eels, from
wagons to perambulators, was being piled up. Everything on four legs,
dogs, cattle, horses, was being harnessed and made to do its share
in hauling. We left the city, going back to the next point where the
refugees would be cared for. On either side of the road, as far as eye
could stretch, trenches had been dug, barricades thrown up, blockades
and wire-entanglements constructed. It all lay very quiet beneath the
sunlight. It seemed a kind of preposterous pretence. One could not
imagine these fields as a scene of battle, sweating torture and agony
and death. I looked back at the city, one of the most beautiful in
France, growing hazy in the distance with its spires and its ramparts.
Impossible! Then I remembered the carts being hurriedly loaded and
the uplifted faces of those American girls. Where had I seen their
expression before? Yes. Strange that they should have caught it! Their
expression was the same as that which I had noticed on the Tailleurs,
the Foreign Legion and the Moroccans--the crack troops of France....
So they had become that already! At the first hint of danger, their
courage had taken command; they had risen into soldiers.

Through villages swarming with troops and packed with ordnance
we arrived at an old caserne, which has been converted into the
children's hospital of the district. It is in charge of one of the
first of America's children's specialists. While he works among the
refugees, his wife, who is a sculptress, makes masks for the facially
mutilated. He has brought with him from the States some of his
students, but his staff is in the main cosmopolitan. One of his nurses
is an Australian, who was caught at the outbreak of hostilities in
Austria and because of her knowledge, despite her nationality, was
allowed to help to organise the Red Cross work of the enemy. Another
is a French woman who wears the Croix de Guerre with the palm. She
saved her wounded from the fury of the Hun when her village was lost,
and helped to get them back to safety after it had been recaptured.
The Matron is Swedish and Belgian. The ambulance-drivers are some
of the American boys who saw service with the French armies. In this
group of workers there are as many stories as there are nationalities.

If the workers have their stories, so have the five hundred little
patients. This barrack, converted into a hospital, is full of babies,
the youngest being only six days old when I was there. Many of the
chi