magazine The Masses, arrived from Manhattan to lecture without wearing a tie; after one was put together for him from shoelaces, he spoke about slang, to everyone’s surprise. “There has been much speculation as to whether Miss Hillard knew what he was going to say,” wrote an editor of The Lantern afterward. “Anyway, she spent an hour in the schoolroom the next morning counteracting the effect.”
When school let out for the summer, the headmistress and her colleagues usually left for a few months in Europe. These trips were interrupted after the summer of 1914, when she and Lucy Pratt were in England as World War I broke out. A few years before in England, Mary Hillard had met poet John Masefield, who then visited Middlebury while in America on a lecture tour, and the two corresponded during the war. She asked him questions about the hostilities that he could only answer philosophically if at all, explaining that after being on the battleground for several months he had “no certainty of our purpose here.” In a letter written in April of 1917, he went on: “Now the biggest battle that ever was fought is raging, and I have been watching it from a hole in the ground in the biggest roar and racket that ever troubled the earth. It is not possible to describe it, except that there is over the earth, an angel of wrath, that is all angry and dark, a sort of threat or menace, not a night, nor a dust, nor even a smoke, but something made of all these, and reddish and rather threatening and all shot with blinks of very terrible fire, and it is like the very Devil of Hell sitting in the air enthroned … Up above, there are aeroplanes droning and casting glitters, and shells bursting (and larks singing) and a sky all blue with the spring.”
“I often think of Westover in these places of death and ruin and awful blasted horror,” he continued in his letter. “Westover is a very beautiful and a very happy memory to me, all kindness and happiness and bright dazzling winter weather, and a happy place to come to out of the cold and the night.” His vivid words from the trenches, which Miss Hillard read to her pupils, no doubt influenced her later devotion to the cause of world peace, as did the death in 1918 of Martha’s son, Kenneth MacLeish, a pilot with the Royal Air Force.
After America entered the war, pupils marched in military drills on the hockey field and participated in patriotic parades and events in Waterbury, including a pageant in St. John’s Church, when the girls waved the flags of the Allies and sang their national anthems. They also worked for the war effort by knitting clothes, making bandages, organizing a nursing course, and raising money for orphans. A red banner with the names of those in the school community who were most involved in the war effort was hung in the chapel. When the armistice was announced early in the morning of November 11, 1918, girls gathered in their nightclothes in Red Hall to listen to Miss Hillard, wearing a pink bathrobe and her hair still hanging in a braid down her back. She lead everyone in patriotic songs before they entered the chapel for an impromptu service. Later, students rang the bell in the tower until its rope fell off, and a large celebratory bonfire burned on the village green.
That year John Masefield returned to Middlebury to read his poetry and preside over what would become a yearly writing contest for seniors. The poet, who was later named poet laureate of England, gave the winner, Polly Willcox, a beautifully bound book as a prize for her short story about circus camels. Poets were always high on Miss Hillard’s wish list of visitors, and Walter de la Mare, another of the most famous poets of the day, also read his poetry there. A few years later William Butler Yeats arrived from Waterbury by sleigh after a snowstorm had made the roads impassable by automobile. Other lecturers during those years included a bishop from Kyoto who spoke about the position of women in Japan, a female scholar from Oxford University who talked about novelist Jane Austen, and a son of Leo Tolstoy who spoke about his famous novelist father.
Reformers and radicals continued to arrive in Middlebury to talk to the girls. Among them was gray-haired Catherine Breshkovsky, a member of the Russian intelligentsia, whose sympathy for the plight of the peasants in her country had led to her imprisonment and exile. Miss Hillard became aware of her plight and arranged for this woman, called Baboushka or “the little grandmother of the Russian Revolution,” to visit in March of 1919. When the visitor in a white headscarf and coarse brown robe glimpsed the West Indian maids, she rushed over to embrace them, calling them “dear children, not long from slavedom.” More fluent in German and French than in English, she dined with pupils at the French table, where she expressed displeasure at maids waiting on table and approval on hearing that girls made their own beds. One time while singing Russian folk songs to students, she spontaneously started doing folk steps under an apple tree in the Quad before suddenly turning serious again. “She seemed as she moved amongst us to create a wonderful atmosphere of heroism and eternal hope,” remembered French teacher Henriette Coffin.
Although Miss Coffin remembered that Baboushka had wondered whether the girls in “this house of so many riches” could comprehend the troubles in Russia, they raised money for her causes for years. In 1927 she sent an embroidered dresser cover to the girls of Westover along with a plea to help a young Russian woman scientist. “The letter was an appeal from a poor country to a rich one,” wrote an editor of The Lantern in the March issue. “But it was more than that,” she continued. “Written by a great woman, whose life had been spent, in every sense of that word, for her oppressed people, and who at her present age of eighty-three years has not the remotest intention of quitting her post, it contained an expression, in rather broken English, of the courage, enthusiasm, interest, hope, and appreciation of a very remarkable personality” whose “outlook on life is broad, varied, and alive, excluding only despair and defeat.” Baboushka’s countryman, Vladimir Zenzinoff, was touched by the way the old lady was remembered at Westover—“her name here is surrounded by a sort of halo”—and he noted in his memoir that photographs of her visit “are reverently kept by Miss Hillard as relics.” He observed that “time and again did she speak of the Grandmother and her life to her pupils, and these stories evidently formed a part of her educational system.”
Indeed, in Mary Hillard’s effort to teach the importance of philanthropy, she established the Dorcas Society, named for a Biblical woman known for her good works. Members of Dorcas sewed and knit clothes for the needy and undertook charitable work in the community. Every pupil was expected to give up dessert during Lent; as she left for church on Easter morning, she was given a gold coin she had earned for the donation plate. Girls also hosted a Christmas party for neighborhood children every year complete with a Santa Claus and gifts. After Miss Hillard took students to Waterbury to hear a talk by Sir Wilfred Grenfell, a quiet English doctor who ran a humanitarian mission in Labrador, they began to raise money for him as well. The headmistress also established a charitable Mary Hillard Society, which over the years gave away thousands of dollars to many causes, including churches, visiting nurses, girls’ clubs, crippled children, and missionaries in China.
Miss Hillard’s wide sympathies and worldly interests created a well-rounded life of her own, especially after the war when she was able to travel to Europe again. In 1928 she offered to take Ursula Van Wagenen Ferguson on her first trip to Europe. Ursula had been the admired president of St. Margaret School’s class of 1908, and after her graduation she was a chaperone at Westover for a while before her marriage. When she moved to Middlebury with her husband and young son and daughter, she renewed her friendships with the Misses Hillard, Pratt, and LaMonte. She became deeply involved in the life of the school and was eventually hired to oversee the Dorcas Society. During the summers when not in Europe, Miss Hillard liked to have the Sunday midday meal served outside in the Quad for whoever was around—her nieces and nephews, teachers and friends, as well as members of the Ferguson family—when “she would always try to stimulate the conversation to some interesting topic,” recalled the Fergusons’ son, John.
The women’s trip to Europe typified the busy, purposeful, and even grand way in which Mary Hillard traveled. Before their ship left New York, gifts of books and magazines, baskets of fruit, bouquets of flowers, and boxes of nuts and candies arrived in the stateroom. Perhaps it was on that trip when she gathered all the fresh flowers in her arms and dropped them into the sea right after the ship left port. “A withered flower is the size of a withered soul,” she liked to say. “She could not bear
