The question may be asked why civilians have been allowed to live here.  Curiously enough it is due to the extraordinary humanity of the French Government which makes allowances for the almost religious attachment of the peasant to his tiny plot of land; it is an attachment which is as instinctive and fiercely jealous as that of a cat for her young.  He will endure shelling, gassing and all the horrors that scientific invention has produced; he will see his cottage and his barns shattered by bombs and siege-guns, but he will not leave the fields that he has tilled and toiled over, unless he is driven out at the point of the bayonet.  I have been told, though I have never seen it, that behind quiet parts of the line, French peasants will gather in their harvest actually in full sight of the Hun.  Shells may be falling, but they go stolidly on with their work.  There is another reason for this leniency of the Government:  they have enough refugees on their hands already and are not going in search of further trouble, until the trouble is forced upon them by circumstances.

As may be imagined, these people live under physical conditions that are terrible.  They consist for the most part of women and children; the women are over-worked and the children are neglected.  Skin diseases and vermin abound.  Clothes are negligible.  Washing is a forgotten luxury.  Much havoc is wrought by asphyxiating gases which drift across the front-line into the back-country.  To the adults are issued protective masks like those that the soldiers wear, but the children do not know how to use them.  Many of them are orphans, and live like little animals on roots and offal; for shelter they seek holes in the ground.  The American Red Cross is specialising on its efforts to reclaim these children, realising that whatever happens to the adults, the children are the hope of the world.

The part of the Front to which I went to study this work was made famous in 1914 by the disembowellings, shootings and unspeakable indecencies that were perpetrated there.  Near by is the little village in which Sister Julie risked her life by refusing to allow her wounded to be butchered.  She wears the Legion of Honour now.  In the same neighbourhood there lives a Mayor who, after having seen his young wife murdered, protected her murderers from the lynch-law of the mob when next day the town was recaptured.  In the same district there is a meadow where fifteen old men were done to death, while a Hun officer sat under an oak-tree, drinking mocking toasts to the victims of each new execution.

The influence of more than three years of warfare has not been elevating, as far as these peasants are concerned.  As early as July, a little over a month from its arrival in France, an S.O.S. was sent out by the Prefet of the department, begging the American Red Cross to come and help.  In addition to the refugees of old standing, 350 children had been suddenly put into his care.  He had nothing but a temporary