Caring for Thousands of Refugees
Long processions of civilian refugees lined the roadsides in the invaded area during the days of battle—the pitiful hosts of those fleeing from the German guns and the terrors of German occupation. Many thousands of villagers and farmers whose little homes had been devastated by the first German occupation and by the battle of the Somme had been trying bravely to restore their ruined houses and cultivate the tortured soil again. With the aid of American friends hundreds of cottages had been built, heaps of shattered masonry cleared away, shops and schools opened, and French, British, and American committees had formed a nucleus around which new life was gradually growing up. No less than 5,500 acres of the devastated land evacuated by the Germans a year ago were again under cultivation—enough to feed 16,000 persons a year.
All this work of the stricken inhabitants, with their replanted fruit trees and scanty stores of new implements, had to be abandoned almost at a moment's notice. Many of the peasants, stunned by the new catastrophe, had to be aroused to flight by the friendly orders of the retreating British officers. The Red Cross workers, the Dames de France, and a group of courageous American women—the Smith College girls—aided the refugees day and night in their retreat from town to town until the German advance was checked a few miles short of Amiens.
The American Red Cross transported thousands from the towns and villages behind the British lines, working thirty automobiles night and day, and carrying 2,000 to friends in Paris in the first few days. These were mostly women, children, and aged persons who had been awakened by the Red Cross workers on the morning of the 25th, taken to the railroad in trucks, and thence transported by rail in special trains. Most of the refugees were able to save only a few of their belongings, which were wrapped up in shawls and bed sheets, or carried in baskets or handbags. One woman, 81 years old, carried only a basket of live chickens, and cried because she had been unable to save two rabbits. Another woman carried a few cooking utensils under her arm. Many women and children were crying because they had been separated from relatives and friends. Children only a month old and people who had reached the age of 90 were alike numbered among the unfortunates.
TRAGIC SCENES
"I saw the first tide of these poor people when the Germans came near to Ham and Péronne and Roye," wrote Philip Gibbs on March 29. "Some of them had been once in the hands of the Germans, and at this second menace they left their homes and their fields and their shops, and came trekking westward and southward.
"One's heart bleeds to see these refugees, and it is the most tragic aspect of these days. There are many old people among them, old women in black gowns and caps who come hobbling very slowly down the highway of war, and old men with bent backs who lean heavily on their gnarled sticks as the guns go by, and the fighting men.
"I saw one old man near Ham who was trundling along a wheelbarrow, and on this was spread a mattress, and on that was his wife. She looked 90 years of age, with her white, wrinkled face, and she was fast asleep, like a little child. Many children are on the roads, packed tight into farm carts with household furniture and bundles of clothing, and poultry and pigs and new-born lambs. The noise of the gunfire is behind them, and they move faster when it grows louder. They are very brave, these boys and girls and these old people. There is hardly any weeping or any look on their faces of grudge against this unkind turn of fate. They seem to accept it with stoical resignation, with most matter-of-fact courage, and their only answer to pity is a smile and the words, 'C'est la guerre.' Those are words I first heard in the early weeks of the war and hoped never to hear again.
"Many of these people trek in family groups and gatherings of families from one village. Small boys and girls drag tired cows after them. The other day one of these cows leaned against every tree she passed and then sat down, and the girl with her looked around helplessly, not knowing what to do. This morning I saw the girl wearing a veil and dressed in an elegant way, taking the cow with her. She was quite alone on the road. It is queer and touching that most of these fugitives wear their best clothes, as though on a fête day. It is because they are clothes they want to save and can only have by wearing them in their flight.
"In one small town the fear of the German entry came at night, a bright, moonlight night into which there came many German bombing squadrons. The citizens had shut up their shops and stood about talking anxiously. Then fear and rumor spread among them, and all through the night there was an exodus of small families and solitary girls and comrades in misfortune, stealing away like shadows from homes they loved, from little fortunes or their shops, from all their normal life into the open country, where the moonlight lay white and cold on the fields. Behind them bombs were being dropped, and some of their houses were destroyed.
"C'est la guerre!"
WORK OF AMERICAN GIRLS
The heroic work of the Smith College girls was described by a correspondent at the French front under date of March 29:
"Working unceasingly under a constant shellfire, for days without sleep, the girls demonstrated admirable initiative and ability and the extreme coolness of the tried soldier. They are still in the field today, ministering to old men, women, and children. I have talked to the first persons to come in from the front, who saw them last Saturday, when shells were falling at Grecourt, the tiny Somme village where the unit has been quartered for months, aiding the folks of a dozen surrounding villages.
"When it became evident that the Germans were coming the girls worked frantically with auto trucks, gathering together all the people in their territory. In one village they went three times to try to persuade an aged woman to leave, but she refused to move unless the ancestral bedstead on which she lay could be transported with her. In final desperation the girls brought a big supply wagon and loaded the bedstead and the woman into it, leaving the village fifteen minutes before the first of the Uhlans arrived.
"The girls organized themselves into small units and each unit was charged with the evacuation of a single village. Cavalcades of refugees, generaled by the Smith girls, marched or rode from their abandoned homes to Roye, where a special train was waiting to carry them westward. Even cows, chickens, dogs, and cats helped to form the cavalcade which reached Roye on Saturday morning. Here the refugees vainly tried to crowd the animals into the train.
"The girls of the Smith College unit then proceeded to Montdidier. There, with W. B. Jackson of Washington, a former Red Cross delegate at Ham, assisted by a group of American Quakers and Red Cross workers, they organized a canteen and began giving out blankets and other comforts and making a marvelous bean soup and a special food for babies, the basis of which was condensed milk. As the refugee trains, some containing as many as 1,000 men, women, and children, poured into Montdidier the arriving refugees were fed until the supply of food was exhausted.
"Then Montdidier became too hot under the increasing shellfire and the workers were forced to split, some going to Amiens and others to Beauvais, where they continued their work. Since then practically all the Smith College girls and some other workers have gone to Amiens, where they are weathering the enemy bombardment in cellars, but carrying on their work as usual."
FLEEING IN BEST CLOTHES
An Associated Press correspondent added this further bit of eyewitness testimony under date of March 27:
"The French refugees of the better class departing from the zones of actual operations are coming out clad in all their finery, which represents the styles of four or five years ago. Then there are sturdy peasants with wooden shoes and clumsily constructed clothes, riding in vehicles drawn by horses or donkeys or in carts pushed by men, and some are even in wheelbarrows. Upon these queer transports are stacked strange assortments of personal belongings.
"There is deep pathos in all this, but none struck the correspondent more forcibly than the appearance of a tiny girl who trudged in her wooden shoes along a hard, dusty road, her eyes fastened anxiously upon a dirty rag doll perched precariously at the top of household effects which were being pushed along by an old man. This child was perhaps representative of all the refugees—she was coming away with her most cherished possession, her baby doll, and was prepared to guard it at all costs; her aching feet were as nothing, so long as the doll was safe.
"These refugees are from the towns within the Somme battlefield and adjoining it. All these villages have been emptied of their inhabitants. So far as possible everything which might be of use to the Germans has been removed. In particular, large numbers of cattle have been taken away by the owners, who patiently drive the beasts on ahead of them along the roads.
"There are few tears or hysterical outbreaks among the refugees, most of whom are of the peasant class. They know they must go, and they seem to be trusting implicitly in the British, but the misery in their eyes as they turn from all they love to a world they do not know is touching. Aged women clinging to the hands of little grandchildren, men stooped with years, youths and maidens—all fall into a picture such as only a catastrophe can produce."
Fifty members of the American Friends' unit of the Red Cross were in the region of the great battle, at Ham, Liancourt, Esmery-Hallon, Golancourt, and Gruny on the Somme and Aisne. These devoted workers, with the aid of many Red Cross trucks that were rushed to them, helped thousands of refugees to safety.
The French Government had several hundred tractor plows at work on the stricken lands. The American relief units also had a few tractor plows and other agricultural materials, all of which had to be abandoned to the enemy. All members of relief units were reported safe.
Castor Oil for Airplanes
How an important agricultural enterprise was initiated to meet one of the requirements of the Aviation Section of the American Army is disclosed in the minority report of the Senate Military Affairs Committee, presented on April 12, 1918. In the course of a description of the initial difficulties encountered in producing battle planes, the report says:
"Remember again that when these combat planes were contracted for the only known lubricating oil adapted to their delicate parts was an oil made from the castor bean. There were not enough beans in this country to make anywhere near the amount of oil required. Neither were there enough seeds with which to grow the needed quantity of beans. The Signal Corps had to search the globe for seeds, and finally secured a shipload from distant India. Then the corps had to contract for the planting of the seeds in this country, and has succeeded in having about 110,000 acres planted. It is now claimed that a form of petroleum has been developed that will answer the same purpose. This, however, is still in the experimental stage, while the oil from the castor bean is known to be entirely adequate and reliable."