In Rheims the women have never closed their shops.  They have covered their windows with sandbags, and by the light of lamp or candle do a thriving business while the big guns thunder.  The soldiers, both British and French, like their trinkets and post-cards, to say nothing of more practical objects, and, admiring their inveterate pluck, not only patronize them liberally but sit in their coverts and gossip or flirt with the pretty girls for whom shells bursting in the street are too old a story for terror.

[Illustration:  Delivering the milk in Rheims]

III

Many of the women of the industrial classes who have been accustomed all their hard dry lives to live on the daily wage of father or husband have refused to work since the war began, preferring to scrape along on the Government allocation (allowance) of one-franc-twenty-five a day for the wives of soldiers, plus fifty centimes for each child (seventy-five in Paris).  These notable exceptions will be dealt with later.  France, like all nations, contains every variety of human nature, and, with its absence of illusions and its habit of looking facts almost cynically in the face, would be the last to claim perfection or even to conceal its infirmities.  But the right side of its shield is very bright indeed, and the hands of many millions of women, delicate and toil-hardened, have labored to make it shine once more in history.

The Mayoress of a small town near Paris told me of three instances that came within her personal observation, and expressed no surprise at one or the other.  She probably would not have thought them worth mentioning if she had not been asked expressly to meet me and give me certain information.  One was of a woman whose husband had been a wage-earner, and, with six or eight children, had been able to save nothing.  The allocation was not declared at once and this woman lost no time bewailing her fate or looking about for charitable groups of ladies to feed her with soup.  She simply continued to run her husband’s estaminet (wine-shop), and, as the patronage was necessarily diminished, was one of the first to apply when munition factories invited women to fill the vacant places of men.  She chose to work at night that she might keep the estaminet open by day for the men too old to fight and for the rapidly increasing number of “reformes”:  those who had lost a leg or arm or were otherwise incapacited for service.

A sister, who lived in Paris, immediately applied for one of the thousand vacant posts in bakeries, cut bread and buttered it and made toast for a tea-room in the afternoon, and found another job to sweep out stores.  This woman had a son still under age but in training at the Front.  He had been in the habit of paying her periodical visits, until this woman, already toiling beyond her strength to support her other children, sat down one day and wrote to the boy’s commanding officer asking him to permit no more leaves of absence, as the ordeal was too much for both of them.