The Effects of War in Four Countries
By Irvin S. Cobb.
[From The New York Times, Dec. 2, 1914.]
[The following story of conditions in Belgium, Germany, France, Holland, and England was sent by Irvin S. Cobb of The Saturday Evening Post to the American Red Cross, to be used in bringing home to Americans urgent need for relief in the countries affected by the great war. Red Cross contributions for suffering non-combatants are received at the Red Cross offices in the Russell Sage Foundation Building, 130 East Twenty-second Street. Such contributions should be addressed to Jacob H. Schiff, Treasurer, and, if desired, the giver can designate the country to the relief of which he wishes the donation applied.]
Recently I have been in four of the countries concerned in the present war—Belgium, France, Germany, and England. I was also in Holland, having traversed it from end to end within a week after the fall of Antwerp, when every road coming up out of the south was filled with Belgian refugees.
In Belgium I saw this:
Homeless men, women, and children by thousands and hundreds of thousands. Many of them had been prosperous, a few had been wealthy, practically all had been comfortable. Now, with scarcely an exception, they stood all upon one common plane of misery. They had lost their homes, their farms, their work-shops, their livings, and their means of making livings.
I saw them tramping aimlessly along wind-swept, rain-washed roads, fleeing from burning and devastated villages. I saw them sleeping in open fields upon the miry earth, with no cover and no shelter. I saw them herded together in the towns and cities to which many of them ultimately fled, existing God alone knows how. I saw them—ragged, furtive scarecrows—prowling in the shattered ruins of their homes, seeking salvage where there was no salvage to be found. I saw them living like the beasts of the field, upon such things as the beasts of the field would reject.
I saw them standing in long lines waiting for their poor share of the dole of a charity which already was nearly exhausted. I saw their towns when hardly one stone stood upon another. I saw their abandoned farm lands, where the harvests rotted in the furrows and the fruit hung mildewed and ungathered upon the trees. I saw their cities where trade was dead and credit was a thing which no longer existed. I saw them staggering from weariness and from the weakness of hunger. I saw all these sights repeated and multiplied infinitely—yes, and magnified, too—but not once did I see a man or woman or even a child that wept or cried out.
If the Belgian soldiers won the world's admiration by the resistance which they made against tremendously overpowering numbers, the people of Belgium—the families of their soldiers—should have the world's admiration and pity for the courage, the patience, and the fortitude they have displayed under the load of an affliction too dolorous for any words to describe, too terrible for any imagination to picture.
In France I saw a pastoral land overrun by soldiers and racked by war until it seemed the very earth would cry out for mercy. I saw a country literally stripped of its men in order that the regiments might be filled. I saw women hourly striving to do the ordained work of their fathers, husbands, brothers, and sons, hourly piecing together the jarred and broken fragments of their lives. I saw countless villages turned into smoking, filthy, ill-smelling heaps of ruins. I saw schools that were converted into hospitals and factories changed into barracks.
I saw the industries that were abandoned and the shops that were bare of customers, the shopkeepers standing before empty shelves looking bankruptcy in the face. I saw the unburied dead lying between battle lines, where for weeks they had lain, and where for weeks, and perhaps months to come, they would continue to lie, and I saw the graves of countless numbers of other dead who were so hurriedly and carelessly buried that their limbs in places protruded through the soil, poisoning the air with hideous smells and giving abundant promise of the pestilence which must surely follow. I saw districts noted for their fecundity on the raw edge of famine, and a people proverbial for their light-heartedness who had forgotten how to smile.
In Germany I saw innumerable men maimed and mutilated in every conceivable fashion. I saw these streams of wounded pouring back from the front endlessly. In two days I saw trains bearing 14,000 wounded men passing through one town. I saw people of all classes undergoing privations and enduring hardships in order that the forces at the front might have food and supplies. I saw thousands of women wearing widow's weeds, and thousands of children who had been orphaned.
I saw great hosts of prisoners of war on their way to prison camps, where in the very nature of things they must forego all hope of having for months, and perhaps years, those small creature comforts which make life endurable to a civilized human being. I saw them, crusted with dirt, worn with incredible exertions, alive with crawling vermin, their uniforms already in tatters, and their broken shoes falling off their feet.
On the day before I quit German soil—the war being then less than three months old—I counted, in the course of a short ride through the City of Aix-la-Chapelle two convalescent soldiers who were totally blind, three who had lost an arm, and one, a boy of 18 or thereabout, who had lost both arms. How many men less badly injured I saw in that afternoon I do not know; I hesitate even to try to estimate the total figure for fear I might be accused of exaggeration.
In Holland I saw the people of an already crowded country wrestling valorously with the problem of striving to feed and house and care for the enormous numbers of penniless refugees who had come out of Belgium. I saw worn-out groups of peasants huddled on railroad platforms and along the railroad tracks, too weary to stir another step.
In England I saw still more thousands of these refugees, bewildered, broken by misfortune, owning only what they wore upon their backs, speaking an alien tongue, strangers in a strange land. I saw, as I have seen in Holland, people of all classes giving of their time, their means, and their services to provide some temporary relief for these poor wanderers who were without a country. I saw the new recruits marching off, and I knew that for the children many of them were leaving behind there would be no Santa Claus unless the American people out of the fullness of their own abundance filled the Christmas stockings and stocked the Christmas larders.
And seeing these things, I realized how tremendous was the need for organized and systematic aid then and how enormously that need would grow when Winter came—when the soldiers shivered in the trenches, and the hospital supplies ran low, as indeed they have before now begun to run low, and the winds searched through the holes made by the cannon balls and struck at the women and children cowering in their squalid and desolated homes. From my own experiences and observations I knew that more nurses, more surgeons, more surgical necessities, and yet more, past all calculating, would be sorely needed when the plague and famine and cold came to take their toll among armies that already were thinned by sickness and wounds.
The American Red Cross, by the terms of the Treaty of Geneva, gives aid to the invalided and the injured soldiers of any army and all the armies. If any small word from me, attempting to describe actual conditions, can be of value to the American Red Cross in its campaign of mercy, I write it gladly. I wish only that I had the power to write lines which would make the American people see the situation as it is now—which would make them understand how infinitely worse that situation must surely become during the next few months.