Her home is in Neuilly, one of the beautiful suburbs of Paris, and for years when awake early in the morning it had been her habit to listen for the heavy creaking of the great wagons that passed her house on their way from the gardens and orchards of the open country to the markets of Paris.  Sometimes she would arise and look at them, those immense heavy trucks loaded high above their walls with the luscious produce of the fertile soil of France.  On the seats were always three or four sturdy men:  the farmer, and the sons who would help him unload at the “Halles.”

All these men, of course, were reservists.  Mobilization took place on Sunday.  On Monday morning Madame Paquin, like many others in that anxious city, was tossing restlessly on her bed when she heard the familiar creaking of the market wagons which for so many years had done their share in feeding the hungry and fastidious people of Paris.  Knowing that every able-bodied man had disappeared from his usual haunts within a few hours after the Mobilization Order was posted, she sprang out of bed and looked through her blinds.

There in the dull gray mist of the early morning she saw the familiar procession.  There were the big trucks drawn by the heavily built cart horses and piled high with the abundant but precisely picked and packed produce of the market gardens.  Paris was to be fed as usual.  People must eat, war or no war.  In spite of the summons which had excited the brains and depressed the hearts of a continent those trucks were playing their part in human destiny, not even claiming the right to be five minutes late.  The only difference was that the seats on this gloomy August morning of 1914 were occupied by large stolid peasant women, the wives and sisters and sweethearts of the men called to the colors.  They had mobilized themselves as automatically as the Government had ordered out its army when the German war god deflowered our lady of peace.

These women may have carried heavy hearts under their bright coifs and cotton blouses, but their weather-beaten faces betrayed nothing but the stoical determination to get their supplies to the Halles at the usual hour.  And they have gone by every morning since.  Coifs and blouses have turned black, but the hard brown faces betray nothing, and they are never late.

II

Up in the Champagne district, although many of the vineyards were in valleys between the two contending armies, the women undertook to care for the vines when the time came, risking their lives rather than sacrifice the next year’s vintage.  Captain Sweeney of the Foreign Legion told me that when the French soldiers were not firing they amused themselves watching these women pruning and trimming as fatalistically as if guns were not thundering east and west of them, shells singing overhead.  For the most part they were safe enough, and nerves had apparently been left out of them; but once in a while the Germans would amuse themselves raking the valley with the guns.  Then the women would simply throw themselves flat and remain motionless—­sometimes for hours—­until “Les Boches” concluded to waste no more ammunition.