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,

The German Retreat...

As a relief visitor, in a Unit authorized by the French Government au secours dans la région dévastée , I have lived recently in the Department of the Somme. There I had in my care a village with a personality which I venture to think is typical of Picardy. As such, I would present it to you. It was on a winter’s morning, by snow and lantern light, that I traversed for the last time a road grown familiar to me through months of use, the road which led from our encampment, known as that of the “D

In Canizy, after the Germans were through with it, not one of its forty-seven houses stood intact. Most were roofless shells, or fallen heaps of brick. An occasional ell, a barn, a rabbit hutch, or a chicken house,—such were the shelters into which the returning villagers crept. Nor was there furniture. Pillage had preceded destruction and loaded wagons had borne away the plunder of household linen, feather mattresses, clothes presses, chairs or anything practicable, into Germany. Scattered thro

By rights, Canizy belongs with three other hamlets, to the commune of Hombleux. The mayor of Hombleux is therefore in reality also the mayor of Canizy. But each of the hamlets has an acting mayor besides. And, to complicate this matter of mayors still further, the real mayor of the commune has left his post to reside in his mansion in the Boulevard Haussmann in Paris. Inquiring into the reason of his non-residence, I was told that he was broken in health, and belonged to a political party which,

As the aeroplanes fly, Canizy is perhaps three miles from the Château, or reckoned in time, half an hour by motor and an hour on foot. But by either route, one turns into the village at the stark Calvary I have already mentioned, with its half obliterated inscription: Ave, O Crux . At our first visit, despite our novelty, Canizy regarded us with indifference. We seemed to them doubtless one more of those strange manifestations of the war which had stranded them among their ruins. Incurious, apat

Every village, everywhere, has its stronger characters, to whom the community looks up, perhaps unconsciously. Canizy, having been deprived of its normal leaders in the Curé, a prisoner, and the teacher, transferred to the school at Hombleux, looked up in this way to Mme. Lefèvre and Mme. Gabrielle. The former was the especial friend of our medical department. In fact, she rented one of her two rooms for our use as a dispensary, and her flagged kitchen was always open to her neighbours and to us

Directly opposite Mme. Gabrielle lives Mme. Odille Delorme. One lifts the latch of a heavy wooden gate to enter her courtyard. On left and right are the remains of barn and stable, from the rafters of which depend bundles of haricots hung to dry. A half dozen chickens scurry from under foot, and at the commotion Mme. Delorme steps out. “I have come to make a little visit,” I begin. “Enter then, and see misery,” is her reply. It is a startling reply from this woman, strong, intelligent, and direc

It was at Christmas time that we came most to realise the broken family circles in all our villages. There was not one household which did not have some hostage avec les Boches . Of the pitiful remnant, the old men—there were no young ones—were to me the most appealing. I shall never forget the fête in the hill village of Douilly, well up to the front, a village completely destroyed, whose inhabitants were living in cellars. On the brow of the hill, facing the sunset, stood the white stone churc

At length, the survey of Canizy was completed: its crooked streets traced on a map, its houses numbered, and the pre-war and the post-war status of each of its families noted thereon. But long before these facts had been collected, the articles found to be most necessary had been bought for the homes. It only remained to wait their arrival. Even the number of sheets and blankets in each household was listed, and against them, the number to be given out. The honesty and unselfishness of most of t

At noon time, on dispensary days, I sometimes lunched with the doctors in Mme. Lefèvre’s kitchen. It was a heterogeneous spot, with two beds (one being stored for a niece), two cats, and a few neighbours always sitting near the fire. Usually the neighbours were waiting for la factrice . A tap at the window, and Madame ran to open it, and received a handful of letters which the postmistress brought each day by bicycle from Nesle. Were it cold, she herself, a capable, pleasant-faced woman, came in

Midway between Hombleux and Canizy, at the crossing of the highway, stood on one side a Calvary, and on the other a demolished farm house. The lane here emerged from a hollow, so that both objects rose distinctly against the sky. About the Calvary, the poplars were shattered by shell-fire; back of the farm sloped an orchard, whose every tree had been lopped. Across the road and into the fields ran a zig-zag trench, where could be found even yet blue coats and rusted helmets; the line of defence

So, in chorus, sang the children of my village, day after day, as they marched and circled about us up and down the streets. A catching tune; a laughing eye; did they realise that only twelve miles away on the firing line their soldiers were dying for the glory of the flag? No, it was not possible for them, fugitives though they themselves had been, to live the horrors of war. As Mme. Gabrielle said: “The children laugh; they do not know that our world is destroyed, and it is well.” Yet it would

In Canizy, one found always something new. It might be an obus , or a soldier en permission , or a family réfugiée , or a baraque . I learned to expect the unexpected. Having carefully negotiated with M. Lanne for certain timbers and chicken wiring which formed the basis for a roof of which I had need, I was prepared to see that they had vanished overnight, and to express neither surprise nor indignation when I was told that they were transformed into the foundation for Mme. Picard’s baraques .

Christmas weather, sunlight, moonlight and snow; our grove a white stencil; our baraques with their red shutters by day and their lighted windows by night, like painted Christmas cards; our defaced and ruined villages new-clothed with beauty,—such was our Christmas week. But the snow, so beautiful to the eye, accentuated the bitter cold of our ill-lodged and under-nourished neighbours, and the moon pointed out to hostile aeroplanes desired points of attack. It was on account of the dangerous moo

Since the commencement of this short volume, the German flood has rolled again across the Somme. Péronne, Nesle, Ham, Noyon, those towns mentioned so often and so gloriously in the annals of France, have fallen once more into the hands of the enemy. With them go the villages where my Unit laboured. Canizy, it is no more. The green-bladed wheatfields have become fields of unspeakable carnage; the poor ruins again smoke to heaven, and down the shattered highways course endlessly the grey columns o

1. Mme. Marie Gense —Had a few rabbits; good house. 2. M. Noulin —Was a storekeeper; had rabbits and hens. 3. M. Poiteaux (soldat). [7] 4. M. Leon Tabary (living near Amiens). 5. M. Huillard (soldat). 6. M. Cottret (prisonnier civil). 7. Mme. Augé —Had hens and rabbits; small garden. 8. M. Huillard (see 5.) 9. M. Gambard (at Compiègne). 10. M. Thuillard, G. (at Bacquencourt). 11. Mme. Cordier —Had 10 cows, 2 bulls, 1 ox, 87 pigs, 3 horses, 150 chickens, 150 rabbits, market garden, orchard. 12. M

1. Lives at 37 in a lean-to; small garden. 2. Lives at 5 in a partially ruined house; has an épicerie , in which we have stocked him, 1 pony, 30 young rabbits, 4 hens. 7. Lives at 7 in a barn; has 10 hens, small garden. 8. House occupied by Tabary, M.; has nothing. 10. Mme. Payelle lives here in a barn; does not belong in village; has nothing. 11. Lives at 11 in a barn; has bought cow, horse, 24 rabbits, 9 hens. 12. Lives at 12 in a baraque ; has a small garden. 13. Lives at 16 in a barn; has la