To Katherine Breckinridge, 29 June 1919

     digitized, transcribed, encoded, and annotated by Stephanie McCormick

ViCcc_sur_Aisne,
Sunday, June 29, 1919.

Darling Mother:

You will be interested in the enclosed letter from Miss
Crandall and in the invitation of the Chicago Political League to
address them on Child Welfare Legislation, hJJanuary 24, 1920. That is the
second time they have asked me. I doubt if their wiillingness to meet
expenses woudlld include a return passage.

Your first letter, really thrilling, from the Brackens
has come and I have read and read it. Although I fear you did undertake
too much in the beginning and I hate to think of your having to get out
of the main house the fir greater part of the summer, still it is a
constant source of satisfaction to know that you and Aunt Jane are there
and Helen too and that Eleanor will soon be with you. "Just my set," as
Angela said in Angela's Business.§   I hope it will be a sunny summer so
that you can live on the big gallery of the little island and not in
the dark hall. When in the autumn do Col. Osborne and his family leave?
I am thankful that Aunt Jane has rented her place satisfactorily and I
hope that means you can spend the following winter together. I am
delighted over the successful if premature arrival of Waller's son and
the approaching arrival here to me of fifty dollars more goat money.
We got in forty five more goats this week, from the Pyrenniees, after a
six days trip, all in good condition. You can imagine the excitement
of the committee in force leading them up from the station with me run_
ning ahead waving an atttrractive green bowuugh and small bosyysys lining the
roadside to prevent flights to the right and the left. I shall give one
of these in each of the Stovall's namexss and christenchriss ten them Roberta and
Louise and write them about their namesakes of course. One will be Jeanne
of course for Mrs. John but not in the same village with Aunt Jane's Jeanne.
When I hear from Brooke about what name he wants his christened I will
give it to one which is nameless until I hear. I enclose a little note of
thanks to Helen. It is so nice that another Helen had sent a check too
through another memeber of the committee and the two checks pay for
Helene, who goes to a widow      of a soldier with an old mother and tiny boy,
and her living to make by working in the fields at Coeeuvres. Some of the
goat money I am going to use to buy up beets to feed thseesese goats with
through the winter. Beets is the recognized winter feed of goats in this
section of FranceofFrance. Now owing to their late return to the fields and the
dreadful conditions of the fields from trenches and barbed wire and
shells and hand grenadesgranades and their having to be cleared, most of the people
did not get in their beet crop and a long drought has spoiled much off what
was planted. So only the wealtheiieier farmers have plan many beets. I am
going to buy in the field, now, enough beets to help with the feed of
the goats we gave through this next winter. In addition we are keeping a
fine buck for all of them to use in the autumn so that there will be no
difficulty or expense providing for next wsspring's kid. It takes a kid
five months to come and they usually start (if( if spring kids) in November.
By providing the buck and some of the winter's food wewe tide the goat question
over its critical winter and next spring will see our widowss and other
needy ones with goat annd kids in good condition and ground cleared and
planted in beets for the following year. Meanwhile a little one's life has
been in all likelihood saved by the goat's milk through the summer months.

I took a goat yesterday to a place called Laversine to a fammily
with eight living children under fourteen, including a three weeks old
baby, and no breast milk at all because the mother had gotten up on the
third day and begun her heavy work, so of course there was no milk. She is
a very tired mother, and a devoted one too. Had I known about her (she(she only
recently came back) before the baby was born I would have arranged for
someone to help her for two weeks so she need not have gotten up. Now she
is doing all the washing. We herearar a lot about our farmers' wives at home
working very hard. But I never knew any who worked as therse women do. My

2.

friend Gerty Duvauchelle has three children living, three dead, and is
not strong at all, with a goitre and all sorts of wrong inside conditions
coming from evacuating when her allast baby was less than three weeks old
and she had to fly before the Boshes§  , and she not only takes care of her
family, a garden, and carries all the water they use up a hill nearly a
quarter of a mile away, but takes in the washing for the Valsery farm and
delivers it about a mile away. When she came to me with that awful abscess
about which I wrote you in her tooth and a temperature of 101 and I had
Dr. Kinney come down from Paris to pull it and others nearly as bad, xsshe
awwas planning to return and start in on the washing for the Valsery farm. Btuut
I paid her what it would have been for that week out of Uncle Will's check
__ since he had said I could use some of it for other things besides goats
and that was urgent, it seemed to me. All of this washing, after being
boiled on the stove in water brought from the distant srpprpring and over
wood brought from the distant fkoorest, must(always all of it by hand) must
be carried down the hill to the washing hole in a whee l barrow and rinsed
there and carried up again, and then ironed and delivered a mile away.
Now Gerty Duvauchelle is not an incompetent or a second rate sort of
person at all. She has kind blue eyes and a bright smile, she is a good
wife and mother annd neighbor and citizen. She writes an excellent letter
and her husband is such an omnivorous reader that he devours Jules Verne's
novels, which I am lending him from Braly's little lending library, almost
over night. They take a daily Paris papeer and follow the events of the
outside world. Their children are cleaner than mine would have beenhavebeen had I
had to bring all the water by hand. Their home is spotless, even its stone
floor and they now sleep with open windows, first beginning it to please
me and keeping it up later because they see the good it does them. The
reasoon life is hard for them is because the man can never earn more than
just enough to keep them from day to day and the sickness, against which
they have no means of providing, and babies coming and dying, and all
the other extra expenses of life must be paid for in their very life'slife s
blood. But the man is a good steady worker, of high intelligence, better
educated than a similar person at home, fond of books, not drinking or
doing anything he ought not to do. Nevertheless his ten hours a day, day
after day, of hardest work with a walk another hour to and from it, is
and has always been paid so low that she must supplleement it by washing or
working in the fields to make ends meet, now espeecially since the war
nearly finished them. I am going to start them in chickens again with three
hens and a cokcck out of Uncle Will's money. There was a big chilccken fund
raised at home and out of it chickenschiekens are brought in and sold at a third
below cost and little chicks are givieen outright. The Duvauchelle'sDuvauchelle s boy, a
three year old of unusual intelligence, is one of the children I should like
to see receive more than the common school education so that he could rise
above the hard daily grind; and help others to rise waafter him through his
mother's ideals. She and her mother before her and her grandmother before
and everybody as far bavcck as she knows, I suppose for hundreds and hundreds
of years, have lived always in a stone collttttage in the village of Montgobert
on the borders of the foretsst of Rez.

You want to know if I want more woolen stockings for next
winter. Know, because they wear so well the others are in perfect condition.
But I should like a pair of long, warm, substantial bed stockings or long
lssocks, any color. If you and Aunt Jane and Eleanor want special knitting
with your odds and ends of wool do knit children's stockings for me, all
ages, but especially sizes up to eight years. They are used to heavy hand
knit stockings in France and they wear so much better than bought ones and
keep the feet of the littlelittles ones warm and dry in their damp climate and on
their cold xsstone floors. I will find meeans to get them over by some member
of the committee sailing from New York in the autumn anytime. Any size, any
color, will be acceptable and help stave off pneumonia for soome youngster.

The poppies have been blooming in the fields for weeks - so beautiful - my warm regards [illegible] Mr. [illegible] and I am so sorry     and I am so sorry     about his shoulder.

[illegible]

Mary