Yesterday I met at tea a French duchess, last year the most frivolous and worldly person, always dressed in the height of fashion and devoted to golf, bridge, and motoring. Yesterday she was dressed in a cheap, ready-made black serge suit, with a black straw sailor hat, trimmed with a black taffeta bow, such as a poor little governess or an upper housemaid would have worn a year ago. And she said she was proud to wear the costume, bought ready-made at the "Galleries Lafayette" for 50 francs.
She has had a hospital in her chateau since the war began, where one hundred little Pious-Pious have been taken care of and nursed back to health, and, alas, to a quick return to the trenches! So she said she had no money "pour la toilette."
What these French women are doing is beyond praise. A sober, quiet determination has taken the place of their erstwhile frivolity. And when one sees delicately nurtured ladies doing the most ordinary menial work in the hospitals, not day by day, but month by month, rising at 7 a. m., and only returning home for meals and bed at 8.30 p. m.—women who in former times thought of nothing but extravagance, luxury and display—one realizes that there is good, red blood left in France, and the Gallic strain, having supported the trials of centuries, is still able to make a stand for justice and freedom.
The best English and French authorities say that the war will last at least a year or eighteen months. An English colonel told me recently that the British government was preparing to make heavy-calibre guns for August, 1916, and the French are settling down to another year or two of war, but after the Lusitania horror I should think all Americans would feel it their bounden duty to help the allies. If they are defeated, what chance has America against the German spirit of world dominion? And we want to remember that every pair of socks, every bandage, every roll of cotton is a stone in the barricade against these abominable Huns. There is no uncertainty, no discouragement, no failing in French lines or English, which hold 580 miles from the North Sea to Switzerland.
I often go to the "Arrivee des Blesses." Alas, they come too often to the railroad station, long stretchers filled with broken humanity. Does one ever hear complaints, groans or repinings? No, never! One said to me as I gave him a cup of beef tea, after he had been lifted from a box car where he had passed three days and three nights: "Madame, I am a homeless cripple, my eyesight is gone and I am forever dependent on my family, my poor wife and my children. But, in the future, when France is victorious and at peace, they will not begrudge their old father his sup and board, for he was decorated by the guns of Arras" (meaning, poor wretch, his sightless eyes).
The Belgian soldiers are strong, able-bodied, silent fellows, and speak eagerly of their return to their country. They do not seem to realize that such a consummation is most unlikely.
I am sending by express a few baskets made by them as they lie crippled on their hospital cots. The little money I paid for them will buy them tobacco, chocolate, post-cards and pencils. I should be glad if you will give these baskets to your friends who have so kindly sent us things. They are of no value, but they will show our appreciation of all you have done. There are also some rings made out of the aluminum which forms the point of the German shells. The men have picked them up on the battlefields and in the trenches—these bits, so full of interest and personal strife—and have made them into rough rings, but carrying a pathetic interest of their own.
