These letters present a singularly vivid chronicle of an American woman's experiences during the Great War. She was living in Paris, but brought her mother to London for safety. Here she went through a course of Red Cross lectures and returned to become a nurse at the American Ambulance in the Pasteur Institute in Neuilly, then under the control of Mrs. W. K. Vanderbilt. Her brilliant intellect and sympathizing heart are brought out in her letters to friends in America. Her whole soul is in the cause of the Allies and in her letters she tells many beautiful stories of her experiences in Paris, London, Nice and Rome. To read her impressions as she wrote them down for her friends is to recapture the thrill and the uplift, the sorrows and the hopes, the high resolves and unshakable purpose of those that will live forever in history. Several letters are reprinted here by permission of her publisher, John Lane Company, London and New York.
I—STORY OF ROBERT LE ROUX
To Miss Anna Lusk, New York.
Paris, Nov. 7th, 1914.
Dearest Anna:
In the contemplation of the great griefs of those who have lost their own, of those who have given their all; in the contemplation of the bravest country in the world—Belgium—ravaged from frontier to frontier, laid barren and waste, smoked, ruined, devastated and scarred by wholesale massacre of civilian women and children, our hearts have been crushed. Our souls have been appalled by the burdens of others, and by the future problems of Belgium, not to speak of one quarter of France. Much of the north has been wiped out, and the stories of individual suffering and insults too terrible to dwell upon, you will say.
One of my old clerks in the Bon Marché has had his little nephew come back to him from Germany—a peaceful young middle-class man pursuing his studies in a German town—with both his hands cut off!
The other day in the Gare du Nord, waiting for a train, there was a stunning Belgian officer—not a private—he was a captain in one of the crack regiments. His excitement was terrible, he was almost beside himself with anguish and with anger. In a little village he had seen one woman violated by seven Germans in the presence of her husband; then the husband shot, the woman shot and her little baby cut in four pieces on a butcher's block. You can hardly call this the common course of war. He was a Belgian gentleman, and I should consider this a document of truth.
But there are so many that I cannot prolong, and will not—what is the use? Every now and then a people needs to be wiped off the face of the earth, or a contingent blotted out that a newer and finer civilization shall prevail. Certainly this is the case with Germany. They say here that the Emperor and Crown Prince will be tried by law and sentenced to death as common criminals, the Emperor as a murderer and the Crown Prince as a robber, for his goods trains were stacked with booty and loot. Think of it, a Prince! Everywhere the Germans pass they leave their filthy insults behind them, in the beautiful châteaux and in the delicate rooms of the French women—the indications of their passing, not deeds of noble heroism that can be told of foes as well as of friends, but filthy souvenirs of the passing of creatures for whom the word "barbarism" is too mild!