The garden was a strange assortment of fashionable women, many of them bearing the highest titles in France, and poilus in their faded uniforms, nearly all maimed—­reformes, mutiles!  The younger of our charges laughed uproariously, with the other boys, at the comic song, but my melancholy charge never smiled, and later when, under the thawing influence of tea, he told us his story, I was not surprised.

He had been the proprietor before the war of a little business in the North, prosperous and happy in his little family of a wife and two children.  His mother was dead but his father and sister lived close by.  War came and he left for the Front confident that his wife would run the business.  It was only a few months later that he heard his wife had run away with another man, that the shop was abandoned, and the children had taken refuge with his father.

Then came the next blow.  His sister died of successive shocks and his father was paralyzed.  Then he lost his sight.  His children were living anyhow with neighbors in the half ruined village, and he was learning to make brushes.

So much for the man’s tragedy in war time.  It is said that as time goes on there are more of them.  On the other hand, during the first year, when the men were not allowed to go home, they formed abiding connections with women in the rear of the army, and when the six days’ leave was granted preferred to take these ladies on a little jaunt than return to the old drab existence at home.

These are what may be called the by-products of war, but they may exercise a serious influence on a nation’s future.  When the hundreds of children born in the North of France, who are half English, or half Scotch, or half Irish, or half German, or half Indian, or half Moroccan, grow up and begin to drift about and mingle with the general life of the nation, the result may be that we shall have been the last generation to see a race that however diversified was reasonably proud of its purity.

VII

MADAME PIERRE GOUJON (Continued)

I

I had gone to Lyons to see the war relief work of that flourishing city and Madame Goujon went South at the same time to visit her husband’s people.  We agreed to meet in the little town of Bourg la Bresse, known to the casual tourist for its church erected in the sixteenth century by Margaret of Austria and famous for the carvings on its tombs.

Otherwise it is a picturesque enlarged village with a meandering stream that serves as an excuse for fine bridges; high-walled gardens, ancient trees, and many quaint old buildings.

Not that I saw anything in detail.  The Mayor, M. Loiseau, and Madame Goujon met me at the station, and my ride to the various hospitals must have resembled the triumphal progress of chariots in ancient Rome.  The population leaped right and left, the children even scrambling up the walls as we flew through the narrow winding streets.  It was apparent that the limited population of Bourg did not in the least mind being scattered by their Mayor, for the children shrieked with delight, and although you see few smiles in the provinces of France these days, and far more mourning than in Paris, at least we encountered no frowns.