[i]

A VILLAGE IN PICARDY

[ii]

[iii]

A Well-Known Tune

[iv]

[v]

A VILLAGE IN
PICARDY

BY
RUTH GAINES
AUTHOR OF “THE VILLAGE SHIELD,” ETC.

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
WILLIAM ALLAN NEILSON
President of Smith College

NEW YORK
E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY
681 FIFTH AVENUE

[vi]

Copyright, 1918,
By E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY

All Rights Reserved

Printed in the United States of America

The history and the work of the Smith CollegeRelief Unit in the Somme is known whereverreconstruction work in France is spokenof. This brief account does not purport togive anything but a small cross-section, thepicture of but one of the villages in our care.It is told in the first person to make the tellingeasier. As I have said, of all our villages,Canizy was the most beloved. All the Unithad a share in it.

The picture is given as it was seen day byday. What was true in this section, may notbe true in another. Here the German retreatwas so rapid that the devastation, thoughappalling, was not complete; whole avenues oftrees were left standing in places, and only twochurches were dynamited, by contrast withthe two hundred and twenty-five destroyedthroughout the région dévastée. It was perhaps[viii]in more calculated ways that the Prussianshere vented their spite; in the burning offamily pictures, the wrecking of machinery,the cutting of the trees about the Calvaries, andthe taking away of the bells from the churchtowers. They left behind them here, as everywhere,ruin and silence; a silence of industry,of agriculture, of all the normal ways of life;a silence which has given the plain of Picardythe name of “The Land of Death.”

Ruth Gaines.