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The history and the work of the Smith College Relief Unit in the Somme is known wherever reconstruction work in France is spoken of. This brief account does not purport to give anything but a small cross-section, the picture of but one of the villages in our care. It is told in the first person to make the telling easier. As I have said, of all our villages, Canizy was the most beloved. All the Unit had a share in it.

The picture is given as it was seen day by day. What was true in this section, may not be true in another. Here the German retreat was so rapid that the devastation, though appalling, was not complete; whole avenues of trees were left standing in places, and only two churches were dynamited, by contrast with the two hundred and twenty-five destroyed throughout the région dévastée. It was perhaps in more calculated ways that the Prussians here vented their spite; in the burning of family pictures, the wrecking of machinery, the cutting of the trees about the Calvaries, and the taking away of the bells from the church towers. They left behind them here, as everywhere, ruin and silence; a silence of industry, of agriculture, of all the normal ways of life; a silence which has given the plain of Picardy the name of “The Land of Death.”

Ruth Gaines.