From the archive: The relief of suffering
Janet Scott continues her series on the Friend and the first world war and writes about he help Friends gave to refugees
On 6 July 1917 the Friend published a list of the workers with the Friends’ War Victims’ Relief Committee. Some 250 women and men were named, including those who worked in the London office and warehouse.
In Holland, where towns such as Amersfoort provided shelter for refugees, Friends were running workshops, teaching trades, providing some employment and enabling refugees to earn some money. In Russia there was medical work, a feeding programme with refugees, and a home for abandoned and orphaned children.
In France, where the largest part of the work was done, Friends ran a maternity home and a hospital, evacuated children at risk, built temporary shelters and new wooden homes and furniture for those whose homes had been destroyed by armies, and provided farm machinery on loan to enable harvesting.
Friends also worked in partnership, some in Tiflis with the Lord Mayor’s Armenian Fund, and some with the Serbian Relief Fund in Corsica. During the year some £70,000 was contributed to support the work.
Reports often took a while to reach London and be published in the Friend. These extracts give a flavour of some of the work reported in the second half of 1917.
France
In July, after a German retreat, some Friends visited the former ‘front’ to see what needed to be done. The 27 July edition of the Friend reported:
In the belt of land occupied by the opposing lines of trenches the state of things is very bad; trench systems are succeeded by barbed wire and then trenches again and barbed wire again, the spaces between being a complete tangle of weeds. It will take an immense amount of time to recover this belt of land…
At St Simon no houses remained in a habitable state, though some walls remained standing. We are to erect five houses in this village… Our men are first to start operations at Tugny, probably next week.
On 10 August the Friend told the story of an emigrée who left her home with her little girl when the Germans invaded and went to live with her parents-in-law. Often they had to live in the cellars and suffered bronchitis and pleurisy. Her father-in-law died. She had no news of her own parents. When that home became unsafe they moved again, having many difficulties with transport:
Madame… came to us on July 7th for her confinement, in very poor health, but we hope that ere she leaves she will be much stronger in body. She is a splendid example of the heroism and patience displayed by so many of the French women, although she has so much cause for sadness.
In October the Agricultural Department commented on the poor harvests of the four years of the war. The Friend on 5 October reported:
In 1914 the good harvest was ruined by the invasion. In 1915, after the initial disadvantage of beginning all over again, great losses were sustained through the people having to make stacks for the first time, their barns having been burned. In 1916 the season was atrociously wet. By this time weeds had increased enormously, the shortage of labour was extreme, and in consequence much was lost. It rained incessantly all through the autumn, making ploughing most unusually difficult. In 1917 a wet spring, following an unusually severe frost (which killed much winter wheat), made it difficult to sow more at the right time; it has now rained almost every day through the harvest, till many fields are almost swamps.
It will thus be seen that the special difficulties caused directly by the invasion have been aggravated by unusual weather conditions.
Russia
On 24 August the Friend described how, in the Buzuluk area, a doctor was summoned for an operation in Cossack-land:
To heal the sick and to save life is always attractive; but to set out on such a pious errand in a giant motor, across these vast steppes, promised to be a unique experience…
Our chauffeur was a good driver but he evidently had a weakness for speed; and compared with that, little else mattered! Bumps in the road he scarcely heeded, though they were many and often grievous; rearing horses, hardly controlled by frightened shouting individuals, were approached, passed and left behind as it were in a moment. The three or four villages that we drove through remained behind us as great clouds of dust.
After a successful operation and a night’s sleep, the return journey was by tarantass, a four-wheel horse-drawn vehicle:
Horses we might well have scorned after our ride of the night before; but not horses such as these. The glory of that continuous gallop will, I believe, remain in my mind the longer of the two. Drive 45 versts behind the pick of the Cossack horses, and your views on horseflesh will have to be revised. I could never have believed flesh and blood were capable of such sustained endeavour.
On 15 September the report was of high prices and scarcity:
The price of food… continues to rise higher and higher. In Buzuluk many of the shops are already closed because that have sold all they had to sell and cannot get fresh goods…
The whole situation has just been rendered infinitely worse by a serious failure of the crops. The harvest in many parts of the district was a poor one last year, but this year it is infinitely worse…
The Zemstvo have already asked the Government to remove the refugees to another district where harvest conditions are better, and where there may be more opportunity for them to gain employment.
Later in the month (28 September), from another part of Russia R R Tatlock wrote in the Friend:
One of the alarming features of the situation is the low buying value of the paper money…an unlooked-for series of troubles has caused the slow settling problem of the refugees to be suddenly thrown into confused movement again. The rushing about is just like a pot being stirred… Hardly anyone seems to know where he is going or what he intends to do next… a train full of people can actually half starve and many die under present conditions.
In Mogotovo, however, conditions were better.
The refugees are making good use of the thirty-six allotments at their disposal, in which a variety of vegetables are growing… The children’s flower gardens are now doing more justice to their name… water for this little corner has to be carried 200 yards… The work turned out from the workshop has improved both in quality and quantity… A number of articles of use, both for the garden, the hospital and the House, have been constructed.
Armenia
In France and Belgium refugees were able to escape with much of what they required in trains, or along good roads. In Poland, they had ample notice to leave. However the Friend (31 August) described how in Armenia:
…everything came like a thunder-clap… everyone who escaped the hands of the Turks had to fly over almost roadless country and over high mountain passes, harried by the Turks in the rear, and often cut off in front by the Kurds, who… and left them, if alive, literally stripped of everything. It is wonderful that through such conditions something between 250,000 and 300,000 came safely through from Turkish to Russian Armenia.
Here, for two and a-half years, they have lived, crowded together in these little Trans-Caucasian towns. Thousands died during the first hot summer, after the great exhaustion of the road…
Even here life and movable property cannot be considered safe, for almost every week lawless Kurds swoop down… and bear away sheep, cattle, buffaloes and anything else they can lay hands upon. Anyone who gets in the way is shot down… Such is a little of the background against which our Committee… is trying to help these people find new hope and the strength to start afresh in life.
