_A notre fils, Charles Diebolt, mort pour la Patrie 1895-1914, 26ème Infanterie—_ _Charles Carron, Musicien; Souvenir d’un camarade, mort au Champ d’Honneur 31 août 1914—_ A rude wooden cross bears the words: “_Ci-gît Edouard Durand, fusillé le 25 août 1914 par des lâches._” As one goes out is the tomb of a young girl; “_Hélène Midon, 18 ans, victime du 1er septembre 1915—une prière—la plus jolie fille du village_.” A white and virginal rose has been planted where she lies. In this cemetery lie, too, the wife and son of the mayor. The first upspringing of early flowers is everywhere—asters, goldenrod, wild roses—and the hot sun extracted from each its soft, peculiar perfume. I picked a seemingly perfect rose from the grave of _un soldat inconnu_. Its petals immediately fell to the ground. Everything grows with an almost ironical luxuriousness on the shallow, hastily dug graves. All over Lorraine is this same flowering; it has been and will be, but there was no time to ponder on the fate of frontier lands, for we were next to call on the officer commanding the detachment quartered at Vitrimont, who was housed in a reconstructed building and who had been waked from slumber to receive us. When I gave him my boxes of cigarettes for his men he said that he had received some before for the soldiers who had the Croix de Guerre. I promptly told him mine were for the soldiers who had _not_ got it. Mrs. C. P. brought bundles of illustrated papers and postal cards. Soldiers are everywhere helping to get in the hay; sweet odors of freshly cut grass float about on the warm air to the sound of distant cannonading. However, in spite of everything, it is already _l’après-guerre_ here, and the delivered population is breathing again, but it all gives the sensation of something prostrate that needs the help of strong, fresh hands before it can arise. Mrs. Crocker’s work is on such a generous, imaginative, sliding scale, and Miss P., untiring and executive, is of immense tact in dealing with the Lorraine peasant, a peculiar type demanding peculiar handling. There are numberless psychological situations needing adjustment in the human as well as material affairs of devastated villages. Miss P. meets all difficulties with understanding plus determination. Some are content, some not, with what is done for them. One woman whose house was completed, and who was evidently dazzled by the result, said, “It isn’t a house to live in, but to rent.” Another, however, when we went into the grange behind her house, pointing to the posts sustaining the hay-lofts, said: “Will they hold? The old ones were twice the size.” Sanitary improvements have been worked out as far as possible, but when you try to tamper with a peasant’s pile of _fumier_, it’s like tampering with his purse—and _that’s_ impossible. Quite a good deal of live stock has been put into Vitrimont.