To some the tears had come. Others, dry-eyed, clutched their babies.
"And flowers?" said one.
"Yes, she must have money for flowers." I hardly knew what to say to the girl, but soon the other mothers were talking to her. They were the best comforters.
How did amateur relief workers get the strength and energy to face the awfulness of the situation? What we did was not "wonderful." Relief work was a debt we owed to life. Fatigue could never be thought of. When my apartment is in a mess from front door to kitchen, straightening looks hopeless. It used to be discouraging until I pretended I had blinders on my eyes and began with the nursery table. I took off everything that didn't belong there and replaced the things that should be there. I finished the table to the last detail before making the bed. I tried to work in a leisurely frame of mind without too many glances at the clock. After a bit one whole room was tidied. Kiddies were requested not to go in there "till Mama says so." Then I tackled the next room, and so on—and so on. In relief work, too, you must begin to work on one atom of the problem. You must put blinders on your eyes to shut out all the other atoms. It is fatal to let your imagination run away with you, fatal to envisage the accumulated woe.
Once in the Rue Servandoni days an Englishman came to ask Herbert to bury his baby. He told me the story of how the baby died, and I cried all night thinking of the mother. Herbert remonstrated with me for trying to bear the whole of another's grief. Christ did that and it broke His heart. His broken heart could save humanity; but as for little me I could do nobody any good by breaking my heart over them. Relief work must be constructive with respect to the patient and instructive with respect to the worker. You have to exercise self-control of emotion and help yourself to poise by quickly concentrating your mind on what details of the problem you are fitted to cope with. You learn after a while that your enthusiasm and sympathy will not do it all. You accept the fact that you are not indispensable. You realize that you can put a person on his feet but that to carry him is beyond you. You are not the only influence for good that is touching his life. This attitude keeps you both happy and humble. And so you develop confidence in life and confidence in time. In relief work both life and time are good allies.
My work started in a modest way in my studio in September, 1914. I wanted to help mothers of newborn babies, and so I called my œuvre SAUVONS LES BÉBÉS. I wrote to friends for money and layettes, and depended—as all American women in France did—upon the personal correspondence with individuals and organizations in America to maintain and develop the work started. I had no committee, and, during the three years I worked for the babies, only one associate. The French wife of an American artist joined me in 1915. From Princeton, Germantown, Philadelphia, Pittsburg, New York, Brooklyn and Boston people I knew and my readers sent me money and boxes through the American Relief Clearing-House. My best aids were always and invariably the police, who sent cases to me and guarded me against imposition. It soon became known in the Fourteenth (my own) Arrondissement, and the neighbouring Sixth, Fifth, Thirteenth and Fifteenth Arrondissements, that an American woman in the Rue Campagne-Première gave layettes to expectant mothers, and sometimes helped with medicines, milk, vacations, clothes and shoes for other children. I did not need to advertise or hang out a sign! In less than three years four thousand mothers of five thousand babies found their way to the Rue Campagne-Première. Sometimes I was swamped, badly swamped, but I managed to get around to all in the end. I remember one time, however, that babies were several months old before I could give their mothers a complete layette.
There was nothing unusual about my œuvre, in its size, its singlehandedness, or its spirit. Every American woman in France did what she could from the very beginning by taking up work as she saw it at hand—in her own home or neighborhood. Many did much more than I. There were others in Paris looking after the new-born babies.
In the summer of 1917 we Americans resident in France had to give up, all of us, the individuality of our œuvres. This meant that most of them went out of existence. When the rumor ran from mouth to mouth in the American colony that the Red Cross insisted on taking over everything and would starve out the stubborn individualists, there was consternation. Since the Red Cross was a Government organization and controlled shipping, it was possible for them to tell us that we should receive no more cases of supplies after September first, even if friends at home kept on sending them. Some were furious; some were offended; some would give a generous slice of their fortune to fight the injunction; some laughed. But the charities' trust had come to stay, and started in to handle things and ride rough-shod over people in a way that I fear is typically American.
In the early stages of war fever, the Y.M.C.A. and the Army showed the same symptoms as the Red Cross in France. There was the idea that the American way is always and exclusively the right way; impatience with and resentment against existing organizations; a thirst for sweeping reforms; and the determination that Americans who had been on the ground from the beginning must be eliminated. The way our splendid Ambulance at Neuilly was absorbed by the army is a story of Prussianism pure and simple. The Red Cross men and their wives did not seem to get it into their heads that we had been at war for three years. I attended a drawing-room meeting one day, where a hundred women were gathered who had been sacrificing themselves in relief work ever since the day France mobilized. More than one had lost her son in the war. A new Red Cross woman, fresh from America, lectured on what the Red Cross was going to do. She smiled at us, and her peroration was this: "Now you must realize that we are at war, and that we are going to put you all to work, all to work!"
When the excitement cooled down a bit, we realized that these Red Cross volunteers meant well, that they were devoted and capable, and that we could not take too tragically their ignorance and inexperience. We realized that we were tired, that we needed a rest and change, and that the Red Cross, with its enormous funds and abundant personnel, was in a position to realize many of our dreams. Our initial resentment was in part dismay at seeing newly arrived compatriots making the same mistakes some of us had made in the beginning, and partly their obtuseness in failing to get the French point of view. Contact with suffering such as they had never seen before soon mellowed most of the Red Cross volunteers and they realized that America was coming, as my husband put it, "not to save France, but to help France save the world."