought in the air and under the sea, by machines so modern that only the latest invention can triumph! Think of it, and then consider that there remains enough of spiritual faith to believe that the salvation of a country comes through prayer.
V—STORY OF COMPTE HENRY DADVISARD
To Mrs. Louis Stoddard, N. Y.
June 25th, 1915.
My Dear Molly, [3] Mme. de S. told me last night that once during the last year she had a little spray of blossoms that had been blessed by the Pope, and in writing to Henry on the field, she sent him a little bit of green—a tiny leaf pinned on a loving letter. When she looked through the uniform sent back to her, a few days ago, in his pocket was this little card, all stained with his blood. This card, with her few loving words, was all he carried on him into that sacred field. I must not forget the belt he wore around him, which she had made with her own hands, and it contained some money and in one of the folds of the chamois was a prayer that she had written out for him. The paper was so worn with reading and unfolding and folding that it was like something used by the years.
All the night before he went to that great battle, he spent in prayer. His aide told Mme. de S. that he had not closed his eyes. They say that if he could have been taken immediately from the field, he would have been saved, for he bled to death.
I only suppose that you will be interested in these details because they mark the going out of such a brilliant life, and it is the intimate story of one soldier who has laid down his life, after months and months of fighting and self-abnegation and loneliness, on that distant field.
From the time he left her in August until his death, he had never seen any of his family—not a soul. I want to tell you the way she said good-bye to him, for I never knew it until last night. She had expected him to lunch—imagine!—and received the news by telephone that he was leaving his "quartier" in an hour. She rushed there to see the Cuirassiers, mounted, in their service uniform, the helmets all covered with khaki, clattering out of the yard. She sat in the motor and he came out to her, all ready to go; and they said good-bye, there in the motor, he sitting by her side, holding her hands. She said he looked then like the dead—so grave. You know he was a soldier, passionately devoted to his career. He had made all the African campaign and had an illustrious record. She says he asked her for her blessing and she lightly touched the helmet covered with khaki and gave it him. And neither shed a tear. And he kissed her good-bye. She never saw him again....
She said that his General told her as follows: "The night before the engagement, Henry Dadvisard came into my miserable little shack on the field. He said to me: 'Mon général, just show me on the map where the Germans are.' A map was hanging on the wall and I indicated with my finger: 'Les Allemands sont là, mon enfant.' And Dadvisard said: 'Why, is that all there is to do—just to go out and attack them there? Why, we'll be coming back as gaily as if it were from the races!' He turned to go, saying: 'Au revoir, mon général.' But at the door he paused, and I looked up and saw him and he said: 'Adieu, mon général.' And then I saw in his eyes a singular look, something like an appeal from one human soul to another, for a word, a touch, before going out to that sacrifice. I did not dare to say anything but what I did say: 'Bon courage, mon enfant; bonne chance!' And he went...."
After telling me this, Mme. de S. took out his watch, which she carries with her now—a gold watch, with his crest upon it—the one he had carried through all his campaigns, with the soldier's rough chain hanging from it. It had stopped at half-past ten; as he had wound it the night before, the watch had gone on after his heart had ceased to beat....
The day before Henry left his own company of Cuirassiers to go into the dangerous and terrible experiences of the trenches, to take up that duty which ended in his laying down his life, he gathered his men together and bade them good-bye. Last night dear Mme. de S. showed me his soldier's notebook, in which he had written the few words that he meant to say to his men. I begged her to let me have them: I give them to you. This address stands to me as one of the most beautiful things I have ever read.
General Foch paid him a fine tribute when he mentioned him in despatches, and this mention of him was accompanied by the bestowal of the Croix de Guerre.
"Henry Dadvisard, warm-hearted and vibrant; a remarkable leader of men. He asked to be transferred to the infantry, in order to offer more fully to his country his admirable military talents. He fell gloriously on the 27th of April, leading an attack at the head of his company."
VI—STORY OF THE MORGAN-MARBURY HOSPITAL
To Mrs. Morawetz, New York.
Paris, June 22nd, 1915.
Dearest Violet,
I went out the other day with Madame Marie to Versailles, en auto. I wanted to see the little hospital that Anne Morgan and Bessie Marbury have given out there. One of their pretty little houses is in the charge of some gentle-faced sisters of charity, and out in the garden, with the roses blooming and the sweet-scented hay being raked in great piles, were sitting a lieutenant, convalescing, and his commandant, who had come to see him, also wounded. Both men wore the Legion of Honor on their breasts. They were talking about the campaign. The lieutenant wore his képi well down over his face; he was totally blind for ever, at thirty! His interest in talking to his superior officer was so great that you can fancy I only stopped a second to speak to him. There were great scars on his hands and his face and neck were scarred too. I heard him say, as I turned to walk away: "J'aime aussi causer des jours quand nous étions collégiens à Saint-Cyr. Ces souvenirs sont plus doux." It was terribly touching.
VII—STORY OF THE GAY FRENCH OFFICER
To Miss B. S. Andrews, New York.
Paris, July 12th, 1915.
Dearest Belle,
Mme. de S. is going next week on the cruel and dreadful mission of disinterring her belovèd dead. She is going down into the tomb in Belgium—if she can get through—to take her boy out of the charnel house, where he is buried under six other coffins. "God has his soul," she says; "I only ask his body" ... if she can find it. She has told no one of her griefs, but to me; and she bears herself like a woman of twenty-five, gallantly....
There is one gay officer of twenty-nine, and six feet two. I don't think you'd speak of "little insignificant Frenchmen" if you could see him! He's superb. One finger off on the left hand, and the right hand utterly useless. So we work at that for fifteen minutes, and all the little group of soldiers linger, because they love him so—he's so killing, so witty, so gay. He screams in mock agony, and laughs and makes the most outrageous jokes; and when he has gone, one of them says to me: "Il est adoré par ses hommes, madame; il est si courageux." The spirit between men and officers is so beautiful in the French army. They are all brothers. None of that lordly, arrogant oppression of the Germans. One of the soldiers said to me: "Il n'y a pas de grade, maintenant, madame. Nous sommes tous des hommes qui aiment le pays."
And Lieutenant ——, of whom I have just been speaking. I said to him: "Tell me something about the campaign, monsieur." And he answered: "Oh, madame, I would like to tell you about the men. They're superb. I have never seen anything like it. I had to lead a charge with 156 men into what we all believed was certain death. Why," he said, "they went like schoolboys—shouting, laughing, pushing each other up the parapet.... We came back nine strong," he said.
Dr. Blake has been magnificent. His operations are something beyond words. Men came in to me for treatment and told me that he worked actual miracles with faces that were blown off, building new jaws, and oh, Heavens! I don't know what not.
VIII—STORY OF A FRENCH MOTHER AT MASS
Paris, July 20th, 1915.
Dearest Violet,
I saw a very touching thing the other day in the Madeleine, where I went to Mass. A woman no longer young, in the heaviest of crape, came in and sat down and buried her face in her hands. She shook with suppressed sobs and terrible weeping. Presently there came in another worshipper, a stranger to her, and sat down by her side. He was a splendid-looking officer in full-dress uniform—a young man, with a wedding-ring upon his hand—one of those permissionnaires home, evidently, for the short eight days that all the officers are given now—a hiatus between the old war and the new. He bent too, praying; but the weeping of the woman at his side evidently tore his heart. Presently she lifted her face and wiped her eyes, and the officer put his hand on hers. And as I was sitting near, I heard what he said:
"Pauvre madame, pauvre madame!... Ma mère pleure comme vous."
She glanced at him, then bent again in prayer. But when she had finished, before she left her seat, I heard her say to him:
"Monsieur, j'ai beaucoup prié pour vous. Sachez que vous aves les prières d'une vieille mère a laquelle ne reste rien au monde."
He touched her hand again and said:
"Merci, madame. Adieu!"
It was just one of those intensely touching pictures in that dimly lighted church, full of worshippers, that one can never forget....
IX—STORY OF A LITTLE SOLDIER FROM AFRICA
To Mrs. William K. Vanderbilt, Newport.
4, Place du Palais Bourbon,
Paris, Aug., 1915.
Dearest Anne,
Wandering about alone, as I have been doing a great deal lately, I have gone into many of the churches and prayed at the different shrines, and it is impressive to see the character of those who come in to pray. Men who can never kneel again; men who sit with bandaged eyes before the lighted altars, for whom all the visions of the world have been blotted out for ever; the poor women in their little shawls; women in their crape veils; the man going to the Front; the man who has come back from it, never to take an active part in life again; and the women who ask the Mother of Sorrows to remember theirs....
A very agreeable Abbé dined with me last night. He told me that he was giving absolution to one dying German boy—only sixteen—on the field, and he put his hand under the boy's head and lifted it, and the boy, who was delirious, simply said: "Mama, mama, mama!" And the Abbé said to me: "It is a very curious thing, but in all the dying appeals I have ever heard, it is always for the mother." That return, perhaps, to the lost childhood—the call just before going to sleep....
One day when I was giving electricity lately at the Ambulance, a poor little Zouave hobbled in—he had only one leg left—and held up a maimed hand for me to treat. He was not a very interesting-looking specimen—rather sullen and discouraged, I thought—but as I looked at his frail little body and his disfigured hand, I looked at his breast too. Three medals were on it—the Legion of Honor, the Croix de Guerre, and the Médaille Militaire—all a man can get! And he was just a little soldier of Africa—a nondescript man whose name would only be heard at other times to be forgotten.
Jacquemin.
"Qu'est-ce que vous avez fait pour mériter tout cela, mon ami?"
Pour mériter tout cela, parbleu! He has one leg only, one hand only, and he has back of him eight months of hospital and eight months of horror, for his sufferings have been beyond words.
Jacquemin!
Oh, his name is pretty well known now in a certain Sector!
"Qu'est-ce que vous aves fait pour mériter tout cela?"
Three medals across that narrow chest!
Well, alone, on a bad night, in storm and rain, he was a volunteer patrol. Alone, he brought in four German prisoners. He was a volunteer for six patrouilles of the gravest danger—not always alone, but always fetching in prisoners and more prisoners. Bad for the Germans. He carried his superior officer, wounded, out under fire and saved his life. Then there was a line of trenches where a hundred and fifty-six men—they know his name: Jacquemin! Jacquemin with the little mongrel dog always at his heels—a hundred and fifty-six men had eaten nothing for four days but the sodden bread left in their haversacks. Jacquemin filled several wagons full of bread and seating himself on the driver's seat of the first, he drove in that life-giving line under the fire of shot and shell, right into the very jaws of death. He brought sufficient supplies to save the line of trenches, for otherwise they would have had to evacuate them through starvation, as indeed was the case with others where this gay little Zouave could not reach. Just the giving of food to the faint and hungry men whose stern faces were set against death. That act brought him one of those medals across his breast—I forget which. Finally, the shot and shell which he had braved so many times was bound to get him, and with his leg and arm almost shot away he lay for dead amongst the other slain, and they buried him. They buried Jacquemin. Fortunately or unfortunately—it depends upon how he regards a life which he will live through henceforth with only one leg and only one arm—a little bit of his soldier's coat sprouted out of the ground. (They don't always bury deep on those fields.) And his dog saw it and smelled and dug and dug, and whined and cried, until they came and unburied Jacquemin and brought him back.
He is sitting up there at the Ambulance now, and his little dog is sometimes in the kitchen and sometimes comes up to the wards.
Jacquemin!
"Qu'est-ce que vous avez fait pour mériter tout cela, mon ami?"
What countless thousands of them have done, all along those lines—Englishmen and Frenchmen, Scotchmen and Irishmen, Indians, Australians, Canadians—hearts and souls and bodies offered up magnificently and valiantly sacrificed for the greatest Cause for which humanity has ever fought! Jacquemin brought them bread to the fighting line; and that great fighting line, by its efforts, is giving bread for ever to the world....
(Hundreds of these wonderful letters, revealing the great soul of this American woman, have been gathered into her book which forms one of the most beautiful insights into the "soul of the war."—Editor.)