There must be plenty of real work, for an army like that of France, stretching clear across the country from Switzerland to the Channel, could not live unless it had a smoothly running civil machine in the quiet country behind.  Neither of the chambers is in session, and except that the main streets are busy—­one is told that one hundred thousand extra people are in town—­you might almost never know that anything out of the ordinary had occurred.  Things must be very different, of course, from ’71, when, beaten to her knees and threatened with revolution, France had to decide between surrendering Alsace and Lorraine and going on with the war.

The theatres are closed, but there are moving-picture shows, an occasional concert, and twice a week, under the auspices of one of the newspapers, a conference.  I went to one of these, given by a French professor of English literature in the University of Bordeaux, on the timely subject:  “Kipling and Greater England.”

You can imagine the piquant interest of the scene—­the polite matinee audience, the row of erudite Frenchmen sitting behind the speaker, the table, the shaded lamp, and the professor himself, a slender, dark gentleman with a fine, grave face, pointed black beard, and penetrating eyes—­suggesting vaguely a prestidigitateur—­trying, by sheer intelligence and delicate, critical skill, to bridge the gaps of race and instinctive thought and feeling and make his audience understand Kipling.

Said the reporter of one of the Bordeaux papers next day:  “Through the Kipling evoked by M. Cestre we admired the English and those who fight, in the great winds of the North Sea, that combat rude and brave.  We admired the faithful indigenes, gathering from all her dominions, to put their muscular arms at the service of the empire...”

It would, indeed, have been difficult to pay a more graceful compliment to the entente cordiale than to try to run the author of “Soldiers Three” and the “Barrack Room Ballads,” and with him the nation behind him, into the smooth mould of a conference—­that mixture, so curiously French, of clear thinking and graceful expression, of sensitive definition and personal charm, all blended into a whole so intellectually neat and modulated that an audience like this may take it with the same sense of being cheered, yet not inebriated, with which their allies across the Channel take their afternoon tea.

A Frenchman of a generation ago would scarcely have recognized the England pictured by the amiable Bordeaux professor, and I am not sure that in this entirely altruistic big brother of little nations the English would have recognized themselves.  But, at any rate, polite flutters of applause punctuated the talk, and at the end M. Cestre asked his audience to rise as he paid his final tribute to the people now fighting the common battle with France.  They all stood up and, smiling up at the left-hand proscenium-box, saluted the British ambassador, Sir Francis Bertie, with long and enthusiastic applause.  A man in the gallery even ventured a “Heep! heep!” and every one drifted out very content, indeed.