Mary Heaton Vorse

“ So to-day when I think of France, I cannot think merely in the terms of a country invaded. Another great, shadowy army fills my mind—the army of mothers searching for their children, of daughters searching for their old parents, waiting day by day for news of those whom they love, wondering among what strangers they are living, and then, perhaps mercifully and perhaps sadly, after months, again united. My mind reverts to this group of women searching continuously for the lost, and helping to reunite the members of those families. ”

“ Here and there in the pleasant wood trees have been mown down as by a scythe, and when the road leads to a town, heaps of brick, tortured ironwork, and shapeless mounds of stone confront one, and in strange contrast to the general desolation, scattered seemingly at random, are occasional wooden houses, temporary dwellings which the English Quakers in coöperation with the French Government have been building in what is aptly named "the devastated areas." ”

“ And as I looked at her, I realized that there were hundreds of women like her who were of course doing the same thing through all the vast, desolated country of the north of France, merely standing by their posts as the telephone and telegraph girls had done during the invasion, unwitting heroines performing their tasks of incredible difficulty. This woman did not mention that she was merely doing her duty; there comes a pressure in human affairs where one ceases to think in terms of duty for one's self, where one works to the limit of endurance and then beyond that limit. ”

“ I saw women, in deepest grief over the loss of their sons, stay by their posts unflinching, never stopping in their work, and everywhere I saw beauty and unquenchable courage, even though many walked with the weary air of those whose illusions have been killed and with them their inner reason for living. ”

“ But now it seems to me that our deepest experience is giving life and their intensest moment is when they are called on by war to go out and destroy the lives for which we have risked our own.
Man plays a very small part in the supreme adventure of birth. When a woman goes down to death to give life she goes alone. Man is nothing to her then. Her husband, the father of the child to be born, cannot share in her pain. ”

“ Of this vast suspense, this anguished searching of mothers for children, of daughters for mothers, of fathers, of sons for all their families, nothing is heard in the outside world. This calamity of the tearing asunder of thousands upon thousands of families, which, had it come at another time, as the result of some catachism of nature, would have caused the pity of the whole civilized world to stream forth, is now only a little incident for the world at large, an incident for every one except those concerned in its hideous tragedy. ”

“ It is in the quiet of the devastated areas, where from one week's end to another you will see no young man, that you will find the sharpest contrasts between women's and men's parts of the world's work in war-time. In the foremost ranks of what one might call mobilized women have been the schoolmistresses. In one little village, which is recorded as totally destroyed, one house has been rebuilt. This one house serves as school-house and mairie. The schoolmistress was a youngish woman, frail and delicate, with lines of sorrow and overwork on her intelligent face. ”

“ No dwelling of man was now near that garden, only the shapeless ruins of what had once been houses. All about was the quiet of the country and fields, fields studded with graves—graves and ruins, and there was that garden, bright with peonies and other flowering things, and the old woman working it. ”

“ Her intensest moment she lives by herself. The great miracle of birth is no concern of his, and he can only shrink back, a frightened witness, and wait and wait interminably and pray that all is well. ”

“ The reception-rooms of hotels are turned into vestiaires; schools house the most miserable of all sinistrées, the refugees. The altered use of public and private buildings is the outward sign which tells you that all through France the thought of anything except war has ceased. Life in its ordinary course has ceased. People get up and go to bed, pursue their various businesses, as in a vacuum. ”

“ As they talk about it, one feels that there has surged into their fruitful, painstaking lives a hideous monster having no connection with the civilization of which they were a part, a terrible and indecent anachronism, as though from some hidden place of slimy ooze some primeval creature had reared its head and come forth to ravage a country-side. ”

“ We do not live in the world in which we believed that we were living. None of us thought that it could happen to us, in our time, to the lands we knew, to our husbands and our sons. No one could believe that the world was like this and continue to bear children. And all the time, like some hideous growing plant, war was preparing ”

“ This blooming garden in the midst of the unspeakable desolation of a ruined village was a part of this old woman's contribution toward reëstablishing order. Whether there has been war or not, the education of the little children must go on, and flower gardens must go on, and all the blooming, graceful things of French life must go on, as much as they can. ”

“ Bind up the wounds of their spirits, put hope into the hearts of the old, save the lives of the little children, put together those countless families that have been torn apart; then the work that your man has left I give to you to do, and later I may come and destroy the fruitful fields you have planted, and in a day undo the work of careful centuries. ”

“ Now I knew why even the men of my own country had seemed so alien to me, and the reason is that the difference between men and women is the difference between birth and death. I had thought that the profound differences between men and women became trivial in the face of their still profounder similarity. ”

“ A well-known writer who has had unusual opportunities for observation has searched almost in vain among the wounded and among those men who have suffered most in war for men who hated it, and has found discouragingly few. ”

“ During the war there have been thrown to the surface extraordinary women like the "Mayor of Soissons," but even more characteristic of the spirit of the people are the unusual qualities that have been called up in those who are merely the nation's ordinary women. ”

“ I saw little children below the age of speech, who had been found wandering on the roads by soldiers, and two Belgian children who had been found in the very trenches where they had fled terrified during the bombardment. No one can ever know who they are; their mothers will never see them again. ”

“ In the vast confusion that occurred when the German army swept down upon Paris—a confusion which affected a civil population of millions of people, members of families lost one another. In the vast card-catalogues of the Bureau de Renseignement les Familles Dispersées is concentrated the suspense and anguish of a nation. ”

“ They even brought with them paraffin with which to burn the manure-heaps, so that, in case they should not hold the land, the civil population might suffer to the utmost, as they have indeed suffered, but with what unshakable gallantry it is impossible to express. ”