We are approaching Noyon, the birthplace of Calvin. This is one of the few towns the Hun spared in his retreat; he spared it not out of a belated altruism, but purely to serve his own convenience. There were some of the French civilians who weren't worth transporting to Germany. They would be too weak, or too old, or too young to earn their keep when he got them there. These he sorted out, irrespective of their family ties, and herded from the surrounding districts into Noyon. They were crowded into the houses and ordered under pain of death not to come out until they were given permission. They were further ordered to shutter all their windows and not to look out.
As an old lady, who narrated the story, said, "We had no idea, Monsieur, what was to happen. Les Boches had been with us for nearly three years; it never entered our heads that they were leaving. When they took the last of our young girls from us and all who were strong among our men, it was something that they had done so often and so often. When they made us hide in our houses, we thought it was only to prevent a disturbance. It is not easy to see your boys and girls marched away into slavery—Monsieur will understand that. Sometimes, on former occasions, the mothers had attacked les Boches and the young girls had become hysterical; we thought that it was to avoid such scenes that we were shut up in our houses. When darkness fell, we sat in our rooms without any lights, for they also were forbidden. All night long through our streets we heard the endless tramping of battalions, the clattering wheels of guns and limbers, the sharp orders, the halting and the marching taken up afresh. Towards dawn everything grew silent. At first it would be broken occasionally by the hurried trot of cavalry or the shuffling footsteps of a straggler. Then it grew into the absolute silence of death. It was nerve-racking and terrible. One could almost hear the breathing of the listening people in all the other houses. I do not know how time went or what was the hour. I could endure the suspense no longer. They might kill me, but ... Ah well, at my age after nearly three years with 'les Boches,' killing is a little matter! I crept down the passage and drew back the bolts. I was very gentle; a sentry might hear me. I opened the door just a crack. I expected to hear a rifle-shot ring out, but nothing happened. I opened it wider, and saw that the street was empty and that it was broad daylight. Then I waited—I do not know how long I waited. I crouched against the wall, huddled with terror. All this took much longer in the doing than in the telling. At last I could bear myself no longer. I tiptoed out on to the pavement—and, Monsieur will believe me, I expected to drop dead. But no one disturbed me. Then I heard a rustling. Doors everywhere were opening stealthily, ah, so stealthily! Some one else tiptoed out, and some one else, and some one else. We stood there staring, aghast at our daring. Suddenly we realised what had happened. The brutes had gone. We were free. It was indescribable, what followed—we ran together, weeping and embracing. At first we wept for gladness; soon we wept for sorrow. Our youth had departed; we were all old women or very ancient men. Two hours later our poilus came, like a blue-grey wave of laughter, fighting their way through the burning country that those swine had left in a sea of smoke and flames."
And so that was why the Hun spared Noyon. But if he spared Noyon, he spared little else.[2] Every village between here and the present front line has been levelled; every fruit-tree cut down. The wilful wickedness and pettiness of the crime stir one's heart to pity and his soul to white-hot anger. The people who did this must make payment in more than money; to settle such a debt blood is required. American soldiers who came to Europe to do a job and with no decided detestation of the Hun, are being taught by such landscapes. They know now why they came. The wounds of France are educating them.
There has been a scheme proposed in America under which certain individual cities and towns in the States shall make themselves responsible for the re-building of certain individual cities and towns in the devastated areas. The scheme is noble; it has only one drawback, namely that it specialises effort and tends to ignore the immensity of the problem as a whole. I visited one of these towns—it is a town for which Philadelphia has made itself responsible. I wish the people of Philadelphia might get a glimpse of the task they have undertaken. There is a church-spire still standing; that is about all. The rest is a pile of bricks. In the midst of this havoc some Philadelphia ladies are living, one of whom is a nurse. They run a dispensary for the people who keep house for the most part in cellars and holes in the ground. A doctor visits them to hold a clinic ever so often. They have a little warehouse, in which they keep the necessities for immediate relief work. They have a rest hut for soldiers. They employ whatever civilian labour they can hire for the roofing of some of the least damaged cottages; for this temporary reconstruction they provide the materials. When I was there, the place was well within range of enemy shell-fire. The approach had to be made by way of camouflaged roads. The sole anxiety of these brave women was that on account of their nearness to the front-line, the military might compel them to move back. In order to safeguard themselves against this and to create a good impression, they were making a strong point of entertaining whatever officers were billeted in this vicinity. Their effort to remain in this rural Gomorrah was as courageous as it was pathetic. "The people need us," they said, and then, "you don't think we'll be moved back, do you?" I thought they would, and I didn't think that the grateful officers would be able to prevent it—they were subalterns and captains for the most part. "But we once had a major to tea," they said. "A major!" I exclaimed, trying to look impressed, "Oh well, that makes a difference!"
There was one unit I wished especially to visit; it was a unit consisting entirely of women, sent over and financed by a women's college. When I was in America last October and heard that they were starting, I made up my mind that they were doomed to disappointment. I pictured the battlefield of the Somme as I had last seen it—a sea of mud stretching for miles, furrowed by the troughs of battered trenches, pitted every yard with shell-holes and smeared over with the wreckage of what once were human bodies. I could not imagine what useful purpose women could serve amid such surroundings. It seemed to me indecent that they should be allowed to go there. They were going to do reconstruction, I was told. Reconstruction! you can't reconstruct towns and villages the very foundations of which have been buried. There is a Bible phrase which expresses such annihilation, "The place thereof shall know it no more." Yes, only the names remain in one's memory—the very sites have been covered up and the contours of the landscape re-dug with high explosives. It took millions of pounds to work this havoc. Men tunnelled under-ground and sprung mines without warning. They climbed like birds of prey, into the heavens to hurl death from the clouds. They lined up their guns, tier upon tier, almost axle to axle in places, and at a given sign rained a deluge of corruption on a country miles in front, which they could not even discern. The infantry went over the top throwing bombs and piled themselves up into mounds of silence. Nations far away toiled day and night in factories—and all that they might achieve this repellant desolation. The innocence of the project made one smile—a handful of women sailing from America to reconstruct! To reconstruct will take ten times more effort than was required to destroy. More than eight hundred years ago William the Norman burnt his way through the North Country to Chester. Yorkshire has not yet recovered; it is still a wind-swept moorland. This women's college in America hoped to repair in our lifetime a ruin a million times more terrible. Their courage was depressing, it so exceeded the possible. They might love one village back to life, but.... That is exactly what they are doing.
I arrived at Grécourt on an afternoon in January. It is here that the women of the Smith College Unit have taken up their tenancy. We had extraordinary difficulty in finding the place. The surrounding country had been blasted and scorched by fire. There was no one left of whom we could enquire. Everything had perished. Barns, houses, everything habitable had been blown up by the departing Hun. As a study in the painstaking completion of a purpose the scenes through which we passed almost called for admiration. Berlin had ordered her armies to destroy everything before withdrawing; they had obeyed with a loving thoroughness. The world has never seen such past masters in the art of demolition. Ever since they invaded Belgium, their hand has been improving. In the neighbourhood of Grécourt they have equalled, if not surpassed, their own best efforts. I would suggest to the Kaiser that this manly performance calls for a distribution of iron crosses. It is true that his armies were beaten and retiring; but does not that fact rather enhance their valour? They were retiring, yet there were those who were brave enough to delay their departure till they had achieved this final victory over old women and children to the lasting honour of their country. Such heroes are worthy to stand beside the sinkers of the Lusitania. It is not just that they should go unrecorded.
In the midst of this hell I came across a tumbled château. Its roof, its windows, its stairways were gone; only the crumbling shell of its former happiness was left standing. A high wall ran about its grounds. The place must have been pleasant with flower-gardens once. There was an impressive entrance of wrought-iron, a porter's lodge and a broad driveway. At the back I found rows of little wood-huts. There was a fragrance of log-fires burning. I was glad of that, for I had heard of the starving cold these women had had to endure through the first winter months of their tenure. On tapping at a door, I found the entire colony assembled. It was tea-time and Sunday. Ten out of the seventeen who form the colony were present. A box-stove, such as we use in our pioneer shacks in Canada, was throwing out a glow of cheeriness. Candles had been lighted. Little knicknacks of feminine taste had been hung here and there to disguise the bareness of the walls. A bed, in one corner, was carefully disguised as a couch. Save for the fact that there was no glass in the window—glass being unobtainable in France at present—one might easily have persuaded himself that he was back in America in the room of a girl-undergraduate.
The method of my greeting furthered this illusion. Americans, both men and women, have an extraordinary self-poise, a gift for remaining normal in the most abnormal surroundings. They refuse to allow themselves to be surprised by any upheaval of circumstances. "I should worry," they seem to be saying, and press straight on with the job in hand. There was one small touch which made the environment seem even more friendly and unexceptional. One of the girls, on being introduced, promptly read to me a letter which she had just received from my sister in America. It made this oasis in an encircling wilderness seem very much a part of a neighbourly world. This girl is an example of the varied experiences which have trained American women into becoming the nursemaids of the French peasantry.
She was visiting relations in Liége when the war broke out. On the Sunday she went for a walk on the embattlements and was turned back. Baulked in this direction, she strolled out towards the country and found men digging trenches. That was the first she knew that war was rumoured. On the Tuesday, two days later, Hun shells were detonating on the house-tops. She was held prisoner in Liége for some months after the Forts had fallen and saw more than all the crimes against humanity that the Bryce Report has recorded. At last she disguised herself and contrived her escape into Holland. From there she worked her way back to America and now she is at Grécourt, starting shops in the villages, educating the children, and behaving generally as if to respond to the "Follow thou me" of the New Testament was an entirely unheroic proceeding for a woman.
And what are these women doing at Grécourt? To condense their purpose into a phrase, I should say that by their example they are bringing sanity back into the lives of the French peasants. That is what the American Fund for French Wounded is doing at Blérancourt, what all these reconstruction units are doing in the devastated areas, and what the American Red Cross is doing on a much larger scale for the whole of France. At Grécourt they have a dispensary and render medical aid. If the cases are grave, they are sent to the American Hospital at Nesle. They hunt out the former tradespeople among the refugees and encourage them to re-start their shops, lending them the money for the purpose. If the men are captives in Germany, then their wives are helped to carry on the business in their absence and for their sakes. Groups of mothers are brought together and set to work on making clothes for themselves and their children. Schools are opened so that the children may be more carefully supervised. Two of the girls at Grécourt have learnt to plough, and are instructing the peasant women. Cows are kept and a dairy has been started to provide the under-nourished babies of the district. An automobile-dispensary is sent out from the hospital at Nesle to visit the remoter districts. It has a seat along one side for the patient and the nurse. Over the seat is a rack for medicine and instruments. On the opposite side is a rack for splints and surgical dressings. On the floor of the car a shower-bath is arranged, which is so compact that it can be carried into the house where the water is to be heated. The water is put into a tub on a wooden base; while the doctor manipulates the pump for the shower, the nurse does the scrubbing. Most of the diseases among the children are due to dirt; the importance of keeping clean, which such colonies as that at Grécourt are impressing on all the people whom they serve, is doing much to improve the general state of health. In this direction, as in so many others, the most valuable contribution that they are making to their districts is not material and financial, but mental—the contribution of example and suggestion. Seventeen women cannot re-build in a day an external civilisation which has been blotted out by the savagery of a nation; but they can and they are re-building the souls of the human derelicts who have survived the savagery. This war is going to be won not by the combination of nations which has most men and guns, but by the side which possesses the highest spiritual qualities. The same is true of the countries which will wipe out the effects of war most quickly when the war is ended. The first countries to recover will be those which fight on in a new way, after peace has been signed, for the same ideals for which they have shed their blood. The sight of these American women, living helpfully and voluntarily for the sake of others among hideous surroundings, is a perpetual reminder to the dispirited refugees that, whatever else is lost, valiance and loyalty still survive.