Evening Republican, Volume 21, Number 40, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 25 February 1918 — The Pumps of Lassigny [ARTICLE]

The Pumps of Lassigny

Red Cross Nobly Comes to the Assistance of Remaining Residents of Wrecked French Village

Lassigny was pounded to pieces in the two years that the Boche trenches lay just before it. It was a deserted village when the Germans retired Ifist spring. t But there were cellars among the jagged bits of wall left standing, and here and there a corner of roof that the big guns had missed. A few families, which had crowded Into the towns behind the line waiting their chance, moved forward into what they called their “homes,” sleeping anywhere—often on damp straw. The government sent in a trainload of wooden barracks, and the army commander sent in a group of boches to set them up. More refugees moved in. The Boches laboriously dug out the wells that other Boches had laboriously shoveled full of dirt and manure. Lassigny Is a'long village, struggling along the road from to —; and it had many wells in the days before the war. When the Germans left, they filled the wells so carefully that six months later the grass and weeds concealed every trace of what had one been village wells. Only the end of a ladder sticking out of the tall grass betrayed one well. The stone walls of the wells were solid, and far down below the water was good—French chemists analyzed it after the Boche prisoners had, shovelfull by shovel-full, cleaned out the well-holes. But the wells are deep, and to haul up buckets of water by hand is a long hard task. There are no strong men in Lassigny these days; only the little children, and the old men and women—and the two brave nurses of the Union des Femmes de France. So toe word went back along the line. “Pumps for Lassigny!” There are no pumps to be had in the ruined region abont Lassigny, fertile and busy as it once was; so the Red Cross delegate sent to Paris; and the Red Cross purchasing department there sent out a buyer to find pumps for Lassigny. The town has its pumps now; and even the tiny bare-kneed tots can start the water flowing. And when the Red Cross mqn comes to town, the townfolk greet him with a smile. When he was last there, there was a knock at the door of the barracks where he was chatting with a French nurse and in came an old peasant woman, bearing her token of gratitude and friendship—a plateful of steaming hot baked apples, and a brown jugful of fresh water pumped from one of Lassigny’s wells.