The curator winked at me. “Do you think so?” he said. “That is what the German Emperor thought when he went through the museum. It is a replica. The pretty girl is in a safe place and she will stay there until I am sure they won’t come back.” (“They” was the term I heard almost universally applied to the Germans in the devastated regions.)
Everywhere was the same joy over the safety and the return of their belles choses. I think I have never been in a group where gratitude mingled with sorrow was stronger than when my friend Auguste Jaccaci, who had been in Paris throughout the War at the head of the beautiful work for Belgian and French children lost or orphaned by the War, asked me to go with him to the opening of a room in the Louvre, closed of course through the dark period. It was one of the smaller galleries, but in it had been gathered new possessions, things bought in the War, others left by wills, a collection of choicest pieces. They were welcomed by the leading connoisseurs of the city: the directors of the Louvre and the Luxembourg, a few artists, a few great ladies. Everybody was in black and went about with unsmiling but touching appreciation, hardly believing, it seemed to me, that again he or she was free to rejoice in beauty. It was like coming home after the long funeral of a beloved member of a family.
But I was more concerned with the everyday conditions under which humble people were living, particularly in the territory so lately occupied. That was where the Red Cross could now be of the most practical help, it seemed to me. It took but little looking about to see that nothing we could provide would come amiss, either to those who had been caught and so remained through the War or to those who were now coming back, generally under the protest of the authorities.
I had not imagined that a bombardment could so strip a community, a countryside, of all the little conveniences of life. At Lens—once a great manufacturing and mining town, now a vast mass of red brick dust, hardly a wall left—I went about looking for signs of life, for I had been told that a few people had weathered the horror and were to be found living underground. Coming on what seemed to be a path running over a pile of debris, I followed it into an opening; and there, in what was left of a basement, sat a woman sewing. There was a fire on the hearth. She got up to greet me—a child ran out, a little girl with tousled head, dirty and ragged. “You must pardon the way we look. We have been here for many months. We haven’t a comb. No pins, nothing. But we are happy they have gone.”
Every now and then I came upon little groups who had found shelter in enemy trenches throughout the War. In a small town southeast of Laon, in the region occupied at the beginning of the War and held until the final retreat, I came upon a half-dozen children who had been brought up in the trenches. A couple of French sisters had come back to the region and were trying to civilize them. “You have no idea,” they told me, “how difficult it is to teach them to use handkerchiefs.” This was an apology for running noses. But, if ignorant of all civilized ways, these youngsters were remarkably healthy. They had had the food of the invaders, and they had lived in the earth very much like young animals. While they knew nothing of books they knew everything about war: guns, batteries, shells, uniforms. On the latter they had positive ideas. They had never seen a Red Cross uniform before, and they criticized it openly: “pas chic”—by which I suppose they meant “bungling.” And I must confess mine was.
Continually as I went about I asked myself how it could be that every pin, every needle, every spool of thread, every comb, had gone. Larger articles you understood, but these little things! The silence of the devastated regions was even more perplexing than this stripping. I drove to the Belgian border several times, and it was a long time before I could make out why it was so still. Finally it occurred to me that I saw and heard nothing alive, no cat, no dog, no hen. All these creatures had completely disappeared. And when they began to be brought back the rejoicing was like that of the return of the beautiful things to the cities. One would live again perhaps.
At Vic-sur-Aisne where the American Committee for Devastated France was carrying on its fine practical work, among the many, many, things it was doing was attempting to restock with poultry. The daughter of an eminent New York family had an incubator in her bedroom where she told me she soon hoped to have a flock of chicks. The day that I was there a hen which had been imported laid an egg. It was an event in the countryside. I saw peasant women wipe away tears that day as they looked at that hen and her egg. They would live again.
I shared this feeling later when spring began to come, and in going over torn battlefields I saw the primroses. One day I heard a skylark sing and sing until it came out of the blue and dropped like a stone to the ground. It was like a voice of promise from heaven.
What saved one’s reason within this immense devastation—so completely, incredibly horrible—was the intelligent and energetic way in which restoration was going on. Highways had been opened from Paris to Lille and on to Brussels. They included such shattered towns as Albert, Arras, Béthune, Lens, Armentières. I could go comfortably, and did, to Ypres, Cambrai, Saint-Quentin, Laon, Rheims—to all important points in northeastern France and along the border. It was when you disobeyed orders and explored unopened territory that you got into trouble. I tried Messines Ridge and landed in a shell hole. It took twenty small Annamese, located by my doughboy chauffeur at work on a clean-up job a mile or so away, to lift out our car and carry it a quarter of a mile to something like safety. The angry berating of an English officer—the English being responsible in that territory—still rings in my ears.
The most heartening sight was the steady, slow redemption of the mutilated land. As a rule the job of clearing away the first layer of war debris was given to German prisoners and soldiers from French colonies. It was a horrifying mess of abandoned tanks, artillery, guns, shells, hand grenades—not all duds, unhappily, as daily accidents demonstrated. With the debris cleared away, the heavy task of leveling the land followed. It was often deeply riddled, as over the Chemin des Dames, where the underpinning of hard white limestone lay shattered on the top—the soil far below. After the leveling came the tractors plowing the land, and finally the seeding. Along the highways outside of most of the big wrecked towns I saw between Paris and Lille were short stretches in one or another stage of this orderly redemption.