Our Part in the Great War

Such is the work of the "American Hostels for Refugees." The present cost of maintaining all the branches of this well-organized charity is about five thousand dollars a month.

Mrs. Wharton has also established "American Convalescent Homes for Refugees." Many refugees come broken in health, with chronic bronchitis and incipient tuberculosis and even severer maladies. Seventy-one beds are provided. There is also a house where 30 children, suffering from tuberculosis of the bone and of the glands are being cared for. Four thousand dollars a month should be provided at once for this work.

At the request of the Belgian Government Mrs. Wharton has founded the "Children of Flanders Rescue Committee." The bombardment of Furnes, Ypres, Poperinghe and the villages along the Yser drove the inhabitants south. The Belgian Government asked Mrs. Wharton if she could receive 60 children at 48 hours' notice. The answer was "yes," and a home established. Soon after, the Belgian Government asked Mrs. Wharton to receive five or six hundred children. Houses were at once established, and these houses are under the management of the Flemish Sisters who brought the children from the cellars of village-homes, from lonely farmhouses, in two cases from the arms of the father, killed by a fragment of shell. Lace-schools, sewing and dress-making classes, agriculture and gardening are carried on. Seven hundred and thirty-five children are cared for. The monthly expense is 8,000 francs.

One of the most important charities in which Mrs. Wharton, Mrs. Edward Tuck, and Judge Walter Berry are interested, is that for "French Tuberculous War Victims," in direct connection with the Health Department of the French Ministry of War. Nearly 100,000 tuberculous soldiers have already been sent back from the French front. They must be shown how to get well and receive the chance to get well. One hospital is already in operation, and three large sanatoria are nearing completion, with 100 beds each. The object is not only to cure the sufferers, but to teach them a trade enabling them to earn their living in the country. Tuberculous soldiers are coming daily to the offices of this charity in ever-increasing numbers asking to be taken in. The answer will depend on American generosity.

A group of Americans, headed by Mrs. Robert Woods Bliss, whose husband is First Secretary of the American Embassy in Paris, have instituted and carried on a "Distributing Service" in France. The name of the organization is "Service de Distribution Américaine." It was established on its present basis in December, 1914, and grew out of personal work done by Mrs. Bliss since the beginning of the war. The purpose has been to supply hospitals throughout France with whatever they need. By the end of 1916, the results were these:

The Director of the organization is Russell Greeley, the secretary of Geoffrey Dodge. The service has a garage outside the gates of Paris with ten cars and a lorry. All the staff, except the stenographers and packers, are volunteers.

This work for the French is connected with the American Distributing Service for the Serbians, which was begun by sending the late Charles R. Cross, Jr., to Serbia as a member of the American Sanitary Commission headed by Dr. R. P. Strong, in the spring of 1915. Mr. Cross made an investigation of the situation in Serbia at that time from the point of view of the American Distributing Service.

In January, 1916, Mrs. Charles Henry Hawes of the Greek Red Cross, wife of Professor Hawes of Dartmouth College, Hanover, being on her way to Italy and Greece for the purpose of conveying relief into Albania through Janina, offered her services to the Distributing Service for the convoying and distribution of supplies. Mrs. Hawes's offer was accepted and she was furnished with a small fund for the purpose of supplies. Events forestalled her, but she succeeded in landing and distributing to the last Serbians leaving San Giovanni di Medua, a thousand rations. At the same time she took an active part in relief work at Brindisi, and distributed about a thousand dollars' worth of supplies to the Serb refugees passing through that port.

Meanwhile the French Army Medical Service had created the "Mission de Coordination de Secours aux Armées d'Orient" for the purpose of distributing relief supplies to the Serbian and other Allied armies in the Balkans. A member of the Distributing Service was appointed a member of the Mission, and a fund of 100,000 francs placed at the disposal of the Distributing Service which thenceforward coöperated actively in the work of the Mission. Urgent representations of the need of help in Corfou having been made early in February to the Mission by the French Army Medical Service, Mrs. Hawes, representing the Distributing Service and the Mission jointly, was sent to Corfou where she established a soup kitchen and did other valuable relief work at Vido. She was later joined at Corfou by Countess de Reinach-Foussemagne, Infirmière Déléguée of the Mission. Through these two agents the Distributing Service sent to Corfou and distributed 197 cases of foodstuffs, clothing, and various articles needed, 5 cases of medicines and 40 tins of paraffine. The Service disbursed for similar purposes through Mrs. Hawes and Countess de Reinach, fifteen thousand francs in cash. It was also instrumental in erecting a monument at Vido to the Serbs who died there.

When the crisis at Corfou was at an end the field depot of the Mission was moved to Solonica. There the Service distributed to Serbians various shipments of relief and hospital supplies: A total of 454 cases.

The Distributing Service now has ready and is preparing to send forward for the Serbian Army a laundry outfit, a disinfecting outfit and a complete field surgical outfit (portable house for operating room equipment and radiograph plant). A shipment is also going forward for Monastir where the field depot of the Mission was established on November 22nd, of 5,000 francs' worth of foodstuffs and other urgently needed materials, and a larger quantity is being accumulated to be sent forward without delay.

In addition, the Distributing Service has sent about 2,000 kilos of hospital supplies to the Serbs in the Lazaret of Frioul, off Marseille, and a similar quantity of material to the hospitals at Sidi-Abdallah (Tunis), and elsewhere in Tunisia and Algeria, given over to the treatment of Serbians.

Mrs. Bliss and her friends have also conducted a work for "frontier children," dating from August, 1914, which has cared for French, Belgian and Alsatian children to the number of 1,500.

APPENDIX

I

TO THE READER

This book is only a sign post pointing to the place where better men than I have suffered and left a record. For those who wish to go further on this road I give sources of information for facts which I have sketched in outline.

The full authoritative account of the American Ambulance Field Service will be found in a book called "Friends of France," written by the young Americans who drove the cars at the front. It is one of the most heartening books that our country has produced in the last fifty years. Much of our recent writing has been the record of commercial success, of growth in numbers, and of clever mechanical devices. We have been celebrating the things that result in prosperity, as if the value of life lay in comfort and security. But the story of these young men is altogether a record of work done without pay, under conditions of danger that sometimes resulted in wounds and death. Their service was given because France was fighting for an idea. Risk and sacrifice and the dream of equality are more attractive to young men than safety, neutrality and commercial supremacy.

Those who wish to assure themselves that a healthy nationalism is the method by which a people serves humanity will find an exalted statement in Mazzini's "The Duties of Man." A correction of his overemphasis is contained in "Human Nature in Politics," by Graham Wallas. Valuable books on Nationality have been written by Ramsay Muir and Holland Rose. Lord Acton's essay on Nationality in his "The History of Freedom and Other Essays" should be consulted. He shows the defects of the nation-State.

On the American aspects of nationality, Emile Hovelaque and Alfred Zimmern are the two visitors who have shown clear recognition of the spiritual weakness of our country, and at the same time have pushed through to the cause, and so offered opportunity for amendment. Hovelaque's articles in the Revue de Paris of the spring of 1916 I have summarized in the chapter on the Middle West. From Zimmern I have jammed together in what follows isolated sentences of various essays. This is of course unfair to his thought, but will serve to stimulate the reader's interest in looking up the essays themselves.

"There is to-day no American nation. America consists at present of a congeries of nations who happen to be united under a common federal government. America is not a melting pot. It does not assimilate its aliens. It is the old old story of the conflict between human instincts and social institutions. The human soul can strike no roots in the America of to-day. I watched the workings of that ruthless economic process sometimes described as 'the miracle of assimilation.' I watched the steam-roller of American industrialism – so much more terrible to me in its consequences than Prussian or Magyar tyranny – grinding out the spiritual life of the immigrant proletariat, turning honest, primitive peasants into the helpless and degraded tools of the Trust magnate and the Tammany boss. Nowhere in the world as in the United States have false theories of liberty and education persuaded statesmen on so large a scale to make a Babel and call it a nation."

And the remedy?

"Those make the best citizens of a new country who, like the French in Canada and Louisiana, or the Dutch in South Africa, bear with them on their pilgrimage, and religiously treasure in their new homes, the best of the spiritual heritage bequeathed them by their fathers."

Alfred Zimmern is the author of "The Greek Commonwealth," contributor to the "Round Table," and one of the promoters of the Workers Educational Association. Those who wish to get his full thought on Nationality should consult the pamphlet "Education and the Working Class," the volume "International Relationships in the Light of Christianity," and the Sociological Review for July, 1912, and October, 1915.

The most penetrating recent articles on the American democracy as opposed to the cosmopolitanism of the melting pot were written by Horace M. Kallen in issues of the New York Nation of February, 1915. Dr. Kallen is a Jewish pupil of the late William James, of outstanding ability, the spiritual leader of the younger generation of Jews. He has touched off a group of thinkers on the American problem, of whom one is Randolph Bourne.

Those interested in the interweaving of French and early American history should read the book by Ambassador Jusserand, called "With Americans of Past and Present Days."

A careful investigation of the myth-making machinery used by nations in war-time is given by Fernand van Langenhove in "The Growth of a Legend" – a study based upon the German accounts of francs-tireurs and "wicked priests" in Belgium. It is made up of German documents.

A fuller study of the German letters and diaries is contained in the pamphlets of Professor Joseph Bedier, the books of Professor J. H. Morgan, and the volumes by Jacques de Dampierre "L'Allemagne et le Droit des Gens" and "Carnets de Route de Combattants Allemands." After an examination of these German documents, no student will speak of German atrocities as "alleged." The most careful collection of testimony by eye-witnesses is that contained in the report of the French Government Commission, "Rapports et Procès-Verbaux D'Enquête." I have personally examined several of the witnesses to this report. They are responsible witnesses. Their testimony is accurately rendered in the Government record. I trust that some American of high responsibility, such as Professor Stowell, of the Department of International Law at Columbia University, will make an exhaustive study of the German documents held by the French Ministry of War.

For the peasant incidents in the last section of my book, I refer to the book by Will Irwin, "The Latin at War," as independent corroboration.

II

TO NEUTRAL CRITICS

Certain points in my testimony have been challenged by persons sitting in security, three thousand miles away from the invaded country, where at my own cost and risk I have patiently gathered the facts on which I have based my statements.

I have built my testimony on three classes of evidence.

First: The things I have seen. I have given names, places and dates.

Second: The testimony of eye-witnesses, made to me in the presence of men and women, well-known in France, England and America. These eye-witnesses I have used in precisely the same way in which a case is built up in the courts of law.

Third: The diaries and letters written by Germans in which they describe the atrocities they have committed. I have seen the originals of these documents.

It is noticeable that the specific fact has never been challenged. The date has never been found misplaced, the place has never been confused, the person has never been declared non-existent. The denial has always been in blanket form.

The New York Evening Post says: "After the spy came the invasion, and after the invasion came the 'steam roller,' flattening out Belgium. This is all given in a general way."

It is given with exact specifications.

Clement Wood, in the Socialist paper, The New York Call, writes: "This book attempts more of a summing up of German offenses, and, being written to sustain an opinion rather than to give impartially the facts, correspondingly loses in interest and persuasiveness. Its usefulness to the general reader or the person who desires an unbiased understanding of the conflict is slight." He speaks of "the alleged German atrocities in Belgium."

My statements do not deal with opinion but with things seen. Apparently it is an offense to take sides on this war. One is a trusthworthy witness if one has seen only picturesque incidents that do not reveal the method of warfare practiced by an invading army. One is fair-minded only by shutting the eyes to the burned houses of Melle, Termonde and Lorraine, and the dead bodies of peasants; and by closing the ears to the statements of outraged persons. One is judicial only by defending the Germans against the acts of their soldiers, and the written evidence of their officers and privates.

The Independent says: "He saw the wreck of the convent school, but learned none of the sisters had been harmed."

The critic selects that portion of my testimony on the convent school which relieves the Germans of the charge of rape. As always, I have given every bit of evidence in favor of the Germans that came my way. I have told of the individual soldier who was revolted by his orders. I have published the diaries of German soldiers which revealed nobility. But is that scrupulous care of mine a justification to the Independent for omitting to tell the humiliations visited on that convent school?

My testimony of bayonetted dying peasants is "credible in so far as no testimony from the other side was obtainable."

"Mr. Gleason also saw the ruins of bombarded Belgian cities."

Is it fair of the Independent to be inaccurate? My evidence is not of bombarded Belgian cities. It is of Belgian cities, burned house by house, with certain houses spared where "Do not burn by incendiary methods" was chalked on the door.

"Otherwise his evidence is at second or third hand mainly."

On the contrary, I have quoted witnesses whom I can produce.

The Times, of Los Angeles, says: "He is quite rabid. He writes with the frenzy of a zealot."

I do not think the colorless recitation of facts, fortified by name, place and date, is rabid or frenzied.