This noble French woman bears the beautiful name of Avril de Ste. Croix. I mention it not because she would particularly care to have me do so, but because she is known to a great many women in America. Madame Avril de Ste. Croix is president of the French National Council of Women, and as a prominent suffragist has attended a number of meetings of the International Association for Woman Suffrage of which an American woman, Carrie Chapman Catt, is president. Every one in France and in the United States who knows Madame de Ste. Croix knows that she is incapable of misstatement or misrepresentation. What she told me I am absolutely confident was true in every particular.
In Paris there is a house of mercy established and maintained by patriotic and generous French people for the rehabilitation of women and girl victims of German lust, and Madame de Ste. Croix is managing director of the establishment.
To this house was brought, about a year ago, a woman who, at the beginning of the war, lived with her husband and five children in one of the French cities taken by the Germans. They did not destroy this city, but occupied it and made it a division headquarters.
Madame Doran we will call her, because it is not her name, lost her husband’s protection and a good deal of her income at the mobilization. The husband joined the colors, and the wife and five children made a home in two small rooms of a tenement. The whole town was filled with German soldiers, and Madame Doran had two men billeted on her. She moved her family into one room and gave the other to the soldiers.
From the first these soldiers tried to debauch the poor woman. She successfully resisted them. They moved on and two more soldiers were billeted on her. They in turn attempted the degradation of this decent wife and mother. She resisted these men also.
For a year and a half she lived with her children in that room, separated only by a thin wall from lustful brutes whose orders were that “the German seal must be set upon the enemy’s country.” In other words, they had orders to destroy as many lives and as much virtue of women as they possibly could.
Successive German soldiers this brave and virtuous woman continued to resist. Finally, after a year and a half of fear and dread and continual struggle, the soldiers then in her home went to their officers and reported her as a quarrelsome, contentious woman, one who made a practise of insulting German soldiers. Those unspeakable cowards and brutes did this thing for revenge.
The authorities descended on the woman, took her children away from her by force, sent them to German institutions and sent her to work in a German-conquered mine in northern France. There the ultimate misery became hers. Her husband gone, her children torn from her, her home taken away, placed at degrading labor, her spirit broken, she fell a prey to German lust at last.
Only by yielding to the soldiers guarding the mine workers could she buy for herself the least privilege. Only by becoming worse than a slave could she obtain the slightest surcease from slavery.
She fell. For about a year she was tossed from one to another of the Huns in the neighborhood of that mine. Inevitably she became in time a menace to health, and then the Huns in Berlin ordered her deported. She was sent back through Switzerland to Evian with a card sewed to her rags, a card describing her as a syphilitic prostitute.