These “oeuvres,” or groups of workers, settle down in a shattered village or township.  The military authorities place the township in their charge.  They at once commence to get roofs on to such houses as still have walls.  They supply farm-implements, poultry, rabbits, carts, seeds, plants, etc.  They import materials from Paris and form sewing classes for the women and girls.  They encourage the trades-people to re-start their shops and lend them the necessary initial capital.  What is perhaps most valuable, they lure the terror-stricken population out of their caves and dug-outs, and set them an example of hope and courage.  Some of the best pioneer work of this sort has been done by the English Society of Friends who now, together with the Friends of the United States, have become a part of the Bureau of the Department of Civil Affairs of the American Red Cross.

The American Red Cross works through the “oeuvres” which it found already operating in the devastated area; it places its financial backing at their disposal, its means of motor transport and its personnel; it grafts on other “oeuvres,” operating in newly taken over villages, in which Americans, French and English work side by side for the common welfare; at strategic points behind the lines it has established a chain of relief warehouses, fully equipped with motor-lorries and cars.  These warehouses furnish everything that an agricultural people starting life afresh can require—­food, clothes, blankets, beds, mattresses, stoves, kitchen utensils, reapers, binders, mowing-machines, threshing-machines, garden-tools, soap, tooth brushes, etc.  If you can conceive of yourself as having been a prosperous farmer and waking up one morning broken in heart and dirty in person, with your barns, live-stock, daughters, sons, everything gone—­not a penny left in the world—­you can imagine your necessities, and then form some picture of the fore-thought that goes to the running of a Red Cross warehouse.

But the poverty of these people is not the worst condition that the Red Cross workers have to tackle; money can always replace money.  Hope, trust, affection and a genial belief in the world’s goodness cannot be transplanted into another man’s heart in exchange for bitterness by even the most lavish giver.  I can think of no modern parallel for their blank despair; the only eloquence which approximately expresses it is that of Job, centuries old, “Why is light given to a man whose way is hid and whom God hath hedged in?  My sighing cometh before I eat.  My roarings are poured out like waters.  My harp is turned to mourning, and my organ into the voice of them that weep.  I was not in safety, neither had I rest, neither was I quiet; yet trouble came.”

This hell which the Hun has created, beggars any description of Dante.[1] It is still more appalling to remember that the external hell which one sees, does not represent one tithe of the dreariness which lies hidden behind the eyes of the inhabitants.  To imagine amid such scenes is to paralyse compassion with agony.  The craving, never far from one’s thoughts, is the age-old desire, “O that one might plead with God, as a man pleadeth for his neighbour!”