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By the time of the arrival of our Unit, six months after the Great Retreat, our villagers had recovered from the shock of their sorrow. They had managed to save enough bedding and clothing for actual warmth; they had planted and worked their gardens; they were used to the simplest terms of life. This courage rather than the too-evident squalor, was what impressed one on a first visit to Canizy. Dumb endurance drew one’s heart as no protestations could have done. It made me long to make my home among my villagers, so that I might the more quickly meet their needs.

But this could not be, because every habitable cranny was crowded to capacity. Hence it was that I lodged with the rest of the Unit, four miles away, at the Château de Bon-Séjour. Again, you will not find my château so called upon the map. It is merely a name that represents to me six months of hardship, of comradeship and of some small achievement that made the whole worth while.

At the Château, then, but not in it, lived the Unit. For the Château, a German Headquarters, and a most comfortable one, in its day, had been wrecked in the best German style. There were seventeen of us, American college women, to whom the Government had entrusted the task of reconstructing thirty-six of the 25,000 square miles of devastated France. Two were doctors, three nurses, four chauffeurs, and the rest social workers. Among them were a cobbler, a carpenter, a farmer, a domestic science expert; and of other manual labor there was nothing to which they did not turn their hands. It was in the golden days of early September that my companions reached the Château allotted them in that indefinite area known as the War Zone, and became from that moment a part of the Third Army of France. But I, for reasons best known to the passport bureau of that army, did not arrive until October. The seventy-mile run from Paris was made in our own truck, driven by two of our chauffeurs. As we cleared the dusty suburbs and took the highway northward, war seemed very far away. To be sure, we often passed grey camions rumbling to or from the front, or saw fleeting automobiles containing officer’s whiz by. But the country, the fields of stacked grain or of freshly seeded wheat; the apple orchards,—sometimes miles of trees along the roadside festooned with red fruit,—poplared vistas of smoke-blue hill and valley, with church spires and red roofs in the distance,—all these spoke of peace. Even the air lay in a motionless amber haze, spiced with apples and wood smoke and ferns touched by frost. But suddenly war was upon us. As we topped a sharp rise we came upon an empty dugout, about which stood a shell-shattered grove. Lopped orchards followed, zig-zag trenches, a bombarded village set in fields bearing no crop but barbed-wire entanglements and tall weeds turned brown. The country became flatter as we hurried along, intent on reaching the Château before dark. At intervals we made detours around crumpled bridges. Occasionally a sentry halted us, to be shown our permits known as feuilles bleues. By this time the sun was setting and caught and turned to gold a squadron of aeroplanes. Like great dragon-flies they coursed and wheeled and presently alighted, to run along the fields to their canvas-domed hangars. In the after-glow, we could still see occasional peasants or soldiers working late at ploughing with oxen or tractors. But otherwise, mile on mile, the brown plain, dotted here and there with scraggly thickets, lay deserted.