And you already know how very well that particular war job was done. And doing it involved much devotion and endurance and self-sacrifice, not only on the part of the directress, but on that of her staff of capable assistants.
Talk about devotion and endurance and self-sacrifice! Into the desolate ruin of the war-racked city of Rheims there walked last October two American Red Cross women on a sight-seeing trip. They had had months of hard canteen work and were well tired out, and were about to return home. In a week or so of leave they went to Rheims because that once busy city with its dominating cathedral has become the world's new Pompeii. And the man or woman who visits France without seeing it has missed seeing the one thing of almost supreme horror and interest in the world to-day.
The two Red Cross women had but a single day to see Rheims. That was last October. They still are there; for back of the ruins, back of the gaunt, scarred hulk of that vast church which was once the pride of France, and to-day the symbol of Calvary through which she had just passed, there rose the question in their minds: what has become of the folk of this town? It was the sort of question that does not down. Nor were the two women—one is Miss Emily Bennet of the faculty of a fashionable girls' school in New York and the other Miss Catherine Biddle Porter of Philadelphia—the sort that close their souls to questions such as these.
They found the answer. It was in the basement of the commercial high school—a dreary, high-ceilinged place, but because of its comparatively modern construction of steel and brick a sort of abri or bombproof refuge for the three or four hundred citizens that stuck it out through the four years of horror. In that basement place of safety an aged school-teacher of the town, Mademoiselle Fourreaux, month in and month out, prepared two meals a day—bread and soup—for the group of refugees that gathered round about her and literally kept the heart of Rheims abeat. The Red Cross women found this aged heroine—she confesses to having turned seventy—working unaided, and within the hour were working with her, sending word back to Paris to send up a few necessary articles of comfort and of clothing. That night they slept in Rheims, and were billeted in a house whose windows had been crudely replaced with oiled paper and whose roof was half gone.
In a short time relief came to them. The American Red Cross sent in other supplies and workers and established a much larger and finer canteen relief in another section of the town. Other organizations—French and British and American—poured in relief; but Miss Bennett and Miss Porter stuck it out, and soon began to reap the fruit of their great endeavors.
I have cited here a few instances of women who have gone overseas—frequently at great personal sacrifices—to help bear the burden of the war. If space had permitted I might easily have given five hundred, and each of them would have had its own personal little dramatic story. I might simply tell of some of the women whom I have met on the job; of Miss Lucy Duhring of Philadelphia, setting up the women's work of the Y. M. C. A. in the leave areas of the occupied territory; of a girl superintendent of schools from Kansas, working in the hospital records for the Red Cross at Toul; of another girl from Kingston-on-Hudson running a big Y. W. C. A. hotel for army girls in Paris and running it mighty well; of still another woman—this one a welfare worker from a big industrial plant in Kansas City—as the guiding spirit in the hostess house at Coblenz. The list quickly spins to great lengths. It is a tremendously embracing one, and when one gazes at it, he begins to realize what effect this great adventure overseas is going to have upon the lives of the women who participated in it; how it is going to change the conventions of life, or its amenities, or its opportunities. How will the weeks and months of camaraderie with khaki-clad men, under all conditions and all circumstances affect them? Many of the silly conventionalities of ordinary life and under ordinary conditions of peace, have, of necessity, been thrown away over there. Men and women have made long trips together, in train or in motor car, and have thought or made nothing of it whatever. On the night train up from Aix-les-Bains to Paris on one of those never-to-be-forgotten nights the autumn the conflict still raged, two girls of the A. E. F. found it quite impossible to obtain seats of any sort. Four or five marines, back from a short leave in a little town near there, did the best they could for them and with their blankets and dunny rolls rigged crude beds for them in the aisle of a first-class car, and there the girls rode all night to Paris while the marines stood guard over them.
The gray-uniformed woman war-worker knows that she may trust the American soldier. Her experience with the doughboy has been large and so her tribute to the high qualities of his manhood is of very real value. Moreover, she too, has seen real service, both in canteen work and in the still more important leave area work which has followed—this last the great problem of keeping the idle soldier healthily amused.
"I have known our girls," she will tell you, "to go into a miserable little French or German town filled with a thousand or twelve hundred American boys in khaki and in a day change the entire spirit of that community. There has been a dance one night, for instance, with the boys restless and trying stupidly to dance with one another, or in some cases, even bringing in the rough little village girls from the streets outside. But the next dance has seen a transformation. The girls of the A. E. F. have come, they are dancing with the men; there is cheer and decency in the very air, there are neither French nor German present—the place is American.
"You have told of what the American girl has been to the men of our army; let me tell, in a word, what the army has been to the American woman who has worked with it: We have trusted our enlisted men in khaki and not once found that trust misplaced. Night and day have we placed our honor in their hands and never have trusted in vain."