“C’est la guerre!” and the women of Paris, thinking of their men at the front, dedicated themselves to suffering and were glad of their very hunger pains, so that they might share the hardships of the soldiers.

By good chance, a number of large-hearted men and women, more representative of the State than the Ministry in power, because they had long records of public service and united all phases of intellectual and religious activity in France, organized a system of private charity to supplement the Government doles, and under the title of the Secours Nationale, relieved the needs of the destitute with a prompt and generous charity in which there was human love beyond the skinflint justice of the State.  It was the Secours Nationale which saved Paris in those early days from some of the worst miseries of the war and softened some of the inevitable cruelties which it inflicted upon the women and children.  Their organization of ouvroirs, or workshops for unemployed girls, where a franc a day (not much for a long day’s labour, yet better than nothing at all) saved many midinettes from sheer starvation.

There were hard times for the girls who had not been trained to needlework or to the ordinary drudgeries of life, though they toil hard enough in their own professions.  To the dancing girls of Montmartre, the singing girls of the cabarets, and the love girls of the streets, Paris with the Germans at its gates was a city of desolation, so cold as they wandered with questing eyes through its loneliness, so cruel to those women of whom it has been very tolerant in days of pleasure.  They were unnecessary now to the scheme of things.  Their merchandise—­ tripping feet and rhythmic limbs, shrill laughter and roguish eyes, carmined lips and pencilled lashes, singing voices and cajoleries—­had no more value, because war had taken away the men who buy these things, and the market was closed.  These commodities of life were no more saleable than paste diamonds, spangles, artificial roses, the vanities of fashion showrooms, the trinkets of the jeweller in the Rue de la Paix, and the sham antiques in the Rue Mazarin.  Young men, shells, hay, linen for bandages, stretchers, splints, hypodermic syringes were wanted in enormous quantities, but not light o’ loves, with cheap perfume on their hair, or the fairies of the footlights with all the latest tango steps.  The dance music of life had changed into a funeral march, and the alluring rhythm of the tango had been followed by the steady tramp of feet, in common time, to the battlefields of France.  Virtue might have hailed it as a victory.  Raising her chaste eyes, she might have cried out a prayer of thankfulness that Paris had been cleansed of all its vice, and that war had purged a people of its carnal weakness, and that the young manhood of the nation had been spiritualized and made austere.  Yes, it was true.  War had captured the souls and bodies of men, and under her discipline of blood and agony men’s wayward fancies, the seductions of the flesh, the truancies of the heart were tamed and leashed.