IN July, 1917, months ahead of the United States army, which was unprepared for war, the Civil Section of the American Committee for French Wounded arrived at the front between Oise and Aisne, where General Pétain had assigned it to the village of Blérancourt.(20) Only three months previously the sector entrusted to the Civil Section for succour had been evacuated by the Kaiser's troops in their strategic retreat of March. No better vantage-point existed to gage the results of invasion and German efficiency.

From inhabitants left among the ruins the American women learned the story of their long martyrdom. One day in August, 1914, from Saint-Aubain to Tergnier guns had roared, so near that doors rattled and windows shook. The people were told that it was artillery practice. The next day the Germans came.

Their haste to advance made them unrelenting. Every French soldier found behind their lines was shot, as was every civilian suspected of having lent him aid. At Blérancourt, shots fired by our retreating soldiers were blamed on the inhabitants. The village was held for a whole night under a threat of general massacre. Five houses were drenched with gasoline and burnt. In the streets what men were left, their suspenders and pants buttons cut, were held at rifle's length. In the cellars the women and children, locked in, awaited suffocation.

After the Marne the enemy took root. Clausewitz had long ago laid down the principle: 'The right of requisition of an occupying army has no other limitation than the impoverishment, exhaustion, and destruction of the country.' General von Heeringen, who commanded at Laon, showed himself a worthy disciple. 'War,' he wrote, 'must be waged cruelly. The people must feel its full weight.' In each village, a Kommandanur, under the orders of an officer. or a non-commissioned officer, enforced orders inspired by the principle. Buildings were seized, all resources in money and kind requisitioned, and the people enslaved beneath a yoke of iron. Several million Belgian and French people lived, some three years, others four years and a half, in this Hell. The American women, just landed, had never imagined any such intensity of suffering. But as the inhabitants told their story, they listened.

They heard the story of the utter spoliation of a people. All money had been taken. Without making any allowance for the absence of man power or the impossibility of producing wealth, the fiscal officers of the German army exacted the payment of all taxes due to the French Government, leaving no part thereof for the administration of the territory or for the upkeep of public services. When money disappeared, the mayors were ordered to issue municipal currency and enforce its circulation. When nothing more could be obtained by this method, currency was issued, as security for which both individuals and municipalities had to pledge all assets in their possession or in banks. Later a central bank was created at Maubeuge from which municipalities were obliged to borrow in order to pay the taxes, to say nothing of the fines imposed. As early as the end of 1915, no private, no public resources of any kind remained in occupied France. Everything had been drained. Ruin was the common lot of all.

The hand of unbending authority had been stretched out over persons, as over things. Did a German officer pass, he had to be saluted. Did a German private present himself, even without a regular billet, he had to be taken in. Twice a day, roll call; after certain hours, a stringent curfew. Fatigue party after fatigue party. Enforced labour for all youths and for men under sixty. The commune of Chauny fined because a civilian had been absent from the daily inspection; the commune of Coucy fined because an inhabitant had spoken to a Russian prisoner; the city of Laon fined because a French aeroplane had dropped three bombs on the station. Such was the daily meed. Then came evacuation. First, all men considered capable of doing military service; next, labourers needed for special work; finally, suspects and the ungovernables, sent off either in groups, or one by one, to a fate the mystery of which was tragic.

At an early date famine threatened. The Germans carried off the wheat and hay and straw and horses and cattle in September. In October, they seized all food supplies. The hospital of Laon, and those of Blérancourt and Chauny, were pillaged. There was nothing left to buy. The more fortunate grew what they could in their gardens when enforced labour left them time to do so. But at night the soldiers dug the potatoes or stole the rabbits. In February, 1915, General von Heeringen reduced the daily rations to one hundred and forty grams of bread and forty grams of meat. Nothing could be had at any butcher shop. But for the offal thrown away by the military kitchens and a few purchases in German canteens, the people would have starved to death before the end of the first year.

Salvation came from the Committee for Relief organized by Mr. Hoover. Formed in 1915, this Committee had merely contemplated bringing, by private gifts, some extra comforts to inhabitants which it believed were being fed by the occupants according to the laws of war. As soon as it was started, the Committee found itself feeding, and obliged single-handed to feed, seven and a half million Belgians and two and a half million French, from whom Germany had taken everything and to whom she refused to give anything. Financed thereafter by the Allied Governments, the Committee for Relief built up a splendid organization. In the sector between Oise and Aisne, its first flour train arrived in May, 1915. The bread ration, first fixed at two hundred and seventy grams, was increased the following year to three hundred and forty grams. Foodstuffs were thus distributed in this region to the value of more than ten million francs.(21) Later clothing was distributed to the people, many of whom were wearing coats made of ticking, dresses cut out of bed linen, overcoats made from threadbare blankets, and shoes lined with sacking.

The morale of the people was low. The bravest were silent and waited. Others gave way. Shameful mutterings and tale-carryings prompted a German officer to say, 'We really have no need of police.' One felt, too, that the enemy was growing weary. The resplendent German army of 1914 had become sordid. Underfed horses, fewer automobiles, shorter rations, all told of increasing difficulties. And then came the reign of 'Ersatz.' Ersatz foodstuffs, ersatz supplies, ersatz war material. Yet the front remained unchanged. The French held; but so did the Germans. They seemed rooted for all eternity. At Blérancourt, the Duke of Mecklenburg and his suite organized their hunting parties six months in advance. At Quierzy, German archaeologists in feldgrau rifled the soil for vestiges of Charlemagne to bolster the historic claims of the German Empire over France.

Suddenly, in the middle of February, 1917, there came a change. In each village---on the 14th at Saint-Aubin, the 16th at Guny, the 18th at Saint-Paul-au-Bois, a little later at Trosly-Loire --- an order of the Kommandantur brought the whole population to the market square, the school, or the church; the roll was called, and whoever was neither infirm nor old nor impotent was made to step out. The rule was to take everybody from sixteen to sixty. They were told to make ready to go. They went, always too slowly to please their escort, hurried forward with rifle butts or bayonets, like the Curé of Saint-Aubin, who insisted on walking at the pace of the oldest at the end of his column so as to abandon none. Some were sent to the Ardennes, others to the North, others to Belgium. Those who remained --- the infirm and old and the very young --- were concentrated in two or three villages, and shut up in churches or in factories. At the doors armed sentinels stood guard.

Then the German engineers made ready all things for the strategic retreat ordered by Quarter-Master-General Erich von Ludendorff. They sawed down all the fruit trees, robbing the villages of their verdant crowns. Then in every farm every agricultural implement, even to a spade or a rake, was gathered up, heaped in a. pile, broken, and burned. All was made ready for the final act, carried out with scientific efficiency. In every commune the houses, bridges, and cross-roads were mined with high explosives, connected to central batteries. One morning in March the sentinels told their prisoners, 'It is for to-morrow.'

The next morning at H hour, everything was blown to pieces. During the next three days more than three fourths of all the villages between Soissons and Laon were destroyed with high explosives, one after the other. In places where the pitiful remainder of the population had been concentrated, or when time was lacking, the destruction was only partial. At Blérancourt only sixty houses were burnt, but the best were set on fire, the soldiers shouting, 'Kapitalisten Kaput.' Three or four churches were spared, thanks to the efforts of German doctors or chaplains. When it was all over, the doors were opened to the unfortunates whom the enemy intended to leave on this murdered land. Stunned and bewildered, they were driven by their tormentors among the still smoking ruins. Germany wanted a desert behind her: she had made it. A few hours later, our Thirty-Third Corps and General Féraud's cavalry entered the villages to the west of the Ailette and along shell-torn roads followed the enemy up the right bank.

The people who were to live amid these ruins had but little in common with that splendid race, the glory and glamour of whose history I have sought to depict.(22) Those who remained after the German retreat were living rubble, formless and helpless, bowed down and passive; our soldiers fed them as one feeds the sick. The Germans, by reverse selection, had left behind only the senile and the paralyzed, the halt, the lame, and the blind, the deaf and dumb, the hunchbacks and the cripples. Those who had fled in 1914 to the South of France, those who, evacuated by the enemy in 1914 to 1917, came back from Germany through Switzerland, were scarcely any better. They had been told that their villages had been liberated. They had set out for them at once, and, arriving at a turn of the road, had looked upon what had once been their homes: the houses, heaps of stones, the fields, chaos. No shelter beyond holes covered with a few planks; no tools, no implements. Even the soil was gone. The return had been full of the glad anticipation of victory; the arrival spelled blank despair.

To understand what followed, one must fathom the depth of their misery. Remember the total impossibility of finding shelter, of satisfying the major instincts of mankind. Furniture, doors, windows, roofs, walls, all had disappeared. To get on their feet they needed money, but of money there was none. All their earnings came from the soil; and the soil was dead. Their small fortunes, saved up bit by bit, were gone. Doubtless the French Government was there, but it was far off and out of reach. Besides, in 1917, the law on war damages had not yet been voted and the system of advances was just beginning to function. In the confusion of the German retreat and the general mixing-up of the population, it was not without difficulty that financial assistance reached those for whom it was intended. Many received nothing. Many were paid once or twice, and then all trace of them was lost. And here we touch upon the second characteristic of this returning population: it was composed exclusively of paupers. These splendid workers, who had never begged anything of any one, were obliged to rely on others for the necessaries of life. A secular tradition of labour had given way to a mental complex of dependence. Want had killed courage.

Besides, these men, yoked by centuries to the same patch of land, were now uprooted for the first time. The German system of massing the inhabitants of the destroyed villages in a few communes had done this.

No one was in his own home, nor even in his own village. Even family ties were lacking, for families were scattered. In August, 1914, the general mobilization had taken all men capable of bearing arms. Among those who were not mobilized, some had fled three weeks later and sought refuge somewhere in France; the others had been carried off by the enemy. The internment of boys, one of the first steps of German occupation, the requisitions of labour, the penal evacuations, and finally the wholesale evacuation of the entire valid population in February and March, 1917, had broken down the cells of social structure. An inhabitant of Blérancourt, fifty-six years old, had ten children living. One of his sons was a soldier. Another, wounded and amputated, was in a Paris hospital. Three others --- two daughters of thirty-one and nineteen, and a son of sixteen --- had been carried off into Germany. At Blérancourt there remained four children under eleven, as well as a crippled son and his wife. Such instances were by no means uncommon.

So much for the present. But to judge the future, look at the children. They had grown up without milk, in cellars, fed more often than not only on black bread and water. Their emaciated bodies told the story of their privations. They were bent by rickets. Their eyes, too big, shone in their sallow faces. Their arms and legs were without trace of muscle. Immediately after the German retreat from Selens, a young girl had gathered some of them in an open barn. She tried to conduct classes. How could she, without books, without blackboard, without paper, without pens, without anything? Wrapped in worn-out blankets, the children shivered in the cold, rainy spring. Wizened, like little old men, their eyes held the look of death.

And yet, amid these sinister surroundings, lacking in all the essentials of life, there came from out of the depths of these ruins a mysterious quickening, annunciative of the rebirth of life and labour. Women, bent with age, began to wash, to sew, to cook for the soldiers. Men gathered themselves together for reconstruction. A refugee from La Fère became schoolmaster at Blérancourt. Elsewhere the foreman of a factory acted as secretary of a municipality. Others began to clear the ruins from what had once been their gardens. Improvised municipalities employed those able to work, and sought to restore some semblance of civic order out of the chaos of destruction. If the village could be re-formed, if the soil could once more be made to give itself to the race, stabilization would ensue. For was not the soil the very soul of the village? Wounded, tangled with barbed wire, it awaited its own, those who for centuries had served it. Rather scratch it with their nails, like savages, than abandon it anew.

In the depths of such distress, incredulity was natural when eighteen foreign women arrived and announced that they were going to stay and help the people reconstruct. When, with the aid of soldiers from the cavalry corps, they put up their barracks, warehouses, and dispensary amid the ruins of the old château, the Picard peasants, accustomed to walls of stone, ran their hands over the wooden partitions with undisguised doubt. Six weeks later, ten families from Saint-Paul-aux-Bois arrived at Blérancourt and asked to be allowed to sign papers giving them the right to wooden dwellings. The American unit acted as go-between with the administration, Féraud's cavalrymen put up the shacks, and the result was soon apparent. By March, 1918, eight hundred families had homes, furnished after a fashion, and received their food supplies three times a week from American trucks. On the ground cases piled up, bearing unknown names --- Denver, Cleveland, Detroit, Los Angeles --- which read like promises of help. The automobile restored circulation to this desert. The rebirth of business announced the rebirth of life. Materially and morally, the beginning was good.

But this beginning, dictated by circumstances, was not the aim, and other duties pressed. First the children, whose health brooked no delay. So a dairy was opened at Blérancourt with Jersey cows, brought from Caen, and of an evening by moonlight its doors were besieged by mothers touched once more by the wand of hope. At the end of 1917, the children of twenty-two villages gathered around a Christmas-tree which gave them their first vision of peace.

There remained the men, for whom all was dead while the soil was dead. Left to themselves, they were powerless. to bring it to life. Soldiers gave what fraternal help they could, but it was not enough. The prefect had funds for advances, but they were not to exceed one fifth of the loss, so that where the holding and all the agricultural implements and tools necessary for its cultivation were utterly destroyed, the aid of the State was less by eighty per cent than the loss sustained. But even had this aid been equal to the loss, individual effort would have remained ineffective. Nearly all the tillers of the soil were gone: dead, mobilized, or carried off as prisoners. If only the remaining few had worked, the result would have been insignificant and mechanical cultivation, made imperative by the condition of the soil, impossible. It was essential that all the holdings be treated as a unit and the total available forces applied to its restoration. Four months later this result was achieved. An agricultural coöperative was formed. The soil began to come to life again; and hope returned.

The mainspring of this rebirth was the tiny Blérancourt office with its trained nurses, its women truck drivers, its lying-in hospital, its crèche, its classes in household science, its warehouses and its card indexes: a centre of material help and moral support. Personal contacts were established which were to be the human framework of a common endeavour. Each inhabitant, man or woman, young or old, was the object of personal observation. Each was weighed morally to know what share he or she could bear of the burden of reconstruction. There was an actual and thorough blending of American initiative and French virtues. Methods of interpenetration were standardized so as, with increased means, to cope with greater needs. If the front moved forward, as was hoped, the work could be pushed on behind it, applying tried methods to fresh areas. The sight of our new regiments of artillery upon the roads and of our great squadrons of aeroplanes in the skies gave promise of widened responsibilities following triumphant morrows.(23)

The fate of battle decided otherwise, and twice in 1918 the effort was blasted by defeat. This crisis, which lasted nine months, began in March, 1918. On the morrow of Caporetto, the Interallied Supreme War Council decided to put off any further offensive on the Western Front until the arrival of the American army. Against two hundred German divisions, we could then put in the field only one hundred and seventy. Ludendorff determined to take advantage of this and to force the issue. The blow fell on March 1st, in the valley of the Oise, where the French and English lines met at Barisis, hard by Coucy-le-Château, on the road from Soissons to Laon. The English had expected it would fall in Flanders. After stealthy concentrations by night, aided by every refinement of camouflage, there came a few shots to find the range and then a deluge of gas shells. The Germans broke through the Gough army. Into the gap General Pétain threw French division after French division, brought up in trucks at breakneck speed. But quick as was the counter-thrust, the Germans were quicker, and on the 25th they reached Noyon. On the 23d, Big Bertha began shelling Paris. Thousands of Parisians blocked the railroad stations. By the 27th, the flood of refugees, driven from between the Oise and the Aisne, was flowing to the South.

To receive them, not even French soldiers --- who would have given moral support --- but English troops who did not understand a word they said. At Chauny, Marizelle, Dampcourt, Bichancourt, all along the Oise, amazement gave place to terror. The women-folk flocked to Blérancourt asking, 'Where shall we go?' On the 22d, the General Staff ordered trucks to be held in readiness and the children to be placed in safety. At each lull in the firing, the old folks sought to return to their homes to save some of their effects. On Sunday, the 24th, the prefect of the Aisne brought the order to leave in the night. On Monday morning, the refugees arrived at Vic-sur-Aisne and at Soissons. Everywhere was an inextricable jumble of people, domestic animals, and goods, children seeking their mothers, mothers seeking their children, old people asking for a train, British soldiers, the remnants of a routed army, French soldiers trying to make their way to the front. Not a trace of civil administration remained. Alone the tax-collector of Blérancourt, M. Héricault, standing in a lorry, was distributing a whole month's advance to each refugee. The American Unit did wonders to guide this retreat. Driven from its field of action by battle, it was at the same moment deprived of its American base by the dislocation of the war relief organization to which it belonged. The French Government suggested that the American Committee move to Alsace where the front was quieter. It refused. In retreat as in action it wanted to be with the Picards who were near to its heart. 'The peasants,' it answered, 'are with us. Work will soon begin again, and we shall be able to grow wheat.'

On May 27th, the front flamed forth anew. On that day, the enemy in enormous waves swamped the Chemin des Dames, crossed the Aisne, and pushed on towards the Marne. Taking advantage of the Allied concentration north of the Oise, in the section recently threatened, to prepare an attack between Rheims and Noyon, they made a last desperate effort to end the war before the arrival of the Americans, who were being landed at the rate of 300,000 a month. Sixty German divisions between Berry-au-Bac and the Soissons-Laon road overwhelmed eleven Allied divisions. Neither on the Aisne nor on the Vesle could the advance be stopped, and it reached the line of the Marne. The whole American zone of restoration was once more in the hands of the enemy or under fire.

From June 5th to June 15th, the three German armies of von Boehm, von Hoffmann and von Francois kept up their assaults. With the exception of Vic-sur-Aisne and twenty-three communes, the whole Department of the Aisne was soon reoccupied by the enemy. The American centre of Vic-sur-Aisne was on the front line. Farther to the south, the Château of Coyolle was under fire. The station at Villers-Cotterets was destroyed by bombing planes. The children, evacuated by miracle, were sent to Paris, and the American Unit could devote all its efforts to a hasty evacuation of the Soissonnais villages. Communications by road became impossible. It took the Vice-President of the American Committee twelve hours over roads, blocked by troops, transport, and refugees, to cover the eighteen miles from Vic-sur-Aisne to Château-Thierry, where the prefect lived. Day by day the movements of the army brought about changes in military organization, and soon the Committee had to rely exclusively on its own resources.

Henceforth the social workers were in the hands of Fate, following the fortunes of the army and serving as and where circumstances dictated. From Paris they sent their colony of children to Normandy. From Paris, with two advanced posts at Changis and Viels-Maisons, they sent their trucks to feed the twenty-four villages of the Aisne as yet unoccupied by the enemy. From Paris they kept in touch with some two thousand families of refugees, scattered over France, who turned to their headquarters for information and help.

Meanwhile, between Paris and the front military services which no one had foreseen were spontaneously growing up. American women volunteers who had come to do works of peace, gave themselves up wholeheartedly to war. Some nursed the wounded; others in canteens, stationary or mobile, served coffee and chocolate to 200,000 French, English, and American soldiers. Grizzled poilus, once they had tasted of these welcome halts, asked on the road, 'Où sont les dames?' Here American hearts beat in unison with French hearts. Rural friendship had developed into a comradeship of arms. Day by day, a wealth of mutual comprehension was amassed at dusty halts. Hearts that had shared the same trials needed no interpreters to understand one another.

And now the dawn of victory. Held in the enormous pocket it had made from the Chemin des Dames to the Marne, the enemy was caught as in a trap. Their supplies threatened, the Germans could no longer attack; and yet attack they must, for their position was untenable and every day their numerical superiority was decreasing. Their army was suffering from a transport crisis. Austria, beaten on the Piave, was clamouring for peace. Hence the attack of July 15th in Champagne. Once this attack was broken, the initiative passed to the Allies. On the 18th, their counter-attack was launched and made lightning progress. Château-Thierry was retaken on July 21st, Soissons on August 2d, and from August 20th to September 6th the whole region between the Oise and the Aisne was reconquered. Tartiers, Lombray, Blérancourdelle, Le Mont de Choisy, Cuts, Blérancourt, Quierzy, Juvigny, Cuffies, Pasly, Guny, Noyon, Marizelle, Pierremande, Autreville, Folembray, Coucy-le-Château, Coucy-la-Ville, Neuville-sur-Margival, Margival, Laffaux, Vregny, Chavigny, Leuilly, Chauny, Barisis were all cleared of the enemy by the joint attack of French and American divisions.

As these familiar names appeared in the list of villages liberated, the American women pushed forward to their initial base at Blérancourt with canteens, dispensaries, and the hospital unit given to the American Committee for Devastated France by the American Women's Hospital Association. They arrived at Château-Thierry and established themselves in the rue de la République, still echoing with the shouts of American Marines pursuing the Germans to the Marne. Then they pushed forward again, marching north behind the army which, as it advanced, left behind it zones empty of troops in which the civilian population was abandoned to its own resources. More than two hundred villages had to rely on American lorries for the possibility of existence. For three months these rolling stores, carrying condensed milk, sugar, rice, canned goods, clothes, boots, kitchen utensils, etc., were the hope of the returning population again established among their ruins. Each month they pushed a little farther to the north and the stationary depots followed them: Changis in June. Château-Thierry in July, Vic-sur-Aisne in September, Laon in October. French bureaucracy, so loath to relinquish its prerogatives, delegated its powers to these foreign women to inventory the plain of Laon and cope with its immediate needs. Yet the final aim was never lost sight of. As soon as a returning refugee asked for tools, they were given to him. What would it have availed to maintain life if not to give rebirth to the soil and attach man to its furrows?

After the celebration of the Armistice, at the outposts as in the farms behind the front, Blérancourt was opened up again and once more set to work. In this sinister region there was nothing of the intoxication of victory; but, if intoxication was lacking, determination was not. In the shattered villages were funerals, marriages, and baptisms. Every day from all corners of France newcomers returned. A few planks, some tarred paper, beds, chairs, and tables were enough to enable them to live through the winter. The spring was to find them ready for the tasks of peace.(24)

STRUGGLES of peace, greater even than those of war: for the war over, bonds slackened and water became thicker than blood. Obstacles hitherto undreamed of emerged from the mists of hope: first in France, then in the United States. In France they were the result of surroundings and of the times. Very few Americans discerned them. Hence the Great Misunderstanding.

The reconstruction of France did not appear to offer the slightest opportunity for outside intervention. Both our laws and our policy made it inconceivable. Our laws? The French Chamber and Senate had dealt with the matter in the abstract. They had evolved a charter of reconstruction very much as they would have drafted a political constitution. All foreign participation, whether material or moral, was banished from this narrowly national programme. Outside of Germany, liable for the reparation of the damage she had wrought, the French Reconstruction Act of April 17, 1919, contemplated only two parties to reconstruction: the Government and the victims. Our policy? Americans had said, 'We will help France to rebuild; our industry will aid reconstruction.' President Wilson's Secretary of the Treasury had promised me to obtain from Congress the credits necessary to finance America's participation in the reconstruction of our devastated regions.

But French ministers responsible for our economic policy would hear nothing of it.

The war over, our factories, which for five long years had lived on war, suddenly found themselves without orders. Every one feared lockouts, unemployment, social unrest. Reconstruction was a panacea for all these evils. Lloyd George once said to me, 'France is lucky to have ten devastated Departments.' Without indulging their humour to this extent, my French colleagues were anything but anxious to see foreigners get the orders they relied upon to provide in times of peace a steady flow of work for our factories. American credits to be spent in America? American corporations rebuilding our destroyed cities? France preferred to rebuild on a strict protection basis without any aid from abroad because aid meant competition.

Reconstruction was indeed a stupendous undertaking and one for which no precedent existed. From the sea to the Vosges war had cut a wide swath of death and desolation. The mind reels before figures which seek to express the magnitude of the cataclysm; but even figures cannot convey all the horror of it, for beneath the ruins of things there seethed an uncertain world of sorrows and hopes and aspirations, a living and suffering people whose nerves were on edge. Ruin was fourfold: that of battle accumulated during fifty-two months of constant fighting, that of economic destruction inflicted by the German General Staff on all industrial plants, that of strategic efficiency stamped upon the face of the territory evacuated by Hindenburg in 1917, that of the final rout piled up haphazard by the last three months of war. Ruin thus heaped upon ruin formed a seemingly insurmountable barrier to human effort.(25)

To the restoration of this chaos(26) the effort of the Government was directed by the law of 1919 which laid upon it an unparalleled task; unparalleled in principle, for never had any government undertaken after a war to make good all damage sustained by private citizens; unparalleled in magnitude, for never had destruction been wrought with such thoroughness and perfection. Solely responsible --- German reparations being due to it and not to the victims --the French Government had to make good three kinds of damage: damage to real estate, damage of moveables, and loss by enemy requisitions. The Government alone, under the law, was responsible for financing reconstruction. The Government alone by the very nature of things had to assume the responsibility for planning and carrying out reconstruction. For in this desolated and ruined land, deprived of all communication with the outside world, private effort was powerless.

Groping its way and with many a faux pas, the heavy machinery of Government, no-wise fitted for the task, gradually set itself in motion. Reconstruction changed hands not infrequently. In 1915, the Ministry of Public Works was responsible; in 1917, the Ministry of Blockade and of Liberated Regions; from 1918 to 1920, the Ministries of Liberated Regions and of Industrial Reconstruction both had a finger in the pie. From 1920 to 1925, the Ministry of Liberated Regions was alone responsible. Thereafter reconstruction was in the hands of the Ministry of Finance. In the devastated regions themselves the same changes of responsibility were complicated by division of authority between prefects, secretaries general of reconstruction, directors general of technical departments: Department of Finance, Legal Department, Department of Administration, Architectural Department, Department of Agriculture, Industrial Department, Department of Statistics, Surveying Department, Department of Accounts --such were, to mention only a few, some of the aspects of this stupendous undertaking. For the actual work of reconstruction everything had to be created. Hundreds of thousands of labourers, foremen, and engineers had to be recruited, transported over tattered roads, sheltered and fed without local resources, and supplied with tools and materials brought from afar.

That the Government did. Badly? So it is said. But who could have done it well? The early contracts were expensive, far above regular prices; but there was no basis of comparison for this herculean labour. Methods varied, but so did needs. All in all, the Government within a few months rid the soil of live shells and barbed wire, filled in the trenches, reduced chaos to some semblance of order. At the same time it made shift to repair what could be repaired; it built shelters of corrugated iron by the thousand, wooden barracks and temporary dwellings in which for years the people lived, in awful conditions, it is true, but without which they could not have lived at all. Thus gradually, after a period during which the Government did all the work, an era of private endeavour dawned when contractors worked for the victims of invasion and under their direction, and the Government paid. At first, the sole medium of reconstruction, the French Government was henceforth merely to finance it.

Then there arose the problem of prices, a problem of surpassing difficulty which foreign observers have utterly failed to grasp because, not being on the spot, they lacked all knowledge of its essential elements. As soon as the railroads began running again, as soon as the roads became passable, the 300,000 rough shelters which had been run up permitted a general return to the war zone, and then, as if drawn in by a great current of air, there was an immediate congestion of transport, of building material, of labour, of capital. Some idea of that congestion may be gathered from the fact that with the public works equipment of pre-war France it would have taken fifty years or more at normal pressure to rebuild the devastated regions. In pre-war times the total amount of public building done in a year never amounted to more than a billion francs, and the building to be done in the devastated regions was estimated in 1919 at some twenty-six gold billions. So reconstruction was to be an artificial and exceptional undertaking. As in a virgin land, everything had to be imported: stones, wood, bricks, mortar, cement, and labour.

A rise in prices, sudden and uncontrollable, was the result. Conditions were such that a building worth 100,000 francs in 1914, cost two, three, four, or five times as much to rebuild. This increase in cost varied according to places, to ease of access, to existing demand, etc. It was also affected by an entirely different and outside cause: the fall of the franc. So the cost of reconstruction was not always nor everywhere the same. In order to ascertain it, the 1914 value had to be multiplied by an ever-varying coefficient which changed according to place, according to time, according to the work to be done. Hence endless discussions about the two values and the two prices: the 1914 value and the cost of reconstruction; the actual loss sustained and the cost of replacement. Only those who have actually had to deal with it can imagine the complexity of the problem.

When there was plenty of work, when demand exceeded the supply, when the franc fell, the coefficient rose. When credits were restricted, labour more plentiful, and the franc rising, the coefficient fell. The combination of a constant --- destruction --- and of a variable --- cost --- precluded all possibility of advance estimates. An estimate that was correct on January 1, 1921, would be entirely wrong a year later: so that the indemnity granted was more than likely to prove too high or too low when the work came to be done, and either the victim of invasion or the Government was bound to lose. The rise and variation of prices was the first sore of reconstruction.

Of remedies there was but one: abundant and regular credits so as to permit the quick completion of approved work without stops or starts. But the enormity of the work to be done was equalled only by the inadequacy of resources. Here the story of the devastated regions merges into the wider history of Europe and of the world, and the reconstruction crisis appears only as part of a more general phenomenon: the sabotage of victory by the victors. Justice, equity, treaties, the unanimous conscience of mankind, had placed Germany under the obligation of paying for what she had destroyed. The Fourteen Points of President Wilson, the terms of the Armistice of November 11, 1918, the Treaty of Versailles, had all most solemnly proclaimed that obligation. In December, 1919, the Clemenceau-Lloyd George agreement, ratified by the other Allies, had allotted to France fifty-five per cent of all reparations to be paid by Germany, the total amount of which was to be determined before May 1, 1921, by the Reparations Commission. Pledges never to be fulfilled, repudiated as soon as signed!

Early in 1920, the future was discernible: Germany determined, in order to escape payment, to risk anything, even bankruptcy; the Allies inclined to help rather than hinder the defaulter's game; a separate peace made by the United States; pressure brought by Great Britain to obtain a revision of the treaties; the surrender by France of her rights --- such was the substance of those five years. Altogether, from 1921 to May 31, 1926, prior to the Dawes plan, France had received from Germany two billion gold marks and 800 million since it went into operation.(27) By the end of 1925, France had spent to reconstruct three fourths of the devastation 63 billion francs, without counting pensions. France had to find the difference in the place of defaulting Germany. This was the second sore of reconstruction.

What could France do, forced to spend, in the shortest possible space of time, over and above 77 milliards on pensions, something like a hundred milliards on reconstruction? Borrow? Borrowing on such a scale dries up a nation's resources. France borrowed right and left, in every conceivable way: first she borrowed direct, then she established a separate organism, the Crédit National, the capital and interest of whose bonds are guaranteed by the State; finally, she borrowed through the war victims themselves. The national debt grew and grew; the franc fell. Budget and Treasury difficulties became more and more pressing. The amounts paid to the victims of invasion grew smaller, both as to advances made before their claims were accepted and as to amounts paid on account after this had been done. Credits voted for the devastated regions were the first to suffer. Next the Crédit National's bond issues, authorized yearly, were restricted. Delays were followed by expedients --- the stretching-out over a long term of a debt payable immediately.

Thus, without denying the principle of its debt, the State sought to escape its consequences and even failed to keep up its payments; for whether made in the form of loans --- commissions and expenses on which rose as high as sixteen or eighteen-per cent---or of so-called negotiable securities which the banks refused to accept as collateral, the final result was always a reduction in the amount due. Reparation of damage in full ceased to be a fact. Contractors, obliged to make heavy advances, hesitated in presence of the enormity of the sums involved and slowed down on reconstruction. In many localities building plants were shut down. At the end of 1922, a magnificent work had been done --- in comparison to which the reconstruction of the South after the American Civil War pales into insignificance. But more than a milliard was overdue to the victims and a great deal of work had not even been touched. In 1926, fifteen milliards francs' worth of reconstruction still remained to be done. Let us stop here; for after the first and the second, this was the third and most serious sore of reconstruction.

Henceforth injustice was to reign, the outcome not of laws but of circumstances. Increases and variations in cost, changing coefficients, insufficiency and irregularity of resources, delay in and paralysis of payments, combined with the methods applied for the execution of the programme, made non-reconstruction fall heaviest upon those victims least able to bear it. First the means of communication: railroads, highways, roads, telegraphs, and telephones had been restored; then the means of productivity: agricultural, industrial, and commercial enterprises and undertakings of all kinds. Finally --- last of all --- came the rebuilding of dwellings. Nothing could have been more logical or fairer if the machinery of reconstruction had worked through to the end. But if the machinery broke down, as actually happened, it was the small householder who suffered. This imparted a double and even contradictory aspect to our reconstruction, which made it all the harder for foreigners to understand. On the one hand, just pride in the actual achievement; on the other, equally just anger at its persistent incompleteness. Pride at having reconstructed three fourths of our ruins unaided; anger that we still bore the running sore of the missing fourth. Thus it is that some have criticized our pride, others our inefficiency.

When funds ran out, all railroads and highways had been completely restored. Thanks to advances of seventy-five per cent that the manufacturers and industrial corporations had received on the estimated amount of their damages, the factories were sixty-five per cent rebuilt and all the more important establishments were working to capacity. Thanks to the farmers' prodigious efforts and to the advances made on an acreage basis (Government ploughing, chemical manure, extra indemnities to market gardeners and owners of vineyards), eighty per cent of the fields were tilled, seventy per cent under crops. Even the tradespeople, although less favoured, had prospered rapidly, thanks to increased business and the rise in prices. But as to homes, on the contrary, when their turn came, funds had been exhausted; they were scandalously behind, and the situation was disastrous.

Of the 4,000,000 inhabitants of the war zone before 1914, 3,600,000 had returned. But out of 304,000 houses totally, and 286,000 partially, destroyed, only 280,000 had been repaired and 44,000 rebuilt, so that there was a shortage of 266,000 dwellings.(28) To put it otherwise, eighty-six per cent of the inhabitants had returned; but, taking into account repairs and reconstruction, only fifty-four per cent of the former dwellings were available, and of the 300,000 totally destroyed, only fourteen per cent had been rebuilt, a shortage of eighty-six per cent. This has been made up by all kinds of shelters and temporary constructions. Community life had been resumed. Individual and family life, which centres around the home, was still absent. The forces of industry and commerce had resumed their activity. But the individual still lacked the essentials of his development. Reconstruction, halted halfway as it was, had saved the State, but sacrificed the individual to the community.

For unfinished reconstruction subjected the individual to all that was most repugnant to his traditions and instincts. Hard-working, but jealous of his liberty and the secrecy of his own affairs, he became either a beggar lost in the intricacies of legal and administrative chicanery or else a mere numbered pawn.. If single-handed he sought to obtain payment of his war damages, it meant endless discussion and difficulties with the Government, the various reparations tribunals, the architects, the contractors, the public Treasury. If, to avoid all this, he joined a building coöperative, which dealt on his behalf with the authorities, he abdicated all independence. His turn came without his being consulted. Neither the architect, the contractor, nor the building materials were chosen by him. It sometimes happened that when the work was done, it was not up to specification. The venal worth of the restored building was always below the cost of reconstruction. Both methods and circumstances made the life of the victim of invasion one of daily disappointment. For the first time in all the centuries that he and his had lived on the same patch of land, he was dependent upon others and had ceased to be his own master.

Did his calling afford him any consolation? Yes, if you mean that his aim was to bring the soil to life again: for it lived; no, if you consider the conditions in which he worked. Bowed down for five years under a foreign yoke or in exile, the peasant found himself upon a land which had no semblance to the past. Man power was lacking. Long before the war shortage of agricultural labour was a commonplace. After the war, with 600,000 peasants slain and amid the throes of reconstruction, the shortage was cruel.

The fields in their mantle of devastation seemed less attractive than before. Besides, in the very fields, not from the towns as in pre-war days, the farmer had to face competition. Every day his farm hands drifted away from him. Why submit to the heavy labour of the fields, why toil for unending hours, when the near-by contractor hired help, any one at any price, to work eight or ten hours a day?

Neither in quality nor in quantity was the harvest to be compared with that of pre-war days. Without working capital --- for what reparations he had received had all been spent in restoring the soil --- the farmer had no means of storing his crops. Silos, haylofts, barns, and granaries were gone. He was obliged to sell his produce immediately, and the food trusts bought his grain, his beets, and his cattle at their own prices. In 1921, the low price of wheat created a serious crisis. In 1922, there was a panic. Capital needs had trebled and quadrupled. People began to see that in agriculture the apparent real value, the venal worth of the ground itself, is but a minute fraction of the accumulated assets that generations have invested for the equipment of the soil.

Agricultural societies formed in the devastated regions nearly all failed. Why? Because, organized on ordinary business lines, they could not give a normal return on their investments, no matter how well managed. What does this mean, if not that, contrary to what obtains in industry, agriculture absorbs an enormous amount of unremunerated capital? Or again that between the actual real value --- that is, the actual cost of reconstitution --- and the apparent value --- that is, the venal worth of the land --- there is an enormous difference? This difference has been made up by the slow labour of generations, burying in the soil the savings of centuries. When that wealth was destroyed --- as was the case in the devastated regions --- people began to see what an asset it was.

Moral conditions may be imagined. At first, despite the horror of the surroundings, there was a great deal of optimism and a widespread belief in a prompt return to normal prosperity. Soon a crisis, brought about by the lack of temporary shelters, provoked an outburst of anger calmed only by the great effort which followed on Clemenceau's visit to the devastated regions in 1919. Then, in 1920, surprise and unrest created by newspaper stories of negotiations for the reduction of Germany's debt. Later, amazement and incredulity at the news that the reduction had been accepted as had the Anglo-Saxon contention that before restoring the devastated regions it was necessary to set Germany on her feet again. From then on discouragement constantly fed, after each international conference, by the assertion of statesmen that 'Germany will pay' and the fact that each time Germany's debt was reduced. Finally payments slowed down, soon to cease almost entirely.

At last the victims of invasion understood. They understood that years would elapse before they would see the end of their woes. Many felt that, like those who had fallen, they were not objects of action, but of speech. The oratorical tributes paid to their 'sacred rights' in every budget debate bore a strange likeness to the wreaths laid on the unknown warrior's grave by defeatists. From time to time a deputy demanded the revision of their damages, exposing their sufferings to suspicion. The small claimants, those who had only a home to rebuild and who, in 1925, were still waiting their turn because of lack of funds, those who had seen the smoke rise from the chimneys of rebuilt factories, the fields bear harvests again, the farms restored, the stores and shops reopened, with still no roof above their heads, felt and still feel the iniquity of existing conditions more keenly than their more fortunate neighbours. In vain you tell them how enormous the work done; they are right when they retort that it is unfinished and that thousands of innocent suffer thereby.

After five years of constant effort, this region, which war so long cut off from the rest of the world, was still morally isolated in the very heart of France. Deep-scarred, it had resumed its material aspect. But its moral and social aspects were yet to be re-created. Reconstruction had been of things rather than of men. Upon it had been set the unrelenting seal of human greed: the individual sacrificed to economic interests. Lack of initiative, lack of confidence --- this was the last sore of reconstruction, which least of all could be healed by Government. Absorbed by its material tasks, busy counting and paying for bricks and mortar, begging loans and staving off its creditors, the State had no time to give to all the human woes which went to make up public feeling.

THIS unavoidable Government shortcoming was to be made good by foreign effort in a small but utterly devastated sector of the war zone.(29) The undertaking was paradoxical. Success crowned it. Why?

Because its aims were clearly defined. Not to do what the Government was doing and to do what it was not doing. Not to compete with the authorities in the construction of buildings, nor to continue the impersonal benefactions of the Red Cross; but to pursue ordered endeavour within a given territory, to aid individuals to reweld social ties by methods the Government could not employ, above all, to create only that which was adaptable, and by adaptation to ensure permanency. Such was the policy from which there was to be no departure. Many Americans talked of 'rebuilding a city.' But the city rebuilt, better or worse than the others, of what profit would it have been for social reconstruction? What lessons for the future would have survived? To create community life, to penetrate and take root in a strange land, the work of social reconstruction had to be done otherwise: in depth, not on the surface; intensively, not extensively.

That is precisely what Anglo-Saxons call social work. Social work, a broad and elastic term, the elasticity of which enables it to do wonders, at bottom always means helpful relations between the individual and the community and between the community and the individual. True, the founders of the system never contemplated the utter misery of France's devastated regions and their methods were not entirely applicable. But their everyday work in great cities had taught them that, among the masses, the individual, crushed between the millstones of the modern world, is always sacrificed. Society takes thought of him only when he is in a state of crisis. Sick, he goes to hospital; insane, to an asylum; criminal, to prison. In his everyday life, the individual knows nothing of preventive aid. Social work aims to afford preventive aid to the individual. It dates from the end of the last century. Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer had just spread the doctrine of association; human, family, and professional association. Social art was the next step after social science. It aimed to raise the standard of those placed by circumstances below normal. It aimed to readjust the social organization. It aimed to set right the things that were wrong.

The first awakening of these notions was when Arnold Toynbee and seven Oxford undergraduates went to live in the poorest quarter in London to learn its needs by sharing them. The idea of prevention by presence, which inspired the English workers in 1883, animated the American workers in 1919. It had long since proved its worth in Anglo-Saxon countries.

Toynbee Hall in London led to a later development in America, Hull House in Chicago; and the movement spread in the United States until now the National Conference of Social Work meets annually and has created a lasting tie between the many American associations devoted to the social improvement of the individual, family, or profession. A whole literature has sprung up which has spread the fame of the aspirations, work, and success of those various associations.

The great growth of social work has complicated its organization. In 1915, there were twenty-five thousand social workers in the United States, highly specialized in various branches. Family and professional hygiene; physical and moral education; preventions of infantile mortality and of tuberculosis; the fight against alcoholism; regulation of child and woman labour; school and hospital legislation --- all this and much more has been attempted and achieved. Hospitals, dispensaries, clubs, libraries, serve as fulcrums on which the work is levered. Special schools exist for training the workers. This is social work with its thousand activities. What is its mainspring? The public spirit of the community, the greatest asset of American life, an asset in which France has always been entirely lacking. Here we have one of the most striking contrasts between French and American life, between the temperaments of our two peoples. Americans believe in the preventive and private effort of free citizens; Frenchmen content themselves with the curative effort of the State in the guise of Providence. This contrast must be emphasized because it is the key to what follows. Let us take hygiene. Sixty-five years ago Florence Nightingale created the profession of nurse in Anglo-Saxon countries. The nursing profession was unknown in France before the beginning of this century. The American or British nurse, whose professional dignity vies with that of the doctor, is gradually shaping the physical existence of the citizens, not only in hospital, but in everyday life. Without waiting for sickness to make its appearance, she teaches the right use of heat, air, light, and cleanliness. Under various names, hospital nurse, district nurse, visiting nurse, social assistant, home visitor, school visitor, she is the preventive foe of everything that menaces public health. She is free from and unhampered by the political and religious differences that divide the community. She has her own training schools, her status in life, her associations, her magazines. She has a definite place and rank in the community.

In France, where Saint-Vincent de Paul in the seventeenth century had a prophetic vision of the future, nothing similar exists. Because no clear distinction has ever been made between the care of the sick and the service of the sick. Again, because religions and politics, which have been kept out of the picture in the United States, have invaded public health in France as they have invaded everything else. In the past, the sick in our hospitals were tended by nuns whose professional skill was often inferior to their admirable devotion. To assist them were servants without hope of promotion, as all the titular nurses were nuns. When lay nursing --- a party measure --- came into effect, the nuns left and the lay servants became nurses in their place. The introduction of lay nursing wiped out for twenty years whatsoever of professional skill there had been in the former system. Training schools for nurses were created, but the output was slow. Conditions being such in the best hospitals, what can be said of preventive hygiene? It was simply non-existent when war broke out.

Turn now to the training of youth. A similar contrast existed between French and Anglo-Saxon methods. When Lieutenant-General Sir Robert Baden Powell, commander of the military police in the Boer War, saw that his street-bred men were slower and less adept than their South-African opponents, he devised a training system for them, from which the Boy Scout movement grew. The expedient imagined to meet an emergency became a vocation, out of which the Anglo-Saxon world has fashioned a marvellous instrument of expansion. Training in contact with nature; an educational system, at once complex and incomplete; which is neither an athletic association, a course of military preparedness, nor a post-graduate course; which is nothing of all these, and yet pertains to each of them; a preparation for the battle of life based, outside of all book learning, on the development of the individual according to rules sufficiently elastic to retain the semblance of a game; that is the Boy Scout movement with its leaders and its troops, the mirror of the ancient clan, its physical culture, moral stamina, practical science, its atmosphere of discipline, honour, self-sacrifice, and good faith without religious bias. The marvellous success of the idea shows how perfectly adapted it is to the Anglo-Saxon race.

Transplant the same idea to France; at once it withers and fades. France can show nothing even faintly resembling the prodigious activity of the British Boy Scouts, 25,000 of whom, from 1914 to 1918, kept watch over the coasts of Great Britain, 100,000 of whom served in the auxiliary services of the army; nothing which even faintly resembles the 500,000 American Boy Scouts who rendered yeoman service to the American Treasury during the Liberty Loan campaigns. In France, where the Boy Scout movement might have claimed descent from the éscoutes of Froissart listening at the outposts, it was split from the first by politics and religion. As soon as started, the movement divided into three branches: Protestant, neutral, Catholic. As a result, its recruits were few and its means small. A movement which, long before 1914, had triumphantly proved its worth in English-speaking countries, in France was but a halting experiment! The war over, would it be possible to make this experiment succeed in the most devastated region in France?

On the other hand, would it be possible, and for the benefit of the adult population, to acclimate in France that essential factor of democratic culture: the public library, as it exists in Great Britain and the United States? The aim: that every one may read, and read what he or she pleases, with the assent of the local authorities and the financial support of all the citizens; that the supply of reading matter should become a public municipal service like the supply of gas or water, or street-cleaning. The Ewart Bill, at once copied in the United States, authorized English townships to impose rates for this purpose. The resources furnished by the penny-rate sufficed for the buildings, the books, and the means of circulating them. These public libraries contain a little of everything, but above all modern books, reference books, magazines, even newspapers. These public libraries are open to all and not only to the erudite pining for learning. They are suited to the people for mankind counts more ignorant than learned. To develop a taste for reading, the people must find at the library the papers they once read in the saloon. No iron bars defy the reader; the books are easily accessible; the reading-room is open all day and far into the night. The growth of public reading in a century is strikingly shown by four figures: free libraries in the United States increased from 31 to 15,000; the books increased in numbers from 75,000 to 100,000,000. That is public service indeed.

In France, a country of ancient and resplendent culture, democracy, founded on the reason of the citizen, has prepared nothing similar to gratify his curiosity. The year-book of each Department gives the list of public libraries. There are libraries in many communes. But no one goes there to read. Most of them are open only two hours a week; they contain neither magazines nor newspapers nor reference books of any kind. Many of their books are out of date and in very bad condition. Their budget, consisting of a few francs voted every year by the municipality, permits neither the purchase of new books, nor proper installation, nor the services of a librarian. Generally located in the darkest and dingiest room of city hall or village school, entrusted for some insignificant stipend to a local caretaker, who knows neither their contents nor their use, our public libraries are graveyards.

Once again a striking contrast: on one side public spirit; on the other individualism; on one side democracy in action; on the other the label of democracy. France has magnificent libraries of untold wealth for men of science, who read or work there. In 1914, the only real reading-room practically available to the people was the reading-room of the Bibliothèque Nationale. Here are some figures: In 1905, the city of Paris granted its public libraries a credit of 31,000 francs. The Government granted the 3000 public libraries in France an annual credit of 50,000 francs. The school libraries, which flourished under Jules Ferry, had rapidly declined and were almost always badly equipped and in unsuitable surroundings. In 1902, there were 48,000 school libraries in 70,000 schools. Paris, with ten times the population of Edinburgh, had twenty-five per cent fewer readers.

I have cited three instances. I could give many others. All would point to the same moral. Social reconstruction, impossible by official means, was also without that unofficial support which comes of tradition: for if France has political traditions she is totally lacking in social traditions. Social reconstruction attempted in one sector of our devastated regions by foreign initiative was bound to encounter two obstacles, one born of the tragic conditions obtaining on the spot, the other born of French inexperience in the matter and of our traditional indifference to collective action. To organize Franco-American cooperation on any scale, it is not sufficient to talk of Lafayette and Rochambeau, nor to rely on the common destiny of sister democracies.

Conditions in the devastated region where the American committee was at work were tragic.(30) Nowhere was material reconstruction or social reconstruction more difficult. Both were dependent upon the same factor: nothing could be done unless and until agriculture was restored to its old prosperity. For that, money and coöperation were indispensable. In March, 1922, the farmers of the Aisne met, and everywhere one heard the same cry of anguish: 'If we do not receive assistance, we cannot possibly go on.' The poor quality of the harvests, the disappearance of the sugar refineries, the competition of Belgian agriculture, added to the high cost of production, the slow returns, and the absence of working capital, continued to weigh heavily on the Soissonnais. American aid was organized so as to meet the two essential needs of this situation: coöperative effort and credits. Coöperative effort without credits would have discredited for all time a system already looked upon by the small farmer with suspicion. Credits without coöperative effort would have scattered money unavailingly among individuals. The combination of coöperative effort and of money solved the problem.

This success contributed to the reduction of the red zone(31) of the Aisne from 45,000 acres to a rapidly diminishing 5000 and was attended by other far-reaching consequences. It modernized methods of cultivation to such an extent that the tractors and harvesters of the Blérancourt Committee were actually bought by the farmers converted to their use. It demonstrated to the race most loath to accept it the value of coöperation. The effect of this revelation spread apace, and the Department of the Aisne boasted three hundred agricultural syndicates in 1922 as against twelve in 1914. It developed the idea of coöperation, thus making social work possible. The foreign workers who had helped the rebirth of the soil could be trusted in all things. Their agricultural achievement became the key to everything. It opened the door to confidence and coöperation, without which neither public health service, nor the Boy Scout movement, nor public libraries, nor the social centres could have overcome the instinctive distrust of the Picard peasant.

To return to the mobile hospital which, its war service over, had been attached to Blérancourt in 1919, four years later, one hundred and twenty towns and villages and two great cities, Soissons and Rheims, were being served by twenty-seven trained nurses who looked after the health of the mothers, the babies, and the school-children, perfecting in the region between Oise and Aisne the first complete public-health organization ever seen in France. Six main centres with fully equipped dispensaries, twenty-five local dispensaries, a goutte de lait at Soissons with distributions of milk to the poorer villages; kindergartens and nurseries of untold service to widows, working women, the wives of wounded soldiers; baby shows; holiday camps in Switzerland; prompt measures against epidemics, all too rife amid the ruins --- such was the scope of the American organization which worked unremittingly from 1919 to 1923.(32)

From 1919 to 1923, the nurses made 400,000 visits, half of them home visits, and gave 200,000 prescriptions. The results of their activity showed immediately in the health statistics of the department. Four years after the armistice, infantile mortality was 8.7 per cent in the rest of the Aisne and 2.4 per cent in the American sector. Of every thousand children born in the American sector, 980 lived, as against only 910 elsewhere, being 70 young lives saved for France. Multiply the difference by the annual birth figures for the whole of France, it would mean an increase of some 50,000 French children a year!

But the child's life saved, the work had only begun. For local conditions were such that the most vigilant care was necessary for its physical and moral development. War had not only been hard on the bodies of the children. Exile and enemy occupation were anything but moral stimulants and the upbringing of the children had nothing to gain thereby. Parents, everywhere scattered, neglected the education of their offspring. Contact with the invader had muddied the most elementary notions of morality. Promiscuity with foreign labour could only make them worse; bad examples were everywhere more numerous than good. Training schools and schools where practical morality was taught, school canteens and playgrounds were the first steps in this direction. Everywhere education and play went hand in hand. Then the Boy Scout movement was introduced into the war zone. In 1921, camps were organized in the woods of the Aisne and the Oise, where several hundred boys were initiated into Scout methods. For the first time the three French organizations, heretofore absolutely separated, met together. For the first time, also, children accustomed to the sadness of ruins took a bath of normal life and untouched nature.(33)

From the very first the grown-up people, like the early American pioneers, asked for reading matter. They had had none before the catastrophe. Anizy had a tiny library with a budget of forty francs a year; Vic, Blérancourt, and Coucy had no budget at all. Soissons had forty thousand volumes, of which the public was allowed access to four thousand, and that for only two hours a week. In 1919, a makeshift library was opened at Vic-sur-Aisne merely for the satisfaction of local needs. But, run on American lines by American women, it gave the devastated regions the first real public library France had ever had. Open all the time, well furnished, well heated, well lighted, with card indexes, dictionaries, works of reference, and agricultural works, it was always full. Other libraries opened in quick succession at Blérancourt, Anizy, Coucy, and Soissons. Books were circulated from commune to commune by automobile. The number of readers in the libraries rose in two years from 7000 to 40,000; the number of readers who took out books from 8000 to 14,000; the number of books read from 11,000 to 100,000; the number of books loaned from 922,000 to 130,000. Henceforth the American free library had won for itself a place of its own in the heart of the battlefields.(34)

All this was accomplished the while France and the United States followed different political paths.(35) Five years after the armistice, there were still five or six cantons in France where the combined effort of the two countries endured. But some day this had to come to an end. A foreign association could not remain eternally on French soil.(36) Sooner or later, either the funds or the voluntary workers would not be forthcoming. Must the work then disappear and leave nothing but the memory of a generous impulse, of a worthy action, or a magnificent achievement of coöperation? To escape this fate there was but one possible way. It was to substitute, for those already existing, new organizations in which French effort would replace American initiative and achievement. But to do this three things were essential. To obtain, in addition to the twenty-seven millions already spent in seven years,(37) the capital necessary to the permanent endowment of the institutions to be retained; to persuade local communities to take over their management and make the necessary sacrifices for their maintenance; to enlist a French personnel to run them.

The money came from the United States at a time when every one said that no more money was obtainable. The transfer of the services to local associations took place without trouble or difficulty. A private corporation, admitted by the French Government to the rights and privileges of public utility corporations, inherited the hospital and dispensaries and was endowed with ample funds to maintain the public health services and equipment. The playgrounds and gymnasiums were ceded to the communes. An interfederal office maintained the collaboration of all the French Boy Scout organizations and the Château of Cappy was given them as a centre. The municipalities took over the social centres and the libraries together with small donations. The Comité Français de la Bibliothèque Moderne undertook to popularize American library methods. France, although impoverished, granted active support. Even the smallest communes voted credits for free libraries, and the revenues of the foundation for social hygiene were doubled the second year by local support.

There remained the problem of recruiting a French personnel, that is, of training it in special schools. Nursing staff: Some twenty scholarships enabled French nurses to be sent to the United States for post-graduate courses, and thanks to a liberal endowment, the training school for nurses of the rue Amyot in Paris increased the number of its pupils. Scout staff: the Château of Cappy was fitted out as a permanent camp on the model of the English camps, and opened to the various French and foreign Scout associations for instruction of chief Scouts. Library staff: a training school for librarians was founded in Paris under the auspices of the American Library Association with the assistance of French and American specialists.(38) Thus in the three directions logical development was pursued to ensure continuity. The formation of French staffs made possible the perpetuation of the institutions. Management, funds, staffs, the three elements necessary to the survival of the American effort, were all present, and from the very first the new schools showed their vitality.(39) The goal was reached, and reached in sympathy and understanding. Lasting instruments of achievement .remained at the disposal of French and American coworkers. Amid the ruins of improvised coöperation, here was something on which to build hopes of ordered achievement.

This is what the people, whose instinct often goes further than official dialectics, felt when, in 1923, at Anizy and, in 1924, at Blérancourt, they gathered round the women who had ventured this great experiment and left among them so many enduring proofs of their friendship.(40) In the historic grounds of the old château, restored by the Americans and by them given to the commune, several thousand Frenchmen, celebrating the work of the past few years, thought that they were merely expressing their gratitude. As a matter of fact they were drawing upon the future --- which is what men make it --- a draft of hope.