And it was. The Germans were in possession of Loos by October. They poured petrol on the houses and burned many of them. At the store in the Place de la Republique, Emilienne, with quick wit, set a bottle of wine out on the counter and they drank and went away without burning, although they looted the store of everything of value. During the year that followed, Loos remained in the hands of the enemy. In the effort of the French to retake it, it was often fired upon from the surrounding hills. From the windows in the sloping garret roof, Emilienne and her father watched many a battle until the bombs began falling on the garret itself. They were exposed to constant danger. They had to live on the vegetables they could gather from the deserted neighbouring gardens. By December her father was ill from privation and hunger and anxiety, and one night he died. Emilienne, girl as she was, seems to have been the main reliance of the family, her mother, her little sister Marguerite, and her little brother Leonard, aged nine. The morning after her father’s death, Emilienne went to the German commandant to ask for assistance. How should she get a coffin? How should it be possible to bury her father? And the German laughed: “One can get along very well without a coffin!” He finally permitted her four French prisoners to dig the grave and the curé of Loos, he said, could say a prayer. But Emilienne was heart-broken at the thought of putting her father into the ground without a coffin. She and her little brother made one with their own hands from boards she found at the deserted carpenter-shop down the street.
By the spring of 1915 the bombardment of Loos increased in violence. There were days at a time when the whole family, with their black dog Sultan, did not dare venture out of the cellar. In September, Emilienne, ascending to the demolished garret, where she lay flat on her stomach on the rafters, watched a battle in which the strangest beings she ever saw took part, fantastic creatures of a grey colour who were throwing themselves on the German trenches. As they advanced, she noticed that they wore “little petticoats,” and she hurried to tell her mother that these must be the English suffragettes of whom she had heard, coming to the rescue of Loos. What they actually were was the Scottish troops in kilts, the famous “Black Watch,” who a few days later had driven the Germans from Loos. As they came into the village, Emilienne, braving a cyclone of shells, and rallying her French neighbours, ran to meet them, waving the French flag and singing the “Marseillaise.” Thus, it is said, by her fearless courage, was averted a retreat that might have meant disaster along the whole front.
But the fighting was not yet over. During the next few days, Emilienne, with the Red Cross doctor’s assistance, turned her house into a first-aid station. Some seven of the stalwart Scotsmen in the “little petticoats,” she herself dragged in to safe shelter when they had been wounded. Two Germans taking aim at French soldiers she killed with a revolver she had just snatched from the belt of a dead man. When the enemy had been finally repulsed, Emilienne Moreau was summoned by the Government to be given the Croix de Guerre.
A little later, her pictured face was placarded all over Paris by the French newspapers. They wanted her to write her personal story. At first she shrank from it: “It would be presumption on the part of a girl. What would my commune think?” But finally she was prevailed upon, and for two months daily “Mes Mémoires” appeared on the front page of Le Petit Parisien with a double-column headline. Even more honours have come to Emilienne. Great Britain bestowed on her its order of St. John of Jerusalem and the King has sent her a personal invitation to visit Buckingham Palace as soon as the Channel crossing shall be safe.
With it all, you would think Emilienne, if you met her, quite a normal girl. You see, she is young enough to forget. And it is only occasionally that in the clear blue eyes you catch a glimpse of tragedy. Her smooth brown hair she is as interested in having in the latest mode as are you who to-day consulted the fashion-pages of a magazine for coiffures. I have seen her on the sands at Trouville with a group of girls at play at blind man’s buff in the moonlight. And by her silvery laughter you would not know her from the rest as a heroine. The next day, when they were in bathing and the body of a drowned man was washed ashore, one of the other girls fainted. Afterward Emilienne said, and there was in her eyes a far-away look of old horrors as she spoke, “Marie, Marie, if your eyes had looked on what mine have, you would not faint so easily.”
There is another French girl, the youngest war heroine I know who has been decorated by any government. And the case of Madeleine Danau is perhaps of special interest, because any girl in the United States can even now begin to be a heroine as she was. They say in France that “la petite Danau” has served her country even though it was not while exposed to shot and shell. She lives in the village of Corbeil and she was only fourteen years old at the time her father, the baker, was mobilised. A baker in France, it must be remembered, is a most necessary functionary in the community, for as everybody has for years bought bread, nobody even knows how to make it at home any more. The whole neighbouring countryside, therefore, you see, was most dependent on the baker, and the baker was gone away to war. It was then that Madeleine proved equal to doing the duty that was nearest to her. She promptly stepped into her father’s place before the bread-trough and the oven. She gets up each morning at four o’clock and with the aid of her little brother, a year younger than herself, she makes each day eight hundred pounds of bread, which is delivered in a cart by another brother and sister. The radius of the district is some ten miles, and no household since war began has missed its daily supply of bread.
One day Madeleine was summoned to a public meeting for which the citizens of Corbeil assembled at the Mairie. She went in her champagne-coloured dress of toile de laine and her Sunday hat of leghorn trimmed with black velvet and white roses. And there before this public assemblage the Préfet des Deux-Sèvres pinned on Madeleine the Cross of Lorraine and read a letter from President Poincaré of France. In it the President presented to Madeleine Danau his sincere compliments and begged her to accept “this little jewel,” this Cross of Lorraine, which shall proclaim that the valiant child of the Deux-Sèvres through her own labour assuring for the inhabitants of the Commune of Exoudun their daily bread, has performed as patriotic a service and is as good a Frenchwoman as are any of her sisters of the Meuse.
The ever-lengthening list of heroic women who have distinguished themselves in this war in Europe is now so many that it is quite impossible even to mention any considerable number of them in less than a very large book. You find their names now in every country quite casually listed along with those of soldiers in the Roll of Honour published in the daily newspapers. And it is no surprise to come on women’s names in any of the lists, “Dead,” “Wounded,” or “Decorated.” The French Academy out of seventy prizes in 1916 awarded no less than forty-seven to women “as most distinguished examples of military courage.” Among these the Croix de Guerre has been given to Madame Macherez, capable citizeness of Soissons, who has been daily at the Mairie in an executive capacity, and to Mlle. Sellier who has been in charge of the Red Cross hospital there during the long months of the bombardment. The Cross of the Legion of Honor along with the cross of Christ decorates the front of the black habit of Sister Julie, the nun of Gerbéviller who held the invading Germans at bay while she stood guard over the wounded French soldiers at her improvised hospital.
It’s like this in all of the warring countries. And all of these women with their war jewelery for splendid service, are women like you and me. But yesterday, and they might have been pleased with a string of beads to wind about a white throat. Out of every-day feminine stuff like this shall our war heroines too be made.