Everything is very quiet here.  Our little commune sent two hundred men only, but to take two hundred able-bodied men away makes a big hole, and upsets life in many ways.  For some days we were without bread:  bakers gone.  But the women took hold and, though the bread is not yet very good, it serves and will as long as flour holds out.  No one complains, though we already lack many things.  No merchandise can come out yet on the railroads, all the automobiles and most of the horses are gone, and shops are shy of staple things.

Really I don’t know which are the more remarkable, the men or the women.  You may have read the proclamation of the Minister of Agriculture to the women of France, calling on them to go into the fields and get in the crops and prepare the ground for the sowing of the winter wheat that the men on returning might not find their fields neglected nor their crops lost.  You should have seen the old men and the women and the youngsters respond.  It is harvest-time, you know, just as it was in the invasion of 1870.

In a few weeks it will be time to gather the fruit.  Even now it is time to pick the black currants, all of which go to England to make the jams and jellies without which no English breakfast table is complete.

For days now the women and children have been climbing the hill at six in the morning, with big hats on their heads, deep baskets on their backs, low stools in their hands.  There is a big field of black-currant bushes beside my garden to the south.  All day, in the heat, they sit under the bushes picking away.  At sundown they carry their heavy baskets to the weighing-machine on the roadside at the foot of the hill, and stand in line to be weighed in and paid by the English buyers for Crosse and Blackwell, Beach, and such houses, who have, I suppose, some special means of transportation.

That work is, however, the regular work for the women and children.  Getting in the grain is not.  Yet if you could see them take hold of it you would love them.  The old men do double work.  Amelie’s husband is over seventy.  His own work in his fields and orchard would seem too much for him.  Yet he and Amelie and the donkey are in the field by three o’clock every morning, and by nine o’clock he is marching down the hill, with his rake and hoe on his shoulder, to help his neighbors.

There is many a woman working in the fields to-day who was not trained to it.  I have a neighbor, a rich peasant, whose two sons are at the front.  Her only daughter married an officer in the Engineer Corps.  When her husband joined his regiment she came home to her mother with her little boy.  I see her every day, in a short skirt and a big hat, leading her boy by the hand, going to the fields to help her mother.  If you don’t think that is fine, I do.  It is only one of many cases right under my eyes.