As I looked at those bare heavily muscled arms I wondered if any man belonging to them would ever dare say his soul was his own again.  But as their heads are always charmingly dressed (an odd effect surmounting greasy overalls) and as they invariably powder before filing out at the end of the day’s work, it is probable that a comfortable reliance may still be placed upon the ineradicable coquetry of the French woman.  And the scarcer the men in the future the more numerous, no doubt, will be the layers of powder.

I asked one pretty girl if she really liked the heavy, dirty, malodorous work, and she replied that making boutonnieres for gentlemen in a florist-shop was paradise by contrast, but she was only too happy to be doing as much for France in her way as her brother was in his.  She added that when the war was over she should take off her blue linen apron streaked with machine grease once for all, not remain from choice as many would.  But meanwhile it was not so bad!  She made ten francs a day.  Some of the women received as high as fifteen.  Moreover, they bossed the few men whose brawn was absolutely indispensable and must be retained in the usine at all costs.

These men took their orders meekly.  Perhaps they were amused.  The French are an ironic race.  Perhaps they bided their time.  But they never dreamed of disobeying those Amazons whose foot the Kaiser of all the Boches had placed on their necks.

IV

One of the greatest of these Usines de Guerre is at Lyons, in the buildings of the Exposition held shortly before the outbreak of the war.  I went to this important Southern city (a beautiful city, which I shall always associate with the scent of locust[B]-blossoms) at the suggestion of James Hazen Hyde.  He gave me a letter to the famous Mayor, M. Herriot, who was a member of the last Briand Cabinet.

  [B] It is called acacia in Europe.

M. Herriot was also a Senator, and as he was leaving for Paris a few hours after I presented my letter he turned me over to a friend of his wife, Madame Castell, a native of Lyons, the daughter of one silk merchant and the widow of another.  This charming young woman, who had spent her married life in New York, by the way, took me everywhere, and although we traversed many vast distances in the Mayor’s automobile, it seemed to me that I walked as many miles in hospitals, factories, ateliers (workrooms for teaching the mutilated new trades), and above all in the Usine de Guerre.

Here not only were thousands of women employed but a greater variety of classes.  The women of the town, unable to follow the army and too plucky to live on charity, had been among the first to ask for work.  The directeur beat his forehead when I asked him how they behaved when not actually at the machines, but at least they had proved as faithful and skillful as their more respectable sisters.