It was Madame Berard (who was a Miss Dana of Boston) who organized this magnificent spirit into a great oeuvre, so that thousands of men could be made happy whom no kindly woman so far had been able to discover.

Madame Berard, who has three sons in the army herself, nursed at the Front for several months after the war broke out.  Even officers told her that they used to go off by themselves and cry because they never received a letter, or any sort of reminder that they were anything but part of a machine defending France.  These officers, of course, were from the invaded district, and in addition to their isolation, were haunted by fears for their women now in the power of men who were as cruel as they were sensual and degenerate.

When she returned to her home she immediately entered upon the career of marraine, corresponding with several hundred of the men she either had known or whose names were given to her by their commanding officers.  Naturally the work progressed beyond her capacity and she called upon friends to help her out.  Out of this initial and purely personal devotion grew the great oeuvre, Mon Soldat, which has met with such a warm response in this country.

Madame Berard’s headquarters are in a villa in the Parc Monceau.  Here is conducted all the correspondence with the agents in other cities, here come thousands of letters and presents by every mail to be forwarded to the Front, and here come the grateful—­and hopeful—­permissionnaires, who never depart without a present and sometimes leave one, generally an ingenious trinket made in the trenches.

When I visited the villa last summer the oeuvre had eight thousand marraines, and no doubt the number has doubled to-day.  Fifteen hundred of these were American, marshalled by Madame Berard’s representative in New York, Mr. R.W.  Neeser.  Some of these fairy godmothers had ten filleuls.  Packages were dispatched to the Front every week.  Women that could not afford presents wrote regularly.  There were at that time over twenty thousand filleuls.

The letters received from these men of all grades must be a source of psychologic as well as sympathetic interest to the more intelligent marraines, for when the men live long enough they reveal much of their native characteristics between the formalities so dear to the French.  But too many of them write but one letter, and sometimes they do not finish that.

XVI

PROBLEMS FOR THE FUTURE

I

What the bereft mothers of France will do after this war is over and they no longer have the mutilated sons of other mothers to nurse and serve and work for, is a problem for themselves; but what the younger women will do is a problem for the men.