DIFFICULT DAYS IN THE WAR ZONE
It isn’t what happens necessarily. It’s what’s always-going-to-happen that keeps one guessing between life and death in a war zone. And there are special torments of the inquisition devised for journalists. Ordinary civilians are occupied only with saving their lives. Journalists must save their notes.
At half-past eleven o’clock that night of my return from Rheims, there is dropped in the mail box on my hotel room door, a cablegram from America: “Steamship St. Louis here. Your material from London not on it.” The room in which I stand, the Hotel Regina, and the city of Paris all reel unsteadily for an instant. Has the British Government eaten up all my journalistic findings so preciously entrusted to Wellington House? I grasp the brass foot rail of the bed and bring myself upstanding. If they have, it is no time for me to lose my head.
Jacques with the empty coat sleeve and the Croix de Guerre on his breast, who operates the elevator, I am sure thinks it a woman demented who is going out in the streets of Paris alone at midnight. But “an Americaine,” one can never tell what “an Americaine” will do. “Pardon,” he says hesitatingly as I step out, “madame knows the hour?” Yes, madame knows the hour. But an alien may not send a telegram without presenting a passport, the document that never for an instant goes out of one’s personal possession. No messenger can do this errand for me.
Five minutes later I am in a taxicab tearing down the Rue Quatre Septembre to the cable office in the Bourse. My appeal for help to Sir Gilbert Parker in London is being counted on the blue telegraph blank by the operator at the little window, when suddenly I remember I have forgotten. My hand feels helplessly over my left hip where there is concealed a letter of credit for three thousand dollars. But I falter, “I haven’t any money, that is, where I can get at it.”
“I have,” speaks a voice over my shoulder. I look around into a man’s cheerful countenance. “What’s the damage?” he says again in pleasant Manhattan English. I hesitate only for an instant. “It’s sixteen francs I need.”
He promptly pulls out his bank-roll. I ask for his card, of course, to return the loan the next day with many thanks for his courtesy. He, however, has no security that I will. As he puts me in my taxicab and lifts his hat beneath the faint war-dimmed light of the street lamps in the dark Rue Vivienne, he only knows that I am his country-woman. And he is an American man. The Lord seems to send them when you need them most.
Three days later the awful silence in which I am suffering all the fears there are for a journalist in war-time, is broken by a reply from London: “Material only delayed. Sailed steamship New York instead of St. Louis.” After another two weeks of fitful nights in which I dream of men in khaki who confiscate journalistic data, there comes the message from New York that is like hearing from Heaven: “Your consignment of material safely arrived.” Meanwhile, before I may be permitted to take a line out of this country, Maison de la Presse must pass on my French data. I am feverishly editing it for their approval when there is a knock at my door. The maid is there with more letters than the little brass mail box will hold. I eagerly open my American mail to find it filled with holiday greetings. So, it can still be Christmas somewhere in the world! I am standing at the window with a Christmas card in my hand, thinking pleasant thoughts of the far-away city called New York where there is still peace on earth, good-will to men, when down the Rue de Rivoli passes a motor lorry piled high with black crosses. There are fields in France that are planted with black crosses, acres and acres of them. After each new push on the front, more are required, black crosses by the cartload! I glanced at my calendar. Why, to-day is Christmas! I had quite forgotten. You see, over here all joy-making occasions seem to have been such a long while ago, like the stories of once upon a time.
I turn once more to the task of making ready my data for Maison de la Presse. Here a too colourful sentence must be rejected. There is a too flagrantly feministic document that will be safest in the waste basket. It is the martial mind that I must meet. A press bureau, you see, is prepared to pass promptly propaganda on the battles of the Somme. But dare one risk, say, a pamphlet on the breast feeding of infants? Propaganda about the rising value of a baby! Dear, dear, it might, for all a man could tell, be treason, seditious material calculated to give aid and comfort to the enemy! Already to my inquiries about maternity measures in Paris, have I not been answered suspiciously: “But why do you ask? This matter it is not of the war.”
My emasculated data at last are ready for review by le chef du service de la presse. He stamps it all over with his signature in red ink. It is done up in packages and officially sealed in red wax with the seal of the state of France. At the Post Office in the Rue Etienne Marcel, I register it and mail it, committing it with a sigh to the mercies of the great Atlantic.