urs daily not only on cheerful letters, but knitting, sewing,
embroidering, purchasing for humble men who will mean nothing to their
future, beyond the growth of spirit they unconsciously induced. Poor
women far from Paris, where, at least, thousands of these
permissionnaires linger for a few hours on their way home, toil all
night over their letters to men for whom they conceive a profound
sentiment but never can hope to see. Shop girls save their wages and
lady's maids pilfer in a noble cause.

It was Madame Berard (who was a Miss Dana of Boston) who organized
this magnificent spirit into a great oeuvre, so that thousands of men
could be made happy whom no kindly woman so far had been able to
discover.

Madame Berard, who has three sons in the army herself, nursed at the
Front for several months after the war broke out. Even officers told
her that they used to go off by themselves and cry because they never
received a letter, or any sort of reminder that they were anything but
part of a machine defending France. These officers, of course, were
from the invaded district, and in addition to their isolation, were
haunted by fears for their women now in the power of men who were as
cruel as they were sensual and degenerate.

When she returned to her home she immediately entered upon the career
of marraine, corresponding with several hundred of the men she either
had known or whose names were given to her by their commanding
officers. Naturally the work progressed beyond her capacity and she
called upon friends to help her out. Out of this initial and purely
personal devotion grew the great oeuvre, Mon Soldat, which has met
with such a warm response in this country.

Madame Berard's headquarters are in a villa in the Parc Monceau. Here
is conducted all the correspondence with the agents in other cities,
here come thousands of letters and presents by every mail to be
forwarded to the Front, and here come the grateful--and
hopeful--permissionnaires, who never depart without a present and
sometimes leave one, generally an ingenious trinket made in the
trenches.

When I visited the villa last summer the oeuvre had eight thousand
marraines, and no doubt the number has doubled to-day. Fifteen hundred
of these were American, marshalled by Madame Berard's representative
in New York, Mr. R.W. Neeser. Some of these fairy godmothers had ten
filleuls. Packages were dispatched to the Front every week. Women that
could not afford