With the French in France and Salonika Part 12

They showed the men in the trenches, and while one stood at the periscope the other opened their Christmas boxes; they showed father and son shoulder to shoulder marching through the snow, mud, and sleet; they showed the old couple at home with no fire in the grate, saying: "It is cold for us, but not so cold as for our son in the trench."

For every contribution to this Christmas fund those who gave received a decoration. According to the sum, these ran from paper badges on a pin to silver and gold medals.

The whole of France contributed to this fund. The proudest shops filled their windows with the paper badges, and so well was the fund organized that in every town and city pet.i.tioners in the streets waylaid every pedestrian.

Even in Modena, on the boundary-line of Italy, when I was returning to France, and sharing a lonely Christmas with the conductor of the wagon-lit, we were held up by train-robbers, who took our money and then pinned medals on us.

Until we reached Paris we did not know why. It was only later we learned that in the two days' campaign the _poilus_ was benefited to the sum of many millions of francs.

In Paris and over all France, for every one is suffering through the war, there is some individual or organization at work to relieve that suffering. Every one helps, and the spirit in which they help is most wonderful and most beautiful. No one is forgotten.

When the French artists were called to the front, the artists' models of the Place Pigalle and Montmartre were left dest.i.tute. They had not "put by." They were b.u.t.terflies.

So some women of the industrious, busy-bee order formed a society to look after the artists' models. They gave them dolls to dress, and on the sale of dolls the human manikins now live.

Nor is any one who wants to help allowed to feel that he or she is too poor; that for his sou or her handiwork there is no need. The _midinettes_, the "cash" girls of the great department stores and millinery shops, had no money to contribute, so some one thought of giving them a chance to help the soldiers with their needles.

It was purposed they should make c.o.c.kades in the national colors. Every French girl is taught to sew; each is born with good taste. They were invited to show their good taste in the designing of c.o.c.kades, which people would buy for a franc, which franc would be sent to some soldier.

[Ill.u.s.tration: A poster inviting the proprietors of restaurants and hotels and their guests to welcome the soldiers who have permission to visit Paris, especially those who come from the districts invaded by the Germans.]

The French did not go about this in a hole-in-a-corner way in a back street. They did not let the "cash" girl feel her artistic effort was only a blind to help her help others. They held a "salon" for the c.o.c.kades.

And they held it in the same Palace of Art, where at the annual salon are hung the paintings of the great French artists. The c.o.c.kades are exhibited in one hall, and next to them is an exhibition of the precious tapestries rescued from the Rheims cathedral.

In the hall beyond that is an exhibition of lace. To this, museums, d.u.c.h.esses, and queens have sent laces that for centuries have been family heirlooms. But the c.o.c.kades of Mimi Pinson by the thousands and thousands are given just as much s.p.a.ce, are arranged with the same taste and by the same artist who grouped and catalogued the queens' lace handkerchiefs.

And each little Mimi Pinson can go to the palace and point to the c.o.c.kade she made with her own fingers, or point to the spot where it was, and know she has sent a franc to a soldier of France.

These days the streets of Paris are filled with soldiers, each of whom has given to France some part of his physical self. That his country may endure, that she may continue to enjoy and teach liberty, he has seen his arm or his leg, or both, blown off, or cut off. But when on the boulevards you meet him walking with crutches or with an empty sleeve pinned beneath his Cross of War, and he thinks your glance is one of pity, he resents it. He holds his head more stiffly erect. He seems to say: "I know how greatly you envy me!"

And who would dispute him? Long after the war is ended, so long as he lives, men and women of France will honor him, and in their eyes he will read their thanks. But there is one soldier who cannot read their thanks, who is spared the sight of their pity. He is the one who has made all but the supreme sacrifice. He is the one who is blind. He sits in perpetual darkness. You can remember certain nights that seemed to stretch to doomsday, when sleep was withheld and you tossed and lashed upon the pillow, praying for the dawn. Imagine a night of such torture dragged out over many years, with the dreadful knowledge that the dawn will never come. Imagine Paris with her bridges, palaces, parks, with the Seine, the Tuileries, the boulevards, the glittering shop-windows conveyed to you only through noise. Only through the shrieks of motor-horns and the shuffling of feet.

The men who have been blinded in battle have lost more than sight. They have been robbed of their independence. They feel they are a burden.

It is not only the physical loss they suffer, but the thought that no longer are they of use, that they are a care, that in the scheme of things--even in their own little circles of family and friends--there is for them no place. It is not unfair to the _poilu_ to say that the officer who is blinded suffers more than the private. As a rule, he is more highly strung, more widely educated; he has seen more; his experience of the world is broader; he has more to lose. Before the war he may have been a lawyer, doctor, man of many affairs. For him it is harder than, for example, the peasant to accept a future of unending blackness spent in plaiting straw or weaving rag carpets. Under such conditions life no longer tempts him. Instead, death tempts him, and the pistol seems very near at hand.

[Ill.u.s.tration: All over France, on Christmas Day and the day after, money was collected to send comforts and things good to eat to the men at the front.]

It was to save men of the officer cla.s.s from despair and from suicide, to make them know that for them there still was a life of usefulness, work, and accomplishment, that there was organized in France the Committee for Men Blinded in Battle. The idea was to bring back to officers who had lost their sight, courage, hope, and a sense of independence, to give them work not merely mechanical but more in keeping with their education and intelligence. The President of France is patron of the society, and on its committees in Paris and New York are many distinguished names. The French Government has promised a house near Paris where the blind soldiers may be educated. When I saw them they were in temporary quarters in the Hotel de Crillon, lent to them by the proprietor. They had been gathered from hospitals in different parts of France by Miss Winifred Holt, who for years has been working for the blind in her Lighthouse in New York. She is a.s.sisted in the work in Paris by Mrs. Peter Cooper Hewitt. The officers were brought to the Crillon by French ladies, whose duty it was to guide them through the streets. Some of them also were their instructors, and in order to teach them to read and write with their fingers had themselves learned the Braille alphabet. This requires weeks of very close and patient study. And no nurse's uniform goes with it. But the reward was great.

It was evident in the alert and eager interest of the men who, perhaps, only a week before had wished to "curse G.o.d, and die." But since then hope had returned to each of them, and he had found a door open, and a new life.

And he was facing it with the same or with even a greater courage than that with which he had led his men into the battle that blinded him.

Some of the officers were modelling in clay, others were learning typewriting, one with a drawing-board was studying to be an architect, others were pressing their finger-tips over the raised letters of the Braille alphabet.

Opposite each officer, on the other side of the table, sat a woman he could not see. She might be young and beautiful, as many of them were.

She might be white-haired and a great lady bearing an ancient t.i.tle, from the faubourg across the bridges, but he heard only a voice.

The voice encouraged his progress, or corrected his mistakes, and a hand, detached and descending from nowhere, guided his hand, gently, as one guides the fingers of a child. The officer was again a child. In life for the second time he was beginning with A, B, and C. The officer was tall, handsome, and deeply sunburned. In his uniform of a cha.s.seur d'Afrique he was a splendid figure. On his chest were the medals of the campaigns in Morocco and Algiers, and the crimson ribbon of the Legion of Honor. The officer placed his forefinger on a card covered with raised hieroglyphics.

"N," he announced.

"No," the voice answered him.

"M?" His tone did not carry conviction.

"You are guessing," accused the voice. The officer was greatly confused.

"No, no, mademoiselle!" he protested. "Truly, I thought it was an 'M.'"

He laughed guiltily. The laugh shook you. You saw all that he could never see: inside the room the great ladies and latest American countesses, eager to help, forgetful of self, full of wonderful, womanly sympathy; and outside, the Place de la Concorde, the gardens of the Tuileries, the trees of the Champs-elysees, the sun setting behind the gilded dome of the Invalides. All these were lost to him, and yet as he sat in the darkness, because he could not tell an N from an M, he laughed, and laughed happily. From where did he draw his strength and courage? Was it the instinct for life that makes a drowning man fight against an ocean? Was it his training as an officer of the Grande Armee?

Was it that spirit of the French that is the one thing no German knows, and no German can ever break? Or was it the sound of a woman's voice and the touch of a woman's hand? If the reader wants to contribute something to help teach a new profession to these gentlemen, who in the fight for civilization have contributed their eyesight, write to the secretary of the committee, Mrs. Peter Cooper Hewitt, Hotel Ritz, Paris.

[Ill.u.s.tration: A poster advertising the fund to bring from the trenches "permissionaires," those soldiers who obtain permission to return home for six days.]

There are some other very good bargains. Are you a lover of art, and would you become a patron of art? If that is your wish, you can buy an original water-color for fifty cents, and so help an art student who is fighting at the front, and a.s.sist in keeping alive his family in Paris.

Is not that a good bargain?

As everybody knows, the ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris is free to students from all the world. It is the alma mater of some of the best-known American artists and architects. On its rolls are the names of Sargent, St. Gaudens, Stanford White, Whitney Warren, Beckwith, Coffin, MacMonnies.

Certain schools and colleges are so fortunate as to inspire great devotion on the part of their students, as, in the story told of every college, of the student being led from the football field, who struggles in front of the grand stand and shouts: "Let me go back. I'd die for dear old ----"

But the affection of the students of the Beaux-Arts for their masters, their fellow students and the inst.i.tution is very genuine.

They do not speak of the distinguished artists, architects, engravers, and sculptors who instruct them as "Doc," or "Prof." Instead they call him "master," and no matter how often they say it, they say it each time as though they meant it.

The American students, even when they return to Paris rich and famous, go at once to call upon the former master of their atelier, who, it may be, is not at all famous or rich, and pay their respects.

And, no matter if his school of art has pa.s.sed, and the torch he carried is in the hands of younger Frenchmen, his former pupils still salute him as master, and with much the same awe as the village cure shows for the cardinal.

When the war came 3,000 of the French students of the Beaux-Arts, past and present, were sent to the front, and there was no one to look after their parents, families, or themselves, it seemed a chance for Americans to try to pay back some of the debt so many generations of American artists, architects, and sculptors owed to the art of France.

Whitney Warren, the American architect, is one of the few Americans who, in spite of the extreme unpopularity of our people, is still regarded by the French with genuine affection. And in every way possible he tries to show the French that it is not the American people who are neutral, but the American Government.

One of the ways he offers to Americans to prove their friendship for France is in helping the students of the Beaux-Arts. He has organized a committee of French and American students which works twelve hours a day in the palace of the Beaux-Arts itself, on the left bank of the Seine.

It is hard to understand how in such surroundings they work, not all day, but at all. The rooms were decorated in the time of the first Napoleon; the ceilings and walls are white and gold, and in them are inserted paintings and panels. The windows look into formal gardens and courts filled with marble statues and busts, bronze medallions and copies of frescoes brought from Athens and Rome. In this atmosphere the students bang typewriters, fold blankets, nail boxes, sort out woollen gloves, cigarettes, loaves of bread, and masks against asphyxiating gas.

The mask they send to the front was invented by Francis Jacques, of Harvard, one of the committee, and has been approved by the French Government.

There is a department which sends out packages to the soldiers in the trenches, to those who are prisoners, and to the soldiers in the hospitals. There is a system of demand cards on which is a list of what the committee is able to supply. In the trenches the men mark the particular thing they want and return the card. The things most in demand seem to be corn-cob pipes and tobacco from America, sketch-books, and small boxes of water-colors.

The committee also edits and prints a monthly magazine. It is sent to those at the front, and gives them news of their fellow students, and is ill.u.s.trated, it is not necessary to add, with remarkable talent and humor. It is printed by hand. The committee also supplies the students with post-cards on which the students paint pictures in water-colors and sign them. Every student and ex-student, even the masters paint these pictures. Some of them are very valuable. At two francs fifty centimes the autograph alone is a bargain. In many cases your fifty cents will not only make you a patron of art, but it may feed a very hungry family.

Write to Ronald Simmons or Cyrus Thomas, ecole des Beaux-Arts, 17 Quai Malaquais.

There is another very good bargain, and extremely cheap. Would you like to lift a man bodily out of the trenches, and for six days not only remove him from the immediate proximity of asphyxiating gas, sh.e.l.ls, and bullets, but land him, of all places to a French soldier the most desired, in Paris? Not only land him there, but for six days feed and lodge him, and give him a present to take away? It will cost you fifteen francs, or three dollars. If so, write to _Journal des Restaurateurs_, 24 Rue Richelieu, Paris.

In Paris, we hear that on Wall Street there are some very fine bargains.

We hear that in gambling in war brides and ammunition everybody is making money. Very little of that money finds its way to France. Some day I may print a list of the names of those men in America who are making enormous fortunes out of this war, and who have not contributed to any charity or fund for the relief of the wounded or of their families. If you don't want your name on that list you might send money to the American Ambulance at Neuilly, or to any of the 6,300 hospitals in France, to the clearing-house, through H. H. Harjes, 31 Boulevard Haussman, or direct to the American Red Cross.