to pauperise them, but to afford
them the opportunity for becoming self-supporting. Re-construction
work in those devastated areas which have been won back from the Boche
was hurried forward in order that the people who had been uprooted
from the soil might be returned to it and, in being returned to their
own particular soil, might recover their place in life and their
balance.

I visited the devastated areas of the Pas-de-Calais, Somme, Oise and
Aisne and saw what is being accomplished. This destroyed territory
is roughly one hundred miles long by thirty miles broad at its
widest point. In 1912 one-quarter of the wheat produced in France
and eighty-seven per cent. of the beet crop employed in the national
industry of sugar-making, were raised in these departments of the
north. The invasion has diminished the national wheat production by
more than a half. It is obvious, then, that in getting these districts
once more under cultivation two birds are being killed with one stone:
the refugee is being made a self-supporting person--an economic asset
instead of a dead weight--and the tonnage problem is being solved.
If more food is grown behind the Western Front, grain-ships can be
released for transporting the munitions of war from America.

The French Government had already made a start in this undertaking
before America came into the war. As early as 1914 it voted three
hundred million francs and appointed a group of _sous-prefets_ to
see to the dispensing of it. Little by little, as the Huns have been
driven back, the wealthier inhabitants, whose money was safe in Paris
banks, have returned to these districts and opened _oeuvres_ for the
poorer inhabitants. Many of them have lost their sons and husbands;
they find in their daily labour for others worse off than themselves
an escape from life-long despair. Misfortune is a matter of comparison
and contrast. We are all of us unhappy or fortunate according to our
standards of selfishness and our personal interpretation of our lot.
These patriots are bravely turning their experience of sorrow into the
materials of service. They can speak the one and only word which makes
a bond of sympathy between the prosperous and the broken-hearted, "I,
too, have suffered." I came across one such woman in the neighbourhood
of Villequier-au-Mont. She was a woman of title and a royalist. Her
estates had been laid waste by the invasion and all her men-folk, save
her youngest son, were dea