I want to tell about some of these French repatriates. I shall not exaggerate or embroider the tale. It hurts cruelly to remember those poor people. It hurts to write about them. But I want our people to know. The next time they sit in a meeting where disloyal so-called socialists warble their phrases about this struggle being a profiteers’ war, about peace by negotiations, and the rest of it, perhaps they will remember.
The French government created a commission to handle the stream of human derelicts which Germany sent back through Switzerland. The people of Evian lent wholehearted aid to the commission, and all efforts have been splendidly augmented by the American Red Cross.
When the trains came in at the receiving station at Evian there were always a certain number of the returned prisoners who had to be taken immediately to the hospital. They were in advanced stages of tuberculosis, they were suffering from anemia and starvation and from all the diseases of neglect. Worst of all, many women and children were found suffering from the diseases of vice and crime.
All these sick ones go to hospitals. The American Red Cross established a children’s hospital at Evian, since nearly sixty per cent. of the repatriates are children, and nearly all of them need hospital care. The French have their local hospitals, and also what they call houses of repose where those of their countrymen not actually sick but extremely exhausted are cared for and put into condition to travel farther.
The emaciated, hollow-eyed and weary remnant who could walk that far are, or were, taken to the old casino, where wealth and fashion used to gather for bridge and expensive food and drink. There the mayor of Evian made a touching speech welcoming the people back to their native land, comforting and cheering them as well as he could. Then they sat down to the first good meal they had eaten, some of them, for years. But first The Marseillaise was sung.
“Arise, children of the land,
The day of glory has arrived.”
Who could listen, without deep stirrings of emotion, to men and women just released from prison-houses of pain and horror singing those words? I can not imagine how they found voices to sing. Some of them, indeed, could not sing. They could hardly speak. They just stood there dumb and broken, their sad eyes streaming with tears. Even freedom and the sound again of their beloved French language could not wipe out their terrible memories.
Some of the repatriates are met at Evian by friends and relatives. Some are cared for by the French government, sent to towns and villages well away from the war zone. Charity and the Red Cross have done splendid work for all refugees, but their problems are often almost unsolvable. Hardly a man among them is fit for industry. As for the women, the plight of many of them is pitiable.
The individual stories of some of these women I heard from the lips of a woman known throughout France for her devoted labors in behalf of victims of German soldiers in the invaded districts.