There was one unit I wished especially to visit; it was a unit consisting entirely of women, sent over and financed by a women’s college.  When I was in America last October and heard that they were starting, I made up my mind that they were doomed to disappointment.  I pictured the battlefield of the Somme as I had last seen it—­a sea of mud stretching for miles, furrowed by the troughs of battered trenches, pitted every yard with shell-holes and smeared over with the wreckage of what once were human bodies.  I could not imagine what useful purpose women could serve amid such surroundings.  It seemed to me indecent that they should be allowed to go there.  They were going to do reconstruction, I was told.  Reconstruction! you can’t reconstruct towns and villages the very foundations of which have been buried.  There is a Bible phrase which expresses such annihilation, “The place thereof shall know it no more.”  Yes, only the names remain in one’s memory—­the very sites have been covered up and the contours of the landscape re-dug with high explosives.  It took millions of pounds to work this havoc.  Men tunnelled under-ground and sprung mines without warning.  They climbed like birds of prey, into the heavens to hurl death from the clouds.  They lined up their guns, tier upon tier, almost axle to axle in places, and at a given sign rained a deluge of corruption on a country miles in front, which they could not even discern.  The infantry went over the top throwing bombs and piled themselves up into mounds of silence.  Nations far away toiled day and night in factories—­and all that they might achieve this repellant desolation.  The innocence of the project made one smile—­a handful of women sailing from America to reconstruct!  To reconstruct will take ten times more effort than was required to destroy.  More than eight hundred years ago William the Norman burnt his way through the North Country to Chester.  Yorkshire has not yet recovered; it is still a wind-swept moorland.  This women’s college in America hoped to repair in our lifetime a ruin a million times more terrible.  Their courage was depressing, it so exceeded the possible.  They might love one village back to life, but....  That is exactly what they are doing.

I arrived at Grecourt on an afternoon in January.  It is here that the women of the Smith College Unit have taken up their tenancy.  We had extraordinary difficulty in finding the place.  The surrounding country had been blasted and scorched by fire.  There was no one left of whom we could enquire.  Everything had perished.  Barns, houses, everything habitable had been blown up by the departing Hun.  As a study in the painstaking completion of a purpose the scenes through which we passed almost called for admiration.  Berlin had ordered her armies to destroy everything before withdrawing; they had obeyed with a loving thoroughness.  The world has never seen such past masters in the art of demolition.  Ever since they invaded Belgium, their hand has been