es, 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!"

[Footnote 1: Since this was written and just as I am returning to
the front, the Hun has set to work to create this hell for the second
time. Most of the places referred to below are once more within the
enemy country and all the mercy of the American Red Cross has been
wiped out.]

I started out on my trip in a staff-car from a city well behind the
lines. In the first half hour of the journey the country was green
and pleasant. We passed some cavalry officers galloping across a brown
field; birds were battling against a flurrying wind; high overhead
an aeroplane saile