French, English, and Americans were all connected with the restoration. What really mattered, I felt, was the work of the French: first, it was their business; then, they understood their people—what they could and could not expect them to do. They were most successful in getting individuals to do the things they had always done in the way they had always done them. The American workers, marvelous as they were, wanted to reform the French modes of life. They were keen on sanitation and chintz curtains; the Frenchmen were keen on community tractors; the Frenchwomen, on community sewing machines. After I had seen one little group of Frenchwomen gathered by an energetic duchess in a wing of her battered château making over old clothes for ragged refugees, who had had literally nothing new for years, I thought I knew what the Red Cross could best do for the devastated regions. The Red Cross had on hand at the end of the war millions of garments, the output of thousands of little sewing and knitting circles scattered from ocean to ocean and from Great Lakes to Gulf. Innumerable shirts, drawers, pajamas, scarfs, sweaters, were piled in storehouses—the most extensive that I saw being at Lille. My cry was: “Turn them over to the French sewing circles so rapidly forming and if possible send a sewing machine with them. You can be sure that the Kalamazoo pajamas, the Topeka shirts, everybody’s sweaters, will be refitted for children and men and women who at present have not a decent shirt to their backs, or decent drawers to their legs.” A desultory distribution was already making, but I wanted it general and systematic. It was consoling to have found at least one thing, obvious as it was, which I felt I could energetically back. Practical help was the more worth while because so intelligently turned to use. The few returning to the towns from which they had been driven often showed amazing resourcefulness and courage. They wanted to rebuild their homes, set up their shops; but when they came to the town where they once had lived it frequently was impossible to find the spot which they supposed they owned. At Cantigny, an utterly devastated flat ruin the day I saw it, a Frenchman and his wife appeared and quietly went about trying to locate the site of their home. They went away in disagreement as to where their street had run.