"Turned out of France the Germans came to St. Eloi, where they remained very long. Then they advanced to Ypres. The whole winter I heard the rumbling of the big guns, and the whistling of the shells. I learned also every day of the sad deaths of the victims of that awful war. I was often very frightened and I have been very happy to leave for France with my companions."
While I was in Paris the refugee children, of course, were from the invaded districts of France; the Belgian stream had long since ceased. Already twelve hundred little victims of the first months of the war, both Belgian and French, either had been returned to their mothers or relatives by the Franco-American Committee, or placed for the educational period of their lives in families, convents, or boys' schools. The more recent were still in the various colonies established by Mrs. Hill and the other members of the Committee, where they received instruction until such time as their parents could be found, or some kind people were willing to adopt them.
It was on my first Sunday in Paris that Mr. Jaccaci and Mrs. Hill asked me to drive out with them to Versailles and visit a sanitorium for the children whose primary need was restoration to health. It was on the estate of Madame Philip Berard, who had contributed the building, while the entire funds for its upkeep, including a trained nurse, were provided by Mrs. Bliss.
Versailles was as green and peaceful as if a few miles away the shells were not ripping up a field a shot. After lunch in the famous hotel ordinarily one of the gayest in France at that time of the year, we first visited the rest hospital of Miss Morgan, Miss Marbury and Miss de Wolfe, and then drove out into the country to Madame Berard's historical estate. Here, in the courtyard of a good-sized building, we were greeted by about forty children in pink-and-white gingham aprons, and heads either shaved or finished off with tightly braided pigtails. It seemed to me then that they were all smiling, and—for they had been there some weeks—that most of them looked round and healthy. But I soon found that some were still too languid to play. One lying in a long chair on the terrace at the back of the house and gazing vacantly out at the beautiful woods was tubercular, the victim of months in a damp cellar. Another, although so excessively cheerful that I suspect she was not "all there" was also confined to a long chair, with a hip affection of some sort, but she was much petted, and surrounded by all the little luxuries that the victims of her smile had remembered to send her. One beautiful child had the rickets, and several suffered from intestinal prolapsus and other internal complaints, but were on the road to recovery.
While their Swedish nurse was putting them through their gymnastic exercises I studied their faces. At first my impression was one of prevailing homeliness; scrubbed, flat, peasant faces, for the most part, without the features or the mental apparatus that provides expression. But soon I singled out two or three pretty and engaging children, and rarely one whose face was devoid of character. And they stood well and went through their exercises with precision and vigor.
It was just before we left that my wandering attention was directed toward the scene to which I alluded in my first paragraph. The greater number of the children were shouting at play in a neighboring field. The preternaturally happy invalid was smiling at the lovely woods beyond the terrace, woods where little princes had frolicked, and older princes had wooed and won. Mr. Jaccaci was still petting the beautiful little boy who looked like the bambino on the celebrated fresco of Florence; Mrs. Hill was kissing and hugging several little girls who had clung to her skirts. It was, in spite of its origin, a happy scene.
I had been waiting by the door for these ceremonies of affection to finish, when I happened to glance at the far end of the wide stone terrace. There, by the balustrade, in the shadow of the leafy woods, stood a girl of perhaps eight or ten. Her arms hung at her sides and she was staring straight before her while she cried as I never have seen a child cry; silently, bitterly, with her heavy plain face hardly twisted in its tragic silent woe.
I called Mrs. Hill's attention to her, for I, a stranger, could not intrude upon a grief like that, and the idol of all those children immediately ran over to the desolate figure. She questioned her, she put her arms about her. She might as well have addressed one of the broken stone nymphs in the woods. That young mind, startled from the present, it may be, by witnessing the endearments lavished upon prettier and smaller children, had traveled far. She was in the past, a past that anteceded even that past of death and thundering guns and rocking walls and empty stomachs; a past when the war, of whose like she had never heard, was still in the sleepless brains of the monster criminals of history, when she lived in a home in a quiet village with the fields beyond; where she had a mother, a father, sisters, brothers; where her tears had been over childish disappointments, and her mother had dried them. Small and homely and insignificant she stood there in her tragic detachment the symbol of all the woe of France, and of the depraved brutality of a handful of ambitious men who had broken the heart of the world.