A Village in Picardy - 1

A VILLAGE IN PICARDY

A Well-Known Tune

A VILLAGE IN
PICARDY

BY
RUTH GAINES
AUTHOR OF “THE VILLAGE SHIELD,” ETC.

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
WILLIAM ALLAN NEILSON
President of Smith College

NEW YORK
E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY
681 FIFTH AVENUE

Printed in the United States of America

PREFACE.

The history and the work of the Smith College Relief Unit in the Somme is known wherever reconstruction work in France is spoken of. This brief account does not purport to give anything but a small cross-section, the picture of but one of the villages in our care. It is told in the first person to make the telling easier. As I have said, of all our villages, Canizy was the most beloved. All the Unit had a share in it.

The picture is given as it was seen day by day. What was true in this section, may not be true in another. Here the German retreat was so rapid that the devastation, though appalling, was not complete; whole avenues of trees were left standing in places, and only two churches were dynamited, by contrast with the two hundred and twenty-five destroyed throughout the région dévastée. It was perhaps in more calculated ways that the Prussians here vented their spite; in the burning of family pictures, the wrecking of machinery, the cutting of the trees about the Calvaries, and the taking away of the bells from the church towers. They left behind them here, as everywhere, ruin and silence; a silence of industry, of agriculture, of all the normal ways of life; a silence which has given the plain of Picardy the name of “The Land of Death.”

Ruth Gaines.

CHAPTER		PAGE
I	Un Village tout oublié	[3]
II	Le Château de Bon-Séjour	[16]
III	M. Le Maire	[35]
IV	O Crux, ave!	[48]
V	Mme. Gabrielle	[61]
VI	Voilà la Misère	[74]
VII	Nous sommes dix	[88]
VIII	Une Distribution de Dons	[100]
IX	En Permission	[113]
X	A la Ferme du Calvaire	[129]
XI	Les Petits Soldats	[139]
XII	M. L’Aumônier	[151]
XIII	Heureux Noël	[162]
XIV	Fidelissima, Picardie	[176]

ILLUSTRATIONS[1]

A Well-Known Tune	[Frontispiece]
Map of the German Retreat[2]	[2]
“They are over there”	[12]
“What, another little Brother!”	[17]
“Only that much Bread!”	[44]
“Is that wounded Man a Boche?”	[51]
“He is big already”	[58]
“I didn’t do that!”	[63]
“Once, before the War, the Pralines were two for a Sou”	[80]
“A Cut of a Sword-scabbard!”	[114]
“If I were grown up!”	[124]
“Our House used to be there!”	[132]
“And do the little Boche children hug their Father?”	[143]
“Company, halt!”	[148]
“If it hadn’t been for the Officer....”	[157]
“He has not come. He has been mobilized....”	[165]
“Well, if we don’t see Santa Claus, we may see a Zeppelin”	[171]
“And if it freezes to-night?”	[174]
“Oh yes, Papa is strong!”	[182]
Plan of the Village	[188]

INTRODUCTORY NOTE

No one, it may safely be said, can see this war as a whole. The nations taking part in it girdle the world, and no people is unaffected by it. Real knowledge can be gained of only comparatively small sections of the conflict, and we are grateful to those who, knowing a small section, give us a faithful account of their own observation and experience, and refrain from speculation and generalisation.

Among the infinitude of tragedies few have appealed more poignantly to our imaginations than those involved in the devastation of Picardy; and among the attempts at salvage few details have attracted the sympathetic attention of America more powerfully than the efforts of the Smith College Relief Unit. Their heroic persistence in the work of evacuation under the very guns of the great offensive of March, 1918, made the members of the Unit suddenly conspicuous; but the more picturesque feats of that terrible emergency had been preceded by a long winter of quiet work. The material results were largely wiped out; the spiritual results will remain. It is the method of that work as carried on in a single village that is described in this little book. When we have read it we know what kind of people these were who clung to the remnants of their homes in the midst of desolation. Their character and temper are depicted with kindly candour; they were very human and very much worth saving. When the time comes for reconstruction on a large scale, such an account as this will be of value in enabling us to realise the nature of the task and in teaching us how to set about it.

Smith College is proud of what these graduates have done and are doing; and this note is written to assure the Unit rather than the outside world that those who have to stay at home see and understand.

William Allan Neilson.

Smith College, Northampton, Mass.

PREFACE.

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS[1]

INTRODUCTORY NOTE