The Germans had left behind them an especial misery in the form of a vast region of burned and blown-up homes, broken vehicles and farm machinery, defiled wells, hacked and broken orchards, and ruined soil. I have stood in both of these valleys myself after German retreats and so can bespeak as personal evidence the desolation which they left behind. I, myself, have seen whole orchards of young fruit trees wantonly ruined by cutting their trunks a foot or more above the level of the ground. And this was but a single form of their devilment.
Yet as the Germans retreated "strategically" there in the spring weeks of 1917, there followed on their very heels the heavy-hearted but indomitable refugees who in yesteryear had known these hectares as their very own. Returning, they found but little by which they might recognize their former habitats. Devastation ruled, life was practically extinct. The farm animals, even the barnyard fowls and the tiny rabbits—the joy of a French peasant's heart—had been killed or carried away. Not even the bobbins of the cast-out sewing machines or the cart wheels were left behind by an enemy who prided himself on his efficiency, but who had few other virtues for any decent pride.
Seemingly stouter-hearted folk than the French might have quailed at such wholesale destruction; but the refugees did not complain. Instead, they set patiently to work—many of them still within the range of the enemy's guns—to rehabilitate themselves. Their burdens and their problems were staggeringly great; their resources pitifully small. Thus our Red Cross found them, and to give them effective aid—not only in the valleys of the Somme and the Oise, but in the other devastated areas of France—formed the Bureau of Reconstruction and Relief under Edward Eyre Hunt. Of Mr. Hunt's work, the record will be made at another time. In order, however, that you may gain the proper perspective on the beginnings of the field service of our Red Cross with our army in action, permit me to call attention in a few brief sentences to some salient features of the Bureau of Reconstruction and Relief.
It located warehouses at convenient places—Ham, Noyon, Arras, and Soissons—all of them within gunshot of the Hindenburg Line. These were stocked with food, clothing, furniture, kitchen utensils, building materials, seed, farm implements, even with rabbits, chickens, goats, and other domesticated animals. A personnel of several field workers was sent into the district to supervise the distribution of these commodities, which was done partly through authorized French committees and municipal officers in the devastated towns. These coöperated with devoted groups of British, French and American workers, who established themselves in small groups and who worked to inspire the liberated areas with faith and courage and hope. Looming large among all these coördinated agencies were the Smith College Unit—composed of graduates of the Northampton institution—and the group of workers from the Society of Friends—both of whom, in the fall of 1917, became integral parts of the Red Cross.
These two coördinated agencies, together with the Secours d'Urgence, the Village Reconstitue, the Civil Section of the American Fund for the French Wounded, the Philadelphia Unit, and the Comité Américaine pour les Régiones Dévastées, had their various operations well under way by the early summer of 1917. When it entered the field, our American Red Cross offered assistance in every way to these organizations, thereby giving a new impetus to their work. Agricultural societies were organized for the common rehabilitation of the areas, American tractors and plows were furnished by the French Government, while the Red Cross workers helped with and encouraged the planting, furnishing large quantities of seeds as they did so, while small herds of live stock, also given by the Red Cross, appeared here and there upon the French landscape.
The workers did even more. They turned to and helped patch up buildings that, with a minimum amount of labor, could again be made habitable, erected small barracks in some places, and assisted generally in renewing life and the first bare evidences of civilization in the towns of the desolated sections.
In March, 1918, these desecrated lands were just springing to life once again. God's sun was breaking through the clouds of winter and gently coaxing the wheat up out of the rough, brown lands, gardens again dotted the landscape—the Smith College Unit itself had supervised and with its own hands helped in the planting of more than four hundred and fifty of these—the little villages and the bigger towns were showing increasing signs of life and activity; then came the blow. The clouds gathered together once again. And in the misty morning of the twenty-first of March began a week of horror and devastation—a single seven days in which all the patient, loving labor of nearly a twelvemonth past was erased completely. The Germans swept across the plains of Picardy once again—the French and British armies and the terror-stricken civilians along with the American war workers were swept before them as flotsam and jetsam, all in a mad onrush. Yet all was not lost. One field worker, a stout-hearted little woman in uniform, sat in the seat of a swaying motor truck and as the thing rolled and tossed over a road of unspeakable roughness wrote in her red-bound diary, this:
"The best of all remains—the influence of neighborliness, friendship, kindness, and sympathy—these are made of the stuff which no chemistry of war can crush. We face more than half a year's work torn to pieces. But I do believe that the fact of this sacrifice will deepen its effect."