They are mostly the people who were taken in the first victorious rush of the Germans in 1914. As long as they could work, or by threats and cruelty could be induced to try to work, the Germans held them as industrial slaves. When, through starvation, exhaustion and disease, they became useless to their taskmasters they were returned to France. I do not know at what rate these victims of Germany’s ambition and lust for world power are now coming back, but last autumn and winter, when the migration was at its height, the repatriates were being received and cared for at the rate of five hundred to one thousand a day. They came through Switzerland, a three days’ journey, in rough box cars, often without food or water, and were nearly always, when they arrived, in a condition bordering on collapse. I want to tell about some of these French repatriates. I shall not exaggerate or embroider the tale. It hurts cruelly to remember those poor people. It hurts to write about them. But I want our people to know. The next time they sit in a meeting where disloyal so-called socialists warble their phrases about this struggle being a profiteers’ war, about peace by negotiations, and the rest of it, perhaps they will remember. The French government created a commission to handle the stream of human derelicts which Germany sent back through Switzerland. The people of Evian lent wholehearted aid to the commission, and all efforts have been splendidly augmented by the American Red Cross. When the trains came in at the receiving station at Evian there were always a certain number of the returned prisoners who had to be taken immediately to the hospital. They were in advanced stages of tuberculosis, they were suffering from anemia and starvation and from all the diseases of neglect. Worst of all, many women and children were found suffering from the diseases of vice and crime. All these sick ones go to hospitals. The American Red Cross established a children’s hospital at Evian, since nearly sixty per cent. of the repatriates are children, and nearly all of them need hospital care. The French have their local hospitals, and also what they call houses of repose where those of their countrymen not actually sick but extremely exhausted are cared for and put into condition to travel farther. The emaciated, hollow-eyed and weary remnant who could walk that far are, or were, taken to the old casino, where wealth and fashion used to gather for bridge and expensive food and drink. There the mayor of Evian made a touching speech welcoming the people back to their native land, comforting and cheering them as well as he could. Then they sat down to the first good meal they had eaten, some of them, for years. But first _The Marseillaise_ was sung. “Arise, children of the land, The day of glory has arrived.”