As it was they complied with my request at once, gave me their blessing, and escorted me to the head of the stair—­no elevators in this great Ministere de la Guerre and the Service de Sante is at the top of the building.  I went away quite happy, more devoted to their cause than ever, and easy in my mind about Bordeaux—­where, by the way, my trunks were not opened.

Therefore, that remarkable experience in France is altogether still so vivid to me that to write about it reportorially, with the personal equation left out, would be quite as impossible as it is for me to refrain from execrating the Germans.  When I add that during that visit I grew to love the French people (whom, in spite of many visits to France, I merely had admired coolly and impersonally) as much as I abominate the enemies of the human race, I feel that the last word has been said, and that my apology for writing what may read like a memoir, a chronicle of personal reminiscences, will be understood and forgiven.

  G.A.

=The living present=

I

Madame Balli and the “Comfort package”

One of the most striking results of the Great War has been the quickening in thousands of European women of qualities so long dormant that they practically were unsuspected.  As I shall tell in a more general article, the Frenchwomen of the middle and lower bourgeoisie and of the farms stepped automatically into the shoes of the men called to the colors in August, 1914, and it was, in their case, merely the wearing of two pairs of shoes instead of one, and both of equal fit.  The women of those clearly defined classes are their husbands’ partners and co-workers, and although physically they may find it more wearing to do the work of two than of one, it entails no particular strain on their mental faculties or change in their habits of life.  Moreover, France since the dawn of her history has been a military nation, and generation after generation her women have been called upon to play their important role in war, although never on so vast a scale as now.

Contrary to the prevailing estimate of the French—­an estimate formed mainly from sensational novels and plays, or during brief visits to the shops and boulevards of Paris—­the French are a stolid, stoical, practical race, abnormally acute, without illusions, and whose famous ebullience is all in the top stratum.  There is even a certain melancholy at the root of their temperament, for, gay and pleasure loving as they are on the surface, they are a very ancient and a very wise people.  Impatient and impulsive, they are capable of a patience and tenacity, a deep deliberation and caution, which, combined with an unparalleled mental alertness, brilliancy without recklessness, bravery without bravado, spiritual exaltation without sentimentality (which is merely perverted animalism), a curious sensitiveness of mind and body due to over-breeding, and a white flame of patriotism as steady and dazzling as an arc-light, has given them a glorious history, and makes them, by universal consent, preeminent among the warring nations to-day.