In England I saw still more thousands of these refugees, bewildered, broken by misfortune, owning only what they wore upon their backs, speaking an alien tongue, strangers in a strange land.  I saw, as I have seen in Holland, people of all classes giving of their time, their means, and their services to provide some temporary relief for these poor wanderers who were without a country.  I saw the new recruits marching off, and I knew that for the children many of them were leaving behind there would be no Santa Claus unless the American people out of the fullness of their own abundance filled the Christmas stockings and stocked the Christmas larders.

And seeing these things, I realized how tremendous was the need for organized and systematic aid then and how enormously that need would grow when Winter came—­when the soldiers shivered in the trenches, and the hospital supplies ran low, as indeed they have before now begun to run low, and the winds searched through the holes made by the cannon balls and struck at the women and children cowering in their squalid and desolated homes.  From my own experiences and observations I knew that more nurses, more surgeons, more surgical necessities, and yet more, past all calculating, would be sorely needed when the plague and famine and cold came to take their toll among armies that already were thinned by sickness and wounds.

The American Red Cross, by the terms of the Treaty of Geneva, gives aid to the invalided and the injured soldiers of any army and all the armies.  If any small word from me, attempting to describe actual conditions, can be of value to the American Red Cross in its campaign of mercy, I write it gladly.  I wish only that I had the power to write lines which would make the American people see the situation as it is now—­which would make them understand how infinitely worse that situation must surely become during the next few months.

How Paris Dropped Gayety

By Anne Rittenhouse.

[From THE NEW YORK TIMES, Sept. 23, 1914.]

On Friday night the Grand Boulevards were alive with people, motors, voitures, singing, dancing, and each cafe thronged by the gayest light hearts in the world.

On Saturday night the boulevards were thronged with growling, ominous, surging crowds, with faces like those of the Commune, speaking strong words for and against war.

On Sunday night mobs tore down signs, broke windows, shouted the “Marseillaise,” wreaked their vengeance on those who belonged to a nation that France thought had plunged their country into ghastly war.  Aliens sought shelter; hotels closed their massive doors intended for defense.  Mounted troops corralled the mobs as cowboys round up belligerent cattle.  Detached groups smashed and mishandled things that came in the way.

Monday night a calm so intense that one felt frightened.  Boulevards deserted, cafes closed, hotels shuttered.  Patrols of the Civil Garde in massed formation.  France was keeping her pledge to high civilization.  Yellow circulars were pasted on the buildings warning all that France was in danger and appealing by that token to all male citizens to guard the women and the weak.