The Germans had left behind them an especial misery in the form of a vast region of burned and blown-up homes, broken vehicles and farm machinery, defiled wells, hacked and broken orchards, and ruined soil. I have stood in both of these valleys myself after German retreats and so can bespeak as personal evidence the desolation which they left behind. I, myself, have seen whole orchards of young fruit trees wantonly ruined by cutting their trunks a foot or more above the level of the ground. And this was but a single form of their devilment. Yet as the Germans retreated "strategically" there in the spring weeks of 1917, there followed on their very heels the heavy-hearted but indomitable refugees who in yesteryear had known these hectares as their very own. Returning, they found but little by which they might recognize their former habitats. Devastation ruled, life was practically extinct. The farm animals, even the barnyard fowls and the tiny rabbits--the joy of a French peasant's heart--had been killed or carried away. Not even the bobbins of the cast-out sewing machines or the cart wheels were left behind by an enemy who prided himself on his efficiency, but who had few other virtues for any decent pride. Seemingly stouter-hearted folk than the French might have quailed at such wholesale destruction; but the refugees did not complain. Instead, they set patiently to work--many of them still within the range of the enemy's guns--to rehabilitate themselves. Their burdens and their problems were staggeringly great; their resources pitifully small. Thus our Red Cross found them, and to give them effective aid--not only in the valleys of the Somme and the Oise, but in the other devastated areas of France--formed the Bureau of Reconstruction and Relief under Edward Eyre Hunt. Of Mr. Hunt's work, the record will be made at another time. In order, however, that you may gain the proper perspective on the beginnings of the field service of our Red Cross with our army in action, permit me to call attention in a few brief sentences to some salient features of the Bureau of Reconstruction and Relief.