In March, 1918, these desecrated lands were just springing to life once again. God's sun was breaking through the clouds of winter and gently coaxing the wheat up out of the rough, brown lands, gardens again dotted the landscape--the Smith College Unit itself had supervised and with its own hands helped in the planting of more than four hundred and fifty of these--the little villages and the bigger towns were showing increasing signs of life and activity; then came the blow. The clouds gathered together once again. And in the misty morning of the twenty-first of March began a week of horror and devastation--a single seven days in which all the patient, loving labor of nearly a twelvemonth past was erased completely. The Germans swept across the plains of Picardy once again--the French and British armies and the terror-stricken civilians along with the American war workers were swept before them as flotsam and jetsam, all in a mad onrush. Yet all was not lost. One field worker, a stout-hearted little woman in uniform, sat in the seat of a swaying motor truck and as the thing rolled and tossed over a road of unspeakable roughness wrote in her red-bound diary, this: [Illustration: AS SEEN FROM ALOFT The aëroplane man gets the most definite impression at the A. R. C. Hospital at Issordun, which was typical at these field institutions] "The best of all remains--the influence of neighborliness, friendship, kindness, and sympathy--these are made of the stuff which no chemistry of war can crush. We face more than half a year's work torn to pieces. But I do believe that the fact of this sacrifice will deepen its effect." Such was the spirit of our Red Cross workers overseas. They now had full need for such spirit. The monotony of working from daylight to dusk in lonely farms and villages, where patience was the virtue uppermost, was now to be replaced by a whirl of events which succeeded one another with kaleidoscopic rapidity, demanding service both night and day of a character as varied as the past had been colorless. * * * * * The headquarters of the American Red Cross for the Somme district on the morning of the twenty-first of March, 1918, were at Ham--the little village once made famous by the imprisonment and escape of Louis Philippe. They were in charge of Captain William B. Jackson, who afterwards became major in entire charge of the Army and Navy Field Service. Here at Ham was also the largest Red Cross warehouse in the entire district. Another warehouse stood at Nelse, a few miles distant, to the rear. To the north was Arras, with still another American Red Cross storehouse, while to the south was the Soissons warehouse.