Burned villages are like ruins of an ancient civilization. To wander through them was as if I were stepping among the bones of a dead age. Only the green fields that flowed up to the wrecked cottages and the handful of sober-faced peasants--only these were living in that belt of death that cuts across the face of France, like the scar from a whip on a prisoner's cheek. French soil is sacred to a Frenchman. I saw a little shop with pottery and earthenware in the window: vases, and jars, and toilet cases. The sign read: "La terre de nos Grés--c'est la même terre que défendent nos soldats dans les tranchées." ("The earth which made these wares is the same earth which our soldiers defend in the trenches.") I want the people at home to understand this war. So I am telling of it in terms that are homely. I asked the authorities to let me wander through the villages and talk with the inhabitants. What a village suffers, what a storekeeper suffers, will mean something to my friends in Iowa and Connecticut. Talk of artillery duels with big guns and bayonet charges through barbed wire falls strangely on peaceful ears. But what a druggist's wife has seen, what a school-teacher tells, will come home to Americans in Eliot, Maine, and down the Mississippi Valley. What one cares very much to reach is the solid silent public opinion of the smaller cities, the towns and villages. The local storekeeper, the village doctor, the farmer, these are the men who make the real America--the America which responds slowly but irresistibly to a sound presentation of facts. The alert newspaper editor, the hustling real-estate man, the booster for a better-planned town, these citizens shape our public opinion. If once our loyal Middle Westerners know the wrong that has been done people just like themselves, they will resent it as each of us resents it that has seen it. This is no dim distant thing. This is a piece of cold-planned injustice by murder and fire done to our friends in the sister republic. I should like a representative committee from South Norwalk, Conn., Emporia, Kansas, and Sherman, Texas, to see Gerbéviller as I have seen it, to walk past its 475 burned houses, to talk with its impoverished but spirited residents. I should like them to catch the spirit of Sermaize, building its fresh little red-brick homes out of the rubble of the wrecked place.