The Living Present Part 1

The Living Present.

by Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton.

BOOK I

FRENCHWOMEN IN WAR TIME

If this little book reads more like a memoir than a systematic study of conditions, my excuse is that I remained too long in France and was too much with the people whose work most interested me, to be capable, for a long while, at any rate, of writing a detached statistical account of their remarkable work.

In the first place, although it was my friend Owen Johnson who suggested this visit to France and personal investigation of the work of her women, I went with a certain enthusiasm, and the longer I remained the more enthusiastic I became. My idea in going was not to gratify my curiosity but to do what I could for the cause of France as well as for my own country by studying specifically the war-time work of its women and to make them better known to the women of America.

The average American woman who never has traveled in Europe, or only as a flitting tourist, is firm in the belief that all Frenchwomen are permanently occupied with fashions or intrigue. If it is impossible to eradicate this impression, at least the new impression I hope to create by a recital at first hand of what a number of Frenchwomen (who are merely carefully selected types) are doing for their country in its present ordeal, should be all the deeper.

American women were not in the least astonished at the daily accounts which reached them through the medium of press and magazine of the magnificent war services of the British women. That was no more than was to have been expected. Were they not, then, Anglo-Saxons, of our own blood, still closer to the fountain-source of a nation that has, with whatever reluctance, risen to every crisis in her fate with a grim, stolid, capable tenacity that means the inevitable defeat of any nation so incredibly stupid as to defy her?

If word had come over that the British women were quite indifferent to the war, were idle and frivolous and insensible to the clarion voice of their indomitable country's needs, that, if you like, would have made a sensation. But knowing the race as they did--and it is the only race of which the genuine American does know anything--he, or she, accepted the leaping bill of Britain's indebtedness to her brave and easily expert women without comment, although, no doubt, with a glow of vicarious pride.

But quite otherwise with the women of France. In the first place there was little interest. They were, after all, foreigners. Your honest dyed-in-the-wool American has about the same contemptuous tolerance for foreigners that foreigners have for him. They are not Americans (even after they immigrate and become naturalized), they do not speak the same language in the same way, and all accents, save perhaps a brogue, are offensive to an ear tuned to nasal rhythms and to the rich divergencies from the normal standards of their own tongue that distinguish different sections of this vast United States of America.

But the American mind is, after all, an open mind. Such generalities as, "The Frenchwomen are quite wonderful," "are doing marvelous things for their country during this war," that floated across the expensive cable now and again, made little or no impression on any but those who already knew their France and could be surprised at no resource or energy she might display; but Owen Johnson and several other men with whom he talked, including that ardent friend of France, Whitney Warren, felt positive that if some American woman writer with a public, and who was capable through long practice in story writing, of selecting and composing facts in conformance with the economic and dramatic laws of fiction, would go over and study the work of the Frenchwomen at first hand, and, discarding generalities, present specific instances of their work and their att.i.tude, the result could not fail to give the intelligent American woman a different opinion of her French sister and enlist her sympathy.

I had been ill or I should have gone to England soon after the outbreak of the war and worked with my friends, for I have always looked upon England as my second home, and I have as many friends there as here. If it had not been for Mr. Johnson and Mr. Warren, no doubt I should have gone to England within the next two or three months. But their representations aroused my enthusiasm and I determined to go to France first, at all events.

My original intention was to remain in France for a month, gathering my material as quickly as possible, and then cross to England. It seemed to me that if I wrote a book that might be of some service to France I should do the same thing for a country to which I was not only far more deeply attached but far more deeply indebted.

I remained three months and a third in France--from May 9th, 1916, to August 19th--and I did not go to England for two reasons. I found that it was more of an ordeal to get to London from Paris than to return to New York and sail again; and I heard that Mrs. Ward was writing a book about the women of England. For me to write another would be what is somewhat gracelessly called a work of supererogation.

I remained in France so long because I was never so vitally interested in my life. I could not tear myself away, although I found it impossible to put my material into shape there. Not only was I on the go all day long, seeing this and that oeuvre, having personal interviews with heads of important organizations, taken about by the kind and interested friends my own interest made for me, but when night came I was too tired to do more than enter all the information I had acc.u.mulated during the day in a notebook, and then go to bed. I have seldom taken notes, but I was determined that whatever else my book might be it should at least be accurate, and I also collected all the literature (leaflets, pamphlets, etc.) of the various oeuvres (as all these war relief organizations are called) and packed them into carefully superscribed large brown envelopes with a meticulousness that is, alas, quite foreign to my native disposition.

When, by the way, I opened my trunk to pack it and saw those dozen or more large square brown envelopes I was appalled. They looked so important, so sinister, they seemed to mutter of State secrets, war maps, spy data. I knew that trunks were often searched at Bordeaux, and I knew that if mine were those envelopes never would leave France.

I should be fortunate to sail away myself.

But I must have my notes. To remember all that I had from day to day gathered was an impossibility. I have too good a memory not to distrust it when it comes to a ma.s.s of rapidly acc.u.mulated information; combined with imagination and enthusiasm it is sure to play tricks.

But I had an inspiration. The Ministry of War had been exceedingly kind to me. Convinced that I was a "Friend of France," they had permitted me to go three times into the War Zone, the last time sending me in a military automobile and providing an escort. I had been over to the War Office very often and had made friends of several of the politest men on earth.

I went out and bought the largest envelope to be found in Paris. Into this I packed all those other big brown envelopes and drove over to the Ministere de la Guerre. I explained my predicament. Would they seal it with the formidable seal of the War Office and write _Propagande_ across it? Of course if they wished I would leave my garnerings for a systematic search. They merely laughed at this unusual evidence on my part of humble patience and submission. The French are the acutest people in the world. By this time these preternaturally keen men in the War Office knew me better than I knew myself. If I had, however unconsciously and in my deepest recesses, harbored a treacherous impulse toward the country I so professed to admire and to desire to serve, or if my ego had been capable of sudden tricks and perversions, they would long since have had these lamentable deformities, my spiritual hare-lip, ticketed and docketed with the rest of my dossier.

As it was they complied with my request at once, gave me their blessing, and escorted me to the head of the stair--no elevators in this great Ministere de la Guerre and the Service de Sante is at the top of the building. I went away quite happy, more devoted to their cause than ever, and easy in my mind about Bordeaux--where, by the way, my trunks were not opened.

Therefore, that remarkable experience in France is altogether still so vivid to me that to write about it reportorially, with the personal equation left out, would be quite as impossible as it is for me to refrain from execrating the Germans. When I add that during that visit I grew to love the French people (whom, in spite of many visits to France, I merely had admired coolly and impersonally) as much as I abominate the enemies of the human race, I feel that the last word has been said, and that my apology for writing what may read like a memoir, a chronicle of personal reminiscences, will be understood and forgiven.

G.A.

=THE LIVING PRESENT=

I

MADAME BALLI AND THE "COMFORT PACKAGE"

One of the most striking results of the Great War has been the quickening in thousands of European women of qualities so long dormant that they practically were unsuspected. As I shall tell in a more general article, the Frenchwomen of the middle and lower bourgeoisie and of the farms stepped automatically into the shoes of the men called to the colors in August, 1914, and it was, in their case, merely the wearing of two pairs of shoes instead of one, and both of equal fit. The women of those clearly defined cla.s.ses are their husbands' partners and co-workers, and although physically they may find it more wearing to do the work of two than of one, it entails no particular strain on their mental faculties or change in their habits of life. Moreover, France since the dawn of her history has been a military nation, and generation after generation her women have been called upon to play their important role in war, although never on so vast a scale as now.

Contrary to the prevailing estimate of the French--an estimate formed mainly from sensational novels and plays, or during brief visits to the shops and boulevards of Paris--the French are a stolid, stoical, practical race, abnormally acute, without illusions, and whose famous ebullience is all in the top stratum. There is even a certain melancholy at the root of their temperament, for, gay and pleasure loving as they are on the surface, they are a very ancient and a very wise people. Impatient and impulsive, they are capable of a patience and tenacity, a deep deliberation and caution, which, combined with an unparalleled mental alertness, brilliancy without recklessness, bravery without bravado, spiritual exaltation without sentimentality (which is merely perverted animalism), a curious sensitiveness of mind and body due to over-breeding, and a white flame of patriotism as steady and dazzling as an arc-light, has given them a glorious history, and makes them, by universal consent, preeminent among the warring nations to-day.

They are intensely conservative and their mental suppleness is quite as remarkable. Economy is one of the motive powers of their existence, the solid pillars upon which their wealth and power are built; and yet Paris has been not only the home and the patron of the arts for centuries, but the arbiter of fashion for women, a byword for extravagance, and a forcing-house for a thousand varieties of pleasure. No race is so paradoxical, but then France is the genius among nations. Antiquity, and many invasions of her soil have given her an inviolable solidity, and the temperamental gaiety and keen intelligence which pervades all cla.s.ses have kept her eternally young.

She is as far from decadence as the crudest community in the United States of America.

To the student of French history and character nothing the French have done in this war is surprising; nevertheless it seemed to me that I had a fresh revelation every day during my sojourn in France in the summer of 1916. Every woman of every cla.s.s (with a few notable exceptions seen for the most part in the Ritz Hotel) was working at something or other: either in self-support, to relieve distress, or to supplement the efforts and expenditures of the Government (two billion francs a month); and it seemed that I never should see the last of those relief organizations of infinite variety known as "oeuvres."

Some of this work is positively creative, much is original, and all is practical and indispensable. As the most interesting of it centers in and radiates from certain personalities whom I had the good fortune to meet and to know as well as their days and mine would permit, it has seemed to me that the surest way of vivifying any account of the work itself is to make its pivot the central figure of the story. So I will begin with Madame Balli.

II

To be strictly accurate, Madame Balli was born in Smyrna, of Greek blood; but Paris can show no purer type of Parisian, and she has never willingly pa.s.sed a day out of France. During her childhood her brother (who must have been many years older than herself) was sent to Paris as Minister from Greece, filling the post for thirty years; and his mother followed with her family. Madame Balli not only was brought up in France, but has spent only five hours of her life in Greece; after her marriage she expressed a wish to see the land of her ancestors, and her husband--who was an Anglo-Greek--amiably took her to a hotel while the steamer on which they were journeying to Constantinople was detained in the harbor of Athens.

Up to the outbreak of the war she was a woman of the world, a woman of fashion to her finger-tips, a reigning beauty always dressed with a costly and exquisite simplicity. Some idea of the personal loveliness which, united to her intelligence and charm, made her one of the conspicuous figures of the capital, may be inferred from the fact that her British husband, an art connoisseur and notable collector, was currently reported deliberately to have picked out the most beautiful girl in Europe to adorn his various mansions.

Madame Balli has black eyes and hair, a white skin, a cla.s.sic profile, and a smile of singular sweetness and charm. Until the war came she was far too absorbed in the delights of the world--the Paris world, which has more votaries than all the capitals of all the world--the changing fashions and her social popularity, to have heard so much as a murmur of the serious tides of her nature. Although no one disputed her intelligence--a social a.s.set in France, odd as that may appear to Americans--she was generally put down as a mere _femme du monde_, self-indulgent, pleasure-loving, dependent--what our more strident feminists call parasitic. It is doubtful if she belonged to charitable organizations, although, generous by nature, it is safe to say that she gave freely.

[Ill.u.s.tration: MADAME BALLI President Reconfort du Soldat]

In that terrible September week of 1914 when the Germans were driving like a hurricane on Paris and its inhabitants were fleeing in droves to the South, Madame Balli's husband was in England; her sister-in-law, an infirmiere major (nurse major) of the First Division of the Red Cross, had been ordered to the front the day war broke out; a brother-in-law had his hands full; and Madame Balli was practically alone in Paris. Terrified of the struggling hordes about the railway stations even more than of the advancing Germans, deprived of her motor cars, which had been commandeered by the Government, she did not know which way to turn or even how to get into communication with her one possible protector.

But her brother-in-law suddenly bethought himself of this too lovely creature who would be exposed to the final horrors of recrudescent barbarism if the Germans entered Paris; he determined to put public demands aside for the moment and take her to Dinard, whence she could, if necessary, cross to England.

He called her on the telephone and told her to be ready at a certain hour that afternoon, and with as little luggage as possible, as they must travel by automobile. "And mark you," he added, "no dogs!" Madame Balli had seven little Pekinese to which she was devoted (her only child was at school in England). She protested bitterly at leaving her pets behind, but her brother was inexorable, and when he called for her it was with the understanding that all seven were yelping in the rear, at the mercy of the concierge.

There were seven pa.s.sengers in the automobile, however, of which the anxious driver, feeling his way through the crowded streets and apprehensive that his car might be impressed at any moment, had not a suspicion. They were in hat boxes, hastily perforated portmanteaux, up the coat sleeves of Madame Balli and her maid, and they did not begin to yelp until so far on the road to the north that it was not worth while to throw them out.

III

At Dinard, where wounded soldiers were brought in on every train, Madame Balli was turned over to friends, and in a day or two, being bored and lonely, she concluded to go with these friends to the hospitals and take cigarettes and smiles into the barren wards. From that day until I left Paris on the seventeenth of August, 1916, Madame Balli had labored unceasingly; she is known to the Government as one of its most valuable and resourceful aids; and she works until two in the morning, during the quieter hours, with her correspondence and books (the police descend at frequent and irregular intervals to examine the books of all oeuvres, and one mistake means being haled to court), and she had not up to that time taken a day's rest. I have seen her so tired she could hardly go on, and she said once quite pathetically, "I am not even well-groomed any more." I frequently straightened her dress in the back, for her maids work almost as hard as she does. When her husband died, a year after the war broke out, and she found herself no longer a rich woman, her maids offered to stay with her on reduced wages and work for her oeuvres, being so deeply attached to her that they would have remained for no wages at all if she had really been poor. I used to beg her to go to Vichy for a fortnight, but she would not hear of it. Certain things depended upon her alone, and she must remain at her post unless she broke down utterly.[A]

[A] She is still hard at work, June, 1917.

One of her friends said to me: "Helene must really be a tremendously strong woman. Before the war we all thought her a semi-invalid who pulled herself together at night for the opera, or dinners, or b.a.l.l.s.

But we didn't know her then, and sometimes we feel as if we knew her still less now."

It was Madame Balli who invented the "comfort package" which other organizations have since developed into the "comfort bag," and founded the oeuvre known as "Reconfort du Soldat." Her committee consists of Mrs. Frederick H. Allen of New York, who has a home in Paris and is identified with many war charities; Mrs. Edward Tuck, who has lived in and given munificently to France for thirty years; Madame Paul Dupuy, who was Helen Brown of New York and has her own oeuvre for supplying war-surgeons with rubber, oil-cloth, invalid chairs, etc.; the Marquise de Noialles, President of a large oeuvre somewhat similar to Madame Dupuy's; the Comtesse de Fels, Madame Brun, and Mr.