I called Mrs. Hill’s attention to her, for I, a stranger, could not intrude upon a grief like that, and the idol of all those children immediately ran over to the desolate figure.  She questioned her, she put her arms about her.  She might as well have addressed one of the broken stone nymphs in the woods.  That young mind, startled from the present, it may be, by witnessing the endearments lavished upon prettier and smaller children, had traveled far.  She was in the past, a past that anteceded even that past of death and thundering guns and rocking walls and empty stomachs; a past when the war, of whose like she had never heard, was still in the sleepless brains of the monster criminals of history, when she lived in a home in a quiet village with the fields beyond; where she had a mother, a father, sisters, brothers; where her tears had been over childish disappointments, and her mother had dried them.  Small and homely and insignificant she stood there in her tragic detachment the symbol of all the woe of France, and of the depraved brutality of a handful of ambitious men who had broken the heart of the world.

XV

THE MARRAINES

It is hardly too much to say that every woman in France, from noblesse to peasant, has her filleul (godson) in the trenches; in many cases, when she still has a considerable income in spite of taxes, moratoriums, and all the rest of it, she is a marraine on the grand scale and has several hundred.  Children have their filleul, correspond with him, send him little presents several times a month and weep bitterly when word comes that he is deep in his last trench.

Servants save their wages so that when the filleuls of their mistresses come home on their six days’ leave they at least can provide the afternoon wine and entertain them royally in the kitchen.  Old maids, still sewing in their attic for a few sous a day, have found a gleam of brightness for the first time in their somber lives in the knowledge that they give a mite of comfort or pleasure to some unknown man, offering his life in the defence of France, and whose letters, sentimental, effusive, playful, almost resign these poor stranded women to the crucifixion of their country.

Busy women like Madame d’Andigne sit up until two in the morning writing to their grateful filleuls.  Girls, who once dreamed only of marrying and living the brilliant life of the femme du monde spend hours daily not only on cheerful letters, but knitting, sewing, embroidering, purchasing for humble men who will mean nothing to their future, beyond the growth of spirit they unconsciously induced.  Poor women far from Paris, where, at least, thousands of these permissionnaires linger for a few hours on their way home, toil all night over their letters to men for whom they conceive a profound sentiment but never can hope to see.  Shop girls save their wages and lady’s maids pilfer in a noble cause.