"When it became evident that the Germans were coming the girls worked frantically with auto trucks, gathering together all the people in their territory. In one village they went three times to try to persuade an aged woman to leave, but she refused to move unless the ancestral bedstead on which she lay could be transported with her. In final desperation the girls brought a big supply wagon and loaded the bedstead and the woman into it, leaving the village fifteen minutes before the first of the Uhlans arrived. "The girls organized themselves into small units and each unit was charged with the evacuation of a single village. Cavalcades of refugees, generaled by the Smith girls, marched or rode from their abandoned homes to Roye, where a special train was waiting to carry them westward. Even cows, chickens, dogs, and cats helped to form the cavalcade which reached Roye on Saturday morning. Here the refugees vainly tried to crowd the animals into the train. "The girls of the Smith College unit then proceeded to Montdidier. There, with W. B. Jackson of Washington, a former Red Cross delegate at Ham, assisted by a group of American Quakers and Red Cross workers, they organized a canteen and began giving out blankets and other comforts and making a marvelous bean soup and a special food for babies, the basis of which was condensed milk. As the refugee trains, some containing as many as 1,000 men, women, and children, poured into Montdidier the arriving refugees were fed until the supply of food was exhausted. "Then Montdidier became too hot under the increasing shellfire and the workers were forced to split, some going to Amiens and others to Beauvais, where they continued their work. Since then practically all the Smith College girls and some other workers have gone to Amiens, where they are weathering the enemy bombardment in cellars, but carrying on their work as usual." FLEEING IN BEST CLOTHES An Associated Press correspondent added this further bit of eyewitness testimony under date of March 27: "The French refugees of the better class departing from the zones of actual operations are coming out clad in all their finery, which represents the styles of four or five years ago. Then there are sturdy peasants with wooden shoes and clumsily constructed clothes, riding in vehicles drawn by horses or donkeys or in carts pushed by men, and some are even in wheelbarrows. Upon these queer transports are stacked strange assortments of personal belongings.