A little way north of the Forest of Vitrimont, in which, after the Battle of the Grand Couronne the bodies of 5,000 of the invaders of Lorraine were picked up, America is busily and quietly at work repairing one tiny bit of the mass of destruction which the Germans left behind when they were driven back to the frontier in the fifth week of the war. The American lady at the head of the work, who has taken up her abode in the pile of ruins that once were the village of Vitrimont, could probably give as convincing an answer as any to why France will go on fighting till she has won an unbreakable peace. In August, 1914, the Germans had the village in their hands for 48 hours. They bombarded it with field-guns and blew to pieces half of its 60 or 70 farmhouses and cottages. Before they left they completed its ruin by setting fire to every house still standing. After a time many of its old men and women and children — the able-bodied men were all dead or away fighting — began to come back to their wrecked homes, and once again to till their fields. They were helped by the Government, who sent men to repair the houses which had suffered least — those, that is to say, which had only been bombarded.
In the early days of the war, I used to wonder whether the French would ever be able to build these ruined villages up again. The undertaking seemed impossible. Now, in the case of one of them, thanks to two American women, one of whom provides the necessary funds, while the other is giving up her life to the supervision of the work on the spot, the impossible is being accomplished. Before long Vitrimont will be a village again.
It is, I believe, the intention of the State to allow the people in all these ruined villages 40 per cent of the cost of reconstructing their houses, and to lend the balance at an easy rate of interest. But even on those terms the restoration of their homes must be beyond the powers of these unhappy victims of German barbarity, and it is not easy to think of any way in which wealthy and generous-minded people in France and other countries can do more to relieve the distress caused by the war than by following the fine example of the two women who have set to work to restore the fallen walls and the fallen fortunes of Vitrimont.