Friends in strange garments

BY ANNA MILO UPJOHN
WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY THE AUTHOR
BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY The Riverside Press Cambridge 1927
COPYRIGHT, 1927, BY AMERICAN NATIONAL RED CROSS ALL RIGHTS RESERVED The Riverside Press CAMBRIDGE · MASSACHUSETTS PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.
When we go into foreign countries we eagerly look for those things that differ from our own, and if we do not find oddities in dress, food, buildings, and customs we are disappointed. But we are also disappointed if we do not meet, in the people, the honesty and kindliness that we expect from friends. We look for differences in surroundings, but for likenesses in people. We wish to find in people the traits that will make us feel at home among strangers in a strange land. We wish to find friends even though they are in strange garments.
The pictures in this book were drawn with the purpose of showing differences in externals among peoples of different nations. The stories were written to bring home to us the likeness in heart among the boys and girls of the world. A young Arab pommels his donkey’s sides for joy because he is going on a holiday in Jerusalem. A girl of Italy shares her Easter cake with a friend who has none. An orphan boy with younger brothers and sisters dependent upon him does his very best for them in Poland as in the United States.
If most of the pictures were made from children in poor circumstances, or from those living in rural districts, it is because the war left the countries of Europe greatly impoverished, and because the beautiful old costumes and habits are rapidly passing from city life and are to be found only in out-of-the-way places. More and more the differences among the children of the world are vanishing, while the likenesses are growing.
The year 1916 found Miss Upjohn, artist of child life and author of these stories, in Europe as a volunteer relief worker. She once remarked that the only time in her life when she had enough children to suit her was when she was daily serving breakfast to four hundred soldier boys in a Red Cross canteen in London. Later she served in France with the Fraternité Américaine and with the Fund for War Devastated Villages. While with the latter, during the German offensive of March, 1918, she helped to evacuate villages in the Canton of Rossières, near Montdidier, Somme. For her service in this connection she was decorated by the French Government. But there are memories which the author treasures even more than this—of the day, for example, when, after two years’ absence, she went back to one of those villages in the Somme and arrived to find the entire population celebrating a requiem for their fallen. Slipping into the church, she took a seat on a bench near the door, but the curé, recognizing her, came forward from the altar and asked her to come up among them because of all that they had been through together. ‘Such things made me feel,’ said Miss Upjohn, ‘that they regarded me as one of themselves, in sympathy at least.’