Betty B.
speaker
3,598 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 2 Jul
Betty B.’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
A number of the peasants would not accept, preferring to live in shacks and dugouts until they could save enough to put up new homes.
Houses of brick and stone have gone up and the fields of wheat and oats, each of which contains 50 acres or more, are being worked on the cooperative plan.
The town folk own a tractor and other farm machinery in common and are producing larger crops than before the war.
The new village is much like the old one, except that it must conform to the building regulations laid down by the government.
The French peasant does not want modern houses and abominates the big windows and the sanitation which our people advise.
As a result, the government has had to insist that none of the towns adopted by Americans
or others, shall be rebuilt except in accordance with the official plans.
I have talked with Miss Bell Skinner of Holyoke, Massachusetts, who spent something like a quarter of a million dollars in restoring the little town of Hatton-Châtel in the department of the Moose.
It was there that the men digging the foundation discovered a great pot of coins which they gave to Miss Skinner.
The coins were the savings of a French peasant of centuries ago.
They were of all denominations and
and some of them were coined in the Middle Ages.
It was one of the numismatic finds of the century, and Miss Skinner has given some of the ancient pieces of money to the National Museum in Paris.
And just here I wish to end the film with a tribute to Alan Seeger and to two other young Americans who best typify the spirit of our youth during the World War.
Seeger was a child of four when I first met his father and mother in Mexico City, and was just 28
when, in a bayonet charge on the German trenches at Boulogne-en-Saint-Terre, he was killed.
In the first weeks of the war, he enlisted in the French Foreign Legion, in which he fought to the day of his death.
Reared in the lap of luxury, schooled in the United States and France, a graduate of Harvard, and closely associated with the leading intellectuals of Paris, before the war came, he had become known as a poet through his juvenilia.
Of delicate health and without experience or knowledge of hardships, he jumped into the thick of active field service, slept in the trenches, did sentry duty, and fought again and again until the hour of his rendezvous with death.
Some of his most wonderful poems were written on the very eve of the day on which he was killed, and his work will endure as one of the literary landmarks of the war.
Showing 581–600 of 3,598 · page 30 of 180
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