hem on their feet again.

Francis Waddington, to whom the chateau descended, was in the
trenches, but his mother and wife did all they could, as soon as the
Germans had been driven back, to relieve the necessities of the dazed
and miserable creatures whose farms had been devastated and shops
rifled or razed. Some time, by the way, Madame Waddington may tell the
dramatic story of her daughter-in-law's escape. She was alone in the
chateau with her two little boys when the Mayor of the nearest village
dashed up with the warning that the Germans were six kilometers away,
and the last train was about to leave.

She had two automobiles, but her chauffeur had been mobilized and
there was no petrol. She was dressed for dinner, but there was no time
to change. She threw on a cloak and thinking of nothing but her
children went off with the Mayor in hot haste to catch the train. From
that moment on for five or six days, during which time she never took
off her high-heeled slippers with their diamond buckles, until she
reached her husband in the North, her experience was one of the side
dramas of the war.

I think it was early in 1915 that Madame Waddington wrote in
_Scribner's Magazine_ a description of her son's chateau as it was
after the Germans had evacuated it. But the half was not told. It
never can be, in print. Madame Huard, in her book, _My Home on the
Field of Honor_, is franker than most of the current historians have
dared to be, and the conditions which she too found when she returned
after the German retreat may be regarded as the prototype of the
disgraceful and disgusting state in which these lovely country homes
of the French were left; not by lawless German soldiers but by
officers of the first rank. Madame Francis Waddington did not even run
upstairs to snatch her jewel case, and of course she never saw it
again. Her dresses had been taken from the wardrobes and slashed from
top to hem by the swords of these incomprehensible barbarians. The
most valuable books in the library were gutted. But these outrages are
almost too mild to mention.

IV

The next task after the city ouvroir was in running order was to teach
the countrywomen how to sew for the soldiers and pay them for their
work. The region of the Aisne is agricultural where it is not heavily
wooded. Few of the women had any skill with the needle. The two Madame
Waddingtons concluded to show these poor women with their coarse red
hands how to kni