Of the 2,500 inhabitants of the village, 1,700 were soon on the lists of the helpless or destitute; among these were many tuberculosis victims. The château living-room became first a clothing bureau, where daily all sorts of garments, sent from America, were distributed. Madame engaged some of the women of the village to patch and re-fashion these, and with certain sums of money that succeeded in reaching her from time to time from an American lady who had “adopted” Herzele, she was able to purchase new materials and offer further saving employment. I do not know the American lady, but if she could have seen Madame’s eyes as she told me of what it meant, imprisoned as they were, to receive these gifts from some one outside who remembered them, I do not doubt she would have felt sufficiently rewarded.
In 1916, when I was in Belgium as a member of the Commission for Relief in Belgium, the Germans prevented my going near Herzele, or any point in the zone of direct military preparation, so I could follow the work of Monsieur and Madame only through the Brussels Lace Committee, which had itself great difficulty in keeping connected with them. They made their judgments from the ever increasing quantities and improved quality of the laces that somehow came through.
The room in the château was the lace office not only for Herzele, but for eleven additional villages, where between 2,500 and 3,000 girls and women, encouraged by the Committee support—its designs and thread and money—were busy with their needles and bobbins; for while this is chiefly a needle-work district, large quantities of bobbin laces are also made. To be sure, none of these laces is superior, but they are good, and marketable. They include Cluny, Duchesse de Bruxelles, a kind of coarse Flanders (where the flowers are made with bobbins and the mesh with the needle), Venise, and Rosaline; and of these the Flanders and Venise are most important. At times it was not difficult for the dentellières to take or send their finished lace to the château, at others they were threatened with fines and imprisonment if they were discovered trying to get it there. To refer to but one instance, the facteur of the village three miles distant was fined seventy-five francs when caught on the way with his pieces. The Germans were doing their utmost always, to attach lace-makers to their Spitzen Centrale, and despite the international agreement which engaged their protection of the work of the Brussels Lace Committee, they interfered with and obstructed its work again and again. At one point they insisted that all deliveries to the Committee should be made through them, and that they be paid 1 per cent. on the value, in gold, for transmission, where transmission, unfortunately, only too often spelled for them retention.
In the village Madame and her daughters went from house to house, instructing and comforting. The days of the deportations were more terrible than any others. In remembering that first hideous deportation night in Herzele, one remembers, too, that early in the war Cardinal Mercier said that while there was once a time, when to make people believe, we felt we must heighten, or embellish the cold facts, that now in order that they should believe, we must withhold part of the truth. That first night, men and boys were torn from their beds and herded into the school, from there to be carried off in cattle-cars to Germany. There was neither light nor heat, and in the cold and the darkness, the tortured little village broke into a great cry of lamentation, while the château was filled with wives and mothers seeking comfort.
Later, when the activist troubles became acute, the two daughters held meetings even in the cabarets to urge loyalty to a united Belgium. They believe that not one person in their entire village can be said to have worked for the enemy, except when deported bodily, or otherwise coerced.
Somehow the years passed, and then one day, the 16th of September, 1917, bits of white paper fell like snow from the clouds. The family rushed out to gather them and found Lord Northcliffe’s celebrated posters, “The First Million,” representing a vast multitude on the march, the statue of liberty in the background, the fields of France in the foreground, and a continuous bridge of ships connecting them. This snowfall was followed by others, and each brought hope.
Finally, in October, 1918, the Germans, knowing the Allied Army of Liberation was almost upon them, again pulled their guns up into the château grounds, but in the final fighting, as in the earliest, the house somehow escaped.
