D $H LETTERS WRITTEN HOME FROM FRANCE IN THE FIRST HALF OF 191 5 By A. PIATT ANDREW LETTERS WRITTEN HOME FROM FRANCE IN THE FIRST HALF OF 19 15 By A. PIATT ANDREW PRIVATELY PRINTED 1916 Zfl COPYRIGHT, 1916, BY HELEN M. ANDREW ALL RIGHTS RESERVED V I 26 1916 2>CI.A433501 TO $? «&> $» OF THESE LETTERS ONLY TWO HUNDRED AND FIFTY COPIES HAVE BEEN PRINTED FOR DISTRIBUTION AMONG PERSONAL FRIENDS. THIS COPY IS NUMBER " France beloved of every soul that loves or serves its kind" Rudyard Kipling. PREFACE Although so many Americans are giving heart and energy to the effort of lightening in some way the suffering of Europe, only a small proportion has chosen to take a part within the line of action. Those of us who have any one we care for there in the midst of it all know that, like men who go to explore mysterious distances, they are generally very much beyond our horizon for months at a time — at least as regards correspondence. An intense sympathy for the purpose they have gone to serve makes news of them doubly welcome when it does come. Believing that those who have pleasant memories of the writer of these letters would be interested in reading these impressions written home, his mother and father have generously consented to put them into this form. Having by affiliation with the work in which he is engaged a detailed knowledge of the circumstances surrounding it, it devolves upon me to say in justice that these pages give little idea of the very difficult task their author has suc- cessfully accomplished. Largely through his perseverance against great odds the American Ambulance Field Service, working constantly under fire along the whole western battle front, has become a very distinguished organization, trusted and relied upon by the armies of France. Whatever politi- cal impressions the French civilian may have gathered in regard to us as a nation, through the utterances of misrep- resentative individuals, the French soldier, living or dying, has now finer evidence of the spirit of our countrymen. No man — whether critic or enemy — may challenge the valor of France, nor her right to all honor ; so to one who, stirred by passionate allegiance to her cause, has brought this tribute of our friendship for her to so high a standard, we owe truly a debt of gratitude. The opportunity and the will to do a work worth while have been spent here to full pur- pose. Many a young American who has had a part in this service will carry from it an inspiration which is better than peace — for having labored among the men and women of France he will have known the vision of supreme sacrifice. H. D. S. Gloucester, May, 1916. LETTERS FROM FRANCE LETTERS FROM FRANCE 12 West 51st Street, New York, December 3, 1914. Dear Mother and Father: I have been turning things over in my mind lately and have about decided that I must go over to France for a few months. There are many reasons for doing so, the possibility of having even an infinitesimal part in one of the greatest events in all history — the possibility of being of some serv- ice in the midst of so much distress — the interest of wit- nessing some of the scenes in this greatest and gravest of spectacles — and above all the chance of doing the little all that one can for France. You need not fear, if I go, that I shall expose myself to any serious risks. If I can I should like to get attached to the ambulance service, or, if that is impossible, to one of the relief commissions (to help, perhaps, in looking after the dis- tribution of food and relief in some French town, — or some- thing of the sort). But I shall not get in the way of the armies. What do you think about it? Is n't it a great chance ? Is n't it a piece of good fortune that I happen to be free in this great moment of history? And is n't it worth while to make some sacrifice in order to have one's little share in the great events that are going on? I have been staying for a day or so at the Davisons', and am going back to Gloucester on Friday. CO II Gloucester, Massachusetts, December ly, 1914. Dear Mother and Father: Only a line or two to tell you 'how happy and busy I am. As I telegraphed you, I have heard from Mr. Bacon and have arranged to join the American Ambulance. I have bought a whole equipment of sheep-lined coats and vests, even Jaeger underwear, — which I never dreamed that I should come to, — and also a heavy sleeping-bag, which I shall probably never use, but which ought to be serviceable in case we should have to sleep out of doors on cold nights. I got a fine letter this morning from Ambassador Jusser- and. I have also ventured to write to Mr. Herrick and Colo- nel Roosevelt for letters which might be of service in some unforeseen emergency and which probably will await me at the steamer. The time is so short and I am so busy. Don't worry about me. Remember I have a strong body and I sel- dom mind the cold, — and for that matter I have every known device for keeping the cold out. Remember, too, that I am doing the thing I want most to do and am very happy in the thought of it. i*i Ill On the train Boston to New York, December i8 y 1914.. Dear Mother and Father: The feverish three or four days of preparation are over, and the story is about to begin. I have every known variety of clothing to protect against the cold, packed in a steamer trunk, a valise, and a suit-case. Last night I motored up to Boston and had a farewell dinner with Mrs. Gardner in Fenway Court. We talked for hours, just we two alone, wondering much what the future had in waiting, and then about eleven I went down to the theatre, picked up my friend, Leslie Buswell, and we bundled into our woollen helmets, opened the throttle, and tore to Gloucester, imagining that we were in the war zone and had a message to deliver to General Joffre which must reach headquarters before 1 a.m. "Madame" had a nice supper awaiting us at one o'clock before the open fire in my upstairs study, and there we talked and talked and talked almost until dawn. So ended 19 14 for me in Gloucester, a dear evening spent alternately with two good friends (Y and L. B.), and now here I am, more eager than I have ever been for anything, headed for the land I love next to my own — awaiting what- ever the future may have in store. I expect to meet other friends to-night in New York. To- morrow morning I get my steamer passage, letter of credit, etc., and at 3 p.m. we sail. C3] IV 12 West 51st Street, New York, December ig, ig 14. 6 p.m. Dear Mother and Father: I had thought by this time to be on the high seas, as the Touraine was scheduled to sail at 3 p.m. ; but instead I am sitting on the top of the Davisons' house in their solarium preparing to dine with the Davison boys and to go with them to the theatre. For some reason, at the last moment the Touraine's sailing was postponed until to-morrow. We were all on the boat, — Harry Sleeper came on un- expectedly from Boston to see me off and C. B. was down there and Mrs. Davison and the dear Davison boys, — and all my luggage, and parcels of books and flowers and little presents from different people, — and some immense rolls of cloth for our uniforms, of which I am to take charge on the way to Paris. But here we are still in New York! In the mean time I have taken a lesson in running a Ford, — which is not the easy thing I had imagined it to be. You have to do everything contrary as regards pedals and levers to what you do with the Packard, and I am glad to have had this little chance to learn the rudiments. To-morrow morn- ing early I am going down to Long Island with the Davisons, and as they have a Ford down there the boys are going to give me a lesson and I am to drive the car back to New York. The Touraine is a slow boat and is not expected to reach Boulogne until Tuesday the 29th. So on Xmas think of me as in mid-ocean. I shall not be lonely, as there are various friends aboard. I saw Huntington Wilson (who used to be Assistant Secretary of State in my Washington days) among the passengers, and my roommate on the boat, Charley Ap- pleton, is a very nice fellow who graduated at Harvard six or seven years ago. I hope you are not worried. The possibility of that is the only thing about the trip that makes me anxious. For the rest, I am keen about the prospect. It is the most worth- while thing I have ever done, and the most interesting. We expect to sail now on Sunday afternoon. A Bord de la Touraine, December 20, 1914. Dear Mother and Father: The steamer is to sail, they say, at 3 p.m. to-day (Sunday). It was booked to sail yesterday at the same hour. Last evening, I went to the theatre and spent the night with the Davisons and to-day I went down to Long Island, and drove their little Ford car back to New York, which was good practice. I also stopped at the Carlton and saw Mr. Herrick, who has just returned from France, and who happened to be in New York, and from him I got a good deal of information about conditions in Paris. I hear from all sides that he has been a successful and popular ambassador, and that it was a thousand pities he was not allowed to remain as our repre- sentative in France. Some of the things he said last autumn will certainly be remembered for a long time by the French people. When the other ambassadors left for Bordeaux, with the President and the Senate and Chamber, Mr. Herrick re- mained, saying that " a dead ambassador might be able to render a greater service to France and the world than a live one " ; subtly implying that if he were killed by the Germans, America might come to the aid of France. And when the German hordes were almost within cannon range of Paris, he touched the hearts of the French people by saying that he would do his utmost to prevent the bombardment of their beautiful capital, "because Paris belongs not merely to France, but to the whole world." The French people must have appreciated such apt expressions of friendship in those hours of profound apprehension. He has intelligence and heart and the bel air. I like him and am sure he merits all the £6] homage he has received for his handling of conditions in Paris. Miss Beaux was here at the boat again to see me off at i p.m., the proposed hour of sailing, and Harry is still here (2 p.m.). He will stay until we actually push off. Heaven certainly is kind in the friends that have been given me. I found your telegram and letter. I am glad you are not sorry that I am going. I shall be back almost before you know it. And so once more, good-bye. VI A Bord de la Touraine, December 21, 1914. Dear Mother and Father: We have ploughed along through gray rain and rough seas all day, and, as it is the shortest day of the year and we are up around the Grand Banks, the night shut in soon after four o'clock. I have dozed in my steamer chair most of the day, and shall do the same during the eight or nine days to follow. Unless some German cruiser gives us chase, there promises to be little diversion. The Touraine may have been a "floating palace" in the palmy eighties, but she could not be so regarded to-day. She is comfortable and cozy and fairly clean, but seems more like a river steamer than an ocean liner. There are less than thirty passengers aboard, and most of them are Frenchmen going back to join the army. We have a little table of five. Most of the men who had agreed to come backed down at the last moment, so there are only four men and one woman aboard bound for the American Ambulance, although it is expected that more will follow by later steamers. There is a Yale graduate named Richardson, somewhat over forty, I should say, — of a rather serious, and inquiring turn of mind, — a dependable type. There is a young Harvard graduate named Rumsey, perhaps twenty-seven or thereabouts, short, red-haired, a member of the Porcellian Club at Harvard. He used to play football at Harvard, has lived on ranches in the West, is a tightly knit little athlete with, I should imagine, no end of courage and a zest for adventure. There is another young Harvard man of about the same age named Charley Appleton, a cousin of the Meyers', who lives in Ipswich in the summer and in New C«3 York in the winter. I knew him at Harvard. Then there is a trained nurse from Cambridge, — a woman of perhaps thirty to thirty-five, — a nice little woman taking her first trip across, and full of interest in the great adventure. She will probably teach us everything we need to know about "first aid" on the way over. We have a small table by ourselves, and are probably des- tined to get very well acquainted as time goes on. No one seems to know exactly what he is to do when he gets over, but they are all expecting to help carry wounded soldiers to and from the hospitals in the immediate rear of the lines. Perhaps they may spend their first weeks carting beds and groceries from Paris to Neuilly. That would certainly be less interesting, however useful it might be. VII A Bord de la Touraine, December 25, 1914. Dear Mother and Father: Often to-day my thoughts have run back over fifteen hundred miles of trackless water and one thousand miles of land to you all happily gathered about the Christmas tree. It has not been a forlorn day for me. Here in the middle of the Atlantic we have not quite realized that it was Christmas. We had a little snow last night and quite a gale, but to-day the sun has shone most of the day, the air has been mild, and it is only when one closes one's eyes tight that one can really believe that this is the day of days in the whole year's calendar and that snowy landscapes and ice probably prevail over most of the United States. This afternoon they had "sports" and races on the deck. My name appeared on the programme by some one's mischievous suggestion, but I did not perform. We shall not land in Havre until Tuesday the 28th, and shall not reach Paris until the 30th. Meanwhile we are steaming along the ocean lane, guarded, the captain says, by British cruisers about twenty miles away on either side just over the horizon. I have enjoyed having Huntington Wilson aboard, and what questions relative to the universe, past, present, and future, have not been settled, or at least dissected, by us it would be hard to find. O] VIII A Bord de la Touraine, December 2Q, 1914.. Dear Mother and Father: Just a word written in my berth late in the last night aboard the Touraine. We are skirting the English coast, which can be dimly seen out of my porthole in the moonlight or can be presumed from the lights along the shore. We have had a gay and warm-hearted evening from dinner until now at about 1.30 a.m. Our little coterie — Huntington Wilson; of whom you know; a Hindu prince, with an unpronounceable name and a willowy little sprite of an English wife ; Madame , the charming, young, and intelligent wife of a French play- wright who is not travelling with her; a strange Franco- American product named Madame , slender, with wild red hair, and wilder than her hair, animated beyond anything I have ever seen in any human being; "Larry" Rumsey, laconic but quick-witted; Charley Appleton; and a pleasant French youth, who has been living in Canada, but is bound back to France to join the army, — they all seem to-night old acquaintances. Yet few of them had entered into each other's previous experience and few will probably have any relation with the lives of any of the rest in the future. For several days, perhaps because of our common interest in the outcome of the war, we have been on very friendly terms, have talked endlessly, and played or laughed and even sung together. To-night, when we "broke up" singing "Tipperary" after a long and happy evening of lively talk in French and Eng- lish, I am sure we all felt touched with a sense of tenderness and regret. C»3 December 2Q. 8.30 a.m. We are approaching the French coast. There are all sorts of vessels coming and going across the Channel (except German vessels). We land about 9.30. IX Hotel Terminus, Paris, December jj, 1914. 10 p.m. Dear Mother and Father: Paris at last! We reached the mouth of the harbor at Havre on Tuesday morning, but what with the heavy sea and an unfavorable tide, the captain did not feel it safe to try and make the dock until night. So we steamed tediously around and around all day, and it was long after dark when the prow finally turned landwards. It was about seven o'clock of a moonlit, starlit night when we drew up at the landing. We had just time to get across the city to the railway station in season to take a night train to Paris, which we were told would get us here by one o'clock. We had to show our pass- ports to French soldiers at the dock and at the railway station, and there were a good many English soldiers, trimly dressed in khaki, patrolling the streets (because many of the British transports land at Havre), and of course we all felt the thrill of setting foot in a country which we loved and which was in the throes of an epoch-making war. We bought the English and French papers to find what had happened while we were at sea, and to help pass the hours on the long night trip. There were no sleepers or first-class carriages, and most of the train was overflowing with reservists who had come over in the steerage of our steamer to join the army. We did not reach Paris until seven o'clock the next morn- ing, and there was practically no sleep during the night. The railroads are used at night for transporting the army and its supplies, and I suppose the Government did not realize what discomfort they were causing us by leaving us for hours on sidings. As a matter of fact, it was not an altogether dismal night. We got out at many stations and talked to the sentinels who were patrolling the frosty tracks and platforms; we visited with our steamer friends in the other compartments; we read and chatted and argued and dozed and sang and finally the morning and Paris arrived. That was yesterday morning. And in the mean time we have done and seen many things. What of Paris ? What impression does one get, who knows it well in times of peace, seeing it now in this moment of gigantic stress ? I don't know that I had ever tried to picture precisely what I ought to expect to see. But I had read that the automobiles and taxicabs had all been commandeered and taken to the front, and I rather expected it would be difficult to get our luggage from the station. I had read so much about the size of the armies that I rather supposed there would be few men on the streets, and they mostly boys or old men. I had read that so many stores had been made over into hospitals that I imagined the usual throngs of shoppers on the boulevards would be missing, and that many window shades would be drawn and many shutters down in the shopping districts. In fact, I suppose I had expected to find Paris a somewhat deserted city with little traffic of the usual character, but with soldiers marching, drums beating, cavalry clattering over the pavements. Much of this may have been true of Paris in the days of mobilization, or in the terrible days of early September, when every one thought that it was only a question of days or hours when the Germans would occupy the city. But whether or not that was the case some months ago, things are very different now. As we emerged from the station, the usual rows of taxicabs were lined up outside, and as we have come and gone about Paris during the last two days it has been hard to see that there is any less than the usual number c'143 of taxis or other autos tearing about the streets. Outwardly life seems to be going on as usual. The boulevards are lined as ordinarily during the holidays with little barracks, where Christmas toys are sold, and the sidewalks and department stores are thronged as of old with holiday shoppers. We walked down by the Seine yesterday afternoon, and the usual loafers were fishing from the bridge and embankments, or strolling past the old book-dealers who display their second- hand wares in boxes along the rail on the left bank of the Seine. One sees no marching troops and very few individual soldiers. Paris seems as calm and undisturbed as ever. To the casual observer it would seem as if the war must be over, or only a dream, or in some other country than France. This is the really astonishing fact. If you look a little more carefully, however, you will notice from the posters on the kiosks that few of the theatres are open except for performances of a philanthropic or patriotic character. If you go down to the Louvre, you will find that its doors have been closed to the public for five months. If you pass some of the larger hotels, you will find that many of them bear Red Cross signs and are evidently used to-day as hospitals. If you look for the gay fashionable restaurants where frivolity was wont to flourish, you will find them closed or sedate and respectable. But above all, if you re- gard the women you pass on the street you will note that about one in every three wears mourning. I don't know that anything has impressed me more than a walk which we took late yesterday afternoon through the old Quartier Latin, and which ended in the church of St. Etienne du Mont. I wanted to go to Notre Dame "to burn a candle " for France, but it was closed, so we went on to St. Etienne up on the hill near the Pantheon, where the remains of Saint Genevieve are entombed in a golden reliquary, a quaint old church which I used often to visit in my student days. We entered the church when the last twilight was per- colating through the stained glass and sat in one of the chapels in quasi-darkness for half an hour watching old women and young women, dressed in black, as they burned their candles about the reliquary and wept and prayed for their loved ones who had given all that they had or could hope for to France. Although Paris is only about seventy miles from the Ger- man lines, it is calm and without excitement. The people are utterly confident that the Germans are helpless so far as Paris is concerned. Moreover, they are confident that, cost what it may cost, they are going to win. They realize that the war must last indefinitely. They know that more and more of their boys have got to die. There are six hundred thousand of them, I am told, at present in the hospitals! They know how terrible the price of victory must be, but life without it — life under German domination — would be un- supportable, and they are ready to pay the cost. This is all I can write now. Next time, I shall try to tell you something about the Ambulance. Good-night! X p rue Angelique Fevien, N euilly-sur-Seine, Thursday night, January 7, 1915. Dear Mother and Father: A week has passed since I have had a chance to write you, a week busy, full of interest, and different from any week I have ever spent. The main hospital of the American Ambulance (and you understand that "Ambulance Americaine" is the name of the whole great undertaking, including two large hospitals, many ambulances in the narrow sense of the word, and hundreds of surgeons, nurses, and attendants) is located in Neuilly, a sub- urb northwest of Paris, through which the Germans would have passed had they succeeded in getting to Paris in Sep- tember. The organizers of the hospital succeeded in per- suading the French Government to put at their disposal an immense school-building in Neuilly, which was in process of erection, the Lycee Pasteur. It is a handsome building of brick and stone, built around a courtyard, and what would have been schoolrooms, large and well lighted, have become wards of the hospital, or dormitories for the nurses, or dining-rooms for the great staff of doctors, ambulance drivers, nurses, and orderlies, not less than three hundred and fifty — probably more. One wing of the hospital is devoted to the transporta- tion service and includes rooms for the staff of this depart- ment, a guardroom for the drivers and orderlies, rooms for those in charge of supplies, and a big garage. Here and in the neighboring yard the various squads of ambulances are equipped, which are to go to the front at one or another point along the five hundred miles of trenches that stretch from the British Channel to Switzerland. Several of the auto- ambulances run every day between the hospital in Neuilly C17] and the railway station in Aubervilliers, another suburb of Paris, bringing over wounded who have been sent there from the front by train.; The principal work of the automobile corps, however, has no direct relation to the hospital at Neuilly. The corps of drivers and orderlies is grouped in squads of about fifteen or eighteen men, who have charge of perhaps ten ambulances each, and these squads go out for service along "the front," carrying wounded from the field dressing-stations to the nearest hospitals. One squad of ten autos left yesterday for the neighborhood of Beauvais, an- other squad is up near Belgium, in the English lines. My squad, as soon as we can get equipped, will leave for some- where else. We hope to get off early next week, but we are subject to the orders of the French Government and cannot know our destination in advance. We shall be gone for an indefinite period, sleeping either in the ambulances, or in buildings "to which we may be billeted by the army, and getting our rations from the army. The preparations for such an undertaking involve more than you suppose of detail. In the first place, we have to get a great variety of papers from the Government, a permit to stay in France, a certificate of immatriculation with the Prefet de Police, an identity card, a driving-license and others, all of which have to be signed and stamped by official after official at bureau after bureau. I had to take my driv- ing examination yesterday with a fussy and pompous old French official, who made me so anxious with his injunctions and admonitions that I nearly ran over, first a tram-car, and then a flock of sheep, either one of which would have been fatal to my hopes, whatever its effect on the car or the sheep. In the end he "passed" me, but it took the greater part of an afternoon of waiting, driving, backing, stopping, turning here and turning there according to his orders. As I had never driven a Ford but once or twice in my life, and in 1^1 driving a Ford you have to remember not to do anything that you have been accustomed to do in driving any other car, you can imagine that I was on tenter-hooks. The old boy would wait until we got to a crowded corner and suddenly scream, "A gauche" (to the left), and then, as I had to dodge trams and people crossing the street, he would say, "Ah! too fast! too fast! you are like the taxi-drivers, who are assassins." After a time I \ discovered that the thing to do to please him was to drive all the time as if following a hearse at a funeral. And when I tried that I "stalled" my engine twice! The Ford cars as they arrive have only a chassis, and upon them we have a carriage-builder construct a light ambulance body capable of carrying three stretchers. We can carry three wounded lying down, or five or six sitting up. We have to paint these cars ourselves, try them out and adjust them, equip them with supplies and tools, take off the tires sent with them and put on non-skid tires, etc. I spend most of my days kneeling in the mud and practising the business of painter, carpenter, chauffeur, and washer in turn. Then we have to equip ourselves with uniforms (the or- ganizers of the hospital have selected a uniform practically identical with the British), with sleeping-bags, blankets, water-bottles and a long list of miscellaneous incidentals, such as a knapsack, a whistle, two pairs of heavy shoes, two khaki-colored shirts, four towels, four pairs of heavy socks, two pairs of heavy gloves, etc., etc. It all takes time, and involves trips into Paris. My section is made up of a fine lot of fellows ; two or three were artists in peace time, one an architect in New York, some were stock-brokers, some real-estate dealers, some are students just out of college; some are millionnaires, some paupers. They are like "les cadets de Gascogne." So far it seems as if we were preparing for a camping lark in the country rather than for serious work with an army in the field in the greatest of all wars. To-day I lunched with M. and Mme. Puaux and Gaby's wife. They were very warm-hearted toward me, said I was doing what Lafayette had done, etc. Afterwards I joined them toward the end of a matinee at the Theatre Francais. (The theatres are mostly closed here except for occasional matinees, because the trams and the underground cease running at 10 p.m.). The play was "La fille de Madame Roland/' a classic piece, and after its close, the curtain rose again upon an eighteenth-century scene with the company in the costumes of Revolutionary times. In the centre of a public square was a statue representing the Republic, deco- rated with wreaths and flags, and in the distance drums and bugles were playing (the bugle calls, by the way, are very like our bugle calls, because, as I am told, they were brought over to America from France by Lafayette). Mounet-Sully, the great tragedian, now quite an old man, dressed as a cito- yen of Revolutionary days in knickerbockers and with a red kerchief about his head, was in the crowd, and as a band in the distance played the "Marseillaise," he recited in a deep, sonorous voice, and as if he were speaking them extemporane- ously for the first time, the martial lines of Rouget de Lisle. I shall never forget the way he shouted to the crowd: "Aux armes! citoyens!" "Marchons! Marchons!" and how the distant band repeated the melody after him. There never was a more thrilling national song. The audience stood as he recited it, and cheered at the end of every verse, and I was glad that I was in a dark corner of the box where no one could see me. When we came out, I saw Monsieur and Madame Puaux wiping away their tears, and many others too. Monsieur Puaux and Mounet-Sully were together in the war of 1870, and when the curtain fell we went around "be- hind" and visited Mounet-Sully in his dressing-room in the midst of the faded wreaths that commemorated his triumphs of other days. It was worth while to see the two venerable friends embracing each other fervently and talking of the great days of the Franco-Prussian War. " Souvenez-vous de soixante-dix, mon ami?" "Oui, souvenez-vous. " My little friend " Gaby " has been for five months in the trenches, as a captain of infantry. He was in the battles of the Marne and the Somme and most of the other great en- gagements. But about two weeks ago he was taken over on the General Staff and now is with General Joffre at the Grand Quartier General. His family hopes that he may get home for a few hours this week, in which case I shall surely hope to see him. Rene is in the aviation corps just outside of Paris, and I shall arrange to see him too before we go to the front. The next time I write I will try to tell you something about the hospital and some of the tragedies among those I have seen in the several wards. There is so much to tell and so little time or chance to tell it. I am very well, and never have been more happy. I have received several letters from America, but none from you yet. XI American Ambulance, Neuilly, January 15, IQ15. Dear Mother and Father: We are still here, but expect to leave any day. I shall never forget the two weeks spent working on the cars in the mud of the hospital yard. We had no freezing temperature, but they say that this is the wettest winter ever known. Every day it has drizzled or sprinkled intermittently, and as the 7 grounds of the hospital (which was a school in process of erection) had never been cleared or covered with gravel or turf, the mud everywhere is several inches deep, and in this mud we have waded and literally wallowed as we worked about and under our cars. I have long since ceased to mind grimy hands and boots caked with clayey mud. We do not even bother to have the mud brushed off our boots and clothes at night. In a dark flannel shirt and overalls I have painted my car a gray-blue like the rest, and have painted on it innumerable numbers : the number of the car in the ambulance garage, 92 ; the number of the army license for the car; the number of the Paris license, etc. Then all of our lamps, cans, and articles of equipment have had to be painted to match the cars, and also to have the car numbers painted on them so that none of our fellows can filch them. Seats have had to be built in the cars, and straps and hooks arranged to carry reserves of water, oil, gasoline, tires, mess-kit, knapsack, blankets, sleep- ing-bag, reserves of food, etc., and places have had to be sawed and fixed for the two stretchers we are to carry, and a place made for the heating pipe connected with the exhaust, which will make the ambulance about ten degrees warmer than it otherwise would be. Then, as the French wounded are supposed to be averse to anything of the nature of a courant d'air, we have had to tack wooden strips and canvas over every crack and opening. Worst of all, perhaps, we have had to change the front wheels on our cars in order to make them uniform in size with the rear wheels, and we have had to change all the tires. All this has been done out of doors in the mud at Neuilly, often in a drizzling rain. In the mean time I have been vaccinated for smallpox and have had two inoculations for typhoid, both of which gave me an unpleasant fever for about twenty-four hours, and I have spent hours and hours getting the necessary permits and official papers. We are equipped and ready to start, and only awaiting orders: ten ambulances, a wonderful supply car containing every kind of tool and spare part for the autos, with extra reserves of food, and a pilot car in which the head of the section is to drive ahead of the convoy. Each car bears on its sides and rear and on its top (for the benefit of Zeppelins and aeroplanes who care to inform themselves) a large red cross, and also three flags, those of the United States, France, and the Red Cross. We look somewhat like an itinerant circus when we run in convoy. On Monday morning, according to present plans, we shall run in convoy to Dunkirk, to serve a region where there has been much artillery fighting, and there we shall remain indefinitely. We shall receive mail very seldom, only as some one comes up from Paris from time to time, and I may not be able to send out letters in any other way on account of the censor. Dear old M. Puaux, who has three boys at the front, bade me an affectionate good-bye yesterday, and gave me a sermon in French to read "at the front." He seems as gratified and pleased at my doing this work as he would be if all America had come over to fight for France. It appeals to the French people that so many Americans sympathize with them in their tragic hours. The little that we in America have actually done seems small, indeed, com- pared with the size of the situation, but its main object and its main effect is to show to the people of France that we be- lieve in them and in the justice of their cause, that we still remember what they did for us in the darkest hour of our own history, and that, as members of a great sister republic, our hearts and hopes are with them in this most unnecessary war. P.S. Very heavy fighting has been going on these last days near Soissons, about forty miles from Paris, and although the papers have given only the barest mention of it, the doctors in the hospital tell me that twenty-five thousand French wounded have passed through Paris during the last two days. There were two thousand brought into Aubervilliers last night. Aubervilliers is a suburb of Paris, and is a kind of distributing station for the wounded. We are to run all our ambulances all night to-night between the Aubervilliers rail- way station and our hospital, a distance of about ten miles, bringing in those who fell to-day. Between twelve and two, they serve a nice supper in the hospital for those of us who work at night, and that makes the long night somewhat less forlorn. XII American Ambulance Hospital, Neuilly, Sunday, January iy, 1915. Dear Mother and Father: To-day will live long in my memory, for I drove out to and spent several hours with my friend of years ago, Gabriel Puaux, who is now on General Joffre's staff. It is not supposed to be known, although everybody knows it, that the General Staff have been quartered for some time in , which is about thirty miles from Paris. The Germans passed through there in the terrible days of September, but nothing about the famous old chateau or the imposing grounds was touched, as the Kaiser is supposed to have in- tended to make the place his headquarters. His army was driven back, however, and now it is General Joffre and his staff who direct affairs from not from the chateau, however, for General Joffre lives in a modest little brick villa and the staff are quartered in a hotel. It is hard to get a pass to because they naturally do not want to be disturbed by people who have no business there, and, as a matter of fact, I did not succeed in getting a pass to , but got one to a neighboring town which I flourished before the . bewildered eyes of the gendarme in the outskirts of and he mistook it for what I ought to have had, and let our machine pass in. The thing that struck me most about the place was the quiet and serenity of it all. The great movements of this tumultuous war were being directed from the town, yet it seemed almost asleep. It was like a summer resort in Octo- ber. Most houses closed — only a few autos in the street, only a moderate number of people strolling aimlessly, Sun- day-fashion, here and there. In a field near the staff building some French soldiers were playing football with a small group of spectators about them. The telephone and telegraph wires may have been busy and doubtless were, but outwardly the town was asleep, and the quiet lawns of the park, green in January, and the sunlit vistas through the long allees of the forest, I shall not soon forget. Gaby was quite resplendent in his fresh sky-blue uniform, and he had many wonderful stories to tell of his five months in the trenches. I also saw another friend, Andre Tardieu, who once lectured at Harvard and who is also on the general's staff. Gaby took some pic- tures which one of these days he will send to me. We leave early to-morrow for Dunkirk — so I must say good-night. This is probably my last night in a cot or bed for a long time. P.S. The lights all over the city have been extinguished to-night. The hospital, which is usually ablaze with light, has all curtains drawn and only a few candles and lanterns. The Government evidently fears that the Germans, tak- ing advantage of the little victory at Soissons, will un- dertake some terrifying tactics in the way of an air-raid on Paris. Monday morning, January 18, 1915. We are all astir early to-day. The final touches before de- parture must be made, as we leave at nine. Before sundown, or at least before two sundowns, we shall be hearing the dis- tant boom of the cannon. XIII Beauvais, January 18, 1915. Dear Mother and Father: At last we are under way! But before we plunge into the obscurity that must surround us from now on, one more word. We (twenty men and twelve automobiles) are spending the night in various "billets" in Beauvais, and to-morrow we go on north "to the front." All day long, wherever we have stopped, people have come out of their houses and offered us flowers and fruit and food and friendly greetings, very much as our ancestors of a hun- dred and fifty years ago must have offered them to the com- patriots of Lafayette. The French people are appreciative, and no matter how humble they are, they know how to express themselves. I have a ravenous appetite for food and sleep, and have never been happier. Good-bye, with love to you both. £27] XIV Dunkirk, January io, 1915. Dear Mother and Father: We have had two days of pleasant driving from Paris to the northern coast. Night before last we spent in Beauvais, dined comfortably in a small back-street restaurant, and then were distributed by the French officers in charge among different hotels and private houses. "Brownie" and I were billeted in a quaint old hotel, "A l'Ecu," in a room whose only windows opened on a noisy courtyard, in which autos honked, horses champed, bells rang, dishes clattered, and soldiers sang and drank, — but the noise made little difference. We slept like logs until we were routed out at half-past five by the landlord. Then we stole through the dark streets be- fore dawn and attended morning mass in the great cathedral just as daylight was beginning to peer through its stained- glass windows. Our trip has been full of touching and appealing impres- sions crowding one upon the other. As our picturesque con- voy ran through the little villages, and we stopped here and there for some one to clean a spark plug or mend a tire, the children invariably crowded around us, and asked ques- tions about America, and we often got them to sing the " Marseillaise " or some of the topical songs of the moment about Guillaume and the " Bodies." (People in France sel- dom speak of the Germans as such, they call them simply "Bodies," which seems to mean "brutal, stupid people.") We lunched at Amiens, but did not have a chance to steal away and see the cathedral, as at Beauvais, but pushed di- rectly on for the north. There were a good many slight breakdowns, as the cars are all new (none occurred to mine except a puncture), and we ran on and on, and the evening came and we still ran on through one village and town after another, passing many convoys of food and ammunition and many French, English, Moroccan, Canadian, and Hindu troops. Occasionally, when we stopped for some cause or other, we had a chance to exchange greetings with them. In France to-day there is only one real business — war. The towns and villages are cluttered with the paraphernalia of war, and one never sees a healthy youth except in uniform. Even in Paris the stores seem only to deal in leather and rubber and fur clothing for soldiers and in other articles of soldiers' equipment. In Paris, as I think I wrote you, women and boys are conductors and ticket-sellers in the subways, and only women and boys are clerks in the stores. I went one day to several shoe stores to buy some heavy boots, and there were only young women clerks to try them on even for men customers. So it is in the rural districts, one sees women and boys and oldish men ploughing and hoeing in the fields, and working on the roads. The sturdy men are all in uniform and devoting their energies to the business of war. After a long, hard drive we reached St. Omer at about eleven. The hotels were full, the restaurants were closed, and no provision had been made either for our food or our lodging. So we wheeled into the public square and slept on the stretchers in our ambulances — without other food than the chocolate and crackers we had in our pockets. We were up again at dawn, and as the water in the spicket at the public pump was very cold, I have not washed or shaved to-day. We ran on until about noon we arrived at Dunkirk — a pretty drive over flat, marshy country dotted with thatched and red-tiled roofs, great wooden windmills and picturesque church spires. At many of the crossroads are little shrines, erected as memorials, I suppose, by devoted sons to their departed parents, or by devoted husbands to their dead wives. Dunkirk is much more of a town than I had imagined, with trolley cars and good-sized stores. About ten days ago sixteen German aeroplanes flew over it and dropped bombs, killing about thirty people. They came and went and came again for nearly four hours with four French aeroplanes chasing them, and the people who told us about it said that every one stood in the street, instead of running to their cellars, and watched the spectacle with open-eyed wonder. A little while ago a French aeroplane flew over the city in the darkness, scouting the sky with its searchlight. You can imagine how interesting it all must be. All day yesterday, as we ran along past the quiet towns and villages, we could hear the great cannons on the front booming like distant thunder. Just think of it! For five hundred and more miles these cannon are booming day after day all day long and often throughout the night. To-night we had a very good dinner (French soldiers' rations) in the freight shed of the railway station, which has been fitted up as a temporary hospital for the wounded and sick brought in on the trains. It was a good meal of soup, roast beef, potatoes, succotash, jam, coffee and beer, — served on a tin plate, which was used for all the courses. Around us were the cots of the wounded — with a few wounded lying on them. To-night we are to sleep in a convent. To-morrow we shall be told just what our job is to be. Wednesday morning, January 20. I am sending this by a friend who is running back to Paris, and he can mail it from there. As we are here in the zone of the army, correspondence is difficult, and subject to censure. XV Dunkirk) January 22, 1915. Dear Mother and Father: We are in the war zone now, only a few miles from the Belgian frontier and the trenches. Our equipment of thirteen autos is divided into two squads, and I am on the night shift from 8 p.m. to 8 a.m., driving wounded from the trains to one or another of the score of hospitals in Dunkirk and the neighboring towns, or to the hospital steamers that carry them to Boulogne or Brest, or some other port on the west coast. During the day we try to sleep and rest in our quar- ters, — the schoolroom of a convent, where we have eighteen cots side by side. It has rained almost incessantly, but to-day the sun came out and "Brownie" and I started out toward noon for a short stroll through the town to make some purchases. Sud- denly a bomb exploded a few blocks away and then another and another, like cannon crackers on the Fourth of July, and we saw people scurrying into their shops and houses and closing down their shutters. The "Taubes" had arrived again and were bombarding the town. We ran into an open hospital door, and poking our heads out from time to time watched the wonderful spectacle. Three or four German aeroplanes were encircling the town at a height of perhaps four thousand feet, now sailing out over the Channel, and then quickly returning, and as they returned we heard re- ports of the dropping bombs. In a few moments the French guns got into action and one saw their shells bursting in white puffs of smoke before and behind the German ma- chines, and then we saw the English and French biplanes rising in pursuit. It was a fascinating spectacle lasting about two hours. About a dozen people in different parts of the city were killed and quite a fire was started along the docks by the incendiary bombs, and very soon clouds of smoke were trailing over the city. Of course, no one can know when a bomb has been dropped until it strikes, but you can imagine how the people fly into their houses as the aeroplanes come near to the zenith, and how they peer out to see them when they have passed on. One bomb dropped about fifty yards from our ambulances, digging a hole nearly two feet deep in the cobblestone pave- ment and sending fragments flying for half a block in every direction. There are several small holes in the canvas cover of my ambulance in consequence. My orderly caught a kodak of one explosion before the smoke cleared. This after- noon about four, a German aeroplane again appeared high in the sky and dropped bombs over the city, and I hear that about a dozen people were killed before the machine was brought down by the French biplane which pursued it and shot balls through its machinery. I am writing in the dimly lighted freight shed of the rail- way station, which is used as a distributing station for the hospitals. Around me are a hundred or more cots for the wounded and the sick, about half of them occupied. We are waiting for the night trains from the front bringing their nightly freight of tragedy. They come, four or five of them, every night loaded with wounded and sick, poor fellows in every degree of decrepitude. Near me as I write is a Moroc- can lying on a cot, and looking very worn and homesick. He knows little French and has no comrades with whom he can talk. Twice he has turned his dark eyes toward me and pushed his hand out from under his cloak and whispered, "Touchez la main, touchez la main" (touch my hand). A few moments ago a priest administered extreme unction to another poor fellow dying of pneumonia and raving so that he had to be strapped to his cot. War has its picturesque sides, but it is a sad business. There are said to be more than six hundred thousand wounded to-day in the hospitals of France. All over the country, from the Channel to the Mediterranean, schools, colleges,' churches, hotels, museums, town halls, and every available sort of building have been made over into hospi- tals. The doctors tell me that more than seventy thousand wounded and sick have passed through Dunkirk alone since the war began. There are twelve or fifteen thousand here now To me the most pathetic are not the wounded, but the poor sick fellows of whom we see scores brought in every day, unshaven for months, dirty, haggard, and scarcely able to move from exhaustion, rheumatism, fever, or frozen feet. The worst cases which can't be moved are kept here — the rest are reshipped to western France. The wounded and sick are divided into two classes — sitters or "hoppers," as the English "Tommies" call them, who can sit up and walk, and "liers," who have to be carried upon stretchers. Word comes to take two "liers," or three "sitters," to this or that hospital, and one loads them on his machine almost like merchandise, almost forgetting that they are somebody's brothers and sons, or husbands, who a year ago were liv- ing peaceful civilian lives like ourselves, without any more thought of war than we had. There are about a dozen German prisoners in a box car in the station, who are a source of considerable amusement to the old reservists stationed here as sentinels. Every morn- ing they are brought out to sweep the station and carry water; and sometimes they help to carry our gasoline tanks. After an hour or so in the open they are locked up again. This morning the old countryman who was guarding them, after carefully locking the door of the car, and being in perfect safety, shook his clenched fist at the door and shouted, "sales cochons," quite unconscious of the amusement he was giving to the bystanders. I sometimes talk with them, but avoid doing so unless I translate what I say, lest some one should suspect me of being a German spy or of communicat- ing things to them that I ought not. Here in this forlorn station, I discovered the other night Comtesse Benoist d'Azy, whom I used to know well in Washington when she was in the French Embassy. I knew her only as a companion at balls and dinners, but war brings out unexpected qualities in people, and I find her here living a remarkably hard and squalid life, the only woman in the railway hospital night after night, helping to dress the wounds of the poor fellows who are brought in on the night trains. She has introduced me to Colonel Morier, who is in charge here, and through him we hope some time to be sent somewhat nearer to the lines. XVI January 28. Dear Mother and Father: Last night we had another visit from the Bodies. It was a wonderful clear moonlit night, and as I drove about the deserted, moon-blanched streets carrying mutilated human freight, I was thinking how the same moon was drenching the silent harbor of Gloucester, when suddenly, without the slightest warning, we heard a Boom ! down the street. A bomb had dropped from the clear, silent sky. Boom ! Boom ! Boom! They were dropping here and there, and blinds and shutters were quickly pulled together. I stopped my motor and got out and could hear the motors in the sky, but nothing was visible. Boom! Boom! Boom! like thunder. It was rather terrifying, but there was nothing to do, any more than there is in a thunder storm, so I resumed my trip and returned to the station. All the lights had been extinguished, and when I entered the freight shed which we used as a hospital, and struck a match, the scene really was amusing. The old reservists, who serve as infirmiers and stretcher- bearers, were hiding in corners under the mattresses which they had torn from the beds. An old soldier whom I rec- ognized as a sentinel had crawled under a table. In one corner I found Madame Benoist d'Azy surrounded by some of my American friends, and as the bombardment had ceased we came out and searched in the pits where the bombs had fallen, looking for pieces of the bombs. No one had been hurt, but many were scared out of their wits. Apparently the Germans are trying to destroy the rail- way station, which is interesting for us, as we are stationed there. There were no more shipments of wounded to the city's hospitals through the night, and I slept as best I could on the seat of my auto, but before retiring I took pains to find a cellar to which to resort when, if ever, the Bodies returned. XVII Dunkirk, January 29, 191 5. 3 a.m. Dear Mother and Father: So long as I live, whether it be weeks or months or years, I can never forget this night. The sky was clear, the moon at its full, a gorgeous, wonderful, silent night. We were waiting in the station about 9 p.m. The nightly train of Belgian wounded had just come in, and the sick and wounded men were hobbling into the freight-house hospital, or were being carried in on stretchers. I was talking to a pleasant Belgian doctor who had descended from the train, and tell- ing him about last night's air-raid, and explaining that on that account the station and the freight-house hospital were to-night left uniighted — when without warning a bomb ex- ploded about a block away and sent many running and shouting in great excitement. Bang! went another bomb, not far away, and Boom ! a third, and Boom ! a fourth, and Boom ! a fifth, and so on. We could hear the whir of the motors in the sky, but only once could I see one of the aero- planes as it crossed the face of the moon high in the air. The bombardment must have lasted at intervals for the greater part of an hour, and meanwhile the "soixante- quinzes" were getting in their work, and one heard the detonations of their shells as well as saw their puffs of smoke as they exploded in the sky, and now and then one heard their shrapnel rattling as it rained on the ground. The spectacle was absorbing beyond anything I have ever seen. I suppose it was fraught with danger, but one almost forgot one's self in wondering where the next bomb would drop. When the bombardment was over, we started out with our ambulances to see what havoc had been wrought. On the third floor of a house near the station, a bomb had [37] pierced the roof and a poor old woman lay torn in pieces. She was evidently getting ready for bed when the bomb struck. It was not a pleasant sight. On another street we found the body of a customs officer and two badly maimed fellow officials lying in pools of blood on the sidewalk. They had been innocently walking in the quiet night. I picked up the dead body, still warm and pliant, and with difficulty got it into the machine. The arms insisted on falling down every time that I crossed them over the poor fellow's breast. Then, for the first time in my life, I drove a hearse, as we carried the lifeless body to one of the hospitals. Later, we went down on the dock and found three other fellows badly torn and wounded and took them to one of the hospitals. On two streets I saw whole fronts of houses torn to pieces ; and in several places hideous streaks of blood dripped down the sidewalks to the gutter. It was about two o'clock when we got our last wounded man to a hospital, and as the hos- pital door closed and I looked up the silent street with its moonlight and shadows, the bells in the old city tower tin- kled out their carillon. It seemed like the peaceful end of a tumultuous tragic symphony. And so the night has passed, and now I sit in my ambu- lance writing by the light of my lantern, and outside the moon is drenching the world with its silent whiteness, just as if all were at peace, and there were not hundreds of thousands of wounded soldiers groaning and suffering, all over Europe. I scarcely know what to say as to the justification for this kind of warfare. War is war and not child's play. That I realize. But at the same time, I doubt whether the French or the English would bombard an uninvested city without warning. No military advantage can be gained by dropping bombs indiscriminately over a sleeping city, and certainly the world at large and the judgment of the future will not endorse the wanton slaughter of civilians and women. XVIII Dunkirk, January 30, igi 5. Dear Mother and Father: I can truthfully say that I have never been more inter- ested in life, and that I am utterly well, though living on army rations, supplemented by only a few additions in the way of chocolate, prunes, and figs, and although I have been on duty every night for a week from 6 p.m. to 8 a.m., and have scarcely seen the sun during all that time. I have sent a letter to Harry Sleeper, asking him to have copies of some of my letters made and sent to Y and C. B. and C. S. S., etc., because I thought it would be easier for him to look after making the copies than for you. I have little chance to write and still less to duplicate what I write, and this plan seemed to me to promise the largest results, assuming that, if my letters get through, they may be of interest to some of my friends. Don't ever worry about me; I am sensible and will avoid risks. If you don't hear, it is because the censor is holding up my mail. With love, as ever. C39] XIX February I, 1915. Dear Mother and Father: I am on the day squad this week and day after day it is the same story. Five to eight trains arrive sometime during every twenty-four hours, and out of these trains hobble or are carried the grist of the war in our vicinity, from four to six hundred men daily, — men with their eyes or heads or chins heavily bandaged, men with their arms or legs in slings, men shot through the shoulder or hips or stomach, men with frozen feet, men weakened by typhoid or pneu- monia, men broken down and scarcely able to stand from months of exposure and anxiety in the trenches, men pale or yellow with sickness and unshaven for weeks. The French soldiers wear the long blue coats and red trousers made familiar to us in the pictures by Detaille and de Neuville of the soldiers of 1870, and with their untrimmed beards they seem very like the pictures of the soldiers of our own Civil War. Among those who descend from the train there are many picturesque Arabs, with heavy turbans, and volumi- nous Oriental cloaks, and sometimes there are wounded German soldiers. They all make their forlorn way to the freight houses which form a temporary hospital, and there they are looked over by the staff of doctors, their wounds are dressed or redressed, and they find places on the long rows of dirty cots awaiting their final disposal. Many are sent on by other trains to other parts of France, and the rest, the worst cases, are given to us to carry to the various hospitals temporarily established in the different schools and public buildings of Dunkirk or in some of the neighboring towns within a radius of ten miles. C4°n It is hard to realize the human cost of war. This centre represents only one small corner of the fighting line of France, yet here there come, every day, several hundred who have been mutilated or injured or invalided by the war in our little immediate neighborhood. The cost of the war as a whole is simply appalling, yet it must go on, and the people of France are determined that it shall go on until those who were responsible for it are crushed. I have talked with quite a number of the German wounded. Several are brought in every day, and they are looked after by the French doctors and nurses as carefully as are those who were wounded in the service of France. Usually a group of French soldiers gather around the cot of a German wounded, eyeing him curiously, but not unsympathetically, as if he were a strange animal, only half human like the "missing link." It is sometimes hard for them to realize that a Boche, emanating from a country that has brought so much misery into the world, is really a civilized human being after all, but they have a great sense of chivalry and many, many times I have heard them say, " Because the Boches are barbarous and inhuman, is no reason why we should be so. We will show them what it is to be civilized !" And they ask whether they would like beer or coffee and they get them bread and meat and give them chocolate and cigar- ettes. I often act as interpreter and translate questions and answers between the French and German wounded. Once or twice I have brought together in this way men who two days before were trying to kill each other, and they have complimented each other on their courage and have shaken hands. A German with a heavily bandaged leg said to me the other day, "Tell him that it was his 'soixante-quinze' [the 75-centimetre gun of which the French are so proud] that cut off my leg." The Frenchman replied, " Tell him that it was a German 77-centimetre that cut off my arm." C40 And so it goes. There are about fifty German prisoners here now, kept in a box car and brought out every day to sweep up the station and clean the yard. I am sure they are glad to be let out in the open air and have something to do. I gave one of them a pair of gloves the other day, and he was very grateful. He always nods to me now and says, "Guten Tag," as I pass. At times one forgets the agony and horrors of the war and is impressed by the picturesqueness and beauty of it. Every man one sees is in uniform, and the farmers and store clerks and bookkeepers, who ordinarily would be uninter- esting to look at, have become picturesque and their lives have become touched with a glamour of romance that peace- ful civilian pursuits never would have made possible. As they are grouped in the dimly lighted freight-house hospital, or on the streets, they are always making unforgettable pictures that any draughtsman or painter would like to register and make permanent for others. Lives, too, that have hitherto been spent in commonplace labor for them- selves are now devoted to the service of others, and are given recklessly and without reserve to their country, and many of these lives have been sanctified by acts of heroism and glory worthy to be immortalized by the greatest artists and poets. One of the trips that I like to make is to a beautifully appointed sanitarium (now a military hospital with twenty- five hundred beds) on the shore about eight miles from here — Zuydcote. Perhaps you can find it on the map. It is almost on the Belgian frontier, and the road to it is the highway to Furnes and Nieuport, where heavy fighting is going on all the time. I take wounded and sick soldiers out there every day, sometimes several times a day, and on the way we pass a continual military procession, dozens of transformed motor omnibuses and motor trucks loaded with supplies, artillery companies, and companies of infantry singing gayly as they march out toward the firing line, or dragging their tired feet along as they march back. Every now and then a limousine goes snorting by like a whirlwind carrying officers to or from the front, or a motor cycle carry- ing messages; most picturesque of all are the companies of mounted Arabs in their gay paraphernalia trotting along as in a circus parade. My days of work begin at 7.30 a.m. and end at 7 p.m., and this leaves little time or strength to write — and now at eight o'clock the lights are turned out in Dunkirk and we can do nothing but go to bed. This has been the order since the Germans began their nightly aeroplane attacks. Both indoors and out all lights have to be extinguished at 8 p.m., and since the order went into effect, no bombs have dropped from the sky. The aeronauts, I suppose, cannot know when they are passing over a city which is as black in the night as the plain country itself. Dunkirk often makes me think of Gloucester. It is some- what larger and, of course, much older. It has much more shipping of merchandise and many more substantial build- ings of brick and stone and greater docking facilities. But it is on the sea, it is a fishing town, and a summer resort. Never before probably has it been so alive in winter time as now with the thousands of soldiers who go and come here. The harbor is like that of Gloucester, a forest of masts, and there is a beautiful old church devoted to the patron saint, "Notre Dame des Dunes," the name referring to the sand dunes which surround the town. On the altar of the church is a figure of the Virgin surrounded by shells and insignia of the sea. The walls of the church are covered with pictures of boats and from the ceiling hang literally dozens of old boat models. XX Dunkirk, February 2, 1915. 8.30 p.m. Dear Mother and Father: It has been a long hard day, and I am ready for bed. I am writing in the little auberge called the "Ancien Hermit- age" which we call our "chow house" and where we and a number of French soldiers eat our army rations, — soup, tough horse meat called roast beef, potatoes, beans, and cheese. We have finished for the evening and have sung French and American songs and wound up with the "Marseillaise" and a last drink together, as some of our French comrades are leaving in the morning for the trenches. Each of us has a tin plate, a tin cup, and a knife, fork, and spoon from our mess-kit, and with these we eat our three meals a day sitting about the rough tables of the little tap-room — rough food and rough living quite in keeping with soldier life. We sleep, eighteen of us, on cots in a schoolroom around the corner, which we call our "billet," and we are supposed to be in by 8 p.m., as all of the city's lights are turned out then. The street lights are put out at eight, and after that shutters must be drawn down, and not a trace of light must be visible from outside, and after nine no one is allowed to circulate on the streets. These precautions are taken to impede noc- turnal aeroplane bombardments, such as terrified Dunkirk last week, and which resulted in several deaths. So far they have been successful. My work began to-day with the taking of a poor insane soldier to one of the hospitals. He waved his arms and shouted all the way and it was distressing. The work ended by carrying a soldier who had just tried to commit suicide by shooting a revolver in his mouth. A little while later I saw another poor fellow die in the railway station hospital [44] without friends or comrades near, and I watched the soldiers divide his tobacco and the contents of his knapsack. These were only a few of the episodes of a not unusual day. On one of my trips to the big hospital in Zuydcote to-day I saw a heap of at least twenty coffins in the hospital yard, and one of the nurses told me that on the average about twenty of the inmates die there each day and that every morning there is a joint funeral for them. How little do people in America realize the sadness and enormity of this war! I made several long trips to-day to hospitals in neighbor- ing towns, which I always enjoy. All along the way we pass rows of trenches and barbed-wire entanglements, awaiting possible use in case a retreat should ever be necessary. It is pleasant, too, to catch glimpses of the sea and of the sand dunes (like those of Coffin's Beach), with little red-tiled cot- tages nestling in their hollows. And all along the way we pass little Flemish inns with curiously appealing names, " Au repos des travailleurs," "A la belle vue de la passerelle," just opposite a footbridge over one of the canals; "Au joyeux retour des pecheurs," in a little fishing village; "Au repos des promeneurs"; "A la relache des bains," near a bathing establishment, etc., — all so suggestive of the peaceful life that is no more. One cannot go in or out of the town without having a password, which changes every morning or night. Once in a while I forget the word, or forget to ask for it before leaving the hospital, and there is great difficulty with the sentinels. This is a rambling note with impressions jotted down as they came to mind. I write to-night, though very tired, because the comrade who brought up our letters is returning to-morrow and can take this back through the lines to Paris. We are, as I think I have written you, within the war zone and a letter mailed here would probably have to be read by the censor. [45] February 3, 1915. 3 p.m. In the station hospital, they are building this afternoon a bomb-proof compartment to which the wounded and sick can be carried in case of another bombardment. A low shed about two hundred feet long has been constructed and covered with hundreds of bags of sand. XXI Neuilly-sur-Seine, March 2, 1915. Dear Mother and Father: I think that all your letters up to the 16th of February must have reached me, and when I get down to Morgan- Harjes this morning there will probably be letters of later dates waiting there. After my first week or two in Dunkirk, I wrote to Morgan-Harjes to forward my mail to their agent there, and letters and papers came through promptly — very promptly considering that it is war-time. There is a lot of pluck among these French people. I sup- pose you have read of Madame Bernhardt, who joined the great army of the mutilated a couple of weeks ago when her leg was amputated, and who now announces that she will play "L'Aiglon" and "Phedre" again in Paris during the summer. That is the pluck of the French soldier, and what pluck they have! It is very seldom that a French soldier allows a groan to escape him. I often see wounded fellows whose faces are contorted with pain, but not a sound escapes them, and if you greet them with a sympathetic word, in- variably, even when the agony is intense, there is a respond- ing smile. I have seen, too, many poor fellows mutilated for life, but who were cheerful and gay and seemed proud and almost glad to have been able to give so much for their country. I came down from Dunkirk in a motor, spending Saturday night in Amiens and arriving here on Sunday afternoon. After six weeks in an unchanging scene, I enjoyed the sight of new roads and towns. It was interesting to see how well tilled the fields are everywhere for the coming crops. The ground does not often freeze here in northern France; the farmers can work all winter, and the boys and the womenfolk [47] and the older men have been hard at it everywhere, as the carefully ploughed fields well show. There was scarcely a field that we passed where we did not see women and chil- dren hoeing or ploughing. So France will have her usual sup- ply of grain and vegetables when the harvest comes, except in those nine departments which the Germans still occupy, and which are destined to be ploughed by the armies and fertilized by much human blood before the harvest comes. The French people have shown great patience with the long pause of the winter campaign. They have endured it without complaint or criticism from any quarter, and with a fine confidence that Joffre can be depended upon, when the right time comes, to resume operations. They did not want the war. They did not expect it. They were not pre- pared for it. It was thrust upon them without warning and without reason, but they are determined now that it shall continue to such a point that never again, during the life- time of those now living at least, can it be resumed. The other night, when we were coming down from Dunkirk, something happened to the auto as we were passing through a small village, and seeing a welcoming light and a kitchen fire through a window, I went in to get warm. A little mother and her four children were sitting by the kitchen stove, the children leaning on a table and cutting out soldiers from the papers, as Helen and Polly so often do. The father was off at the war and so were two uncles — brothers of the little mother. She asked, as they all ask, "How long is it going to last?" And when I ventured to guess that it might per- haps end next winter, she said, "All I ask is to see my hus- band come back sometime safe and sound, but I want the war to go on until the Kaiser is beaten, even if it takes years, so that my little boys will never have to serve in another war." And that is how French people of all classes seem to feel. The war must go on, at no matter what frightful [48] cost until "Guillaume" and the Hohenzollerns and German militarism are extinguished. In Dunkirk I saw and talked with many German wounded. As I was about the only one in the station hospital who could speak German, the French doctors sometimes asked me to interpret between them and the Germans, and I al- ways enjoyed doing it, telling the Germans that I was an American and assuring them that they would be looked after in the French hospitals with the same care as the French wounded, which is utterly true, although sometimes the Germans seemed to fear this would not be the case. I have never seen any harshness displayed toward German wounded or even toward German prisoners who were not wounded. There was always a good deal of curiosity to see the wounded Bodies, and to find out their point of view. The French soldiers would gather around the cots in the station where they lay, and get them coffee or chocolate or beer, and bread and meat, and then I would intermediate the questions and answers. When was he wounded and how ? — and perhaps some French wounded on a neighboring cot would call out, "I was wounded on the same field yesterday," and some- times I have seen them laugh and shake hands. The French soldiers are not bitter toward the German private — they know that he is not to blame. "We have not anything against you, except that you have a government of the Middle Ages. So we had, too, until 1870. And you have got to do to-day what we did then. You have got to get rid of your emperor who thrives on war, just as we did. And when you have a republic and govern yourselves there won't be any more war." The more ignorant Germans seem bewildered by the thought of living without a Kaiser, but several times I have seen more intelligent Germans shrug their shoulders and say, "Perhaps, who knows?" Of course, I agree to all this and am a willing interpreter. I tell the Germans how well I know their country, and of the pleasant memories I have of summers I have spent there ; that I have had friends among German people, but that I too believe that the world must be purged of the scourge which their government is. And I always add: "You sing of Deutsche Traue [German faithfulness], but never again until your government is changed and the whole Hohenzollern machine is sent to the scrap heap, and the German people learn to rule themselves, can the other peoples of the world believe in or accept the German word as good. Your government has broken its pledged word and called its promises scraps of paper. In violation of these, it has invaded and ruined an innocent country and would have starved seven million innocent people if Americans had not prevented them from starving. The war must and will go on until your government is overturned, until you wake up to the fact that your government has betrayed you, until you have established a new government such as other civil- ized people have, in which no individual or family can pre- tend to rule by divine right, and not until then, not until the German people rule themselves, will Deutsche Traue have any but an ironical meaning to the rest of the world." Some day, and perhaps the day is not so distant as now it seems, the German people will awake from their hypnotic dreams and will realize that if their name " German" is ever again to be associated with honor and chivalry and to be other than an offence to the nostrils of the world, their gov- ernment must expiate its heinous crimes. On the way down from Dunkirk the other day, we came through much of the region traversed by the German army on their triumphal march which preceded the battle of the Marne last September. I am sending you some postals from the little town of Senlis, through which we passed and which still lies in ruins. Some civilian, the Germans claimed, ls°3 fired a shot, so the German officer ordered that all the public buildings and the finest houses should be destroyed. I have marked a rather poor picture of one of these houses which must have been a beautiful place, and which we visited, and with whose caretaker I had quite a talk. It was surrounded by gardens, and carefully trimmed lawns, and statuary and gravelled paths, and the house contained tapes- tries, paintings, and many objets d'art which the owners had been collecting for a lifetime. The gardener's wife showed us about the ruins, and told us how the mistress of the house used to polish her tiled floors on her hands and knees, so devoted was she to the place. The owner of the house, a man named Fenwick, a captain in the French army, was off at the war, and the wife departed a day or two before the Germans arrived, leaving the caretaker and his wife in the lodge at the gate. The story of what happened is typical of many other stories I have heard, and in this case I heard it directly from an eye-witness. The German officers sent two motor vans to the house and looted it from top to bottom of tapestries, paintings, clocks, furniture, wine, and everything else that appealed to them, and then they ordered fires built in various parts of it and blew it up. Nothing remains now but the shell of the house; not a door, or a chair, or a window frame. Practically every house on the street was treated the same way, and the mayor of the town was taken out to a neighboring hill and shot. There can be no question about it. This sort of thing happened all along the line of the then apparently victorious army. When officers occupied country places and chateaux, they appropriated whatever appealed to them. Doubtless there are many German officers who would have disapproved of such performances, but the German officers as a class have been so long accustomed to trample upon civilian rights, even in their own country, that it was only to be expected that they would disregard such rights to a far greater degree in a foreign country. I feel confident, on the other hand, that the natural chivalry of French officers sim- ilarly situated would have made such conduct impossible. So much in general. As for myself, the ambulance committee have promoted me and I am now a staff officer, with the title of general inspector of the field service. An automobile has been put at my disposal, and I am hereafter to visit and inspect the work of our various sections in the different divisions of the French army. It is the most interesting job I can imagine, and will be a welcome change. I shall be almost continuously on the road, here, there, and everywhere. It is a new place just created, and I am to make of it what I can. XXII St. Omer, France, March q, 191 5. Dear Mother and Father: I left Paris at ten o'clock this morning on my first inspec- tion tour, equipped with formidable letters to French officials in the different armies along the line and prepared to look into various questions of concern to the administration of our several sections — with power to act if need be. A high-powered Peugeot car has been assigned to me, with a pleasant fellow named Freeborn as driver. We in- tended to stop first of all at Beauvais, where we have a section of thirteen machines and where the French adminis- tration for the automobile service in the western armies is centred. Then we intended to stop leisurely at St. Pol, Abbeville, and elsewhere, and end up at Dunkirk, at each of which places we have a few cars. But about ten miles out of Paris we had an experience which changed our plans. A heavy limousine ahead of us skidded into the curbing and smashed its steering-gear, and out of the depths of the car emerged two English officers, one of them a general. They were bound from Paris to St. Omer, the headquarters of the English lines, and they were anxious to go on without delay; so we took them in, changed our plans and brought them through the 250 or 260 kilometres to their destination. The general was General Henderson, of the Flying Corps, an altogether delightful person, who lunched with us as our guest in Beauvais and insisted upon our having tea and remaining to dinner with him at his headquarters in an old chateau near St. Omer. So we have added to our stock of war memories the recollection of a hospitable evening spent in France with half a dozen English officers about their table, with much good talk. C533 It was surprising to find how familiar they all were with our Civil War. They have all studied at Aldershot the cam- paigns of the war, especially the campaigns of Stonewall Jackson so wonderfully depicted in Henderson's "Life." General Henderson, who I believe is a distant relative of the author of that work, said that, although he had never seen the region, he thought he could find his way blindfolded over the battlefields of Virginia and Maryland. They all admired Lee, and Henderson said that he placed him among the "Great Six," or whatever the number, — the few great generals of all time. They seemed to think that the war will last for at least a year. They have genuine respect for the strategy of Joffre and entertain no doubts whatever as to his ability or as to the eventual outcome. As I retire to-night I can hear the cannon rumbling on the frontier. Good-night. XXIII Dunkirk, March u, 1915. Dear Mother and Father: It seemed almost like getting home again to come within sight of the spires and towers of Dunkirk and to pass again along the roads of the suburbs that I have driven over so many times night and day in my ambulance. It was good, too, to see the fellows with whom I had messed so long. I slept in my old cot in the schoolroom, heard the old jokes before going to sleep and before arising, and the whole ex- perience was like going back to college after graduating. The Comtesse Benoist d'Azy was still working in the sta- tion hospital and has befriended the boys in many ways. I had several talks with her, and also saw Colonel Morier, the acting general, who was good enough to ask me to lunch with him and his fellow officers at their headquarters. He is a charming man, with the graceful courtesy which only Frenchmen have, and at the same time an efficient officer who carries out his plans with unhesitating despatch. Through him I am trying and hope some day soon to get a more interesting position for our fellows now in Dunkirk. He knows, by the way, the former Italian Ambassador to the United States, Marquis Cusani, who used to be at Gloucester, and of whom Miss Beaux made a drawing last summer. On the way from St. Omer to Dunkirk I passed through the picturesque town of Cassel, on the top of an isolated hill, from which one can see over the surrounding fertile country for about fifteen miles in every direction. There is located the headquarters of General Foch, and at those headquarters is my old friend, Rene Puaux, now on the general's staff. I spent an hour or so with him wandering tssl around the town, renewing old memories and talking about the war. He is in charge of espionage and told interesting stories of his interviews with German prisoners. They had recently discovered from examining German prisoners the location of a German general's headquarters in an old chateau several miles back of the line, and doubt- less believed by the Germans to be quite safe. After Rene's discovery the French brought up a number of long-range guns and, accurately gauging the range, without any warn- ing, the day before our visit, the French guns had let go a perfect hail of shells and reduced the German headquarters to a ruin. Imagine the German officers scurrying out like ants, leaving papers, records, and everything. Rene told also of a visit recently made to Cassel by a feminine American journalist, Mary Roberts Rinehart. She knew scarcely a word of French, and Rene went about as her interpreter, had several guns fired for her benefit, and, at the end of a long day, sat down with her and helped her write her article. General Joffre, who disbelieves in publicity, when he heard of it, sent a reprimand for showing Mrs. Rinehart such attention. If you see the article in any American magazine, send me a copy. Good-bye again. We are off now for Paris-Plage, where our next section is located. Paris, March 18, 1915. The preceding sheets of this letter I found among my papers a few minutes ago. I had intended to add to them every day — but other things intervened. I can only tell you very briefly some of the impressions of the remaining days of my first inspection tour. We left Dunkirk on a cold, gray afternoon, Thursday, March 11, passing through Calais, which is nominally in the Belgian line, forming a part of the narrow strip that reaches from the little northwest corner of Belgium which still re- mains in Belgian hands, back to the coast and Calais. (To the north is the French army, with which we were stationed in Dunkirk. To the south, the narrow strip of the English lines, and then come the French lines again all the way to Switzerland.) On we went through Calais, skirting the bleak coast to Boulogne. Then on again to Etaples and Paris-Plage, which we reached about dusk. Paris-Plage is a fashionable coast watering-place, whose splendid hotels and casino are now all turned into hospitals. Here we found a group of ambu- lances, and we got a warm welcome from our boys. It was the day of the great English battle of Neuve-Chapelle, and trainloads of English wounded were pouring in from the east. In fact, our boys were up all night with their ambu- lances. Next day we motored over sunny hills and farms and through the picturesque villages of Picardy, much of the time not seeing a trace of war, only the doux pays de France, touched by the first breath of spring. At Hesdin, St. Pol, and St. Riquier we have ambulances, and in all of those towns were many soldiers. We spent the night at St. Riquier, a dear little village with a wonderful cathedral whose facade, hundreds and hundreds of years old, is sculptured like the finest lace — in some respects the most beautiful old church I have ever seen. I shall not soon forget the scene next morning within the church, when with an old French colonel I stood in the choir loft of the church and looked down upon a soldier's funeral. They do those things with such impeccable taste in France. The bright uniforms of the soldiers following the flag-draped coffin, the mellow tones of the century-old organ, the soldier barytone singing with deep emotion beside me, the fragrance of the incense, the thought of the boy who lS7l had died far from his family and friends, the sudden recog- nition of the terrible sacrifice that is being made in France to save her from a brutal invasion, all united in a poignant impression. We got back to Paris late Saturday night, the 14th, hav- ing covered in a few days about nine hundred kilometres, or about five hundred and fifty miles. This week I have been struggling with all sorts of administrative problems in Neuilly, and have done very little else. XXIV Paris, March 18, 1915. Dear Mother and Father: Scene follows scene and act follows act so rapidly in the great world-drama that there is scarcely a day or an hour without an experience that I should like to put into words to convey to you, and to myself in future years when my mem- ory will not be so vivid, but, alas! I have so little free time. To-day I motored out to Juilly, about twenty miles from Paris, where we also have a hospital in a picturesque old quadrangled college which Mrs. H. P. Whitney refitted and equipped. I went with Dr. Du Bouchet and Dr. Gros of our own hospital, and after lunching with our Juilly friends, and talking with our boys who drive the ambulances there, we drove on over the battlefield of the Marne. It was there, you remember, that last September the French army finally halted the onrushing German hordes, saved Paris, and turned the invaders back. Nothing that I have seen during my three months here has so much touched me as the view of those fields. The farms have all been carefully ploughed over, and are ready for the new year's crops, as they are everywhere in France. The women and children and old men have attended to that. But every few rods, scattered about the fields, small wooden crosses and little red, white and blue flags mark the spots where lie the bodies of the boys and men who gave their lives in those terrible days. We stopped several times, and got out of the motor, and uncovered our heads before graves where twenty, or thirty, or forty men had been buried together, and which farmers and passers-by had covered with wreaths and flowers. On the top of many graves were placed some of the clothes and belongings of those who were buried, — [593 here a hat, or a torn coat, or a pair of shoes, there a comb or brush, or sponge, or wallet, which might by some chance catch the eye of some wife or mother and help her to iden- tify the whereabouts of a lost husband or son. All was silent in the afternoon sun, but the torn trees, the villages with roofless houses, and walls pitted with bullet-holes, and church towers torn by shells, told of the thunder and havoc of five months ago. We drove up to one farmhouse on the top of a gentle hill, where General von Kluck made his headquarters for four days in that terrible week, and we went through the house with the farmer's wife, and heard her tell her story. It was one of those nice old places with the farm-buildings built around a quadrangle, and with the gardens and buildings surrounded by stuccoed walls, but the walls and barns and house were badly rent by the German and French shells, and the house, deserted at the advent of the Germans, had been, as usual, pillaged of whatever was of value. On the wall of the entrance hall was scratched in chalk this inscription, as well as I can remember it: — "Wenn Ihr nicht so rasch weggelaufen hattet, hatten wir nicht so viel gesauft." "If you had not run away so fast, we should not have gotten so soused" (drank so much). It was the same story that one hears everywhere, of coarse brutality on the part of the German officers. I do not regard the German people as a brutal race ; I know them pretty well after all of the summers I have spent among them; but the Prussian officers are often without respect for anybody's rights, or for anything except their own med- iaeval, miscalled sense of honor. If anybody interferes with them, or gets in their way, he must pay the penalty. They have overridden their own people for years. The average C6o] German, in the face of a German officer, cringes and does not dare to call his soul his own, and so the Prussian officers, from the Kaiser and Crown Prince down, have conducted this war. They have behaved without respect for God or man. The officers have pillaged houses, stolen tapestries, clocks, and furniture, committed deliberate depredations, even thrown billiard tables from windows ! torn up dresses in closets, and have behaved generally like ruffians. The cha- teau of Madame de Bay, in which the Crown Prince was quartered, showed this sort of treatment. If the German people or the German-Americans want ever to recover the respect of the world for their race, they must repudiate the officers and officials who have conducted this war and have made the name German synonymous with grossness. The war, terrible as it is, must go on until the German people realize how they have been betrayed, and repudiate those who are responsible for the most monstrous crimes that the world has ever known. The Kaiser's government has violated treaties and broken its pledged word, has wantonly burned libraries and destroyed churches, has deliberately pillaged and burned houses, has bombarded unfortified towns, has violated every principle of law and decency on land and sea, and the Kaiser's government has got to go ; it must go, and will go, and until it goes, the German people, in the eyes of the world, are disgraced. I have heard people express the hope that the Kaiser may suffer some horrible death as punishment for the un- speakable suffering he has brought on the world ; but it is better that he may live in full possession of his faculties as long as any human being can. He is bound to see his country defeated, and to pay the most staggering indemnity in lives and money that any country has ever paid. That is as cer- tain as the rising of the sun, if he lives. He is also bound to see his dynasty pass and his family deposed. That also on is moderately sure. And then I want to see him live on for scores of years, confronted by the consequences of his overweening ambition. It is impossible to imagine the suffering entailed by this war. In France alone, during the past few months of the war, up to December 31, the killed numbered over two hundred and fifty thousand. In Germany they are said to number over a million. And then there is England and Austria and Russia and Serbia and Turkey and Japan. It is believed that there are over six hundred thousand wounded soldiers in the hospitals of France alone at the present time. It is all simply overwhelming. Mutilation and death cease to mean anything. In Dunkirk, by the time I left, after seeing thousands and thousands of mutilated and broken human beings, I ceased almost to realize that they were human. They just dropped into two classes, the "liers" and "sitters," and if they groaned with pain, one almost felt annoyed rather than sympathetic. Once or twice to-day we got out of the machines and wandered into the trenches, which, like mole-holes, run everywhere. They are wonderfully well constructed, with walls and floors of saplings, and roofed-in bomb-proof com- partments at intervals. There are many parallel lines of them, running all of the way from the Channel to the Swiss frontier, and girdling every town and village with several rows — even the towns which are thirty miles or so from the front. It is a colossal work, which has involved the labor of hundreds of thousands. This is a long letter for me, and there are many more things I should like to say. I have not time to read it over and correct it, but if there is anything of interest in it, you might have it copied and sent to Mrs. Gardner, Miss Beaux, Miss Sinkler, H. D. S., and to Helen. One delightful experience that I have had these last days was a rapidly developed acquaintance with a young Belgian officer bearing the remarkable name of Leon Theodor. He has been for months in the trenches, and has been separated from his family, who live in Brussels, since the beginning of the war. His father, a depute and head of the Brussels bar, is confined in Germany as a prisoner for having written a letter to the members of the bar defining the jurisdiction of the German courts. Leon was here for ten days on leave, and we lunched and dined together at different places, and had one long delightful horseback ride in the Bois. Next week I shall start off again on one of my long in- specting trips, Dunkirk, etc. XXV Paris, March iq, 1915. Dear Helen: I got a letter to-day from you enclosing some drawings of little Polly, with the words, "Come home" — also many clippings which I am always glad to have. Tell Polly I shall come home some day when the great war is over — but that, alas, won't be to-morrow. I am living a very different life from that of a few weeks ago. I have a pleasant little apartment in Neuilly, the suburb of Paris where our main hospital is located, and from here I make trips every week to look over the situation in our other hospital in Juilly or in one or another of the four ambulance sections along the front in the different armies. It takes me away for the present from the direct handling of the wounded, which I regret, but it is more important and more responsible work and full of opportunity for service as well as for interesting experiences. Paris is resuming its normal aspect, and now and then I hear a concert or an opera, or see a play, and now and then, when I am free, I run into town for lunch or dinner with friends who live here or who are passing through. One often thinks that the happiest days of one's life lie in the past, but I am sure that for me life has never before been so full of interest and real happiness as at present. I don't suppose that many in America realize what France has done and is doing. General Joffre has allowed no foreign journalists at the front, and no French generals or officials have given interviews. So you only read of the war from the British viewpoint. But the fact is that of the five hundred miles of frontier between the Channel and Switzerland, France has held and still holds all but about forty miles. 1^1 I know it because I have passed through the little band of the English lines several times. Of course, England has rendered inestimable service in clearing the seas and keeping them clear. But on the land France has borne ninety-five per cent of the burden. Nine departments of France are wholly or partially in- vaded and the Germans hold several important French cities, notably Lille, but every one is sure that they have reached their zenith as far as France is concerned. With love to you all. P.S. I got a telegram yesterday from mother, saying they were leaving home to spend Easter with you. Perhaps this will reach you while they are there. XXVI Paris, March 21, igi 5. Dear Mother and Father: I have imagined you to-day reading with perhaps some anxiety the accounts of the Zeppelin raid upon Paris last night. I have been hoping all along for the chance to see one of these much-named monsters, and last night, a still night with a half-moon, it came. At about 2 a.m. the guns at the fortifications notified the sleeping populace that, af- ter months of waiting, Zeppelins had been sighted and were rapidly approaching. The people leaned out of their windows or poured out into the streets everywhere to see the spec- tacle, and presently searchlights uncovered a tremendous, silver, cigar-shaped creature creeping through the heavens, and flaming streaks like rockets shot across the sky vainly trying to hit it. The Zeppelin mounted quickly, and almost before one knew it, had disappeared from view. Meanwhile, heavy explosions followed one after another, as the bombs dropped in our neighborhood, — one, as we learned this morning, having struck within a hundred yards of the American hospital. I set out early after breakfast to see the damage. A dozen or more bombs had been dropped on Paris and its suburbs, but no one, so far as I could learn, had been killed, only a few had been injured and no buildings of importance had been touched. The long-expected Zeppelin raid was a fiasco as far as actual results were concerned. As a spectacle for the Parisian populace, it offered an entertaining and thrilling experience. Of military significance, it had none. As an in- dication of German intentions, it did present, however, one more evidence, if any more were needed, of what "Kultur" means, a scientific veneer for fundamental barbarity — one C66] more example of the German disregard for the elementary- principles of humanity. Civilized people do not bombard uninvested cities without warning, but the Germans bom- barded Yarmouth and a number of uninvested, unfortified towns in England a few weeks ago, and they have dropped their bombs upon many sleeping French towns far from the zone of the armies, and no one is surprised that they should drop bombs haphazardly over Paris and other cities on the way here, as they did last night. Even in their own country the military men do not, as a rule, treat their civilians and their women as worthy of much considera- tion. Why should any one expect them to show a sense of chivalry toward the civilians and the women and children of other countries ? Four or five houses in Paris were more or less torn to pieces by the bombs, and in one, on the rue Voltaire near here, I picked up the fragment of a bomb which I enclose. It could tear quite a hole in a human body. In the house in which I found this piece of bomb three children were sleeping in a bed, and were precipitated from the second to the ground floor when the house collapsed, but they were not seriously hurt. This afternoon I attended the opera "Louise." Much of it is a kind of glorification of Paris, in which the story takes place. It was well sung and acted, and the audience was especially responsive to the songs about the beauties and the soul of Paris, doubtless thinking of the fortunate survival of their wonderful city, despite the wanton efforts of the Boches to do it harm. At the end of the opera came the "Chant du Depart," in which mothers and wives and sweethearts offer their sons and husbands and lovers to France, and then the "Marseillaise" thrillingly sung and played in an appropriate dramatic setting. XXVII Neuilly-sur-Seine, Monday, March 24, 1915. u p.m. Dear Mother and Father: I was dining downtown to-night in a brilliantly lighted restaurant, with throngs of soldiers, civilians, and women about me, when suddenly some one announced that the Zeppelins were signalled again and that all lights must be extinguished. Every one hurriedly paid his bill and got out into the street to see what there was to see. It was a rainy night, and not only was every street lamp extinguished, but the firemen blew bugles everywhere and made every citizen extinguish the lights in his house. Paris, the city of light, was for once a city of complete darkness. We got into a taxi, six of us, and without lights rolled along up the Champs Elysees to the house of an acquaintance, where we mounted to the roof and waited, hoping every moment that the mon- ster would arrive, but nothing happened. People waited in vain in all the open squares, expecting a repetition of Satur- day night's spectacle. Occasionally one saw an investigating searchlight flash across the clouds, but nothing more. The aviators who defend Paris, but who on Saturday night were not on their jobs and nowhere to be found at the critical moment, were at their places to-night, and the Zeppelins, it is said, turned back. No one takes the Zeppelins very seriously after Saturday's feeble performance — under the most favorable conditions of weather and careless military precautions. Toward mid- night Paris returned to bed, disappointed, when the firemen rode through the streets bugling the signal that means " all is over." [68] Wednesday, March 26, 1915. 11 p.m. - I was just getting Into bed to-night when a fireman whis- tled under my window and called to me to extinguish the lights. I turned out everything except a single candle, and pulled the curtain ; but even that was not satisfactory to the cautious guardians. Every suspicion of a light had to be extinguished, so I was left in the dark. I was quite unwilling to go to bed and miss the spectacle, so I dressed without a light and went over to the hospital, where one has plenty of space to survey the heavens. Zeppelins had been signalled from Chantilly. The people in the hospital were all up and expectant, but nothing else happened, and I must go reluc- tantly and disappointedly to bed. XXVIII Compiegne, March 27. Dear Mother and Father: The scene has changed again and I woke up this morning in the Palace Hotel, Compiegne, and from my window looked out at the beautiful old palace where many kings and one or two emperors of France lived in the days before France had shaken off their yoke. We are on the way to the centre of the eastern armies, where I am going to try to arrange to have some of our new sections sent. We stopped at Beauvais yesterday to see our men there. To-day we go on, following the army line about twelve or fifteen miles inland, past Soissons, Rheims, Chalons-sur- Marne, to Vittel, some two hundred or more miles from here. It would be interesting to pass through Soissons and Rheims, but the roads near both places are continually under fire and it is impossible. Here in Compiegne Mr. John D. Rockefeller has given a hospital which is under the direction of the famous Dr. Alexis Carrel, of the Rockefeller Institute in New York. Mr. Rockefeller and one of his daughters, I believe, have spent two summers in Compiegne, hence his interest. It is installed in a sumptuous hotel, the Rond Royal, and is named the Ambulance Carrel. We called there last night and were shown about the place by Dr. Carrel, a very alert little man who is naturally proud of the hospital bearing his name, and which he has just finished equipping with every arrangement that modern science and surgery can provide. After all, Americans are doing a good deal for France. There are American hospitals scattered here and there all over the country, and it would be interesting to get together a list of them which would show the real magnitude of America's contribution to the hospital work of France. [70] Hotel du Commerce, Neufchdtel {in the Fosges), March 27. 8 p.m. We left Compiegne about 9.30 and had a fine day's run; first through the Forest of Compiegne, then on past the many-towered chateau of Pierrefond, and on and on past convoys of ambulances returning from the battle-front, and long convoys of automobiles — many of them Pierce-Arrows, Packards, and Whites — carrying provisions, baled hay and straw to the front ; here and there a group of mounted cav- alry officers in brilliant uniform; now and then a group of red-trousered soldiers; now through the crooked streets of little villages with lichen-covered plaster houses which would have been picturesque even in times of peace, but which were doubly so when gay with uniformed soldiers. Then on over the fields, valleys, and rolling hills, and as we ran through the valley of the Marne we occasionally stopped at some soldier's grave by the wayside, covered with wreaths and flowers, or by a flag-covered mound where fifty or sixty soldiers were buried, their hats hanging from stakes above the graves, or at some village, farmhouse, or church de- stroyed by the ruthless enemy in that terrific onslaught early last September when the Germans thought they could brutalize France into surrendering. There can be no doubt that they committed unbelievably barbarous crimes in those days. I have recently read a little book, which ought to be translated into English and pub- lished broadcast, called "German Crimes as Told in German Documents," by Professor Bedier, historian in the University of Paris, in which he reprints page after page in facsimile of diaries and letters taken from German prisoners and German wounded, telling of the massacres of civilians, including women and children, and of the wilful pillage and destruc- tion of private property in those days. I have sent several copies to influential Americans, with the hope that some [70 one will have it translated and republished in the United States. Of late the Germans have been more moderate. They have slowly come to realize that their barbarous methods have not produced terror, but undying hate on the part of the peoples directly affected, and loathing and contempt on the part of the rest of the world. How stupid, too, was their policy of murder and destruction in the regions like Belgium which they hoped permanently to retain! On the other hand, the Germans need not fear, that if some day the French army gets into German territory chivalrous France will follow their brutish example. And so the day has passed like a moving picture. There have been glimpses of many lovely bits of ancient French architecture, churches, chateaux, town halls, and other build- ings, many untouched and others mutilated ; many glimpses of trenches, many glimpses of soldiers manoeuvring in the fields, and then, above all, the continual panorama of the doux pays de France, than which there is none more beau- tiful in the world. It has been a sunny day, like the days in America when the wind blows from the northwest, with clear, blue sky, bright sunlight, and crisp air. We have travelled seldom more slowly than fifty miles an hour, sometimes running up to sixty, for the roads in France are incredibly good. You can imagine that I am sleepy and ready for a comfortable bed in this clean provincial inn. Hotel Lorraine, Vittel (in the Vosges), March 27. We are here until to-morrow in what is one of the finest summer resorts of France, a little city of immense stone hotels, usually thronged in summer by wealthy people of all countries taking their cures at the medicinal springs. It has a theatre, casino, polo-field, and race-track, and the whole nestles down in an open valley among the foothills of the mountains on the Alsatian border. This year the hotels, which have nearly five thousand beds, will be occupied by wounded soldiers. There will be no races, no polo, no operas, or fashionable cures. I hope to arrange, through the officers here, to have one of our sections sent into French Alsace, and with Captain de Montravel, who is charged with the automobile service in the eastern armies, whom I came on here to see, and whose acquaintance I made last night, I am to visit several towns on the Alsatian frontier to-morrow to see what can be done. It is much colder here than in Paris. The trees are not yet in bud, and the little shops of the town are just opening after months of hibernation. Palm Sunday night, Bar-le-Duc, March 28. Palm Sunday night, and we are in the home of the fam- ous confiture preparing to spend the night. The streets, res- taurants, and hotels are thronged with soldiers, and we had difficulty finding rooms, but at last found two under the roof of a rather second-rate hotel. There is one thing about France — even in the small hotels of small towns, the beds are covered with clean linen, and there is a kind of homelike touch to the rooms. There is a charm, too, about the uneven floors, low ceilings, thick stone walls, and the quaint views from their casement windows that compensates for the lack of modern plumbing and convenient electric lights. We tried to get some of the Bar-le-Duc currant jelly at dinner, but they told us that it was mostly made for export to America, and was seldom seen here. When we looked out of our windows in Vittel this morn- ing, we saw more snow than I had seen in Paris or Dunkirk all winter. During the night the hills and valleys had been painted over with about two inches of fresh white snow, every field blanketed, every twig of every pine tree weighted down. We left at eight o'clock for Remiremont, a town near the frontier, following in our automobile the machine of Captain de Montravel, with whom I had been negotiating for our next ambulance section and who offered to take me about to see other French officials concerned with the matter. We whirled over ridge after ridge, each opening up new pano- ramas of snow-covered valleys, always nearer and nearer to the frontier of Alsace, until finally we could look up the valley to the ridge, about eight miles away, which was for forty-four years the boundary between Germany and France, but which, God willing, will never again be so. In Remiremont they were just bringing in about four hundred German prisoners with six German officers, taken at Hartmannsweilerkopf the day before. It was an inci- dental victory of some importance, although the official communications only devoted a few lines to it. Hartmanns- weilerkopf is a height on the other side of the Vosges Moun- tains which commands the valley down to the Rhine. The French had been struggling to get it all through the winter, and at last it was theirs. We should have liked to go up into Alsace, but with a full day ahead of us and more than three hundred miles back to Paris we postponed that ex- perience until next time. My hope is that we can persuade the French officials to send one of our sections into Alsace. I tell them that it would annoy the Germans to read in the American papers that American volunteers were serving with the French in what a year ago was German territory. It would show for one thing that the French are actually in Alsace. Captain de Montravel, who is a warm-hearted Southerner and who [74] received us with open arms, seemed to like the idea, but Captain Doumenc, of Joffre's staff, whom we met at Remire- mont, had to be persuaded, and suggested that we send a section on to Vittel and let de Montravel look it over be- fore deciding. Speaking of Alsace reminds me that I sent to little Helen the other day a copy of Hansi's "Mon Village," the book about an Alsatian town, tenderly written and charmingly drawn, which appeared about three years ago and which resulted in the imprisonment of its author by the Germans, who disapproved of his gentle irony. I have not time to begin to register half that I have seen and felt to-day. The principal thing is that I succeeded in arranging to send a section of ambulances to the Vosges at the end of this week, and if they make a good record I have the promise of Captain de Montravel that when we send the next section, he will try to persuade Captain Doumenc to send the first one on to Alsace. On the way back we came through Nancy, the old capital of Lorraine, about ten miles from the German frontier. It is the most sumptuous little city that I have ever seen, with wonderful old squares of seventeenth and eighteenth century French architecture that ravish the eye with their symmetry. They say that last September the Kaiser, with ten thousand soldiers in parade uniform, stood waiting on a ridge about ten miles distant, expecting Nancy to be taken, and pre- pared to make his triumphal entry. He had doubtless seen pictures of the place and felt it would be an appropriate setting for the sort of grandiose pageantry with which he likes to surround himself. They hoped the Crown Prince would enter Paris about the same time; but Nancy could not be taken any more than Paris. Every now and then one of the German airmen drops a bomb on Nancy, as happened this very afternoon, killing an 1751 unoffending woman and child ; but, relatively speaking, the city has not been touched by the Germans, although it is only ten or a dozen miles from the German line. The streets this afternoon looked as gay and happy with their Sunday crowds as if there were no war. Paris, March 29. We got to Paris this evening, having covered twelve hun- dred kilometres in four days. All day to-day we were run- ning through the battlefields that surround the little river Marne, the scene of one of the most momentous struggles of all time, when the German hordes were halted last Septem- ber after almost reaching the very gates of Paris. We have passed village after village of which nothing re- mained but charred walls and chimneys and twisted pipes, burnt from end to end by the Germans because the people offered resistance. The devastation is pitiful. Town after town looks like Salem after the fire. Time and again we stopped and talked with the inhabitants who remained. Sometimes one house was left standing in the village, and there all the women have congregated and are living to- gether. In one case I found an old woman living in a cellar. In other cases a room or two was miraculously left intact, and there the women and children of the family are living. Their men are all at the war, so nothing has been rebuilt in the six months since the Germans were driven back. One, of course, must recognize that war means destruc- tion, and one should expect to find roofs torn open and walls pierced by shells, but the Germans were not content with the ordinary ravages of war. They proposed to terrify the people of France into surrender by the utter brutality of their methods of conducting the war. I have passed to-day through town after town which the Germans had deliberately burned and destroyed, and I have heard from the people how German soldiers, under officers' commands, went from [76] house to house with inflammable material. These are the names of some of the towns as I recall them: Revigny, Heiltz, Thieblement, Pargny, Sermaize. What a pity that the Americans of German descent, many of whom or whose ancestors left Germany to escape the hardships and oppressions of militarism, and who have been proud of our peaceful, self-governing democracy in America, should have allowed themselves to be deluded by the extensive propaganda of the German Government and should to-day be defending a government that represents the spirit of the Dark Ages, that recognizes no law or obligation, human or divine, if it conflicts with what they regard as their interests. One of the things I noted to-day was the number of women, children, and old men working in the fields. I was often tempted to get out and snap a picture of some woman driving a plough or harrow, or some elderly couple driving a wagon to market, or some boy swinging along across a field sowing grain. Easter Sunday. Paris, April 4. I have kept this letter all the week hoping to be able to add to it, but we have been so busy getting our section ready to send to the Vosges that I have not been able to spare a minute until the end of the day, when the spirit was no longer willing. Yesterday the section started and it will arrive some time Monday, twelve cars and sixteen men. I selected the men with the utmost care, picking here and there among our western sections, and making myself more or less unpopular thereby. They are all college men, and Richard Lawrence, Harvard, '02, is to be their chief. From the point of view of a stock farm for breeding purposes, they leave nothing to be desired. I feel sure that they will "make good" ; that de Montravel will recognize the type of men that they are. The future of our service depends upon them, and I told them so. XXIX Neuilly-sur-Seine, April 7, 1915. Dear Mother and Father: I have received three letters from you from Boston, the last two of which were numbered 1 and 2 — and the last of which was dated March 22. I judge from the continuity of your letters that they have all reached me. I get letters more or less regularly from C. B. and C. S. S. and Isabella. I am so glad that you saw her and the marvellous new rooms she has added to Fenway Court. Is n't she a dear and wonderful person? And the great tapestry room! How fortunate that the Germans can't molest it ! It is the sort of place that some of the German officers would enjoy looting and defiling and then burning. I am starting off to-morrow for a trip to Dunkirk and the north, and next week I shall go again to the Vosges to see our new section — about all Harvard men — which has just gone out. I am living a very normal civilian sort of life now. Paris is just about as it always is — only without Americans and other tourists, and with very few theatres, and at night the restaurants all close at 10 p.m. My life is full of interest, but I miss somewhat the in- tensely human things that I used to see so much of in Dunkirk. H78H XXX La Panne, Belgium, April 8, iqi 5. Dear Mother and Father: On this trip I have visited our men in Beauvais, St. Pol, Hesdin, and Dunkirk. To-night I am in Belgium — to be exact, in the little northwest corner of Belgium that still remains in Belgian hands. To be still more exact, I am in the erstwhile watering-place La Panne, which is now the capital in which the brave King Albert and his wife live. The little city seems to contain all of the young Belgians still extant. The streets until dark were thronged with joy- ful youths in uniform, thousands and thousands of them crowding not only the sidewalks, but the middle of the streets. To-day, being King Albert's birthday, there was an immense review on the beach. Belgian flags were flying from most of the large houses, and when we arrived the soldiers were having sack-races in the streets, boat-races on the shore, and competitions of various kinds to fete the day. I like the trim, dark-blue uniforms of the Belgian soldiers. Most of them seem very young, and although they are cut off from their homes they have the air of being embarked on a great adventure. They seem more often gay and lark- ing than depressed. With the mothers and fathers over in the German lines it is probably a very different story. This afternoon, as we set out from Dunkirk, we, too, were caught by the spirit of adventure, and although our passes only read to La Panne, an officer gave us the pass- word, the word for the day, in the Belgian lines, and advised us to go on and see Nieuport ; so we went through Furnes, where great holes in the walls and broken window panes show that shells occasionally strike, and on past company [793 after company of soldiers, some going toward, some coming from, the front; past moving companies of artillery, past armored motor cars filled with smiling youths; past little village after village, past sentry after sentry, who saluted and beckoned us to go on when we gave the word; past trenches and trenches, and finally, almost of a sudden, we reached a point where human beings disappeared, very much as in ascending a mountain one reaches the line where trees cease to grow. The houses and farms were deserted. No one was walking by the roadside. It was the region within shell fire. Every now and then a deep hole in the road gave evidence of that. About two miles farther on we reached Nieuport. It is the first city I have seen that had been destroyed by shells, and I presume that Dixmude, Ypres, Arras, Soissons, Rheims, and many other places look like it. It must have been quite a prosperous town, judging from the fronts of some of the residences, but not a roof or wall remains intact. The streets are littered with house-fronts and their contents, tables, chairs, mattresses, and everything having poured out when the houses gave way before the monstrous shells. Here were tenantless stores with gaping walls and roofs, with goods, damaged by exposure, still on the counters. I walked into one and took a candlestick from the shelf. Here and there were the ruins of what was once a church, — not blackened by fire, but just shot to pieces, — and all around the ruins of the principal church were scores and scores of fresh graves marked only by crosses of rough wood. Not a living inhabitant remained, and there was scarcely a tree that had not been torn to pieces. We were startled, when in the centre of the town, by a loud explosion, then another, and then another, but a sentry poked his head from behind a wall and told us it was a departure from one of our own French guns, and that while [80] the Germans dropped a few shells in the town every day, they had not done so to-day. It was a curious fact about these cannon, which were being fired within a quarter of a mile of us, that we could not detect their location. They are half-buried and concealed by pine boughs. The powder is smokeless, and one heard the explosion without being able to say from whence it came. We watched and watched as we drove back, and heard at least a dozen heavy reports in our vicinity without being able once to tell where the cannon were. On the whole, Nieuport, abandoned by all but the sentries and silent except for the cannon, offered the most impressive picture I have yet seen of the devastation of the war. As I go to bed to-night in La Panne, I hear only the wash of the waves on the beach under my window, and I know I shall sleep well. Hesdin, April p, 191 5. Another interesting day. We woke up in La Panne and the Belgian Minister of the Interior, M. Berryer, with whom we had a conversation about sending some ambulances to help evacuate a number of Belgian towns infected with typhoid, arranged to have us return by way of Ypres. With his help we got a pass through the Belgian lines and had it viseed by the Prince of Teck at the English Mission in La Panne, so that we should have no difficulty in the English lines, and about noon we set out on the road through Furnes to Ypres. It was one of the finest of spring days and we tore on through the quaint Flemish towns, one after another, and over a pleasant, highly cultivated country, crossing the famous little river Yser on the way. These famous rivers of the war invariably surprise one by their smallness. The Yser, more or less swollen by the spring rains, looked much like the Concord River, the flood by which "the embattled farmers stood " upwards of one hundred and forty years ago. I As we neared Ypres, the uniforms of the crowds of soldiers that we passed changed from Belgian dark blue to the British khaki, and we ran into Canadians, Scotchmen, Aus- tralians, and other British varieties, but no Indian troops. I don't know where they have all gone. Some say they have proved a failure, but whether or not that is true they seem to have disappeared from this part of the map. The English are pushing in with vast numbers in the neighborhood of Ypres, and are probably widening somewhat the little strip of the front line which England has been maintaining. Even now the English do not hold, however, more than twenty- five or thirty miles of the five hundred miles of front. The Belgians hold perhaps ten miles, and all the rest is held by the French. Ypres presents a sad spectacle. Here was fought last No- vember and December one of the greatest battles of this great war; the battle in which the Germans were prevented from reaching Calais, and just as, when defeated in their effort to reach Paris, the Germans took revenge on the wonderful architecture of Rheims, so here they wreaked their vengeance for thwarted aims on the beautiful buildings of Ypres. The Cathedral and the wonderful old Halles which sheltered the market, an architectural treasure covered with sculptured tracery and statues, which had survived the ravages of centuries of storms and battles, were made the targets, and now they are torn and mutilated so that they can never be repaired. The architectural losses are irreparable. It stirs one beyond the power of articulate expression to see what a scourge to architecture, one might even say what an enemy to the finest artistic achievements of the human race, this self-styled Kultur folk have been. As long as history endures they will be classed, as they are C82] classed to-day by their contemporaries, with the Huns and Vandals and brutish hordes of antiquity. Things of beauty that should have been a joy for generations and generations to come are gone forever, and the Germans are their delib- erate destroyers. There can be no question that they de- liberately selected these monuments for destruction. The completeness of their annihilation in the midst of other build- ings that remain is indisputable evidence of the fact. While we were in Ypres this afternoon several shells struck in different parts of the town, and it was extraordinary to see the throngs of English soldiers walking about as non- chalantly as if the Germans were a thousand miles away. Many of the stores are still open. Women, children, and literally thousands of soldiers were strolling about looking at the bombarded buildings as they might in ordinary times look at the effects of a city fire. And meanwhile at intervals the bombardment was going on. We stayed about an hour, got a bit of lunch in a cafe, and then ran on and stopped for a few moments at Cassel, where I saw Rene Puaux, my genial friend who is still there on General Foch's staff. To-night I have stopped in Hesdin to arrange for the withdrawal of our ambulances from the Army, where they seem to have been more or less superfluous, in order to send them to other places where they are needed. All this requires complying with much red tape and the seeing of many officials. Paris, April u, 191 5. I got back again to the quiet of Neuilly last night, and as a friend is going to America, leaving to-day, I shall give this letter to him to mail. I am perfectly well, and find life full of opportunities to help and full of interest. XXXI Letter published in the Boston Herald, April 28, 191 5 WHAT FRANCE IS DOING BY A BAY-STATE MAN WHO IS ON THE GROUND To the Editor of the Herald: It is a disappointing, but explicable fact that the "Boston Herald" and most American papers envisage the war as primarily a struggle between Germany on the one hand and England and Russia on the other, while France is treated as a factor of only secondary importance, almost like Austria, or Belgium or Serbia. The reasons for this attitude are not far to seek. What- ever news our papers receive from the Allies' side of the scenes of war comes through correspondents who, whether American or English by origin, are affiliated with English papers, and are naturally more interested in providing their readers with accounts of movements and engagements in- volving British troops, the brothers, sons, and acquaintances of their readers, than with stories of the activities and ex- periences of the French armies in which their public has no direct personal interest. Not only is this natural, but it has been made inevitable by the policy of the French General Staff, which has allowed no correspondents, whether English, American, or even French, within their lines. Interested primarily in the military problems, anxious at whatever cost to eliminate the possible dangers of publicity, regardless of any of its possible diplomatic benefits, the Staff has refused access to the front, not only to English and American jour- nalists, but also to their own. Not infrequently the only ac- counts printed in France of French engagements of no mean importance are the dry, laconic two or three lines of the official "communiques," "our troops made progress," or, "we made considerable gains" in such or such a place. A fortnight ago I happened to be in the Vosges at the time of the capture of Hartmannsweilerkopf, a ridge on the other side of the Alsatian Mountains, which commands the valley at that point down to the Rhine. For two months the French troops had been contending for the height, and at last it was theirs. Some four hundred German prisoners, including five or six officers, taken in the engagement, were just being brought into Remiremont in the Vosges the day of my ar- rival, and the local French officials were elated by the situa- tion. We scrutinized the papers next day for some vivid account of the engagement such as we had heard in the vicinity, but we only found the dry and bloodless announce- ment, "Our troops took Hartmannsweilerkopf yesterday." French generals and cabinet officials have rarely if ever given interviews or allowed their names to be signed to articles. No Frenchman of any considerable importance has visited America since the war began. Not one sou has ap- parently been spent in endeavoring to interest or to influence American opinion in favor of France. France has pursued the even tenor of her way through the war. Not only has she not resorted to publicity agents, press bureaus, special envoys, braggadocio interviews with ambassadors and gen- erals, or any of the other methods of fostering foreign feeling, which the Germans have made familiar, but she has even interfered with the natural and appropriate publication of what has been happening in France, and of what we in America, because of our traditional friendship and sympathy with France, and our similarity of political institutions and ideals, would have been glad to know. These, I believe, are the principal reasons for the curious undervaluation on the part of the American press of the contribution which France has made and is making to the [85] war. Probably not one American in ten thousand knows that of the approximately five hundred miles of the western battle-front, France has held, and still holds, all but about thirty-five, that England has never held more than twenty or twenty-five miles, and Belgium not more than a dozen miles. Yet such are the known and indisputable facts. I know them because I have several times crossed through the British and Belgian sectors. Up to the end of December, I have been told by credible authority, it is estimated that France had lost about two hundred and fifty thousand killed (not including wounded and prisoners), and I also believe, upon equally good au- thority, that the total of British troops, which until recently had been sent across the Channel, numbered scarcely more than that. In other words, France had lost, in actually killed, almost the equivalent of the whole British fighting army. I say this, not in disparagement of England's contribution to the war. Her assistance on the sea has been of supreme importance, and the valor of her soldiers, both on land and on sea, has been demonstrated beyond question. I say it only to give a just perspective as to what France is doing. We owe to France, politically and spiritually, debts which we can never repay. It was to the spirit of revolutionary France that we owe much of the spirit of our own Revolution. It was to France with her armies and her fleet and her ex- penditures of seven hundred million of dollars in our behalf that we owe our independence. And neither then nor since then has she ever asked for anything in recompense. France is the only other great country in the world without a heredi- tary ruling class, where the spirit of democracy prevails and the people rule. To the schools of France we owe practi- cally everything that we have in America that is worth while in architecture, painting, and sculpture. France is a X863 peaceful and unmilitary democracy whose energies have for generations been devoted primarily to the arts of peace. Our sympathies as Americans, believing in democratic government, detesting militarism, and mindful of what France has done for us, ought to be wholly with France in this struggle against a mediaeval monarchy opposed in every way to our own historical ideals. I believe that they are so, but I also am confident that we should have been more actively on the side of France if it had been brought home to us by our press how much this is France's war. To those of us who still believe in the ideals of the founders of our government and who have no sympathy with the savagery of medievalism, who believe in popular govern- ment and not hereditary rule, to those who care for the peaceful advance of civilization and would like to see forever doomed the " Kultur" of mailed fists and war lords, without regard for solemn pledges, international law, or any other right than that of might, it will always be a source of humili- ation and regret that America has not displayed a more ac- tive sympathy with those ideals for which she used to stand, in this momentous period of their history. A. Piatt Andrew. Paris, April II, 1915. XXXII Remiremont {in the Fosges), April 14, 191 5. Dear Mother and Father: Another day to live forever in my memory: I have motored for miles and miles with French soldiers in Alsace. I wrote you a couple of weeks ago about my first trip to the Vosges to try and arrange for a section of our ambulance to serve in Alsace, and how I had found several French officers in the region who were enthusiastic about the project, and how I returned to Paris and got together a "crack" section, mostly Harvard men, with Richard Lawrence, Harvard, '02, as chief, and how within three days we had them started east. They went first to Vittel and the officers liked them, very much apparently. Two days later they were sent a little farther east, and two days after that still farther, and now they are stationed just this side of the pass that marks the boundary of Alsace, and each day they run up over the pass and down into the valley on the other side, where they get the wounded in various Alsatian towns within sound of the German guns. So yesterday I started east again to see how things were going and to arrange for another section. We flew again up the valley of the Marne, now much more verdant than a fortnight ago, covering about three hundred and fifty kilo- metres in an afternoon, and arrived in Vittel in time to find Captain de Montravel and Lieutenant Paquet still at dinner. They told us how our boys had arrived ten days before in a pouring rain, but with their hoods up so that they could see all that was to be seen as they passed through the valley of the Marne; how the moment they arrived a train of wounded had come in, and how efficiently they had des- [88] patched the work of carrying them to the hospitals; how ready and willing they all were; how expert in repairing their machines; how they were up at six in the morning with radiators and tanks filled, brass polished and ready for work, — what thoroughbred gentlemen they all were, — in fact, a glowing account, which was very gratifying. And so I went on to-day to see our men and to set foot for the first time in Alsace. We found them located in a pretty little village, St. Maurice-sur-Moselle, just this side of the frontier, surrounded by snow-covered mountains. And then we went on, several French officers and myself, through the tunnel that used to mark the boundary between Germany and France (I will send you some photographs I took of the two sides of the tunnel), and came out in the promised land. I have never seen a more beautiful outlook than that which strikes you almost as soon as you emerge from the tunnel. You look down for miles on a narrow, highly cultivated valley, dotted with red-roofed villages and bulwarked all about by the silent, snow-capped hills. One saw the pictures of Hansi in real life. I have not time to tell you much of what we saw or much of what I felt as we rolled down the ridge and through the valley past town after town, now part of France again after forty-five years, the signs still in German over the hotels and stores, the children waving their hats at us as we passed, the crowds of French soldiers, the old Paris autobuses run- ning here and there in these strange surroundings, loaded with meat, our own little ambulances passing now and then, the distant boom of the guns. I wish I could find time to register them. I snapped a lot of kodaks, and I am afraid I must leave it to them to tell the story. It was one of the happiest, most interesting, most beauti- ful days that I have ever spent. [8 9 ] Paris, April 23, 1915. I intended to write this letter over and greatly to extend it, but my work the past week has been too absorbing. The following day after the one I spent in Alsace, we motored over three hundred miles back to Paris, and since then I have literally not had a moment's time to myself. Captain de Montravel liked our first section so well that he wanted another right away, so we got back the section from Beau- vais, and revamped it somewhat, and succeeded in getting it off for the east three days after I returned. It is located somewhere near Nancy. Since then I have been on another trip to Dunkirk, and have had a terrific amount of work to do straightening out affairs in the office here in Neuilly, where everything has been at sixes and sevens. XXXIII April 23, 1915. Dear Mother and Father: Here are some pictures which I took on the day we spent in Alsace — the Alsace which used to be German, but which, God willing, never will be so again. You will see the German signs over hotels and the railway station where I am standing with French officers. It was one of the happiest days I have ever spent in some of the most beautiful surroundings that I have ever seen. One does not wonder, after visiting Alsace, that a beauty-loving people like the French could not endure seeing it taken from them by the Germans. These pictures show that France has recovered at least a part of Alsace. C90 XXXIV N euilly-sur-Seine, Sunday, April 25, 1915. Dear Mother and Father: I made a flying trip to Dunkirk this week, — ran up one day and came back the next; it is about two hundred and forty miles each way, and a rather hard trip, but I enjoyed it because we stopped over night in a little inn in Cassel, where I spent several hours with Rene Puaux, who always knows everything that is going on, and is a most delightful and diverting companion. It was the night after Garros had been captured by the Germans, and Rene, who knew him well, was greatly sad- dened, both because of his personal loss and because of the loss to the army. I used to see Garros flying over Dunkirk. He was stationed in one of the environing villages, St. Pol, and often toward dusk during the winter we would see him flying home from some mission in his monoplane. You could not mistake any one else for him, for no one else ever flew with the grace and ease of Garros. He could close off his motor and float like a gull, dipping, and soaring, and turn- ing, now this way, now that, until it seemed incredible that it was a machine and not a bird you were watching in the sky. It was a small machine with no place for a passenger, and with the propeller in front of the driver and a long fish- like tail behind. Just in front of the driver was a rapid-fire gun which he could operate with his foot as he manoeuvred the aeroplane with his hands, and as the gun was attached to his aeroplane and perfectly stationary he had to manoeu- vre the whole machine in order to aim at his enemy. You can see what a wonderful flyer he must have been. He was like a hawk. He could rise faster than the other machines and turn about more quickly, and the German flyers were greatly afraid of him, because he had brought down I don't know how many of them. One extraordinary mechanism that he had devised was an arrangement by which he could fire through the revolving propeller. It was estimated that the propeller would only be hit four times in a hundred shots, and at the point on the two blades where a bullet might hit were two metal tracks to divert it. I used to see all of this in Dunkirk, so I was particularly interested in Rene's story of what had happened to Garros the day before. Garros had already brought down two German aeroplanes, and when he came back that day they sent him out, though tired, and in a machine that had already been severely used, to drop bombs on a railway station, a mission which any of the scores of aviators might have successfully performed. Whether his engine stopped working or he was hit by a bullet, they did not know. But he did not come back, and night came on and still no word, and finally in the early morning they intercepted a German wireless message which told that Garros was a prisoner. I suspect that thousands of people had hoped that some day when the Kaiser or the Crown Prince was in Lille or Courtrai, Garros would be able to swoop down and fire on him. At any rate, he ought to have been reserved for the exceptional work, and not have been wasted on the easy and more or less futile work of trying to destroy a railway station, which is part of the everyday work of the average military aviator. Simply because he was a genius in flying they asked him to do everything. But — Garros is gone! And the Kaiser lives ! From another acquaintance we heard a great deal about the now famous battle between the English and the Germans at Neuve-Chapelle six weeks or so ago, when as you remem- ber more than ten thousand British were lost, killed, or [93] wounded. I remember the night of that day, when all night long trains of wounded were pouring into Paris-Plage where I was staying, and where our boys were working. Well, it appears that the British in one day fired thirty-six thousand shells, or more than were fired in the whole Boer War. It was a veritable hailstorm of shells which obliterated every- thing within range. The Germans who were not killed were routed, and orders were issued to the Germans in Lille, which was the real objective, to begin packing their things. But the English made two terrible blunders. In the first place, they let their men get too far ahead of their artillery, and it is said that hundreds of English soldiers were killed by their own guns, and then, after victory was in their hands, they apparently waited for twenty-four hours to decide what to do next, and that allowed the Germans to change their minds, to come back with reinforcements, and to reentrench themselves before the battle was resumed. A number of English generals were dismissed from the service immediately after the battle, but that could not bring their men back to life or achieve the lost victory. General French was quoted recently as saying that "if we are to vanquish our enemies, we require shells, still more shells and always more shells," and when this was quoted to another distin- guished officer, he is said to have remarked, "Yes, but it re- quires even more than shells, it requires a brain." The entrance of Italy into the war is now predicted for the very near future and with her on the side of the Allies will come sooner or later the Eastern Latin country, Roumania. Their military aid will not, perhaps, be very great, but it will help to cut Germany off from her present trade with the outside world, from horses, copper, petroleum, and other things. And it cannot but have an effect on the "morale" of the Austrians and Germans. Already the German papers have ceased to speak of the outcome of the war as a certain [94] victory. They speak rather of the impossibility of their being defeated, — and that is quite a step in advance. In France, on the other hand, every one feels confident of an ultimate victory, but those competent to judge seem to think that unless something unforeseen happens, the struggle will be long. "Long, dur, sur," is the laconic proph- ecy attibuted to General Foch. XXXV Dieulouard, near Pont-a-Mousson, Tuesday, April 28, 191$. Dear Mother and Father: I have had another interesting and memorable day. I came east yesterday to see how the second section had fared that we sent out two weeks ago. The first section went to Alsace, as I wrote you when I returned from there. It was a joy to know that they were well liked, well placed, doing good work, and very happy after the discouraging period that had gone before with almost nothing to do in the west. How was it to be with the second section ? I motored up to Vittel, about two hundred and twenty- five miles, and had dinner with my good friend Captain de Montravel, and had again a warm, enthusiastic welcome and a good report of the second section, which had spent two days under his critical eye in Vittel. They are now at a place of which I had never heard — Dieulouard, between Nancy and Pont-a-Mousson ; so we set off this morning to look them up and also to see the Commandant Bourgoin, of the Army Automobile Service, at Ligny-en-Barrois, under whom they serve. The day has been full of interesting and varied experi- ences. As we wound over the hills and valleys of the Vosges, we passed through a trim, little, red-roofed town basking in the warm spring sunshine, among green fields and peace- ful silence, and discovered that we were in Domremy, the village in which Jeanne d 'Arc was born ; so we went into the little church where she was baptized and had her first com- munion, and where she went to pray when she heard "the voices" in the neighboring fields; and we spent a quarter of an hour sitting before the flag-draped altar in the dim silence [96] of the church. The priest asked us to go with him to the house in which she spent her girlhood, a lovely little cottage in the midst of a garden surrounded by tall pines, and we visited the heavy-beamed room in which she is supposed to have been born. The priest whittled off a piece of one of the big beams and gave it to me, and I picked a sprig or two of flowers, perhaps the descendants of plants that grew there five hundred years ago when she was a child. And so the day began, and then we hurried on. About noon we reached Ligny, and I had a satisfactory interview with the commandant, found that he was pleased with what he had seen and heard of our men ; and then on and on, past soldiers, convoys, trenches, and towns for a couple of hours more, when suddenly, with a turn in the road, we came into the ancient crooked streets of the village of Dieulouard and found our ambulances and our men stationed in the shadow of a rambling old chateau. The boys were very glad to see us, especially as we brought heaps of mail, and they are thoroughly happy because at last they are located in the midst of things. A few of them are at Dieulouard, the rest at Pont-a-Mousson. Both places were under daily bombardment. The fields around are pitted with shell holes, and windows, walls, and roofs everywhere are pockmarked with the shrapnel. Two shells dropped here this afternoon after we arrived, from some unseen battery four miles away. One heard first the distant boom, then the whistle of the shell as it passed overhead, and another explosion as it burst. Just outside of Pont-a-Mousson, where we spent a couple of hours, is the wood called Bois- le-Pretre, where there has been terrific fighting for months, and where seventeen thousand Frenchmen are said to have given up their lives. We visited the dressing-stations and saw the men being brought in on a sort of wheelbarrow stretcher, and in one of the many improvised cemeteries 1971 ' that dot the hillside we saw where a Harvard man, Andre Champollion, whom I used to know in Cambridge, and who was killed in the French army three weeks ago, was buried. To-night I am sleeping in one of the little French houses in the town. There has been no bombardment since this afternoon. The streets are silent under the moon, except as now and then a company of artillery or a convoy of supplies clatters by over the pavement. It is curious about these towns. Pont-a-Mousson has been bombarded not less than eighty-six times, and the neigh- boring villages as often or oftener; but most of the people seem to go on living here and go and come as if there were no war. There are crowds and crowds of soldiers, but many women and children too. How strange the world's history is. Who, a year ago, would have dreamed that these quiet, prosperous little towns, where people lived dull but complacent lives, would be thronged with gayly bedizened soldiers, with all their schools and churches and the larger houses turned into hospitals, with shells bursting at any hour of the day or night, shot by unseen cannon miles away, with aeroplanes dropping bombs, and all the other excitements and terrors of war? And a year from now their normal lives may be resumed! God grant it! I hope you can read my scrawls. I write them generally by candlelight in bed. My days are long, and I am always glad to get out of my heavy boots and leggings and tight uniform, and then I seize my one chance in the half-hour before I go to sleep to try and tell a little of what I am seeing and doing. Nancy, April 29, 191 5. I am writing again in the early morning — 5 a.m. I seize the chance because we are off again at about seven for St. Maurice-sur-Moselle and a visit to our section in Alsace. [98] "Day unto day uttereth speech and night unto night showeth knowledge." Yesterday said more to me about the war than any day that had gone before. When hereafter you read about Pont-a-Mousson or Bois-le-Pretre, you can think that to me they are no longer mere names on the map. One of the officers asked me yesterday if I had any desire to see some of their trenches, and in the morning word came from the general to meet his aide at nine o'clock in the little village of Juzzainville, not far from Pont-a-Mousson. That is the beginning of the story, and I wish I had time to try and communicate to you something of what we saw. One of the boys drove me over to Juzzainville in our staff car, and as we pushed through the crowds of soldiers in the streets and they saw our American flag, it was one continual salute, — " Vive 1 'Amerique " — " Good-morning,' ' " Vive les Americains." It makes one feel like a prince coming to his kingdom to be in this part of the country. They all appreciate so far beyond its desert our being here with them. Soldiers and officers alike have read the American reply to Germany and feel at last that we are their friends. But what a pity it is that we have been so late and so slow and so perfunctory! What a pity it is that in this great moment in the world's history we should have been afflicted with a third-rate Secretary of State and a President incapable of acting definitely! With the officers I never hesitate to say that the point of view of intelligent America has not been well represented by Wilson and Bryan, that as a people we still have ideals, and that we are not wholly given over to materialism and business as the Wilson-Bryan programme seems to indicate, that we believe with Colonel Roosevelt that our country ought to have protested and to have pro- tested vigorously and imperatively against the invasion of Belgium, the levying of such vast tributes from the Belgian cities, the bombardment of unfortified towns, the submarin- [99] ing of merchant vessels, the unnecessary massacre of towns and villages, and all of the other violations of humane con- ventions, and that we are humiliated that Wilson and Bryan should have made their first protest against England on a matter affecting the business of a few exporters. We found Major Long at Juzzainville and with him I visited the headquarters of General Riberpray in an old chateau, was invited by the general to lunch, and we were off for the famous Bois-le-Pretre. Never was there a more delicious spring morning — with warm sunshine, fragrant apple trees in full bloom, dandelions and violets by the roadside, and birds singing everywhere. We wound in the motor up the sloping hillside past groups of moving sol- diers, some coming back from the wood, others going up, past cemeteries of fresh graves, where twenty or thirty men were busily digging new places for the dead, and twenty or thirty more were covering graves just filled. Suddenly I was struck with horror as a lumber wagon came down the hill, and I discovered that it was a cartload of men who had given their lives during the night. They were piled five and six deep, — criss-cross, — perhaps two dozen of them, their lifeless legs and arms and heads hanging over the sides of the wagon ; and then we passed a little hut in which I saw a dozen or more other corpses sprawling on the floor as they had just been brought in. Of course, I thought it horrible, but my officer friend said, "Oh, yes, but we are used to it. One sees that every day." Toward the top of the hill one enters the famous wood — about four or five miles long. The birds were still singing everywhere, and all the trees coming into leaf. Nature was serene and tranquil. Now and then, as if a distant Fourth-of-July celebration were going on, one heard something like a giant firecracker, and occasionally one would hear something go whistling overhead above the Croo] treetops, and five or six seconds later a heavy door would seem to slam. Presently we turned into a ditch just high enough to overreach a man's head, and then on, through trench after trench, zigzagging and crossing each other like streets, and we found ourselves in what was really a great under- ground city, where literally thousands of men live. It is almost unbelievable the work that has been expended in building these trenches. Even in the little wood, Bois-le- Pretre, there are miles and miles and miles of them, with underground rooms for every sort of purpose — little sleep- ing-rooms, little dining-rooms, storehouses for ammunition of every sort. In the various caverns used as officers' head- quarters were always tables and chairs, pictures on the walls, which were often covered with oilcloth, always tele- phones, and not infrequently electric lights. The officers whom we met along the way all gave us a warm-hearted welcome. They generally had something to say about Lafayette and Washington and the fraternal rela- tions of France and America in the past. One delightful colonel (Colonel Rollet) made us sit down in his underground cavern, and ordered a bottle of good moselle and some cakes and drank a health to the United States, and I in turn told them that we could never forget that we owed to France our very existence as an entity, and I drank to the future France, greater and more glorious than ever, and to an early victory. They made us put on some loose, wrapper-like coats of a yellow-green, so that we should not be so visible to a chance aviator, and then we went on and on past groups of soldiers eating their rations in little caverns, past heaps of shells, past little mortars, past piles of hand grenades. Every now and then I poked my head out and looked at the forest, and never could I have believed that human beings could so devastate the face of nature. Literally for miles not a tree remains standing. Even the underbrush has been shot away. Only torn stumps of trees and branchless trunks re- main, as if a cyclone had swept over the region. It had been a cyclone — but a cyclone of shells and balls intended not to mutilate nature, but to kill men. I must confess to a little surprise at the sight of hand grenades. Could it be that they get so close to the enemy that they could throw things at them ? Of course, I knew that they had to make charges from one trench to another, and that then they used the bayonet, — but could they really throw things from one trench to another without leaving the trench? The captain laughed when I asked the question, and pointed to some guns eaten by acid that had been thrown across by the Germans the night before. Pres- ently we turned a corner into a ditch which bore the sign, "Toward the first line." The soldiers were getting thicker and thicker, and just ahead I could see a line of them with their rifles poked through holes in a wall of sandbags and all with their eyes glued to peekholes between these bags. The captain beckoned to me not to speak, but to take a look through one of the holes. Not more than sixty feet away was another row of sandbags. And behind those bags was the German firing line! Remembering how General Manoury had lost an eye a month ago when engaged in a similar occupation, a few brief glimpses sufficed for me. But we followed along this line for about a block. It was the line of brave boys who guard their country and many of whom doubtless will give their lives for that dear country — a line extending almost continuously for more than four hundred and fifty miles from the Channel to Switzerland. It was a picture I shall always remember — these hundreds of French lads silently standing and "watchfully waiting" within fifty to a hundred feet of the German firing line. [102] Yet they seemed smiling and content. They have their little jokes. At one point where the passage was narrow a wooden sign bore the words, "Passage of the Dardanelles" — and that trench led into another marked by the words, "Street of the Eunuchs." Over some of the little dugouts were the names of soldiers' wives or sweethearts, as "Villa Bertha," "Villa Marie," — or as if it were a little inn, "To the gay return from the trenches." Another was playfully labelled, "Palace of the seven virtues." One of the officers' shelters that I visited, which consisted of two comfortable rooms underground, was called the "Cave of Alibaba." The Germans who at one time occupied this part of the wood called it more lugubriously, though perhaps more accurately, "the witches' cauldron" {Hexenkessel) or "the Widow's wood" {Witwenwald). We spent perhaps two hours in the trenches in the de- vastated wood, and then came out again where we had entered, into the unspoiled wood. A cuckoo was singing as we came out, and other smaller birds. The contrast seemed strange between human savagery and the tranquillity of nature. The general had asked us to lunch with him and we arrived about noon at his chateau in the midst of peaceful, sunny gardens. General Riberpray had about a dozen fine- looking officers at his table, colonels, captains, lieutenants, and all grades down to sergeants, but they all treated each other like comrades of the same rank, and no one mentioned war. They discussed books and plays and history and there was a great deal of playful badinage, and you would never have believed that these were men spending their lives in the harsh work of war. It was a rule, they said, never to mention war at table. The old general placed me at his right, and toward the end of lunch our glasses were filled with champagne and he rose and lifted his glass with the kind of graceful tribute to the United States that came from and went right to the heart, such a speech as only a Frenchman can make. Then we walked out into the garden and had coffee under the trees, and who would have dreamed that France was at war! Two of the younger officers begged me to stay over. They wanted to show me Metz! So in the afternoon we went for a long walk to the top of a ridge called the Cote de Mousson, from which we could see the spires of the cathedral in Metz, which a year from now, God willing, will once more belong to France. On the way we passed through a cemetery, which had been subjected by the Germans to heavy bombardment. It was a pitiful sight, with scarcely a monument left intact, with vaults and graves torn open by shells, and coffins and bones exposed. Even the dead can't be left to rest in peace in these tumultuous times. Last evening we motored over to this charming little city of Nancy, and I have spent the night in a comfortable hotel with an electric light by my bed and a silk comforter to keep me warm. Only yesterday the German aviators dropped bombs about the beautiful Place Stanislaus, one of the best architectural groups in Europe, evidently trying to destroy here, as they have elsewhere, the precious monuments which France has inherited from her glorious past. They did not achieve their purpose, however, the bombs having dropped in the open square without damaging any of the buildings, though killing two women and a child. Such an achievement doubtless brings some satisfaction to the friends of " Deutsche Kultur," but how lacking in perception are those respon- sible for this kind of unchivalrous warfare ! They think they can terrify the French people into seeking peace by de- stroying their glorious churches and public buildings, and the treasures of their wonderful past — and by killing their women and children. It is poor psychology, that! Every church and architectural gem wantonly destroyed and every woman and child killed in an uninvested city only arouses new determination to push the war to its uttermost end, and to crush beyond recovery for generations a nation which has made itself a menace to civilization and a scourge to the human race. I have talked with French people of all classes from all parts of the country. They have no thought of yielding, whatever the cost, until the victory is complete. They expect the war to be long and costly, but as God reigns and right is right, they are certain as to the eventual out- come. St. Maurice-sur-Moselle, April 29, 191 5. This has been a day of surprises. We left Nancy at about 8.30 under a warm summer sun and ended the day wading through snow-drifts two feet deep in the Vosges. We began with glimpses of as beautiful architecture as I have ever seen, and the day closed for us with a sunset scene from the mountain-top. Nancy is a charming little city, with beautiful fountains and parks and open squares surrounded by buildings of wonderful proportions and har- mony. No wonder the Kaiser longed to make a triumphal entry into it with his picked regiments in parade uniform, and as he was denied that privilege, what more natural, for a man of German " Kultur," than to endeavor to destroy it. About eight miles out of Nancy we saw the immense back of a cathedral with two unusual, semi-Oriental spires arising out of the approaching town. It was St. Nicholas-du-Port, and I am ashamed to say that I had never even heard of it before. The church is immense and very unusual in design and ornamentation and very beautiful. We lost half an hour looking at it, and I bought several books about it which I hope to read if ever I can catch up with myself. In the mean- OS] time, I lift my hat to Lorraine and the marvellous archi- tecture of its past, and I pray the " Bon Dieu," as the little concierge in the cathedral said she did every day, to help keep the Prussians away and spare these glorious monu- ments from their savagery. So good-bye to St. Nicholas-du-Port ; and on and on we go between the eternal lines of flowering trees which border and perfume every French road in the springtime ; past fields smiling with spring verdure, dotted everywhere with wooden crosses marking soldiers' graves, — for we are now entering the region where the Germans were in the beginning of the war. At Luneville the walls are pitted with the traces of balls and shrapnel, and as we go into the heart of the city we find streets and streets obliterated by the German torch. " Burned without reason," a French officer, whom we inter- viewed, asserted, but this is nothing compared with the cruel devastation we are going to see in the next towns. At Gerbeviller, about twelve miles farther on, where last spring some two thousand people lived in peace and comfort, not a single house remains. They were not frame houses like those in an American town, which might easily catch fire one from another; they were stone buildings, and they were deliberately set fire to, one after another, by these modern Huns and Vandals. I do not believe that there are twenty-five people left in the town. We saw a few old women and a few children wandering around among the ruins ; the two churches, the chateau on the edge of the town, hundreds of homes and little shops — everything in ruins. The next town we came to was Magniers, and this like- wise was a ruin, except for one or two buildings. I stopped to take a photograph when an officer stepped out of one of the few remaining houses, and, seeing that I was an American, invited us to lunch with him and his staff. We had a good lunch, with good and entertaining talk, and another warm- [106] hearted toast to the great sister republic across the seas, and nearly two hours had passed before we were once more on our way. I shall long remember the warm hospitality of Colonel Danglade, of the Third Hussars. Then about forty miles farther, and we reached St. Maurice-sur-Moselle, where our first section is located, the one that is working in Alsace. Just as we were coming into the town I saw Charley Codman and Paul Watson, two Harvard boys who are with this section. They were just starting to climb the neighboring mountain, Ballon d'Alsace, to see the sunset and begged me to come along; so, without waiting to see the others, or realizing the task that lay ahead, I took off my coat, rolled up my sleeves, and we set off on a long, hard climb. The latter part was over melting snow and rather difficult, but we reached the summit just before the sun had disappeared beyond a great panorama of mountain ranges. At the top of the mountain some one has erected an equestrian figure of Jeanne d 'Arc. The night had well closed in before we got back, and we had to pick our way carefully down the trails through the pine woods. In the little inn where the section has its meals, we found Dick Lawrence and Dallas McGrew and Lovering Hill and the other fellows, and we talked over their needs and prob- lems and swapped news of the war until bedtime. Hartmannsweilerkopf had been retaken by the Germans a week before and retaken by the French two nights ago with many losses and many wounded on both occasions, and our boys have been very busy. This is all I can write now. Neuilly-sur-Seine, May I, 1915. Yesterday morning we started out early from St. Maurice and motored across the pass and drove down into the valley of Alsace, now verdant and fragrant with the spring. The streets of the picturesque little Alsatian towns were thronged with the sturdy " chasseurs alpins " who have been doing such splendid fighting in the mountains roundabout, and on whom still heavier tasks are still to fall. We went as far as Thann, which is pretty badly mutilated by the shells that drop on it every day, and there the sentinels told us it would be dangerous to try to go farther. I bought some dolls dressed in Alsatian clothes for Helen and Polly in a little shop in Thann, and I sent a number of postals which the girl clerk took over to the mayor's office and had stamped with the old German and the new French seals. Let me know if you ever receive them. 1 The trip has been a hard one. Yesterday we motored until midnight, — considerably over three hundred miles in one day, — and we reached Paris about noon to-day. Our boys in Dunkirk, it appears, have had a good deal of excitement this week. They have been working night and day in Belgium in the great battle around Ypres in which the Germans have been using asphyxiating gases, and on Wednesday and Thursday shells began dropping, without warning or any indication of their origin, upon Dunkirk itself. One of the fellows lost his nerve and returned to Neuilly to tell the story. They think now that these shells were fired by German guns located about twenty miles away. The Germans get their range by the aid of the avia- tors, and about thirty shells were dropped in the heart of the town, killing a good many civilians, women, and children. [108] XXXVI May 8, ipi 5. Dear Mother and Father: I simply cannot write how I feel about the sinking of the Lusitania. I know that you must feel the same way. Words cannot characterize this latest of a long series of loathsome acts which for all Christendom and for generations must make the name "German" a term of odium and reproach. But words are insufficient. The German government seems indifferent to the contempt and indignation of the rest of the world. It must be forced to conform to the primitive dictates of civilization, if civilization is to endure. I hope with all that is in me that our country will join with the rest of the civilized world in vigorous action against the gov- ernment that has now added to its hideous record of crimes against other peoples the ruthless and wanton massacre of so many of our own fellow citizens. We who are rich and strong and safe must do our share in saving the future from a return to the Dark Ages, which the triumph of the Germano-Turkish powers would mean. I can't remember whether I sent you copies of these pho- tographs or not. I took them a month ago in Nieuport, La Panne, and Ypres or along the communicating roads. Since that time what remained of the picturesque old city of Ypres has probably been destroyed. In the picture of the Drapers' Hall which I took, you will see that the roof and windows were all gone and the walls shattered beyond repair. Since then the fighting has been terrific around Ypres, and this fine old structure is doubtless even more a ruin now than it was then. Our boys in Dunkirk have worked night and day during this fighting and have been constantly under shell fire, but luckily none of them has been even scratched. I have just received a fine tribute to their courage from General Putz, a copy of which I enclose. I can't help feeling a little regretful not to have been able to be with my old section during these great days. Tuesday, the nth, I start east again on another inspection trip. DETACHEMENT D'ARMEE Au QG. le 5 Mai, 1915. de BELGIQUE Etat-Major Le General Putz Commandant le detachement d'Armee de Belgique Ier Bureau — a Monsieur Andrew, Inspecteur du Service des Ambulances de l'Hopital Americain. Monsieur, — Mon attention a ete appelee sur les precieux services rendus au Detachement d'Armee de Belgique par la Section Sanitaire Automobile Americaine qui lui est attachee. Cette Section a du, en effet, concurremment avec la Section Anglaise, assurer l'evacuation d'Elverdinghe sur Poperinghe des nombreux militaires blesses au cours des recents combats. Malgre le bombardement d'Elverdinghe, des routes qui y accedent, et de l'Ambulance meme, cette evacuation s'est effectuee nuit et jour, sans interruption, et dans d'excellentes conditions de promptitude et de regularite. Je ne saurais trop louer le courage et le devouement dont a fait preuve le personnel de la Section, et je vous serais oblige de vouloir bien lui transmettre mes felicitations et mes remercie- ments pour l'effort physique considerable qu'il a si genereuse- ment consenti, et les signales services qu'il a rendus. Veuillez agreer, Monsieur, l'expression de ma consideration tres distinguee. (Signe) Putz. XXXVII Letter published in the Boston Herald, Thursday, June 3, igis OUT OF THE DEPTHS On the stationery of the American Ambulance of Paris, Mr. A. Piatt Andrew of East Gloucester, widely known in connection with the currency reform campaign, and later as an opponent of Captain Augustus P. Gardner for the congressional nomina- tion last fall, writes a letter to which we give prominence in another column. In an accompanying note, he says that he could not help writing it, that it expresses what he "feels in the very depths." Such a letter from an earnest and high- minded man deserves careful reading. We commend Dr. Andrew's letter, in spite of our strong disinclination to inflame public feeling at this particular time, when the President's course in steering the ship of state can be none too easy. We have deemed it a duty to urge on our readers some degree of calmness and patience, even though we have never been willing to say any word which would be interpreted as palliative of Germany's offence in the destruction of the Lusitania, or as an indicative of any lack of support of President Wilson in whatever course he may take to maintain the rights of neutrals on the seas. FROM AN AMERICAN ON THE BATTLE-LINES To the Editor of the Herald: We Americans of to-day are onlookers upon one of the greatest struggles in the world's history, and a struggle as clear and crucial in its issue for the future of the earth on which we live as any since history began. We observe a mediaeval monarchy in which the people have practically no share in the government, whose representatives respect no right except that of might, who regard no pledge or promise which interferes with their interest as binding, and who sanction the most hideous and inhuman brutalities, attempt- ing to impose itself upon peaceful and unoffending countries. C"0 We have sat silently by while clause after clause of treaties, of which we, too, were signatories, were treated as scrap- paper. We have sat silently by while an utterly unoffending nation was devastated, its towns and cities and peaceful farms pillaged and burned, its universities and libraries and churches destroyed. We have sat silently by while 7,000,000 people of this innocent nation were driven from their homes. We have sat silently by while the mediaeval monarchy ground monstrous tributes from those who were left. We have sat silently by while officers of this mediaeval monarchy allowed their cohorts, drunk with stolen wine, to rape and murder and commit crimes of cannibals and beasts. We have sat silently by while the hordes of this mediaeval monarchy swept on through a sister republic, burning every- thing before them, farmhouses, villages, towns, and cities, leaving in their trail scores and scores of cities, and scores of thousands of homes, transformed into chimneys and ashes like Messina or San Francisco after nature's cruel upheavals. We have sat silently by while the world's most wonderful architectural heritages were deliberately and persistently destroyed by incendiary bombs and torches. We have sat silently by while women and children in sleeping towns and villages, uninvested and unfortified and far removed from the contending armies, were assassinated without warning by representatives of this mediaeval monarchy. We have sat silently by while other representatives of this mediaeval monarchy sent unoffending fishermen and sailors and crews of neutral merchantmen, without warning, to the bottom of the sea. We have sat silently by while the best that civiliza- tion has accumulated in international laws and treaties and humane customs during a thousand years were swept away by a species of hereditary and undemocratic government that our ancestors more than a century ago contended against through seven years of desperate war. We have sat as silent, unmoved witnesses while such a government ruth- lessly pursued its course and turned civilization back into the "Kultur" of the eleventh century. We have expressed no opinion, have taken no side, our President has exhorted us to remain neutral and indifferent as to what might prevail. As representatives of a great de- mocracy we have voiced no protests, we have offered no help, we have not even expressed sympathy with that great peace-loving sister democracy whose ancestors fought with us and for us during our seven years' struggle for existence, who spent for us thousands and thousands of lives and hun- dreds of millions of dollars, and to whom we owe our very entity and independence. Not only that, but in the face of all the hideous and revolting facts of the past ten months which are known to every one, our President, after the sink- ing of the Lusitania, publicly and officially proclaimed "the humane and enlightened attitude hitherto assumed by the Imperial German Government in matters of international right" and "the German views and the German influence in the field of international obligations as always engaged upon the side of justice and humanity." We have behaved as if our souls were dead and the ideals of the founders of our government were extinct. We have behaved like a soft-bodied man, who, seeing a ruffian beat- ing and kicking and spitting in the face of a woman on the street, looks on for hours with indifference, says that is not his business, shows no resentment until a misdirected blow accidentally strikes him in a tender spot, and then explains his previous inaction on the ground that he had not hitherto observed that the ruffian was not "humane," "enlightened," and "engaged on the side of justice." Is America no longer a country of ideals beyond success in business and the accumulation of material wealth and comfort? Is America no longer capable of making sacrifice except to mammon? Is the generous spirit which animated the founders of our government, and which a century and more ago inspired the admiration of the world, extinct ? Do we no longer stand for anything except big railroads, great steel plants, kerosene, beef, wheat, and cotton ? As a nation do we represent nothing which makes us worthy of an endur- ing future? Are we headed on the road to Carthage and Rome? A. Piatt Andrew. Paris, May 19, 191 5. XXXVIII Neuilly-sur-Seine, May 21, 191$. Dear Mother and Father: Week follows week now with great speed, and I am so busy and there is so much that is worth doing and must be done that there is no time left to write. Last week I went up again to the east, taking with me Dr. du Bouchet, a delightful companion, the head surgeon of the hospital. Summer is really here and the landscape has changed much since my early trips. The trees along the valley of the Marne, which we generally follow on our trips east, are now in full verdure and the branches and trunks torn by shells are not as evident as they were. The little wooden crosses in the fields marking soldiers' graves are often concealed by grass and the coming crops. The pencil inscriptions on the boards, telling that such and such a number fell here on "the field of honor," are disappearing also. At Pont-a-Mousson, where we spent the first night, I could hear the shells whistling overhead all night long, our shells and theirs, but none struck in the town. The German trenches are only about half a mile away, but for some reason the Germans prefer to send their shells on beyond to towns four or five miles distant. Perhaps they hope sometime to occupy Pont-a-Mousson and are keeping it for expected future use. At any rate, they only drop in two or three shells in the course of every twenty-four hours and let it go at that. I went up again into the Bois-le-Pretre, in which "our" army has now practically taken possession of all the trenches clear through to the other side. They are fighting there every night, but the men seem cheerful and gay, and as we went up the slope of the hill we passed hundreds coming back from the trenches with their helmets and sacks covered with bouquets of lilies-of-the-valley, and other wild flowers, picked in the wood. I lunched at Colonel Etienne's head- quarters with a crowd of officers, all of whom were lavish in their tributes to the work of our men, and then we pushed on again through beautiful landscapes to Nancy, past the picturesque old cathedral town of St. Nicholas-du-Port, and then through the devastated towns and cities of Lorraine, spending the night in Remiremont. All through this region the figures of Jeanne d 'Arc were wreathed with flowers and draped with flags, as it was near the date of her anniversary and Lorraine was her birthplace. Next day, Thursday, the 13th, we ran down to Alsace and to Thann, passing many pretty processions of boys and girls dressed in white, preparing for their first communion, usually accompanied by their mothers and priests carrying decorated candles and brilliant banners. On the way back we passed through Sermaize, Pargny, Etrepy, and several other towns that were destroyed by the Germans on their barbarous invasion last September. They are sad beyond words, nothing but chimneys as far as you can see. In Sermaize I saw the ruins of a beautiful church bearing over the door the date 1083, which had been de- liberately burned by the Germans. In the ruins of this roof- less church stood a figure of Jeanne d'Arc, her flag shot from her hands, which still grasped the staff. The figure was almost miraculously devoid of scratches, and about its base French soldiers had placed several empty German shell cases filled with fresh flowers. At Nancy I bought two dolls for Helen and Polly, dressed in the old costumes of Lorraine, and in Thann, where shells are crashing in every day, I recently bought two dolls deco- rated by a local milliner in the picturesque black coiffure C"*3 and gay dress of Alsace. I will send them in a day or two. Tell the children to keep them always because of the time and place from which they come, Nancy and Thann, in Lorraine and Alsace, in May of the year of the great war, 1915. In Bois-le-Pretre, I picked up a German cap. Perhaps the soldier who wore it was buried among the neighboring trees, perhaps he is a prisoner. I am sending it to you to keep for me. Please place it over BemstorfFs picture in my library, covering his face. I am leaving this morning for Dunkirk in the north for a couple of days to see our boys, who must have had much to do these last weeks in the terrible fighting around Ypres. We have twenty ambulances up there now, and most of them are stationed near Poperinghe in the thick of it all. They tell me the Canadians fought like heroes night after night and day after day with bayonets and swords and knives in hand-to-hand contests. How many unnamed heroes there are of whom history will never know what they did ! Things are going well now everywhere. Italy is presently coming in. Roumania, we hope, will follow. I feel it more deeply than I have ever felt anything that my country, great and powerful as she is, and supposedly interested in the survival of justice and right, should have remained an unmoved onlooker in the great struggle. There never was a clearer issue between right and wrong. Never in our life- time, or in our country's history, has there been an issue so momentous, or one in which, considering our history and past ideals, we ought to have been so much concerned, but . . . what can we hope for? How can our country be ex- pected to recognize its obligations or its opportunities, with its President, according to report, absorbed in flirtations, and Bryan, of the vacuous mind, in charge of our foreign affairs ? XXXIX Hotel Chapeau Rouge, Dunkirk, Friday, May 21, 1915. Dear Mother and Father: It was a beautiful drive from Paris to-day, about two hundred miles through a landscape that has become much embellished since last I saw it, a month or so ago. Every- thing is rampantly green, except the flowering white and purple wistaria which hangs over doorways, and the high white stuccoed walls and the red-tiled roofs of the villages. I have worked hard these last days, and was glad to slip into a comfortable position in the motor and watch the world roll by, and dream. France is too gentle, too peaceful, too civilized, too beautiful to be at war. This I kept thinking as we swept on. We made the trip without incident, stopping for lunch at Beauvais, where a month ago our boys, who are now so busy at Pont-a-Mousson, were fretting day after day in comparative idleness. When I saw them last week up there, all of the other ambulances had been called back and they alone were performing the service of transporting the wounded for the region centring around Pont-a-Mousson and Bois-le-Pretre, and the work was so arduous, extensive, and important that we sent them another ten machines this week. Beauvais no longer has any particular interest for me except for a single French official, Captain Neumoger, whose office is there and whom it is a pleasant duty from time to time to see. At Montreuil we passed through the usual crowds of khaki-uniformed "Tommies." In Boulogne we passed many picturesque Hindus, now dressed in khaki-colored turbans and khaki coats and breeches, — a curious uniform, half C"83 British and half Oriental. Some of their officers looked quite magnificent, great tall fellows with large khaki turbans and smart English walking-coats, and carrying canes like swank- ing British officers. Near Calais, where we ran again into the Belgian sector, a young Belgian soldier asked us to give him a lift, which we are always glad to do for any soldier, but especially a Belgian. He was an attractive-looking young fellow about twenty-one, and he told us that his home was in Antwerp and that his mother lived there still, but not a word had he been able to hear from her since the German invasion of last August. " I have just got back my hundred and third letter," he said. He had sent the letters by way of England, but they had been returned a hundred and three times without reaching Belgium. So I told him to give me a letter to his mother and I would try and get it through by means of our Embassy. i Dunkirk we reached just before dark, in time to see its desolate streets, most of its windows broken or boarded over, most stores and restaurants closed, most houses abandoned, and here and there groups of houses in ruins. We found our hotel open, and here I found my old friend, the Comtesse Benoist d 'Azy, who has remained through all the bombard- ments and still goes every day to the railway-station hospital, although the station has been the particular goal of the German shells. We had a good talk, and to-morrow I shall look up our men who have moved out into the suburbs. Good-night. Saturday, May 22, Dunkirk. Friday night we spent quietly enough in the hotel at Dunkirk. There were no shells, and in fact none had dropped in the town for a week. We heard many stories, however, of the recent bombardments. It seems incredible but the shells, which without warning began to drop in Dunkirk about a month ago and of which more than a hundred have Z"9l fallen in the intervening time, came from about thirty-six kilometres — more than twenty-two miles — away. They are as tall as a man, and even the steel cap, of which Colonel Morier showed me several, was so heavy that I could not lift it. Think of it, a projectile six feet high, and weighing at least a ton and a half, thrown twenty-two miles! The explosion of one of these projectiles is enough to destroy utterly two or three store buildings and contiguous houses. One heard no anticipatory sound, one could not hear the report of the departure of the shell twenty-two miles away, and since, when the shell reached its goal, its force was spent, there was not even a whir or a whistle ; but suddenly, out of the clear and silent sky, came a vast explosion, and houses and stores fell in and dust and smoke and fragments of stone and timber mounted into the air as in a volcanic eruption. People and wagons on the street were blown to atoms. One shell struck in the cemetery as an interment was taking place, and the coffin and nine or ten mourners, mostly women and children, were transformed into debris in the twinkling of an eye. Another struck on the street near the convent where we used to be billeted, and killed a group of children at play; nobody knew exactly how many, the fragments were so scattered. Little wonder that the people have deserted Dunkirk, and that the streets, which a month ago were gay with the uniforms of several nations, are now deserted and silent, and its homes tenantless. Our section of ambulances is divided now into two squads of ten each. Half the men and machines remain in Dunkirk doing the same good work as formerly at the station, in which however only one train now arrives per day. The men live in a comfortable villa at Malo, a summer resort suburb of Dunkirk on the shore. The other half are stationed at Poperinghe, in Belgium, not far from Ypres, and we shall run down there and see them to-day. C 120.3 Neuilly-sur-Seine, Sunday night, May 23. Poperinghe is a Flemish town, perhaps twenty or twenty- five miles from Dunkirk, and the roads leading to it are thronged with convoys and soldiers, so we had to run slowly, but we ran through a pretty country, with great windmills and little thatched-roofed cottages, surrounded by bright- colored gardens and highly cultivated farms. On the way we passed a procession of a hundred or more German prisoners, and with the permission of the French cuirassier who rode at their head, I took several photo- graphs of them as they trudged by. The cuirassier was more than pleased to be snapped in such surroundings, and wheeled his horse into the foreground so as almost to obscure the prisoners. Poperinghe is chock-a-block with soldiers, English and French. It is about three or four miles from Ypres and six or seven miles from the famous Yser Canal, about which Germany and the Allies have been fighting continuously and furiously for so many weeks. Our boys are stationed in a farmyard near the town. Some of them sleep on stretchers in a little room in the farm- house, others sleep in the straw in the loft of the barn. They take their meals in the brick-floored kitchen-living-room of the little farmhouse, surrounded by dirty babies, a dog, several hens, and a goat — an environment which suggests the pictures of Teniers and some of the Flemish painters of long ago. My old ambulance was here, and Campbell, who used to be my orderly, but who drives it now, insisted that I must drive it again, so just before dark we started out with me at the wheel. Practically all their work now is night work. They go pretty near to the front and would be exposed in the daytime to rifle fire as well as to the cannon fire of the enemy. We stopped at Elverdinghe, where our section was stationed a few weeks ago, but which has been torn by shells into crumbling ruins. Then, as darkness descended, we went on to the dressing- stations on the edge of the Yser Canal, — first to Zuydcote and then to Boesinghe. We had to crawl over the road without any lights, even oil lamps, and one has to watch carefully for the dark spots on the road, which are shell- holes, usually three or four feet deep, and at unexpected intervals and which would capsize your machine if you hap- pened to run into one. As we got closer to the Canal and the line, the din of the guns became greater and greater. It goes on incessantly day and night, and one gets so accustomed to it as not to notice it from a distance, where it sounds like the rumble of thunder, but as we approached, it grew louder and louder, with boom! crash! boom! It seemed like the night of the Fourth of July; cannon firecrackers seemed to be exploding everywhere, with packages of little crackers sputtering at intervals (the crackle of musketry). You were startled every now and then by a terrific explosion right near at hand, and were relieved to know that it was only a "departure" from one of our own concealed batteries. But perhaps a few seconds later you heard the whistling whir of a German shell as it passed on over your head to its destination, a mile or two back. Meanwhile, as far as you could see along the line of the trenches the sky was bright with rockets. In order to keep the enemy from charging across under cover of darkness, each side continuously sends up rockets which drop brilliant lights in the sky hung from small parachutes. They last for a minute or so and illumine the landscape with intense white light. I wish I could convey to you my impression of that scene — the dark night, the sky flashing with explosions of shrapnel, the line of rockets and glowing stars, the roar and din of the cannon incessant as the noise of a factory, every now and then a thick crackle of small arms, probably meaning that some one had been caught crawling out of his trench, or that a company was attempt- ing an attack. In the midst of it all, there were several claps of real thunder, but God's thunder was nothing as compared to man's. Eventually we reached the dressing-station, a Flemish farmhouse, whose interior was lighted by a single candle, and here were two men badly wounded, lying in the straw on the floor. We carried them out to our ambulance and then threaded our way back through the dark, shell-torn road to the tent hospital in Woesten, which is a halfway post, a " relai d'ambulance," on the route to the base hospital, where the more seriously wounded can be treated at once. We took our men into the tent, and as one of them had been shot in the breast he was immediately put on the table. It is the same story that has happened hundreds of thousands of times in the last ten months and I won't harrow you with the details. The poor boy had already lost much blood, and before morning he had doubtless given his life for his country, dying without a friend or acquaintance near, lying on the ground in a dimly lighted tent in Belgium. We made other trips during the night to other "postes de secours," and at about two o'clock I got back to the farm near Poperinghe and crawled up in the barn loft and went to sleep in the sweet-smelling hay. Neuilly-sur-Seine, Wednesday, May 25. I am afraid you can't read these scrawls. I carry them about in my pocket and scribble as I get time. A letter has just come from you dated as late as May 14. I enjoyed the clippings about Roosevelt's libel suit and the Riggs Bank suit and the editorials from Western papers C I2 33 about the Lusitania massacre. One gets very little news in the European papers about American domestic matters. Roosevelt's trouble and the Riggs Bank troubles do not bulk very large to the people over here, as compared with their own troubles, so I am only able to keep au courant with things at home through what you send. We have a new ally in Italy, and the Italian flag has been added everywhere to the groups of allied flags displayed on the fronts of buildings in Paris. We should all be proud and happy to see our Stars and Stripes along with the rest. It seems craven and ignoble that we are not lending our little aid in this great struggle. "'T is man's perdition to be safe When for the truth he ought to die." Yesterday I came across this hideous bit of travesty: — "Too proud to fight, to right a wrong, Too wise to talk with wisdom, too mighty to be strong, Fail Columbia!" How can one be really happy here in the midst of such unflinching sacrifice and courage, realizing that through the weakness of a few men America has become vulnerable to such thrusts as this? I have read Church's "American Verdict on the War" which you sent and regard it as a powerful document. Would that every intelligent German could have a copy of it. They apparently know so little about the crimes their gov- ernment has committed and about the verdict of the rest of the world upon them. A letter came the other day from President Eliot, commenting sympathetically upon my lit- tle screed in the "Boston Herald" about France's part in the war. I also received the enclosed very kind commentary from my old friend, Ambassador Jusserand: — Ambassade de la Republique Franqaise aux fctats-Unis, Washington, le io Mai, 1915. My dear Mr. Andrew: Your charming and most interesting letter arrived yesterday, and must have crossed at mid-ocean one which I had written to you and which has gone to the bottom with the last victim of German barbarity, the unfortunate Lusitania. I expressed in it the great interest and feeling of gratitude with which I had read your note printed in the "Boston Herald" on April 28. It was very cheering to read your favor- able account of the stubborn defense we are making, and, thank Heaven! a little more than defense nowadays. I hope that the movement forward will soon be continued. The deeds of the "kultured" people ought to give to all liberal-minded men, and such are all our soldiers, a new impetus in their desire to wipe off the face of the earth not their nation, but their system. Don't think that such snapshots as you sent us were less interesting for us than for the tall, thin, handsome man who appears in them, and in whom I recognize with glee my former tennis partner, under what he calls the " ancien regime." These little bits of landscape which appear in them seem to us lovable. We wish it were possible for us to kiss the trees, the plants, the stones on the road. A pity you were not sent sooner and were not present in what must have been a very memorable occasion when, in the former sousprefecture of Thann, French rule was established again, a tribunal was instituted, and, for the first time after almost half a century, the sitting was inaugurated with these solemn words: "Au nom du peuple francais." I cannot tell you how deeply grateful we are, with all our compatriots, for what Americans are doing, for their sympathy, their warm-heartedness, their help of every kind. May good luck attend you and all you undertake, and please tell all the Americans with whom you may be in contact what our feel- ing is and what an important thing they are doing in sealing again and in rejuvenating, so that it may live forever, the old friendship that was established in the days of the War of Independence. Believe me, my dear Mr. Andrew, with warm sympathy and gratitude, Very truly yours, Jusserand. XL Neuilly, June I, igi 5. Dear Mother and Father: I have spent a busy week here in Paris, mostly at my desk, and there is not as much as usual of interest to write about. Still, every day yields stirring impressions that I should like to record, if only time could be found. The experience that stands out clearest in my memory is the ceremony in the Sorbonne of last Saturday afternoon, when the great men of France, in the amphitheatre of the University, gave expres- sion to their gratitude to the people of the United States for what we have done for them during the war. The Presi- dent of the Republic was there, several members of the Cabinet, and a great many members of the Academy, writers and artists were gathered on the stage. A large French chorus had been trained to sing our American songs, and the ceremony opened, when, upon the arrival of the President and our Ambassador, the chorus rose and sang the "Star-Spangled Banner " and then the "Marseillaise." As always in France, everything was arranged with excellent taste. There were no uniformed soldiers, for this was a cere- mony of peace, having only to do with the peaceful services which a neutral country has been rendering. The great writers and artists of France had contributed two immense albums of tributes in verse and prose and paintings and drawings expressive of the homage of the French people to America, a form of voicing appreciation of which only Frenchmen would have dreamed. Gabriel Hanotaux, one of the most brilliant writers and historians, gave a brief, elo- quent, and heartfelt address which could not but bring a response from the heart of every Frenchman and American in the audience. I126I It was all beautifully and simply arranged, and yet it was one of the most humiliating and disappointing experiences I have ever had, for at the end of M. Hanotaux's carefully prepared address, the Ambassador of the United States had to respond, and accept on behalf of the American people the tributes which had been paid. Probably never since the time of Franklin has the American representative in France had such an opportunity to participate in as memorable an occa- sion or in so distinguished an assemblage. Certainly never in his life will the gentleman from Ohio have such a chance to utter one or two phrases that might be historic, and that would reverberate over the world. But alas! irrelevant and uninspired ideas were never expressed in more commonplace English, never have I heard a more rambling, long-winded, ill-prepared address. Here in France, in this prodigious period, in this touching setting, in the presence of most of the dis- tinguished men in France, he rambled on for three-quarters of an hour, as if he had been caught unprepared, even making jokes, — poor ones at that, — talking very much as he might at a Methodist Church "sociable" in Elyria, if his wife had been unexpectedly presented with a "kitchen shower." I doubt whether there was an American present, except per- haps the little wife, who did not want to hide his head for shame. It was not that one expected him to express the hope that France would win, or anything else that was unneutral, but one did expect him to use correct English and to speak with dignity, good taste, sympathy, and feeling. There were only two consoling thoughts. Very few of the audience could understand English, and knew how second-rate it all was — and the other very slightly consoling thought was that he did not really represent the United States, but the minority of American people, who, because of the contest between Taft and Roosevelt, happen to be in power. One felt this last consolation the more when on various occasions [127] in his speech, Mr. Sharp alluded with characteristic campaign stump-speech drawl to that "gra-a-a-te Amurican statesman, and Secretary of State, William Jennings Bryan." I am off to-day again for the East. P.S. I telegraphed you yesterday that I have received your letters regularly. I get five or six a week and also many clippings, all of which bring great pleasure, even if I do not acknowledge them. XLI American Ambulance Hospital, Neuilly-sur-Seine, June 5, IQ15. Dear : From one or two letters that I have recently received it would appear that some disgruntled ex-member of our service has disseminated the notion that outside of Paris the American Ambulance has not been doing very serious work. It seems even to have been implied that the General Staff of the French army was not inclined to entrust to our sections service actually at the front. To one who knows the real situation, this is surprising and disappointing, because utterly contrary to the facts. The real facts, which you and the others in America who are working for the Ambulance should know, are these : that every one of our field sections, without exception, is working as far forward as the most advanced French sections con- ducted by enlisted soldiers, and that some of our sections because of the peculiar availability of our cars, and the un- usual devotion and courage of our men, are working nearer the actual battle-line than even the French cars. All this is attested by numerous letters from French generals and other officials, as, for instance, General Putz and General Le Boc, and by the request which has been made by the General Staff that we provide additional sections of twenty cars each, as rapidly as we can. It may be of interest to you to know somewhat more specifically the character of the work being done by some of our field sections. The section in the north, which, for con- venience, we have called the Dunkirk section, is now divided into two parts with ten ambulances in each. One part is sta- [129] tioned at the railway station in Dunkirk, where it serves the evacuation hospital, located in the freight house. Our men carry wounded from this evacuation hospital to more than a score of hospitals in Dunkirk, Malo, Bergues, Bour- bourg, Gravelines, Zuydcote and other towns, and they also bring back the convalescents from these hospitals to the trains which carry them to hospitals and resting-places in the interior of France. As you know, Dunkirk has been bombarded by the heaviest artillery during the last month. Shells as tall as a man and seventeen inches in diameter have dropped into Dunkirk from batteries located thirty-eight kilometres distant. They dropped without any preliminary warning and their explosion utterly annihilates everything within range. During these bombardments our men have rendered great service in picking up the killed and wounded on the streets. Fortunately, none of our men or machines have suffered any injury, but this work has been carried on in the midst of very real danger. The other part of our northern section is stationed at Poperinghe, where the men live and eat in a little Flemish farmhouse just outside the town. Some of the men sleep in the straw in a barn loft and the rest sleep on stretchers in a small room in which all the men also eat. One man goes back with a machine each day to Dunkirk, and is replaced by a man from Dunkirk, who brings out another machine with meat already cooked and other supplies. Thus the per- sonnel changes every ten days, and the men who have been working about Poperinghe are able to live more comfortably for ten days at Malo, a seaside resort near Dunkirk, where they are billeted, and while there they are able to work under more favorable conditions upon their machines. The men at Poperinghe have very little to do in the daytime, but at night, without phares or oil lamps, they set out after dark over rough pavements, in many cases badly torn by shells, and creep along some seven or eight miles on the road to Woesten, where is located the tent hospital ("relai d'ambu- lance")> called the Ambulance Marocaine. Formerly, they went to Elverdinghe, somewhat nearer Ypres, but during the last three or four weeks Elverdinghe has been virtually de- stroyed by shells, and the chateau which served as a hospital was hit a number of times and had to be evacuated. From the relay-tent hospital in Woesten they get their orders for the various "postes de secours" along the Yser Canal, and so the ambulances move along in groups of two or three to Boesinghe, Zuydcote, and other villages where in little Flemish farmhouses are located the dressing-stations. The wounded are brought here directly from the trenches or roads on which they have fallen and are carried back from these primitive stations to the tent hospital in Woesten. Our men often make several trips during the night. They are sometimes in the very midst of a deafening thunder of cannon fire, and crackling musketry, and rockets and fusees from the French and German trenches, one fourth of a mile away, illumine the night as for a holiday celebration. We have, as you know, two sections in the east, one in Alsace and one on the frontier of Lorraine. The section working in Alsace is stationed at St. Maurice-sur-Moselle, a clean little village in the Vosges, about three or four miles this side of the former frontier and surrounded by lofty mountains. From here, our cars go each day up over the pass and through the tunnel, which leads into what, a year ago, was German territory, and then, down a zigzag road through a series of picturesque little towns to various hos- pitals at Moosch, St. Amarin, and Kruth, where the wounded arrive in hand-carts or on mule-back, from the surrounding heights, Hartmannsweilerkopf and Guebweiler, often after trips of seven, eight or ten hours, through trenches and mountain paths, in regions where there are no roads. [130 The following account from one of our men in this section gives a good idea of the daily work: — The service of Section Z, which is the military designation of the section attached to the army of the Vosges, is the fetch- ing of wounded from the evacuation hospitals in the recap- tured province of Alsace to the rail-head hospitals on the French side over a picturesque and difficult pass. The drivers are sub- ject to the same discipline as that governing the soldiers, eat the regular army ration that is issued daily, and are billeted on the townspeople. Every morning at half-past six some of our cars go over the pass and report for duty at the main evacua- tion hospital. This place is in a valley, just behind the high summits commanding the valley of the upper Rhine, where the fiercest fighting in the east has taken place and is still going on. The sound of artillery fighting echoes almost continuously from the guns in Hartmannsweilerkopf, for which, as the papers have daily stated, the contest is unremitting, the French holding and the Germans attacking. The majority of our wounded come from this battle-front. They are brought down on man and mule-back, the journey often taking a whole day. At the entrenched line, of course, they receive first aid and the attention of the battalion surgeons. The cars are all capable of carrying three stretcher cases and one seated beside the driver, or four seated, and the experience has been that the unique spring suspension and light body construction make our cars the most comfortable for the wounded of all the types in service. The daily routine includes an afternoon service of our cars to the same hospitals. After a vigorous action, especially on the offensive, our whole section may be rolling back and forth over the pass through the night. Usually this work is from another evacuation hospital to the north established in a big German cotton-mill, where the wounded straggle in all night and wait their turns with the busy, brown-bloused surgeons, in a big storeroom lighted by acetylene light. The donors of the ambulances would be quite satisfied of the high value of their gifts if they could once witness the courage and gayety under torture of the magnificent French soldiers. Every one of them has thought the question out for himself, and every one of them is sure that he, personally, is serving the cause of justice in a contest of civilization against barbarism, and the reasoning has not been based on assumed or hypo- thetical premises, but on the grimmest of horrible facts. When they are set down at the end of their hour's ride in the American ambulances, almost without exception they make some cheer- ful expression of gratitude, the accumulation of which would mean much to the givers of the cars. So much for the work of our section which the French Government has sent into the romantic region of the regained province. The other section in the east consists of twenty ambulances with a supply-car and a pilot car, as in the north, and which we expect will be the standard size of all our future sections. It is located not more than five or six miles from the German frontier, about fifteen or twenty miles north of Nancy. These American ambulances are the only ambulances in a region where there are continual engage- ments. The men live in barracks and private houses in the town of Pont-a-Mousson, which has been bombarded no less than a hundred times and which is located no more than eight or nine hundred metres from the German trenches. Our machines run up to the dressing-stations on the edge of the Bois-le-Pretre and carry the wounded soldiers from these dressing-stations to the hospitals in half a dozen towns five or ten miles back from the lines. Our men run for miles within range of the German shells, and much of the time within sight of the German lines. The following excerpt from a letter just received from one of our men gives a good idea of the work of this section: — The final proof of confidence is, of course, in the work en- trusted to us. This includes going out at night to Montauville and Clos Bois, stations behind the trenches, to bring in wounded who have received first aid, often a dangerous service, the whole district being under fire. It is interesting to note the compara- tive indifference of the people to shell fire. When the sound is heard of the approaching missile, some — not many — draw into doorways. Several groups of women to-day stood exposed, watching the explosions, and children continued their games. We had sat down to dinner before the firing ceased. Suddenly Jonin ran in and said two ambulances were needed down at the station. McConnel and Willis immediately volunteered and went down. They brought in three injured, of whom one died half an hour later. Firing recommenced at nine and continued on and off all night. There were no further casualties. A general description of day and night trips to Montauville may be of interest. On receipt of orders, the ambulance next in turn proceeds through the streets of Pont-a-Mousson (some- times in itself an exciting experience, the town being subject to intermittent shell fire at all times), crosses the railway, and threading its way through convoys of supply-wagons or bodies of troops, comes after three kilometres to Montauville. This is a village straggling along the road, with orchards, gardens, and little woods on either side; on the right hand, outward journey, can be seen the French third line of trenches crossing a hillside lopped with wood — the beginnings of Bois-le-Pretre. In all the houses soldiers are quartered. There are four "postes de secours" and from one of these the ambulance takes the wounded who are waiting. Clos Bois lies farther along the road, halfway up the hillside; there is no village, a farm-building serving as dressing-station. At night the same route is followed, but as no lights are carried it is sometimes not easy to keep to the road. We have often found it necessary for an orderly to accompany each driver on night trips for help in case of accident, and, on very dark nights, to go ahead and show the way. Dur- ing an attack this night work is an experience not to be for- gotten. The air is full of the growl of cannon reverberating between the hills, and from time to time a ghastly glare is thrown over the scene by phosphorus bombs held suspended by para- chutes which are sent up to uncover the enemy's bayonet charges. All the time the darkness is made visible by the flashes of guns and exploding shells. This section last week carried 1650 wounded, and in no week since their arrival in the east have they carried less than one thousand. Such, told briefly and in glimpses, are some of the services that our American youths are rendering to-day in France, and these services are deeply appreciated by the French people. I could cite letter after letter from distinguished French officials in confirmation of this. I will only quote C I 34] from one recently addressed to us by the president of an important committee of the Chamber of Deputies, after a visit by that committee to our several sections. It read as follows : — I have the honor to thank you in the name of the Commission on Public Hygiene for the enlightened and devoted service which the American Ambulance lavishes upon our wounded. In the sad hours through which we are passing it is particularly sweet for us to know that friendly hands are quick to help our brothers who are so courageously giving their blood in defence of our country. I hope the good people of Boston, who care for France and who want to express their sympathy with France in this calamitous period, will respond to your appeal and will help us to go on with and extend the work. A. Piatt Andrew. XLII Neuilly, June 23, 191 5. Dear Mother and Father: I have begun many letters to you these last three weeks, only to be interrupted, and to allow so long an interval to elapse before resuming, that I have started and restarted again. Since I last wrote you, I have been again in the east, visited our sections at Pont-a-Mousson and the Vosges, had a wonderful mountain drive in Alsace over the Col du Bla- mont and the Col de la Grosse Pierre, not very far from which the French are now fighting their way toward Mun- ster; and since then I have been back again to the north and visited our section which was in Dunkirk, but which now is located at Coxyde, near Nieuport, and one night I went out with them to the dressing-stations around Nieuport, where we picked up wounded Zouaves and marines in the cellars, the only places still available around Nieuport for dressing- stations. Meanwhile, Buswell arrived, and my spare moments were absorbed with him. It seemed as if we were back in Gloucester, as he brought a thousand fresh impressions of Harry and Jack, and C. B. and Isabella and C. S. S. and the two generations of Patches. We lunched and dined to- gether, chatted, strolled, shopped, disputed, and were very happy, and almost forgot about the war for three or four days. It seemed like a real vacation, and when he went (I sent him to Pont-a-Mousson) I had to plunge again into details to forget how I missed him. But the war still goes on. One can forget it for a time in the bright sunshine of Paris — but not for long. Paris is neither gay nor sad. It is always beautiful beyond any other city in the world. The great avenues and boulevards seem [1363 as thronged as usual with automobiles and the broad side- walks are thick with people. The public buildings and most large private buildings are bright with the grouped flags of the Allies. (I used to hope some day to see the Stars and Stripes where they ought to be among the other flags, but our days of chivalry and idealism — one might now add of national self-respect — seem gone.) One sees many variously colored uniforms of soldiers back for a few days from the front or of wounded soldiers here to recuperate, but there is no mock gayety as apparently is the case in Berlin and Vienna. There is no music in any of the restau- rants or cafes ; there are no public dances. People who dine out do not wear evening clothes, but go in their uniforms or day clothes. Only about half the theatres are open, and most plays have to do with Alsace or Lorraine, or the war, and the performances generally end with the "Marseillaise," every- body standing. At the opera, they often close the perform- ances with a patriotic scene, half pantomime, half song, with orchestral accompaniment, representing life in the trenches, with the bugle calls and a picture of the men sleep- ing on the ground, while one of them reads a letter from home by the light of the moon; then there is a night attack, and far away you hear the sputter of muskets, and finally a distant shout, growing louder and louder, and you know they are charging ; then a great cheer meaning success, and presently as the dawn breaks a hundred or more soldiers come scrambling out of the trenches and run into the fore- ground with their regimental flag, reporting victory. To end the scene Marthe Chenal, the great soprano of the opera, representing France, dressed in glittering helmet and cuirass, sings the "Marseillaise," making a great drama of it, and with the rousing soldiers' chorus and the booming drums and the trumpets, one feels ready to die the next minute for France. At the Francais, they give a sweet little play of Alsatian life called "L'ami Fritz," by Erckmann-Chatrian. It is a bucolic piece, appealing to the simplest sentiments, and is prettily "set." At the end comes a wedding party in an Alsatian "parlor," in which all of the great actors of the company are gathered in simple Alsatian clothes, and, one after another, each sings an Alsatian song, or recites an Al- satian poem, the great tragedian Mounet-Sully, and the great tragedienne, Segond-Weber, and all the rest. Another night, they give "Colette Baudoche," a drama- tization of the book of Maurice Barres, in which the scene is laid in Metz (in old Lorraine) about 19 10. The city has been invaded with Germans, the architecture vulgarized, the atmosphere of life grossened, but the old " dames de Metz," though often poor, hold aloof from the German newly rich. The story is of an old French family named Baudoche — the widowed mother who has to take boarders, and her daughter. They take a German high-school teacher to board, good-hearted and sentimental, but rather rough and lacking in intuition. He is very persistent in his attentions and finally persuades the daughter to agree to marry him, much to her mother's concealed distress. Then comes the day in September, when in the church in Metz they have the annual service in memory of the French soldiers who died for their country in 1870. The daughter goes to the service and is overcome by her love for France and con- cludes that she ought never to marry a German. She comes home and announces her decision. The German teacher is baffled and loses his temper. "One can never understand these French," he says. "In France, the conquest is never finished." And so the play ends, and everybody applauds, thinking of the battle of the Marne, and how near to and how far from a conquest the Germans then came. So much for the lighter side of life during the war. D38] Gradually the world is coming to recognize the glorious and valiant stand which France has made. Even the London "Times" is now printing a series of articles under the title of "The Achievement of France," to show the English people that it is the army of France which is bearing the brunt of the war and that England has done practically nothing on the land. To-day, after eleven months, her front does not extend over thirty-five miles, and even that front is not as far ad- vanced as it was six months ago. Eleven months of the war have passed, and she is not yet making any substantial con- tribution to it with her army. Her sector resembles a piece f pi e — ver y w ide in the rear, running all the way from Calais to Havre, but gradually contracting as it gets toward the firing line. Her total losses in dead, according to Mr. Asquith's statement of a few days ago, amount only to about fifty thousand, a considerable number, to be sure — but in France the dead are supposed to number close to three hundred and fifty thousand, and only the other day in the terrible fighting north of Arras, I am told that France lost nearly fifty thousand dead and wounded. So it is all along the five hundred miles of the French front. Night after night the cannonading and shooting go on, subterranean mines are exploded, French soldiers are fighting metre by metre through barbed wire, charging or resisting charges from trench to trench, with hand grenades, bayonets, and knives, in the woods, in the fields, through villages, around farmhouses, and even in the cellars. I come moderately close to it only at points. No human mind can picture the whole. But France, gentle, peace-loving country that she is, pays almost all of the cost with the lives and bodies of her sons. The English mentality is hard for an American to under- stand. Many Englishmen seem unable to think of the war in other terms than those of sport: war is the biggest sport- ing proposition, the biggest game hunting which the world has to offer. As I pass through the English lines, I not infre- quently see handsome English officers, trimly uniformed, on beautiful mounts, returning with their polo mallets from an afternoon game. Some of them have brought over their hounds and hunt across the fields. War does not seem to them a vitally serious proposition. Their country is not invaded ; in fact, it can't be invaded, their navy will see to that. It is true that the war must be won on the land, not on the sea. It is also true, as the London "Times" says, that "one is fighting for England just as truly in the Pas de Calais, as we should be on the soil of Kent." But one must not get excited about these damned Germans. Given time, they will tire themselves out. That seems to be the point of view of many Englishmen. French officers are very reticent in speaking of this. They naturally refuse to criticize their ally, and unless they know you very intimately, they pass over any remarks about the English attitude in silence, or with some such remark as, "Yes, the English mentality is different from ours"; or, "They seem to have great difficulty over there in getting suf- ficient ammunition"; or, "England is helping enormously on the sea"; or, "England is the great reserve upon which we can depend for the future." One whom I know very well, however, said the other day, with a smile, "Now that Italy has ceased to be neutral, we hope that Kitchener's army will follow her example." There is no question in any one's mind here as to the outcome of the war. German domination is inconceivable, and cost what it may, the war will be carried on until the German system is crushed. Remembering the German atti- tude toward treaties, the Allies will not allow of any compro- mise based on German pledges. Even though it take years, they are ready to push the war to an uncompromising end. The advantage which Germany had at the start through her [Ho] preparedness must sooner or later be offset by the effective organization which has been developed on our side, and, of course, the reserve resources of the Allies in men and sup- plies are indefinitely greater than those of the Germanic- Austro-Turkish alliance. But oh, the pity of it : — that America has so failed to recognize her opportunity. Never again will a tremendous issue be so clear as between right and wrong. Never again shall we have so vast a chance to help in making right pre- vail. It is for America, the one great disinterested judge among the nations of the world, to speak firmly for the sanc- tity of contracts between nations, and for the rights of small and unoffending countries to "life and liberty, and the pur- suit of happiness." It is for America to denounce officially sanctioned vandalism, arson, and murder, and to insist upon the elemental necessities of human civilization. The smaller neutral countries, especially the Balkan countries, are only waiting to follow her lead. If America did her duty, the Germans, even despite the bad attack of "big head" with which they are now so grossly afflicted, would be forced to recognize what the future has in store for them, that they are the enemies of the whole world which they cannot hope to vanquish, and that the eventual cost for them must become more staggering each day that the war is prolonged. It lies in the power of one man, and his name is Wilson, to bring this home to the German people, to expedite the ending of the most terrible calamity which has ever befallen the earth, and to prevent the sacrifice of additional hundreds of thousands of human lives. It is safely within the facts to say that upon Woodrow Wilson hangs the fate — the con- tinued life of millions of men. I am loath to believe that we, as a nation, have reached such a sophisticated point in our development that chivalry and sacrifice for others seem Utopian. I am loath to believe that we have become so well fed, sodden, and complacent that we would not willingly run any risks to help preserve justice, freedom, and civilization. I am unwilling to believe that as a people we have lost all national pride and self- respect and such respect for American citizenship as would make us resent the wholesale massacre of our countrymen, and the German Government's insolent evasions and delays in replying to our protests and the Kaiser's conferring on the murderer of more than a hundred American men, women, and children the highest honors in his command. The out- side world looks on with disappointment at what seems like America's degradation, but I will not admit that the Ameri- can people are responsible. They have been misguided, and to a great extent misrepresented, by the timid and faltering pacificism of Wilson and Bryan. P.S. Yes, I got the clippings of my "Herald" article, and am glad that you liked it. Dr. Powers's "reply" shows how little he knows about the way Germany is carrying on the war. He spoke of the great zeal shown by the individual German soldiers; but he probably does not know that the German infantry is forced to march in serried ranks in order to prevent them from "saving" themselves, and that cases are known where German artillerymen have been chained to their guns. In Germany, the government treats individ- uals as of no importance. They are like so many shells to be fired. Already, according to calculations based on offi- cial reports, the Germans and Austrians have lost nearly two million dead. This death list is not the result of zeal on the part of individual soldiers. It is the result of the ruth- less, mechanical, inhuman, though efficient, methods by which the German monarchy carries on the war. The Hohenzollern family must be kept in power, no matter how many plain German boys die to keep them there. I have often talked with German prisoners, and not infrequently have found they were glad to be free and out of the war, as soon as they had discovered that they would be treated humanely by the French. I write very little about the work which occupies most of my time. Not only do I have continually to visit our sec- tions, find out their needs and their troubles, interview the French officials of the armies to which they are attached and get their suggestions, try to correct mistakes and mis- understandings, etc., but back in Neuilly we have always new cars and new men to take care of, to get outfitted and to send out. We have now over one hundred and sixty cars on our rolls and more men than cars, and they are scattered all the way from the Channel to Alsace. To keep everything going smoothly means much attention to detail, but all of this would not be interesting to write about or to read. XLIII Neuilly, June 25, 1915. Dear Mother and Father: I am leaving on Sunday, the 27th, for the east. A French lieutenant has been attached to me as an orderly whom I shall see for the first time on the eastern trip. No reply yet to America from Germany. How long will Wilson wait ? I am always well — and happy in what I am trying to do — though disconsolate about our government. I wish you were here — both of you. Love to you. CH4] XLIV St. Maurice-sur-Moselle, July 2, 1915- Dear Mother and Father: I am once more on the grand tour, and just turning home- wards to Paris after five days in "the field." We left Paris Sunday morning (June 27), after seeing our big Pierce-Arrow ambulance well on the way to Pont-a-Mousson and eight new Fords started on their way to St. Maurice. When I got down that morning to the automobile bureau in Paris from which I get my passes, the captain in charge there explained that he had received word from the G.Q.G. (grand quartier general — general headquarters — every- body in the army alludes to the different branches and bu- reaus alphabetically) that an officer was to be attached to me He apologized for not having a lieutenant available, but said he would give me a "marechal de logis," which is, more or less, the equivalent of a sergeant in English. I was not sure, by any means, that I was pleased to have a strange and 'possibly uncongenial person tied to me, but there was no way out, and presently a tall, distinguished-looking sol- dier who might have been a Russian general from his ap- pearance, presented himself in broken English as my future aide. I expressed appropriately polite satisfaction, and asked him his name. He murmured four or five syllables which I could not catch, and I offered him my card (one of those with several rows of titles, such as they use over here in France) and he presented me his. It read, "Le Due de Clermont-Tonnerre." So the duke now travels with us as my aide, and as he has proved congenial and companionable the arrangement works pleasantly enough. He looks after the passes, getting them viseed and prolonged and added to when necessary, and I am sure can save much bother, it Ci45J demonstrates one time the more, however, how utterly- democratic France is, that a duke belonging to one of the most famous families in France is naturally and willingly an under-officer in the French army. Such a thing would seldom happen, I suspect, in England. Our first real stop was at Pont-a-Mousson, where we ar- rived quite late Sunday night. I found Salisbury (who had been advised by telephone from a neighboring town of our approach) awaiting us in the barracks, which are the office, garage, dining-room, and general club of the section, and he took us to his own quarters to sleep. As I have told you before, our men are quartered all around the town in private houses, sometimes in houses that have been utterly deserted by their usual occupants, sometimes in houses where one or two servants remain. This time I found Salisbury quartered in a luxuriously furnished house with a perfectly appointed bedroom, and we slept in very comfortable canopied beds with electric lights at the head, and in the morning, when the curtains were drawn back from the windows by the servant, we looked down on an adorable garden bright with flowers, and lawns and gravel walks, and a pool and stream, with peacocks wandering about. In fact, I was awakened early that morning by the peacocks. The booming of our cannon which were being fired from a neighboring wood was not disturbing, for I have long since grown accustomed to it, as one does to thunder, but the crowing of the peacocks was an unaccustomed sound and waked me very early. It seemed curious within eight hundred yards of the German trenches to find so comfortable a place, with roses and honey- suckle and geraniums blossoming in the gardens as if they had never heard of the war. The owner of the house has been away for months, but the servants live on, and care for things as usual. All day Monday I was busy with arrangements for our section. I lunched with General Le Boc, who commands the division with which our section works, and who could not say enough about the efficient and devoted service which our men are rendering, and their courage in sharing so many of the hardships and dangers of the soldier's life. We had the usual champagne after lunch and toasts to the United States and the American volunteers and to France and the Victory. They all told me, over and over again, how dependable our men are, and how much they appreciate what we Americans are doing for them, and I had, as usual, to tell them how we regretted that we were represented at this great moment by men like Wilson and Bryan, and how we still hoped the time might come when the American Government would show officially that we as a people are not indifferent as to the outcome of this prodigious struggle. I stayed over at Pont-a-Mousson all of Tuesday, too, and Tuesday afternoon I had two interesting experiences. I drove up on one of the ambulances to Auberge St. Pierre, a dressing-station in a brick house on the edge of Bois-le- Pretre, perhaps five miles out of Pont-a-Mousson, and as at that moment there were no wounded ready to be taken back, and our batteries were firing from their shelters a quarter of a mile away, I walked down along the edge of the wood to where they were. They were firing four cannon (90-milli- metre guns) at a time at some unseen battery on the other side of the forest, and the reports of where the shells hit were being telephoned back from some of our trenches on the other side near where our shells were landing. "A little to the left," "So many yards back," etc., the man would call from the telephone, and the artillerymen would readjust their range. Then, when the guns were charged and the fuses inserted, the signal was given, and with a roar four more shells went whizzing off at imperceivable speed to an unseen destination two miles away. It is said to take about CU7l a thousand shells to kill a man; so if our fire was no more accurate than the German fire that afternoon, they had nothing to fear, for the Bodies' shells were not coming within half a mile of us. Later I visited an aviation field, not far away, where I had met some of the aviators, and here I had the second experience of the day. B , one of the best of the French aviators, invited me to fly with him. We went up to a height of something over three thousand feet, from which we had a wonderful panorama of the war zone thereabouts. One could see at least twenty or twenty-five miles in every direction. We sailed over L — ■ — and the surrounding forts, and then over some neighboring towns, with the earth below us like a carpet of finest pattern, of green and yellow, in which a ribbon of blue — the river — ran here and there like a slender serpent, with the trenches looking like broken nets of brownish string. B is a master in his profession, and there was no breeze ; so when we were somewhat over three thousand feet in the air, he shut off the motor, and we did spirals and glided and soared like the gulls. It would have been a gorgeous experience anywhere, but here was the ad- ditional interest of looking down on a famous battleground. On Wednesday (the 30th) we motored over to our tent hospital, which left Neuilly about a month ago, and which is now pitched at Pagny-sur-Meuse. This is an American field hospital purchased by American friends directly from the American Government. . . . I have arranged to send half of our cars over to Belleville in the region of Pont-a-Mousson to work in connection with Salisbury's section. Here in the Vosges Lawrence's section has undertaken a new and very important work. The region is mountainous, and no railroads cross or penetrate the mountains. The roads are narrow, steep, and crooked into sharp zigzags, and C *48:i as everything used in carrying on the war in Alsace has to be transported by wagons or by horses and mules, the roads are crowded. To transport one 220-shell it takes a horse, and the distance from Bussang, the nearest railway base to Mittlach, in the valley of the Fecht, is about twenty-four miles. So there is one eternal procession of horses, cannon, wagons, and soldiers going over the mountains. There are no hospitals on the other side, and the poor fellows wounded in the battles about Metzeral have had to be brought over the mountains on mule litters or in springless wagons, a trip occupying four or five hours, with only the most simple dressings. Our cars have, within the past two weeks, under- taken the task of running up over these mountains, and being light and powerful have successfully accomplished it, reduc- ing the trip for the wounded by three or four hours, and offering comparative comfort in a springed vehicle in place of what must have been a painful trip on mule-back or in a jolting lumber wagon. None of the French automobiles are able to make this trip, so we have really been rendering a precious and indispensable service in reducing suffering and saving lives. Last week we carried over a thousand wounded in this way, — most of the work being done at night, a great achievement, considering the steep grade and the roughness of the roads, and the necessity of making most of the jour- ney without lights of any kind while passing interminable convoys. On Thursday I went up over the mountains past Huss, the highest point of the crossing (four thousand feet above sea-level), from which the world opens up in a great pano- rama of mountain-tops, and then down again into the valley of the Fecht to Mittlach. While we were there some of the officers took us for a climb up one of the mountains called , from which we could survey the whole valley where the French have been fighting so furiously and so CH9] successfully during recent weeks. Every ridge is ferret-holed with trenches, and the once wooded tops are now only a tangle of splintered stumps. The wooded slope that we went up, however, was almost untouched, and was nested thick with dugouts and caverns filled with soldiers — a veritable ant-hill of "blue devils," as the "chasseurs alpins" are called. Never have I heard such grand music as the roar of the shells as they tore down the air line of the valley, echoing and reverberating through the forest, until after perhaps ten seconds one heard the distant explosions as they fell near the German batteries not far from Munster, about eight miles away. At one point we came on an opening in the wood, where there was an artillery observation post, a low hut concealed by pine branches above and about the sides. One of the officers invited us in, and with glasses we watched the shells arriving down the valley and ploughing up clouds of dust. They were being fired from batteries a mile or so away, but the observer in the post watching their arrival would give his orders by telephone, "A little to the right"; "Not quite so far but in the same direction," etc., etc. At one time we saw three despatch riders (Boches) on motor-cycles, flying down the road about three or four miles away, and our officers tried to hit them, and we could see the clouds of dust rising, first to the right, and then in front, and then behind them. We could not hit them, but I venture to say they were well scared. Down below us were the charred ruins of Metzeral, which the Germans had burned a few days before when forced to retreat. A mile or so beyond, a factory of some sort was going up in flame and smoke : the Germans were burning it lest it fall into French hands ; and down at the head of the sunny valley we could plainly see the spires of Munster's churches rising above the red-tiled roofs of the city. Perhaps when this reaches you, France will have gained it, but I fear if she has, it will be only a mass of ruins, for the Germans burn everything when they retire. On the top of the mountain we wandered for an hour among the trenches, which had only been deserted by the Germans a few days before — ditches six and seven feet deep running everywhere, and lined with subterranean rooms covered with straw and littered with German papers, empty bottles, rusty bayonets, old knapsacks, packages of letters, torn overcoats and underclothes, empty shell cases, etc. I picked up a number of touching letters and postal cards written in Ger- man, and one German diary, which had been begun on August i, 1914, the first day of mobilization, and which had been kept up until this June. The writer may be still living, but not improbably his body was one of the scores lying in unmarked graves. Everywhere, as one walked through the trenches, one saw white lime protruding from the fresh earth, only a foot or so deep, which French soldiers were pitching into the trenches to cover the German bodies, and now and then one hurried past a nauseating odor where some body was still partly exposed. It is curious how inured every one has become to death in its most brutal aspects. One thinks little more of passing a putrescent human body in a wood than one would, in ordi- nary times, of passing a dead dog or cat. It is unpleasant, and one hurries by, but one no longer has any sense of horror such as one would have had a year ago. Scenes that a year ago I could not have witnessed without being sick and feeling faint, I find myself now regarding with only a pathetic inter- est. They are inevitable, if melancholy, facts and so familiar as not to excite surprise. Here and there, deep in the wood, one came on graves of German soldiers who had died before the French captured the hill, and their graves had been marked by their comrades by crosses of fresh boards, covered with characteristically sentimental inscriptions, such as, "Unser unvergesslicher Freund," or, "Mag Ihr die Erde leicht sein," and at one place in the very heart of the wood was a fresh little burial- ground with a dozen or more crosses, some in German, some in French, where the soldiers of the two armies lay side by side. There is so much always to tell about and so little time, as one experience runs close on the heels of another. Time passed very quickly up on Hill . We climbed in and out of the trenches, past groups of soldiers sprinkling disin- fectants over human fragments, past batteries of our guns, past groups of singing " chasseurs," and always with the ac- companying music of our guns firing at intervals of a min- ute or so. We forgot all about lunch. Some soldiers gave us a few slices of bread, and that was enough. On the way back to St. Maurice, we watched a German bombardment of one of our mountain-tops, Hilsenfirst, I think it was called. One could see the flashes as the shrapnel burst in the air, and often four or five columns of dust when as many shells struck simultaneously, and then one would count, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, before the re- ports of the explosions reached us. July 4, 1915- On the way back from the east, we took a route somewhat more to the south than usual, and as we were rolling along on Friday evening, de Clermont-Tonnerre remarked that if I were willing to run a few miles off our course, he would be grateful, because he could see one of his houses that he had not seen since the mobilization, nearly a year ago, and that we could spend the night there, which we decided to do. So about dusk we rolled through a pretty French town called Ancy-le-Franc, and then through heavy iron gates into a park bordered by century-old trees, and came on a tremendous thick-walled chateau of the time of Louis XIV. Only a caretaker and his family lived in it, and the silence of its courtyard in the twilight and of the long alleys of trees that led away from it down mysterious, dreamlike vistas, contrasted sharply with what we had been experiencing the day before. We went through one room after another, with fine old fireplaces and heavy-beamed ceilings like those of Fenway Court, and in the candlelight we could see the pictures on the walls of Francois Premier, and Diane de Poitiers, and the duke's ancestors of the sixteenth and seven- teenth centuries who used to live there, the Clermonts, Tonnerres, Noailles, and other famous old names of pre- Republican France. The walls were fully ten or twelve feet thick, and there were everywhere panels in the walls which could be opened, and through which we passed into other rooms or into staircases. There was a lovely chapel with a balcony, and a room for the archives of the family, the walls of which were literally panelled with the crests of the different branches. We had a mighty good dinner in a large tapestried room lighted only by candles, and the duke offered us some of his favorite wines. That night I slept in a damask-hung bed in a vaulted room, and from its walls looked down on me the portraits of men in armor and beautiful women, who three centuries or more ago had walked and laughed and loved and suffered within these same walls. Before I blew out the candle, I must admit that I wondered which of the panels in the walls were entrances from unseen passages, and what I would do if the wall opened during the night and some wraith walked across the room. But nothing happened. The only sounds were of the tinkling bells in the old clock on the roof of the chateau, and I slept as I had not slept for months. In the morning, as I opened my window, I looked out on C I 53H a decorative canal running down throm* * u a bordered lawn to an arrifir^liT , g br0ad tree " wii to an artificial lake, and in the centre nf +u lake and at the h^A r^f +u , centre of the covered villa of the time of Lo'uis ^ Tw as 5£^E t' go a t n a r h a e pl r la ; e of one of the d "S* we got back here Saturday afternoon and I fonnH H, Dav»on and his boy Trnbee waiting for me a the ho V T and wanting me to dine with them P ' ta '' XLV Neuilly, July 5, 79/5. Dear Mother and Father: Yesterday, we celebrated the "Glorious Fourth," but alas, I must admit that I felt there was but little glory for us Americans to celebrate. The United States have had a great past, — they are destined, I feel confident, to have a great future, — but for the present I feel only a haunting sense of humiliation and regret. The only glory about the Fourth for me is the glory of France fighting the world's battles with indomitable courage and silent determination and with- out a murmur of complaint, although not properly sup- ported by any of her allies. In all the wonderful history of this great nation, she has never given more convincing evidence of her real greatness. In the morning we all went out to the grave of Lafayette. There was a group of our American ambulance volunteers in their khaki uniforms and a group of American volunteer soldiers from the Foreign Legion in the blue uniforms of France. With the French and American flags we marched through the cemetery to the tomb of the great Frenchman who spent so many years in the service of the United States during the grim years of our struggle for freedom. Here we were, — a little group of Americans, — trying in our turn to do our little for France in her desperate effort to throw off the yoke of her aggressors. But our Ambassador was our spokesman, and he spoke without imagination, without comprehension, without sympathy. It would have been easy for any intelligent man with a heart to recall in terms of living sympathy the story of Lafayette and of the past friendship of France and the United States without in any [155] way violating our present official neutrality. But Mr. Sharp was not the man to do so. In the evening, there was a big American dinner at the Palais d'Orsay, with perhaps four hundred present. M. Viviani, the Prime Minister, spoke gracefully and eloquently, and M. Ribot and most of the other members of the Cabi- net were seated at the speakers' table. Once more we had to listen to our Ambassador's ill-timed stories about Ohio politics, his rambling, inappropriate, undignified anecdotes and jokes. What a descent from the days when Franklin and Jefferson and Jay represented their country in France! Many Americans could not listen to him, but left the ban- quet hall and strolled in the foyer, until he had finished. It was hard for them to know when that had occurred, for he received little applause and that polite and perfunctory. Fortunately, another American, Professor Mark Baldwin, was listed to speak, and he happily expressed in a few well- turned phrases what we all felt. His every sentence was punctuated by tumultuous applause, applause louder and longer, because of the contrast with what had gone before. When he spoke of " questions and occasions about which no intelligent and high-minded man can afford to be neutral," the audience stood up and cheered, and cried, "Right," "True," "Bravo," and the gentleman from Elyria looked very grave, and Mr. Bacon, only a little way from him at the speakers' table, beamed with satisfaction. Apropos of the Fourth of July and the sympathy of France and America, I want to append the telegram which the prefect of Nancy sent to our men in Pont-a-Mousson on our national holiday. It read as follows : — En ce jour ou vous celebrez la fete de votre Independance Nationale, a l'heure meme ou dans de rudes combats la France defend son independance contre un ennemi dont la folie de domination menace la liberte de tous les peuples, et dont les procedes barbares menacent les conquetes morales de la civ- ilisation, je vous adresse l'expression des profoodes sympathies francaises pour votre grande et genereuse nation, et je saisis cette occasion de vous presenter de nouvelles assurances de la gratitude emue des populations lorraines pour le devoue- ment admirable de tous les membres de l'Ambulance Ameri- caine de Pont-a-Mousson. I like, too, what the French papers of a few days ago quoted President Lawrence Lowell as saying at the Harvard commencement. It was something like this: "Our thoughts night and day are with those who are fighting on the other side of the sea. Each morning brings us terrible news of the many youths who will never wake again. They are doing their duty. They are sacrificing themselves that civilization may endure. To-morrow, perhaps, we shall be at their side in the trenches. But even to-day, we have our part in their war"; and to make sure that no one could misunderstand to which side he referred, he added: "Who knows whether, among those thousands of martyrs, there is not another Louis Pasteur?" "The achievements of these heroes," he continued, "who are falling on the fields of battle, will be our heritage. It is for us that they are dying." If only Woodrow Wilson could realize the same truth ! XLVI Neuilly, July 8, 1915. Dear Mother and Father: The other day, when I was in the abandoned trenches in the wooded hills above Metzeral in Alsace, I picked up a number of letters and postals among the debris left by the soldiers — French and German — in their dugouts and sub- terranean holes. Here are a few of them which may interest you. Here is also a German soldier's diary, begun August 1 last and coming down to June of this year, when he was probably killed; also a letter taken of! a German soldier's body, pierced by a bullet-hole. The enclosed letter, just received, from Ambassador Jusserand refers to a pine branch from Alsace that I sent him six weeks or so ago. The clipping about it which unex- pectedly appeared in the " Intransigeant " the other day may also interest you. Ambassade de la Republique Franqaise aux Etats-Unis, Washington, le 12 Juin, 1915. My dear Mr. Andrew: I have been kept so extremely busy of late that I could not tell you at once, as I wanted, how deeply touched and moved we had been, both my wife and myself, by the unique, memor- able, lovable gift which Mr. Charles Carroll brought to us from you. The Alsatian branch of a pine tree is being framed and will appear in our Embassy as one of our most cherished souvenirs. Your card pasted on the side of it will ever remind us of how near a French heart an American heart can be. When you have time, give us news of what is going on, and then news of yourself and of your work. Even if I answer you irregularly, it will be one more work of mercy for you to do so. A new military attache has just been sent me who was for months at the front in Flanders and elsewhere, so that I have, from the military point of view, fresh news and impressions. They are, thank Heaven, of the most favorable description. Believe me, with best regards and heartfelt thanks, Very truly yours, Jusserand. Excerpt from Ulntransigeant, July 6, iQij NOS VRAIS AMIS Mme Jane Catulle Mendes est allee, on le sait, porter en Amerique la bonne parole francaise. Elle etait l'autre jour a l'ambassade de France a Washington, ou elle avait demande audience a M. Jusserand. Pendant qu'elle attendait dans un salon tout decore d'admirables ceuvres d'art francaises, son attention fut attiree par une branche de sapin encore fraiche, ornee d'un ruban tri-colore, et d'ou. montait une forte et exquise odeur de seve. A l'un des rameaux de l'arbuste, une carte etait attachee, on y pouvait lire: " J'ai cueilli cette branche hier pour vous dans V Alsace redevenue francaise pour toujour s." Et cette carte etait signee: A. Piatt Andrew. "Ainsi," nous ecrit Mme Catulle Mendes qui nous conte cette emouvante anecdote, "je voyais pour la premiere fois, je touchais une branche d'arbre de l'Alsace francaise, et c'est en Amerique que cette emotion m'etait reservee! Ai-je besoin de vous dire que mes yeux s'emplirent de larmes. ..." Nous aimons a reposer notre esprit sur ce trait qui peint si eloquemment l'active et sensible amitie americaine pour la cause de la France et sa confiance dans notre victoire finale sur les barbares. XLVII Boulogne-sur-Mer, July 12, 1915. Dear Mother and Father: I have been up again with our northern section — my old section — and am on my way back to Paris. Since my last visit Dunkirk has again been bombarded by the long-range guns, and the little city that was so thronged with people in the winter is now more deserted than ever. Most of the stores have their shutters drawn, or their windows, shattered by the concussion of near-by explosions, are boarded over. The majority of the civilians — all, I presume, who could af- ford it — have departed, and the town is no longer filled by the thousands of soldiers who enlivened its streets a few months ago. The beautiful old church of St. Eloi, where I used in January and February to go to the midday mass on Sunday, and which on those occasions used to be brilliant with the uniforms of soldiers, and where I used to enjoy the music and the peaceful atmosphere of the service, is now only a ruin, the Germans having succeeded in hitting it with two of their four hundred and twenty shells. Perhaps a dozen buildings throughout the city have been destroyed. As a protection for the people the mayor has marked the available cellars on each block by red flags and painted signs, "Refuge en cas d'alerte." So, if the shells begin to arrive, one has only to run to the nearest red flag and there find a welcoming door leading to a cellar. This, however, offers no guarantee that one may not be buried alive under masses of debris. The bombardments in Dunkirk are rather terrifying. The last one continued from three in the morning until six in the evening, shells dropping at irregular intervals of half an hour, or an hour, or sometimes oftener, — in all about C1601 forty-six. They come from twenty-two miles away, and in their journey rise several miles in the air, so that to all intents and purposes these enormous projectiles, weighing a ton and a half and tall as a man, drop like meteors out of the sky. It appears that now the people in Dunkirk have con- siderable warning that a shell is on the way, for some one telephones from our trenches in the vicinity of the German lines to Dunkirk as the shell leaves, and at Dunkirk a siren whistles the warning, and then the people have nearly a minute to find shelter while the shell is on the way! ! ! You can imagine that it is rather exciting, for almost every day that the city is bombarded a dozen people are killed and others wounded. Yet many go on with their usual occu- pations. Madame Benoist d'Azy told me that on the day of the last bombardment, which began at 3 a.m., she remained in her bed until the usual hour, and then went about to the hospitals as on other days. She remains always cheerful, fearless, and gayly fatalistic. Our boys, too, did their work just as ordinarily that day, except that they had the added work of picking up the people killed and wounded in the streets. As soon as a shell arrived, our little cars were seen running through the town to find what they could do for those who might be hurt, quite regardless of the possible arrival of another shell in the same locality. Every one in the war zone becomes fatalistic about the hazards of war. " If I am going to be hit, I am going to be hit," one thinks, just as one thinks on the North Shore when the lightning is flashing on a summer afternoon. I went on, too, to Coxyde and Nieuport where some of our boys are working. Nieuport presents still the strangest sight of my experience — a whole city destroyed, not by fire, but by bombardment. Not a roof remains intact. The churches, the city hall, stores, schools, everything wrecked. Shells still drop here and there within the city every day, and not a civilian remains there, yet, curiously enough, there are still people living on the neighboring farms and the fields are cultivated. I lunched with Colonel Quinton, who is in charge of the artillery of this division, in the little farmhouse which is his headquarters, and he took me around among his batteries, which are well concealed among the sand dunes. One thing I saw yesterday which I had never seen before — a man-carrying kite. It was a windy day and the usual sausage balloons which they send up for observation pur- poses would not have been available. Instead, they had a series of box kites carrying a basket in which the observer sat. They tell me that the swinging of the observer in one of these baskets is most unpleasant. Around the church in Nieuport the graves have multiplied manyfold since I was last here, and as most of the soldiers here are "fusiliers marins" drawn from the sailorfolk of Brittany, where the cult of the dead is very highly developed, the graves have been decorated with everything that the town has to offer. There are graves framed in bedsteads, graves decorated with tiles from the floors of neighboring houses arranged in the form of a cross with borders, and every kind of vase and utensil has been used to hold flowers and plants, and all kinds of statues and bric-a-brac are care- fully grouped about the head and foot of the graves. It is hard for us now to look upon a devastated city like Nieuport, and to visualize the anguish that it represents, the thousands of women and children who have had to abandon their homes and their household treasures, of which nothing of value now remains, who trailed out on foot to neighboring towns with the little they could carry, like vaga- bonds, and who are now homeless and living on other people's charity, — the thousands of youths who have been mangled and torn here and who have given their arms, or their legs, or their eyes, or their lives. One simply cannot Ci6a3 realize that it is all real and not a spectacle. The reality- flashes over you only for instants, and then you comprehend what a scourge to the human race the ambition of the Hohen- zollern family has been. Neuilly, Tuesday, July 13, 191$. I got back to Neuilly yesterday evening. To-day word came of trouble in our tent section — a serious state of de- moralization because of their inactivity. So they want me to start right off east, and I shall leave to-morrow. With much love to you both. I have just got your letters of June 27 and 28, one enclosing a moss rose from my garden. How I should like to see that garden ! XLVIII Vittel (Vosges), July 18, 1915. Dear Mother and Father: Once more I am returning from the east. I have visited the sections at Pont-a-Mousson, Pagny, and in Alsace, and am now headed again for Paris, which we left on the morning of the 14th. As we left, an imposing cortege was conveying the remains of Rouget de Lisle, the composer of the immortal "Marseillaise," from the Arc de Triomphe, where the body had been lying in state, to the Invalides. Two great voices from the Opera, a soprano and a tenor, with a great chorus and a military band, had stirred the thousands of listeners with that incomparable song, the words of which are so ap- propriate to this time when a great section of France is under the heel of a brutish invader. With the artillery marching between rows of glittering cavalry and aeros flitting like great bird guardians overhead, the procession was moving down the Champs Elysees as we left Paris. You will have read, long before this reaches you, President Poincare's great speech, intended not merely for those who heard it, but for the soldiers and people of France and for the world, declaring the unshakable intention of the government to push the war to victory and to rid the world of the German peril, no matter what it may cost in men and money and no matter how long the struggle may last. That night in Pont-a-Mousson, we were sitting in the twilight in the garden back of the barracks with our boys when some one said, "Listen." Once more we heard the "Marseillaise," this time sung by the soldiers in the trenches only half a mile away. No one spoke, but every one, I am sure, was moved as we heard the distant voices and recalled the words — "Contre nous de la tyrannie l'etendard sang- [164]" lant est leve"; then, "Aux armes, citoyens," "Marchons! Marchons!" and at the end that wonderfully tender verse beginning, "L'amour sacre de la patrie." And we thought how, that night, those same words and that wonderful martial song, the most stirring melody that ever was written, were being chanted along five hundred miles of battle-line by millions of French soldiers. They had scarcely finished up in the wood on the hill when, "boom, boom, bur-r-r- bub, bub, bub, bub, boom," rifles spluttered, grenades exploded, cannon barked, mitrailleuses trilled. An attack was under way, and we knew that up there men were cutting their way through the barbed wire, were charging at each other with bayonets, knives, rifles, and hand grenades, as they do night after night, and night after night. I got on one of the ambulances and went up to Clos Bois, a little villa on the edge of the wood which is used as a dressing-station, and sitting on the lee side of the villa as we waited for the wounded to be brought in, we listened to the roar of the cannon (one of our batteries of "soixante-quinze" was quite near), and now and then we heard the spent bullets hitting in the trees and bushes around us. That night our men carried in more than one hundred and fifty wounded, but it was only a small attack. On one day of last week our men had carried nine hundred and ninety-seven wounded — and so it goes. How one hopes that those who are responsible for this prodigious agony — baffling all human power of compre- hension — will find their just punishment ! Paris, July 22, 191 5. From Pont-a-Mousson I went on into Alsace. We have more than twenty ambulances there now, and the army ad- ministration has withdrawn the French ambulances, so we Americans alone are carrying all the wounded in Alsace. [165] Our boys are doing a wonderful work, climbing up over mountain passes which no other automobile ambulances have crossed before. At I had tea with General Maud'huy, who planned the recent French offensive in Alsace, — a charming gentleman, reputed a great officer. He knew all about our work and spoke very appreciatively of what our men were doing in Alsace. Of course, he asked about Wilson and the late lamented Bryan, and I was forced to tell him what I thought. All intelligent Frenchmen, like all intelligent Americans, are surprised that our government brooks the long delays and persistent evasions (not to men- tion the perjured testimony and false statements) of the German Government, but Frenchmen are too courteous to express their opinions freely. It goes without saying that they cannot respect our government, but they are profoundly grateful for our individual help and they only speak of that. XLIX Neuilly, July 25, iqi$. Dear Mother and Father: The President's third (or is it the fourth?) Lusitania note, which appeared to-day, is firm enough — but what does it all amount to? The note last February was equally firm, when he said that he would hold the German Government "strictly accountable " for any American life or vessel lost through their submarine policy. In the Lusitania one hun- dred and twenty-nine lives were lost, and several American vessels have been sunk, and now, nearly six months after, he says that if any more lives are lost, he will consider it "unfriendly." . . . [167] Glisolles, La Bonneville, July 31, IQIS- Dear Mother and Father: Once more I have been up in Belgium, and again we are homeward bound. The trip has been comparatively unevent- ful and quite without thrills. There is very little fighting in the north now, or for that matter anywhere along the line, and I begin to see the possibility of perhaps getting home for a fortnight before long. Although the papers periodically publish reports of a German concentration of troops in preparation for another effort to break through to Calais, these reports are generally discredited as from German sources intended to deceive. We saw two Taubes being attacked by land guns — a sight which eight months ago would have been thrilling enough, but which to-day excites literally only momentary interest. You hear a mitrailleuse in the distance, and you see groups of soldiers looking up. Way up in the sky you see something that looks like a fly, and all about it puffs of white smoke from the exploding shells sent up by the mitrailleuse. You watch it for half a minute, and go on with whatever you are doing. I found that Colonel Morier had moved our boys of the northern section, as indeed he promised me on my last visit that he would do, to a place in Belgium called Crombeke, where they will serve a region all by themselves, and where they can work in several different groups between the dress- ing-stations along the Yser Canal, and the field hospitals. As there is little happening just now in this region, they have very little to do, but they are excellently situated to get serious work as soon as things open up again. They are located on a farm, and living roughly as they might in a Cx68] summer camp. They sleep either in the loft of a barn, or in their cars, or on the ground in an open field out of doors. I tried the latter alternative, and would have slept fairly well, except that the cows shortly after dawn were continu- ously trying to eat the straw under our blankets, and at intervals of a few minutes I was awakened by a bovine nose or hoof in near proximity to my head. M. de Clermont-Tonnerre always accompanies me on my trips. He is an agreeable and well-informed companion and helps, through his wide acquaintance with people and cus- toms, in many ways. Through him we also frequently find comfortable lodging and good repasts while en route. On the way up north, we stopped for lunch at a chateau at Achy, near Beauvais, where an aunt of his lives. It was a nice old place, with pretty vistas of woods and meadows and running water, the chateau a charming, homelike coun- try place, built, I should suppose, in the eighteenth century, and now somewhat run down because of depleted fortunes. The old duchess, perhaps eighty years old, a spinster daugh- ter, and an invalid son of about forty-five, live there alone. Another son is a colonel in the army, and they have not seen him for a year, but as we had seen him last week in Alsace, they were eager to know about him. "Did he look well?" "Was he thinner or heavier than he used to be?" "Had he aged much?" The duke was plied with questions. Last September the Germans came very near to Achy, passing through on the road about a mile away. The daugh- ter told me how her mother had refused to move at their approach, or even to allow the servants to pack their paint- ings and silver and 6b jets d'art. She intended to meet the Germans at her door, and if she was to be turned out of her home by them, it should be by force. Fortunately, they never arrived. She had stayed in Paris during all of the siege of 1870, and, in fact, the frail, under-sized son, who still lives D6 9 ] with her, was born there during those terrible days, and that was the reason for his not being strong. On the way back from Dunkirk, I rode part of the way with Colonel Morier, who happened to be coming in his motor in the same direction, and we had an interesting talk. He has been a warm friend ever since I first arrived in Dun- kirk last January, and I always stop for a moment at his office when passing through. From all accounts, he is leaving Dunkirk to become a general in some other part of the line, and he said " good-bye " as if for a long time. I left him at St. Omer, and got into my own motor, and on the way back de Clermont-Tonnerre invited us to spend the night in his chateau at Glisolles, near Evroux, from which I am now writing. It is another beautiful country place, not as old or thick-walled or formidable as the one at Ancy- le-Franc, where we stayed a month ago, but much more home- like — just a nice old eighteenth-century country home, with a fine old stone staircase, old furniture, and the walls covered with family portraits and old prints. The surrounding coun- try is rolling, and from my window I look out over quite a panorama of wooded hills and steepled villages nestling among woods and meadows and yellow fields. It is all so dreamlike and charming and remote from war that I have taken a whole day off. This morning the duke and his two young daughters and Freeborn and I, accompanied by three Russian wolfhounds and an amusing pet monkey, made a pilgrimage to a lake down in a neighboring valley, and we took our bathing-suits and had a swim, and came back ravenously hungry to a lunch of delicious vegetables and fresh fruits. It seemed like a real summer holiday in America in times of peace. To-morrow we are off again for Paris — about two and a half hours from here. This is the harvest-time, and it is interesting, as we drive across the country, to see the women [17° 3 and children and old men driving reapers and heaping the sheaves of wheat. Yesterday I passed an old, white-haired, white-bearded man, with a feeble, white-haired woman, binding sheaves of wheat, and several times I have seen nuns working in the harvest fields. Every one in France is doing his or her share to keep things going and to help rid their country of the invaders. If only the days of miracles were not past and the swine could be driven into the sea ! P.S. Did you read Owen Wister's "Pentecost of Calam- ity" in the "Saturday Evening Post" for July 3 ? It is very good. I wish that German-Americans generally could read it. It is so devoid of prejudice against Germany and the Germans of other days. Also do get and read "Ordeal by Battle," by Frederick Scott Oliver, — author of the famous life of Alexander Hamilton, — one of the best books on conditions in Eng- land before and during the war. It contains many lessons for us Americans on the need of preparing in time. LI Neuilly, August 5, 1915. Dear Mother and Father: Two fine long letters came from H. D. S. this week and four from you (the last dated July 21), all of which helped to make me happy. The mail always comes in a great batch on Tuesdays, and if I am in Paris on that day, I go down to Morgan-Harjes and devour everything greedily on the spot. Then, at night, when I get back to my little apartment, it is good to read it all over again at leisure. I am sending to you by a friend who is going over to the States this week two rolls containing lithographed drawings of the war by various French artists, which, I think you will agree, are very fine both in execution and in conception. The sketches by Forain are particularly good, and I only wish that every one in America could see those referring to the Lusitania massacre. French artists are portraying the human aspect of the war with such tenderness and pathos as will perpetuate the sympathy of the world for France, and the abhorrence of the world for "Kultur" for genera- tions to come. Most of their drawings (except in the very cheap journals) are touched rather with tenderness than with hate, but their very tenderness and reserve accen- tuate the grossness and brutality of a people whose school- children are taught hymns and prayers of hate, and whose church bells gayly carolled the massacre of the twelve hun- dred innocent passengers on the Lusitania. I have been tempted to send to Woodrow Wilson a copy of the Forain drawing of the bodies of women and children washed up on the beach from the Lusitania. One poor bedraggled creature, still alive, is lifting herself from the midst of her dead com- patriots and crying, "How our Wilson will avenge us!" Little did she know "our Wilson"! If the picture really got beyond Tumulty's waste-basket and reached the President's hands, might it conceivably help him to see his own and America's ignominy as most of the rest of the world see it? I lunched to-day at the Siegfried's with several men high in public life here in France, and over the cigars after lunch- eon, they asked the usual question: "Eh bien, Monsieur Andrew, what about the United States and your Mr. Wil- son? " "And your Mr. Bryan, is he considered a great states- man?" "And your Ambassador, Mr. Sharp, what has been his diplomatic career?" I love my country. I am proud of her past. I have great dreams for her future, but, somehow or other, I must con- fess it beyond my power to defend the policies of "our" Mr. Wilson, or the competence of men like "our" Mr. Bryan and "our" Mr. Sharp, whom he has chosen for positions of the highest responsibility. Jealous for my country and wanting always to defend her, I am unhappy, indeed, when I think of the role she has been forced into by her repre- sentatives in this the most crucial, transitional period of all the world's history. Ctje Hitjrrsi&r press CAMBRIDGE • MASSACHUSETTS U • S • A LIBRARY OF CONGRE