A soldier's mother in France

by Rheta Childe Dorr

My only son, I have said before, is a soldier. He is at the front. Yet, after what I have seen of this war, I would never speak of peace to him. I don’t want him to think of peace. I want him to think of fighting.

Since this war began, nearly two million people, not fighters, but women and children and men too old and infirm to fight, have been driven in wretchedness from their homes. This in France alone.

We know what happened in Belgium, in Serbia, in Roumania and Poland. Armenia? Words fail in describing what happened there. I have seen only France, and I can speak only of France. Two million French people have fled before fire and sword.

But that isn’t anything very terrible, by comparison. To lose your home and everything you possess is a bearable thing—by comparison. On a Sunday soon after the great spring battle began I spent the day in a railroad station at a junction where hundreds of trains rushed ceaselessly to the north bearing soldiers and munitions, and to the south with wounded men, refugees and broken guns and airplanes. Many refugees were fed and comforted by the French Red Cross at the station that day.

It was my privilege to help a little those noble French women. I filled hundreds of cups with coffee, strong and hot, and I helped to feed the exhausted who could not even stand up at the counter where coffee and sandwiches were served. We literally fed them, holding the food to their lips.

There was one old woman—perhaps she was not really old, but her sufferings had emaciated her and seamed her face with wrinkles—who was my special care for an hour. She had to be given brandy before she could sit up, and she had to be fed hot milk from a spoon, like a baby. She was almost dead. Another woman, her neighbor in the ruined and violated village that once was their home, told me in quick whispers that old woman’s story.

When the Germans invaded France in August, 1914, this woman lived in a small town directly in the path of the Wurtemburg army that swept in from Lorraine. Her husband kept a small shop where tobacco and fruit and such like were sold. They had a home and three children—Cécile, sixteen; Georges, twelve, and Marcel, six. They were quiet people, like all the other villagers, and the mobilizing of their men when war came was the first great and terrifying event in their lives. This woman’s husband had a club foot and could not be mobilized. She had no son old enough to fight, so she was counted lucky.

Then the Germans came. They swarmed in early one morning and the horrified villagers at once began to see war in its most frightful guise. Soldiers broke into the home of the club-footed man and demanded tobacco. He led the way to his little shop and told them to help themselves. They did, and when they had filled their pockets and their haversacks they shot the lame man through the heart. Meantime, with torch and grenade, other soldiers were setting fire to the village. They burned the dead tobacconist’s home, and when the wife rushed from the house with her youngest child in her arms they shot the child. He screamed “Mother!” just once, and died.

She and her two remaining children fled, but Cécile, the sixteen-year-old daughter, did not get very far. She was seized by a German officer, and it was a year before her mother saw her again. When those two met again the girl was a skeleton, and she bore in her arms a skeleton baby. It was a girl. Otherwise they would not have permitted her to take it back to France.

The reunited family made their way to a relative in a village near Peronne. When the Germans swept over that district in 1916 they fled again, and in the flight Cécile, never strong after her experience in Germany, died. Soon afterward the baby died. Georges, now a sturdy boy of fourteen, was all that was left. After the Germans retreated last November they went back to their village near Peronne, and the boy worked for their support—until March twenty-first, this year. Then they fled again, and here she was—alone.