Читать книгу Our Part in the Great War - Gleason Arthur - Страница 6

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.