"I saw one old man near Ham who was trundling along a wheelbarrow, and on this was spread a mattress, and on that was his wife. She looked 90 years of age, with her white, wrinkled face, and she was fast asleep, like a little child. Many children are on the roads, packed tight into farm carts with household furniture and bundles of clothing, and poultry and pigs and new-born lambs. The noise of the gunfire is behind them, and they move faster when it grows louder. They are very brave, these boys and girls and these old people. There is hardly any weeping or any look on their faces of grudge against this unkind turn of fate. They seem to accept it with stoical resignation, with most matter-of-fact courage, and their only answer to pity is a smile and the words, 'C'est la guerre.' Those are words I first heard in the early weeks of the war and hoped never to hear again. "Many of these people trek in family groups and gatherings of families from one village. Small boys and girls drag tired cows after them. The other day one of these cows leaned against every tree she passed and then sat down, and the girl with her looked around helplessly, not knowing what to do. This morning I saw the girl wearing a veil and dressed in an elegant way, taking the cow with her. She was quite alone on the road. It is queer and touching that most of these fugitives wear their best clothes, as though on a fête day. It is because they are clothes they want to save and can only have by wearing them in their flight. "In one small town the fear of the German entry came at night, a bright, moonlight night into which there came many German bombing squadrons. The citizens had shut up their shops and stood about talking anxiously. Then fear and rumor spread among them, and all through the night there was an exodus of small families and solitary girls and comrades in misfortune, stealing away like shadows from homes they loved, from little fortunes or their shops, from all their normal life into the open country, where the moonlight lay white and cold on the fields. Behind them bombs were being dropped, and some of their houses were destroyed. "C'est la guerre!" WORK OF AMERICAN GIRLS The heroic work of the Smith College girls was described by a correspondent at the French front under date of March 29: "Working unceasingly under a constant shellfire, for days without sleep, the girls demonstrated admirable initiative and ability and the extreme coolness of the tried soldier. They are still in the field today, ministering to old men, women, and children. I have talked to the first persons to come in from the front, who saw them last Saturday, when shells were falling at Grecourt, the tiny Somme village where the unit has been quartered for months, aiding the folks of a dozen surrounding villages.