A little poem of Padraic Colum's springs to my mind as I ask myself how to make you realise, how bring the truth home to those who have never seen the eternal question shadow the eyes of homeless men. One verse of it runs—
I am praying to God on high,
I am praying Him night and day,
For a little home, a home of my own,
Out of the wind and the rain's way."
and it just sums up the refugee desire.
You—if you are a refugee—had a home once, you earned a livelihood; but the home is laid waste and bare, your livelihood has vanished, and in all probability your savings with it.
You buried what money you had in the cellar before you left, because you thought you were only going away for a few weeks, and now the Germans have found it. You know that they pour water over cellar floors, watching carefully to see whether any percolates through. If it does it is clear that the earth has recently been disturbed, so away they go for shovels and dig; if it doesn't they try elsewhere. There is the well, for instance. A carefully-made-up packet might lie safely at the bottom for years, so what more suitable as a hiding-place? What, indeed, says the wily Hun as he is cautiously lowered into the darkness, there to probe and pry and fish, and if he is lucky to drag treasure from the deeps. Or you may have hidden your all under that white rock at the end of the garden. The rock is overturned to-day, and a hole shows where the robber has found your gold.
A gnarled tree-trunk, a post, a cross-road, anything that might serve as a mark lures him as sugar lures the ant; he has dug and delved, and searched the surface of France as an intensive culturist digs over his patch of ground. He has cut down the communal forests, the famous cherry and walnut trees of Les Éparges have all been levelled and the timber sent into Germany; he has ripped up floors, torn out window frames; he falls on copper and steel and iron with shrieks of joy; he is the locust of war, with the digestion of an ostrich; he literally "licks the platter clean," and what he cannot gorge he destroys.
So if you are a refugee you ask yourself daily, "What shall we find when we go back? How shall we start life afresh? Who will rebuild our houses, restock our farms and our shops, and indemnify us for all we have lost? France? She will have no money after the war, and Germany will be bankrupt.