Our Part in the Great War

V
"FRIENDS OF FRANCE"

American relief work in France has many agencies and activities. I have given illustrations of it, but these are only admirable bits among a host of equals. I have told of the American Field Service. Other sections of young Americans have been at work in the hottest corners of the battle front. The Harjes Formation and the American Volunteer Motor Ambulance Corps, known as the Norton Corps, have made a name for daring and useful work with their one hundred cars on the firing line. What the Field Service has done, they too have done and suffered. It was with a glow of pride that I read the name of my Yale classmate, W. P. Clyde, junior, of the Norton Ambulance, cited in an order of the day, and made the recipient of the French War Cross. The commanding general wrote of him:

"Volunteer for a perilous mission, he acquitted himself with a cool courage under a heavy and continuous fire. He has given, in the course of the campaign, numerous proofs of his indifference to danger and his spirit of self-sacrifice."

I have shown the contribution of scientific skill and mechanical ingenuity which Americans have made in hospital and ambulance work. There remains a work in which our other American characteristic of executive ability is shown. Organization is the merit of the American Relief Clearing House. When the war broke out, American gifts tumbled into Paris, addressed and unaddressed. There was a tangle and muddle of generosity. The American Relief Clearing House was formed to meet this need. It centralizes and controls the receipt of relief from America intended for France and her Allies. It collects fresh accurate information on ravaged districts and suffering people. It prevents waste and overlapping and duplication. It obtains free transportation across the ocean for all gifts, free entry through the French customs, and free transportation on all the French railways. It forwards the gifts to the particular point, when it is specified. It distributes unmarked supplies to places of need. It receives money and purchases supplies. It has 114 persons giving all their time to its work. It has issued 45,000 personally signed letters telling of the work. It employs ten auto trucks in handling goods. It has concentrated time, effort and gifts. It has obtained and spread information of the needs of the Allies. It has been efficient in creating relationship between the donor in America and the recipient in France, and in increasing good will between the nations. I do not write of the Clearing House from the outside, but from a long experience. For many months my wife has given all her time to making known the work of Miss Fyfe who manages the work of relief for civilians, their transportation, and conducts a refugee house, and a Maternity Hospital in the little strip of Belgium which is still unenslaved. Little local committees, such as Miss Rider's in Norwalk, in Cedar Rapids, in Montclair, and in Douglaston, L. I., have been formed, and 36 boxes of material, and over $1,500 in money, have been given. Those supplies the Clearing House has brought from New York to La Panne, Belgium, free of charge, promptly, with no damage and no losses. What the Clearing House has done for this humble effort, it has done for 60,000 other consignments, and for more than a million dollars of money. It has distributed supplies to 2,500 hospitals and 200 relief organizations in France. It has sent goods to Belgium, Salonica, to the sick French prisoners in Switzerland. It dispatched the ship Menhir for the relief of Serbian refugees. It has installed a complete hospital, with 200 beds and a radiograph outfit. The cases which it transports contain gauze, cotton, bandages, hospital clothing, surgical instruments, garments, underwear, boots, socks. The names of the men who have administered this excellent organization in Paris are H. O. Beatty, Charles R. Scott, Randolph Mordecai, James R. Barbour, and Walter Abbott.

After the claims of immediate dramatic suffering, comes the great mute community of the French people, whose life and work have been blighted. And for one section of that community the Association of "Les Amis des Artistes" has been formed. "To preserve French art from the deadly effects of the war, which creates conditions so unfavorable to the production of masterpieces of painting, sculpture, architecture, decorative arts, engraving," is the object of this society. The members see that other forms of activity will swiftly revive after the war. "The invaded districts will be rebuilt, business will flourish. But art will have a hard and prolonged struggle." The society purchases from its funds the works of men of talent whom the war has robbed of means of support. These paintings, statuary, engravings, so acquired, are annually divided among the members. The purchase is made by a committee composed of distinguished artists, critics and connoisseurs, representing the three great French salons and the various art tendencies of the modern movement. The Honorary Committee includes Bakst, Hanotaux, Maeterlinck, Rodin and Raemaekers. Americans who are aiding are Mrs. Mark Baldwin, Mrs. Paul Gans, Walter Gay, Laurence V. Benét, and Percy Peixotto.

The new American fund of the "Guthrie Committee" for the relief of the orphans of war has been recently announced. It is planned to raise many millions of dollars for this object.

Children, artists, invalid soldiers, refugees – there is a various and immense suffering in France at this moment, and no American can afford to be neutral in the presence of that need. The sense of the sharp individual disturbance and of the mass of misery came to me one day when I visited the Maison Blanche. We entered the open air corridor, where a group of thirty men rose to salute our party. My eye picked up a young man, whose face carried an expression of gentleness.

"Go and bring the War Minister your work," said the Major who was conducting us.

A little chattering sound came from the lips of the boy. It sounded like the note of a bird, a faint twittering, making the sound of "Wheet-Wheet" – twice repeated each half minute. Then began the strangest walk I have ever seen. His legs thrust out in unexpected directions, his arms bobbed, his whole body trembled. Sometimes he sank partly to the ground. His progress was slow, because he was spilling his vitality in these motions. And all the time, the low chirrup came from his lips. More laborious and cruel than the price paid by the victims of vice was this walk of one who had served his country.

And yet nothing in the indignity that had been done to his body could rob him of that sweetness of expression.

"A shell exploded directly in front of him," explained the doctor, "the sudden shock broke his nervous system, and gave him what is practically a case of locomotor ataxia. He trembles continuously in every part. It forces out the little cry. The effect of that shock is distributed through his entire body. That is what gives hope for his recovery. If the thing had centered in any one function, he would be a hopeless case. But it is all diffused. When the war ends many of these men who are nerve-shattered, will recover, we believe. As long as the war lasts, they live it, they carry a sense of responsibility, with the horror that goes with it. But when they know the shelling is over for ever they will grow better."

In a few minutes the young soldier returned carrying two baskets. The one thing that is saving that man from going crazy is his basket making. Very patiently and skillfully his shaking hands weave close-knit little baskets. Some of them were open trays for household knick-knacks. Others were worked out into true art shapes of vase. I shan't forget him as he stood there trembling, the little reed baskets rocking in his hands, but those baskets themselves revealing not a trace of his infirmity. Only his nervous system was broken. But his will to work, his sweet enduring spirit, were the will and the heart of France.

The War Minister, in whose hands rests the health of four million soldiers, is as painstaking, as tender as a nurse. Fifteen minutes he gave that man – fifteen minutes of encouragement. The rest of France waited, while this one little twitching representative of his race received what was due from the head of the nation to the humblest sufferer. Do I need to say that the soldier was bought out? Professor Mark Baldwin and Bernard Shoninger held an extempore auction against each other. But one basket they could not buy and that was the tray the man had woven for his wife. He was proud to show it, but money could not get it. And he was a thrifty man at that. For, as soon as he had received his handful of five-franc notes, he went to his room, where he sleeps alone so that his twittering will not disturb the other men, and hid the money in his kit. Something more for his wife to go with the basket.

Clearing house of the suffering of France, the Maison Blanche is the place where the mutilated of the Grand Army come. As quickly as they are discharged from hospital, they are sent to this Maison Blanche, while completing their convalescence, before they return to their homes. It is here that arms, legs, stumps, hands and the apparatus that operates these members, are fitted to them. They try out the new device. It is to them like a foot asleep to a whole man; a something numb and strange out beyond the responses of the nervous system. It behaves queerly. It requires much testing to make it articulate naturally.

Through the recreation hall, where plays and motion pictures have made gay evenings in time past before the war, file the slow streams of the crippled, backwash of the slaughter to the North. To the soldiers it is a matter of routine, one more item in the long sacrifice. They fit on the member and test it in a businesslike way, with no sentimentalizing. Too many are there in the room, and other hundreds on the pleasant sunny lawns, in like case, for the individual to feel himself the lonely victim. There are no jests – the war has gone too far for superficial gayety – and there is no hint of despair, for France is being saved. The crippled man is sober and long-enduring.

There in that room I saw the war as I have not seen it in five months of active service at the front. For yonder on the Yser we had the dramatic reliefs of sudden bombardment, and flashing aeroplanes. But here were only broken men. There were no whole men at all in the long Salle. The spirit of the men was all that it ever was. But the body could no longer respond. They stood in long line, stripped to the waist or with leg bare waiting their turn with the doctor and the apparatus expert. There is the look of an automaton to an artificial limb, as if the men in their troubled motions were marionettes. And then the imagination, abnormally stimulated by so much suffering, plays other tricks. And it seemed to me as if one were looking in at the window of one of those shameful "Halls of Anatomy" in a city slum, where life-size figures lie exposed with grotesque wounds on the wax flesh. But here was the crackle of the leather straps, and the snapping of the spring at the knee and elbow-joint of the mechanism, and the slow moving up and filing past of the line, as man after man was tested for flexibility. Here is the army of France – here is the whole vast problem flowing through one door and gathered in one room.

American money is helping to reëducate these broken men, teaching them trades. There at the Maison Blanche, our fellow-countrymen have already trained 563 men, and at the Grand Palais 257. As I write this, 701 maimed men are still in course of being trained, and the number in the agricultural school has grown to 90. Altogether 2,000 maimed soldiers have been trained through American help. Most of the money for this work has been raised by the "American Committee for Training in Suitable Trades the Maimed Soldiers of France," of which Mrs. Edmund Lincoln Baylies is Chairman. The president of the society in France in control of this work is B. J. Shoninger, the former president of the American Chamber of Commerce in Paris.

Like England in the battle line, we are only at the beginning of our effort. In spots and patches we have responded well. Many are giving all they can. The thirty-five million dollars in money which we have collected for all causes is excellent. (Though England has given more than that to Belgium alone, in addition to financing the war and caring for her own multitude of sufferers.) America has made gifts in goods to the amount of sixty million dollars. Of local relief committees working for France we have over two thousand. There are about forty-five thousand Americans devoting their full time to the service of France as soldiers, drivers, fliers, doctors, nurses, orderlies, and executive officers. There are many thousands in the United States who are using a portion of their strength and leisure to raise money and supplies. As Sydney Brooks said to me:

"Those Americans who believe in our cause are more Pro-Ally than the Allies."

A group of Americans among our millions are aware that Washington wrote:

"All citizens of the United States should be inspired with unchangeable gratitude to France."

Note: For an account of the work of Mrs. Wharton see page 321.

VI
THE SAVING REMNANT

I wish to show in this book three expressions of nationality. I seek to show the fire and vigor of German nationality, and how that force has been misdirected by the handful of imperialistic militarists in control. There has been no instance of a noble force so diverted since the days of the Inquisition, when the vast instinctive power of religion was used by a clever organization to torture and kill. Every instinctive element in our being is at times turned awry. Nationalism suffers just as sex love suffers from the perversions of evil institutions. But the abuse of instinct is no argument for cutting loose from that vital source and seeking to live by intellectual theories, emptied of warm emotional impulse. The remedy is in applying the intellect as a guide and corrective, not in treating instinct as an enemy. The nationalism of the German people will yet vindicate itself and swing true to freedom and justice.

I try to reveal the nationality of France, in the love of the peasant for the soil of his Patrie, for the house where he was born, and for the sunlight and the equality of his beautiful country. I have shown that there can be no peace as long as other men with other customs invade that soil, burn those homes, and impose their alien ideas.

I have told of what the American tradition of nationality has driven our men and women and our boys to do in France. They see the fight of France as our fight, just as France saw the American Revolution as her struggle. None of this work was done in vague humanitarianism. These men and women and boys are giving of their best for a definite aim. They are giving it to the American cause in France. France is defending the things that used to be dear to us, and our fellow-countrymen who are of the historic American tradition are standing at her side.

In recent years, our editors and politicians have been busy in destroying our historic tradition and creating a new tradition, by means of which we are to obtain results without paying the price. Neutrality is the method, and peace and prosperity are the rewards. I have collected many expressions of this new conception of Americanism. One will suffice.

Martin H. Glynn, temporary chairman of the National Democratic Convention, in renominating Woodrow Wilson for president, said:

"Neutrality is America's contribution to the laws of the world… The policy of neutrality is as truly American as the American flag… The genius of this country is for peace. Compared with the blood-smeared pages of Europe, our records are almost immaculate. To-day prosperity shines from blazing furnaces and glowing forges. Never was there as much money in our vaults as to-day… When the history of these days comes to be written, one name will shine in golden splendor upon the page that is blackened with the tale of Europe's war, one name will represent the triumph of American principles over the hosts of darkness and of death. It will be the name of the patriot who has implanted his country's flag on the highest peak to which humanity has yet aspired: the name of Woodrow Wilson."

It was in protest against this neutrality, this reveling in fat money vaults, this assumption that prosperity is greater than sacrifice, that these young men of whom I have told have gone out to be wounded and to die. This mockery of the "blackened page" and "blood-smeared pages" of Europe has stung many thousands of Americans into action. The record of their service is a protest against such gloating. These fighters and rescuers and workers would not have served Germany with an equal zest. Neutrality between France and Germany is impossible to them. Those who fail to see the difference between France and Germany in this war are not of our historic American tradition.

Meanwhile our friends at home, very sincere and gifted men, but mistaken, I believe, in their attitude toward nationality, are summoning America to an artistic rebirth, so that "the new forces in our arts may advance." They write: "The soldier falls under the compulsion of the herd-instinct and is devoted by his passion to a vision out of which destruction and death are wrought." To one who has heard the guns of Verdun, this piping is somewhat scrannel. Art is not something that exists in a vacuum beyond space and time, and good and evil. Art is the expression of a belief in life, and that belief takes varying forms, according to the place and age in which it falls. It may be the expression of a surge of national feeling, as in Russian music. It may be the response to a rediscovery of ancient beauty, as in the Renaissance. It may be the quickening received from fresh discoveries of territory and strange horizons, such as touched the Elizabethans. In America we have long tried by artificial stimulants to revive art. We have omitted the one sure way, which is a deep nationality, achieved by sacrifice, a reassertion of national idealism. Out of that soil will spring worthy growths, which the thin surface of modern fashionable cosmopolitanism can never nourish. The sense of the true America has laid hold of these young men of ours in France. By living well they create the conditions of art. The things they do underlie all great expression. Already they are writing with a tone and accent which have long gone unheard in our America.

My lot has cast me with young men at their heroic moment. For the first months of the war it was with Belgian boys, later with French sailors, finally with these young Americans. They have made me impatient of our modern cosmopolitan American who, in the words of Dostoievski, "Can be carried off his feet, positively carried off his feet, by noble ideals, but only if they come of themselves, if they fall from heaven for him, if they need not be paid for."

The reason why pacifism is ineffectual is because it is an intellectual theory, which does not build on instinct. A man's love of his home and his nation is an instinctive thing, full of rich emotional values and moving with the vital current of life itself. Our pacifists would clear their thinking if they came under shell-fire. All that is sound in modern radical thought has been strengthened by this war. The democratic movement in England has become an overwhelming force. But the unsound elements in radical thought, those elements introduced by intellectual theorists who scheme a world distasteful to average human nature, have been burned away in the fire. One of those unsound elements was the theory of pacifism and cosmopolitanism. Many Americans have no belief in the idea of our country. They are busy with the mechanics of life. Any person who is not "getting results" is felt by them to be ineffectual. In that absorption in material gain, they have laid hold of a doctrine which would justify them in their indifference to profounder values. It is so that we have weakened our sense of nationality.

The nation is a natural "biological group," whose members have an "instinctive liking" for each other and "act with a common purpose." The instinctive liking is created by common customs and a shared experience. This experience, expressed in song and legislative enactment and legend, becomes known as the national tradition, and is passed on from generation to generation in household heroes, such as Lincoln, and famous phrases such as "Government of the people." That instinctive liking, created by the contacts of a common purpose and rooted in a loved tradition, is gradually being weakened in our people by importations of aliens, who have not shared in a common experience, and have not inherited our tradition. It is not possible to blend diverse races into a nation, when members of one race plot against our institutions in the interests of a European State, and members of another race extract wealth from our industry and carry it home to their own people. Instinctive liking is not so nourished. A common purpose is not manifested in that way. We have not touched the imagination of these newcomers. It requires something more than "big chances" to lay hold of the instinctive life of peasants. Our lax nationalism never reaches the hidden elements of their emotion to make them one in the deeper life of the State. Skyscrapers and hustling and easy money are excellent things, but not enough to call out loyalty and allegiance.

These changing conditions of our growth have blotted out from memory the old historic experience and substituted a fresher, more recent, experience. Forty years of peace and commercial prosperity have created a new American tradition, breeding its own catch words and philosophy. The change has come so quietly, and yet so completely, that Americans to-day are largely unaware that they are speaking and acting from different motives, impulses and desires than those of the men who created and established the nation. The types of our national heroes have changed. We have substituted captains of industry for pioneers, and smart men for creative men. Our popular phrases express the new current of ideas. "Making good," "neutrality," "punch," "peace and prosperity": these stir our emotional centers. We used to be shaken and moved when the spirit of a Kossuth or Garibaldi spoke to us. But to-day we receive the appeal of Cardinal Mercier, and are unmoved. We no longer know the great accent when we hear it.

So we must look to the young to save us. Henry Farnsworth was a Boston man, twenty-five years old. He died near Givenchy, fighting for France.

"I want to fight for France," he had said, "as the French once fought for us."

Our American workers are aiding France because she defends our tradition, which is also hers, a tradition of freedom and justice, practiced in equality. In her version of it, there are elements of intellectual grace, a charm, a profundity of feeling expressed with a light touch, bits of "glory," clothed in flowing purple, which are peculiar to the Latin temperament. But the ground plan is the same. Our doctors and nurses of the American Hospital, our workers in the hostels and the Clearing House, our boys in the American Field Service, are not alone saving the lives of broken men of a friendly people. They are restoring American nationality.