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 shelter for them and his need for assistance was acute.
Within a few hours the Red Cross had despatched eight workers--a
doctor, nurse, bacteriologist, an administrative director and two
women to take charge of the bedding, food and clothing. A camionette
loaded with condensed milk and other relief necessities was s