To Katherine Breckinridge, 23 March 1919

     digitized, transcribed, encoded, and annotated by Hayley Harlow

Vic_sur_Aisne,
March 23, 1919.

My darling mother:

Here I am again before  the wood fire in my room in
the old house, with the yellow light filtering in yellower than even it
is, through the oiled papers which take the place of the broken panes.
During the past ten day or so I have only sent you one little hand
written letter and one post card! First I was unusually busy and tired
because I was not yet fully over my grip, then I had bronchitis!  This
seems to be the correct thing to do after the grip but it laid me by
for several days again and I am thankful now that it is all over and
I have gone through the initiation process usual to Americans landing in
France this winter and have it done with.  Everybody was lovely to me,
unit people and maids, and out own doctoresses took care of me, so that
I receoveoveroverred quickly.  I began to work again day before yesterday but
am rather taking it easy for a few days and this Sunday is going to be
a day of full rest .XLast Sunday was pretty strenuous.  We usually plan
to do as little as possible on Sundays, none of our routine work, but
sometimes things come up which can't be postponed, and our chauffeurs,
who are indefatigaleblble, are apt to be called out before the day is done
as we seem to have in our camions about the only means of transportation
except for an occational ambulance or military camion in this section.
  The train of course, and there is now one train a day from Paris to
Vic, Soissons, and many other place where the tracks go, doesn't go
where its trakcckcks aren't, or haven't been restored.     

Last Sunday Rose-Clark, a dear little red headed chauffeur,
we call Tete Rouge in the unit, and I had to take a camion full of
patients to Luzancy on the Marne, a distance of about nineety kilometers
and an all day job.  The American Woman's Hospital is at Luzancy in an old
chateau where it was established not so very far from Chateau Thierry
when the lines where a few miles in front.  They are now going to move it
to Blérancourt in the heart of the devastated areas of this part of the
aisne, where we have a unit, and put it in the barracks as there are no
chateaux left standing there.  It isn't needed any longer back where it
is, in that now peaceful section, and no civilian doctors are returning to
care for the sick as yet around Blérancourt where the absence of every
civilized thing is still apparent, coverings, shelter, medicines, etc.
I had forgotten what a peaceful section of country could look like until
we went down to Luzancy Sunday.  A few miles before we got there the
awful wreckage seemed to stop.  From one nearly destroyed village we
suddenly came upon one untouched by war and chickens were in its streets,
We passed cows in the fields and sheep and the trees hadn't that scourged
look which so many of the trees hereabouts have.  No fruit trees were cut
down.  No houses had holes through the roofs.  There wasn't even the
effect of cannonading which one finds in those of our villages behind
the lines which the Germans didn't occuply but which were shelled con_
tinuously.  They gave us a great welcome at Luzancy, for our committee
cooperates with theirs and all of their workers are women as all of ours
are.  We turned over our patients to the doctors and nurses at the Chateau
hospital and had tea with those offtheir not on duty and then Miss Clark
borroke tohehe news that some important inner part of the camion had burst and
the blacksmith at Luzancy would be hours in making another.  We found we
had to spend the night.  However we located a pohhohone and called up Vic with
the news and the doctors took us over to a cottage they occupy in the
village, a lovely little old place with a walled garden so charming that
one can only clasp ones hands and give thanks that this beauty spot was
spared,.. while Thousands as charming in our poor Aisne are nothing now
but debris and shell holes.  This Marne country around Luzancy, only a
few miles from Chateau Thierry, is a smiling undulating rickhh looking
land and the Marne a little stream about the size of the Aisne.  Our country
here on the Aisne is rugged, rough, mountainous in a small way.  Both are

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beautiful.  The architecture of this section of the Aisne (I always mean
my own section since the Aisne is a big department in old Picardy and
others sections may not resemble ours) is stone cottages, sandstone,
weathered into soft, dull colors, and the old farm buildings and chateaux are much the same.  Those around Luzancy however are a sor made of cobble-
stones, cemented together and covered over with cement which has gotten
in the course of long years, a sort of lppinkish gray look.  Through the
broken cement the cobbles show here and there.  I don't know which I
think lovelier but each is of its own country, and suits that best because
it expresses it best.  No two houses are alike in the villages, they are
all irregular, each lovelier than its neighbor, but their being made of
the same material and of the same general style, gives them a harmoney and
beauty altogether lacking in our type of village where each house starts
into existence on its own and without any consideration of its relation
to its neighbors or its environment.  The peasant farmers, wealthy or
poor, independent or working for others, practically all live in the
villages.  They don't live in their ollands.  The little villages come
fairly close together and everybody who owns land in between lives with
his neighbors. So there is no isolated farming and no lonely farmer's
wife. They have the advantage of community life, school, church, for
each group. The men and some of the women go off to the fields each
day and come back to the village at night. The women wash alltogheetether
in the same wash holes with pretty thatched roofs. The children play
alltogheeether. Each cottage has its own lovely garden at the bacjkk and its
rabbits and chickens, each cottage that is, in the undestroyed country.
The wealtheiieier farmers whose estates comprise big farms, for this part of
world, live at the outskirts of the villages, in old walled farm buildings
like the one near Mortefornntaine, which was evacuated but never destroyed
and never occupied by the enemy, being beyond his range, where you go
through soft mossy walls into a basse cour, or farm yard, which all the
farm buildings of sandstone encircle and which is alive with cheerful
animal life, and then you pass thlengthroughroughtthe walls of the house where there
is an arch and come into a garden to lovely that it doesn't look as it
it could be meant for human beings, still enclosed by the protecting
wall which makes it as much yours and your bedroom. It has box, fruit
trees, lawns, flowers, vegetables, and as you walk around it you hear
the delectable cackle and lowing of the basse cour on the other side of
the house, and you know that if you wander back through the arch you
will come into a liveliness as extreme as the peace of the garden is
extreme, a liveliness shared by youths and maids of the village and th
farmer and his life al together, for they will be working in with their
servants. The cow herd sleeps on a cot with the cows in what was the
refectory of an abbeym,, for the Mortefontaine farm was church property
once, a church farm. Knowing my tastes you can imagine that lovely as
the chateaux are, set back in their parks a little out of those villages,
where there are chateaux, or else in thweeierr grounds a littlewith the
village grown up around them on three sides as here at Vic and at Coeuvres,
those farms equally withdrawn from the villages by a little space make
the greater appeal to me. I don't seem to covet the Aisne chateaux, but
I do covet the farms. Their walled seclusion, the beautiful intimacy
of beasts and man and the cackling cheerfulness of their basse-cours,
and then all withoiin the same old defenxssive wall the infinite beauty and
peace of the garden, and the house where the master lives, fronting on
the one side on the lively basse_cour on the other on the peaceful garden
and all within the same mossy walls___can't you see what their appeal
would be to me? I don't seem to conceive a happier life than that of one
of these French famers,rmersrmers, not too far removed from the planieineiner aspects of
life, close in touch with his cows, his chickens, his fellow creatures
of the village who work for him, and yet really are not socially beneath
him, and might aspire to the same competence after years of frugality and

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foresight, and yet with beauty such as we Americans rarely dream of
around him every day, in his very rabbit hutches and cow sheds, and a
garden for his children, lovelier than any nursery of my dreams.A person
with simple tastes, loving secullulusion and beauty and loving as much plain
every day people and cattle and poultry, such a person would be satis_
fied on a French farm and I announce right now to you and Aunt Jane that
my "corner" needn't be very different from the Ferté farm at Mortefontaine.
When it comes to neighbors I would as soon have French peasants as any
other set of people I ever meant met.

In a subsequent letter, for this one is lengonththenthening out consider_
ably already, I will describe the various types of landowners hereabouts
from the wealthy peasant to the landed middle class and on to the old
land owning nobility, all of whom are rpeepepresented in our section and
most, of whom, who come back among the ones who return, are known to us
personally.  Needless to say share this and any other letters with Uncle
Will and Aunt Rachel, I want Aunt Jane and those in Kentucky to see this
one.  Parts of it are for Aunt Jane.  I think Anne would enjoy it too and
Frances Maltby and Susie Sutphen.  To facilitate your sending it around,
I am having a carbon copy made as I write and will mail that in another
envelope so that you will have two letters, just as I have done sometimes
before.  Please send one or two of my letters to Edith Richie to read at
some convenient time as she will want news of me too and I literally
haven't time to write the others fully, and I do you.  Choose those you
think most descriptive of my life here and send with a note of explana_
tion, please, to Mrs. Howland Jones, 10 Tucker at Marblehead, Mass.

I saw Dr. Kinney at Luzancy.  She was you know the woman dentist
in my cabin on the Rochambeau and a duck.  She is working at the Val de
Grace in Paris making over faces and rooming with the Collins at 5 Rue
Daru where Lees is.  I put her on to the place.  She says Lees is like a
different person since her ten days rest, not only more rested looking
but even put on flesh and began to get plump in the face again.  Her hours
now are easy ones, three in the afternoon to ten at night, which enables
her to sleep late in the morning and walk down to the Y.M. hotel in the
afternoon, a nice long walk.  She is in the libaryrarrary.  Mrs. Ham, the widow
of the man killed at St. Mihiel, also in my cabin, is now at Blerancourt
where I saw her the other day.  We have units there, at Soissons and at
Laon.  You will find the last two places probably on an ordinarlly map
but hardly Vic and Blerancourt.  To get to Laon one passes over the Chemin
de Dames through a country where the very earth has been torn to bits.
  But even there, some of the people are returning.  They love their homes
so, these people.  But the shock for some is too much.  Sometimes they
kill themselves, two lately at Blerancourt have done that.  One was a
woman over sixty years old.  Her husband was dead, her son killed, she
had been two years deported with her daughters into Germany.  At last she
could return to what had always been her home and somehow I think that
perhaps somehow in her mind the idea persisted that the nightmare would
end when she got back in the old familiar places.  But of her home not
one stone was left standing upon another and the garden and trees were
utterly gone.  So she hanged herself there.  Our preiieiest at Vic, who is a
good man with honest eyes like Médors, our shaggy dog's, did not refuse
her the services of the church and she was buried in holy ground.  Those
things would have counted with her.  One of our camions carried her body
there and members of our unit followed her to the grave. 

I don't see how any person or any organization ever got the
idea that we weren't needed, we Americans, I mean, and our supplies, in
France any more. We will be desperately needed until the next harvest
anyway. And I have been talking to one of the people interested in the
country around Lille and unquestionably that section is far worse off
than ours because more inaccessible. It isn't a questionqestion there of meeting
people as they return. They are there already where the retiring Germans

4.

left them and all around them the groupnd, the bridges, the roads, are
so destroyed that it is almost impossible to get supplies to them. In
some villages the people have to be fed by aeroplane. None of them
begin to have enough. This person who spoke with me said, that anyone
who went in had to carry their own food and that to see them starving
still as when the fight was on, starving after their years of agony,
starving now that when all prated of peace, was to watch the needless
death of a nation. You see the government has it all worked out on
paper, each family is to get its indemnity money. BBut to translate that
paper business into lists of the families and get them the money is
a task that the present officials, their ranks broken still by mobiliza-
tion can't seem to compete with, the more especially as the local officials
who act as go betweens are oftentimes non existent. Everything is still
disorganized. The crisis is still like that of the San Francisco earth
quake on a vast scale. And then, after all, what even is the money if
the problems of transporting supplies can't be adequately met? A
millionaire at Blerancourt couldn't get a mattress except from our
depot of supplies at any price, because there are no mattresses except
those we have brought in. There are certain villages whosese only food is
brought by our camions. Should one let them straararve because theoretically
France can look out for them now with her indemnity money from Germany?

One of the most tragic things siisis the way in which the people
continue to be blown up by explosives in the fields, and gardens. There
seems no way out of it. A peasant sticks his spade in the ground and it
is likely enough to strike a hand granade. Our casualities for the past
week are three men and two women of whom only two men survive. We carried
them to the military hospital at the Compieggnnene and both lost hands, bedjsisides
other injuries. Esther Braly says that as she went back to our camion,
which happened to be passing one injury, there in the road stood a far
Boshe at his work of road mending and she had a wild impulse to chockkeke
him, he was so safe. We have Boshes working all about here now. They look
well fed and are kindly treated. I have seen no instance of anything but
kindness, and they are working in the runiinins they wroghtughught. WWe also have
Sengalese troups gqquarteresdd in Vic which look like any other darkies.

I could never tell you what a comfort the stockinsggs you knit con_
tinues to be to me. The ground is nearly always damp, for it drizzles con_
tinually, and the woolen stockinsggs are almost a necessity. My little
pillow covers are a joy too and stay clean a long time, being tan and brownn

Dr. Kinney tells me the American Womans Hospital associaiontiotion
would be glad to take me over at any time after my work with this com-
mittee closed either for France or units to Serbia if they send there and ifif
I want to go. The Red Cross is open too I am sure. There is no lack of
uddull opportunities for work of a very satisfying kind as long as I want
it and I am happier in it than in anything since Breckie died. Do you know,
it is so satisfying to remember he spoke French. All of my work with the
xcchildren here takes on a personal character because it is in a tongue he
understood and the very rhymes we sing and games we play, like Savez-
vous planter les choux? are rhymesrhymns and games often which he sang and
played. §  So he seems to be singing and playing them with us now.

Your letters describing the trip to Washington and Qauuauantico are
very satisfying I am distressed delightful. I am distressed over your
illness after you got to Knoxville but so glad you were with those so deeaar
to you and you to them. Only I wish I had been there too for that time.
Your big spaciousness of room and bath after our huddledness at the Rutledge
must seem palationalal. I don't know why you did not get a letter from me
by the returning Rochambexaau as I wrote a long steamer letter and mailed it
on the boat. There were hundreds of letters mailed by passengers on her
and I suppose mine has finlaally reached you. Perhaps it had to go to Paris
before being allowed across the Atlantic. The first scribners came and I
am glad you sent it for not only did I enjoy very much the Kate Douglas
Wiggin story but others of the unit enjoy the rest of the magazine too. § 

5.

We are notwell off for newspapers since we subscribe collectively to five
Paris dailies, three leading ones in French and the English paper the
Daily Mail published in Paris and the Herald. But we only see occasional
magazines. We have a shelf of novels various people have left behind,
more than we have time to read. By the way the most realistic true thing
in the way of a book about war inin FFrance is Dorothy Canfield's Home wFFires
in France. §  Do read it. The story in it called A litletltle Kansas Leaven is
adorably funny and pathetic and delicious, and the story called A
Permissionaire is the best description of one of the peasants andg con_
ditions in the devastated country I know. The description of a French
undestroyed village in the first sotytortory of all is of one not so very far
from us in the undevastated region. We have been promiserdd a visit from
Dorothy Canfield later. I hope it materializes. You know how wIIe lover her
two novels and even more her books of mothers and children.

We often have visitors. The last has been a publicity lady from the
Delineator who is too compiically inadequate to breathe. Her heart is not
good so things fatigue her easily, her stomach is upset by odds and ends
to eat and she speaks not a word of French. §  Mrs. Daggett she is. Now
without heart, stomach, or French what could she do in our section? How
could she get publicity withtout French? And she has in addition no back_
ground of knowledge of French life, customs or history to help her. She
speaks of peasants as if they were Gauls and when we took her to Fontenoy
-- the tragic runiinins of what was one of the loveliest of villages she
asked of one family: "Why do they sleep in a cellar?" Some one gaevve her
money for a French child. We have many suggestions, but she turned them
down, saying the persons in question wanted to help a child of her own
class, "not a peasant." We told her we feared that the Duchess of Albufera
at Montgobert had no needy ones in her family at present but we would
enquire. Miss Crandall by the way has sent me forty dollars from a friend
of hers who wants to be godmother to a French child. I am debating over
several bonny ones, so needy, so dear, so intelligent. I shall be carceeful
to choose only an intelligent one whose necessities are due to war condi_
tions only, since the future will need sadly these surviving children and
in reallyreallyevery village are the usual riffraff,_ feeble minded, not many, but some,
who in peace or war have nothing and keep nothing. The others must be
helped first. Miss Crandall sent me an American check and I will have to
send it home to be made over into French exchange, advancing meanwhile
from my own account. Odd people do not think of that?

Your enclosures are most appreciated, like extra letters.
Mrs. Smiths, with her dear insight, her spiritual thoughtfulness, her
forgetfulness of self, is so like her and so lovely. I like Chad's letter
too, very much. It is altoghyetether spontaneous like that of a child encour_
aged to this for himself. I like his giving a list of the fish he caught
and telling you that in the Young Marooners he had gotten to where they
moved out to the prarieiriirie. §  Yes please send Mrs. Scott Robertson a copy of
Breckie and write in it yourself. You need not ask me about any copy you
want to send anyone. But be sure the copy is perfect. I was so glad to get
the pictures of the Brackens. I had forgotten them. I loved the quotations
from Clifton's letter. You need not forward my letters to father unless
you especially want to forward certain ones as he sees my letters to Dick
and I will write him occasionally alternating with Dick with whom he can
share them. Thus Eureka Springs will be written to, one or the other of
the men, direct. The Carson baby must be darling. I am glad it looks like
renting the Brackens and think your idea of living with a few dear ones
on the little island would be happy in materialization with Helen to
cook for you and another maid, but how I wish you might have it all with
no strangers about! Yes, destroy the manuscript of "Breckie." There is no
need to keep it. I must get ready for lunch. This is enough of a letter
for one day, isn't it darling? Dear love for you and all I love who
will share this volume with you. Devotedly your child, MaryMary