These two coördinated agencies, together with the _Secours d'Urgence_, the _Village Reconstitue_, the Civil Section of the American Fund for the French Wounded, the Philadelphia Unit, and the _Comité Américaine pour les Régiones Dévastées_, had their various operations well under way by the early summer of 1917. When it entered the field, our American Red Cross offered assistance in every way to these organizations, thereby giving a new impetus to their work. Agricultural societies were organized for the common rehabilitation of the areas, American tractors and plows were furnished by the French Government, while the Red Cross workers helped with and encouraged the planting, furnishing large quantities of seeds as they did so, while small herds of live stock, also given by the Red Cross, appeared here and there upon the French landscape.
The workers did even more. They turned to and helped patch up buildings that, with a minimum amount of labor, could again be made habitable, erected small barracks in some places, and assisted generally in renewing life and the first bare evidences of civilization in the towns of the desolated sections.
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: