suppressing one kind of news, spreading another, and giving way to demands which could no longer be denied.  There was another and more effectual cause:  the war had deprived the world of twelve million workmen and a thousand milliard francs’ worth of goods.  But of this people took no account.  The demobilized soldiers who for years had been well fed and relieved of solicitude for the morrow returned home, flushed with victory, proud of the commanding position which they had won in the state, and eager to reap the rewards of their sacrifices.  But they were bitterly disillusioned.  They expected a country fit for heroes to live in, and what awaited them was a condition of things to which only a defeated people could be asked to resign itself.  The food to which the poilu had, for nearly five years, been accustomed at the front was become, since the armistice, the exclusive monopoly of the capitalist or the nouveau-riche in the rear.  To obtain a ration of sugar he or his wife had to stand in a long queue for hours, perhaps go away empty-handed and return on the following morning.  When his sugar-card was eventually handed to him he had again to stand in line outside the grocer’s door and, when his turn came to enter it, was frequently told that the supply was exhausted and would not be replenished for a week or longer.  Yet his newspaper informed him that there was plenty of colonial sugar, ready for shipment, but forbidden by the authorities to be imported into France.  I met many poor people from the provinces and some resident in Paris who for four years had not once eaten a morsel of sugar, although the well-to-do were always amply supplied.  In many places even bread was lacking, while biscuits, shortbread, and fancy cakes, available at exorbitant prices, were exhibited in the shop windows.  Tokens of unbridled luxury and glaring evidences of wanton waste were flaunted daily and hourly in the faces of the humbled men who had saved the nation and wanted the nation to realize the fact.  Lucullan banquets, opulent lunches, all-night dances, high revels of an exotic character testified to the peculiar psychic temper as well as to the material prosperity of the passive elements of the community and stung the poilus to the quick.  “But what justice,” these asked, “can the living hope for, when the glorious dead are so soon forgotten?” For one ghastly detail remains to complete a picture to which Boccaccio could hardly have done justice.  “While all this wild dissipation was going on among the moneyed class in the capital the corpses of many gallant soldiers lay unburied and uncovered on the shell-plowed fields of battle near Rheims, on the road to Neuville-sur-Margival and other places—­sights pointed out to visitors to tickle their interest in the grim spectacle of war.  In vain individuals expostulated and the press protested.  As recently as May persons known to me—­my English secretary was one—­looked with the fascination of horror on the bodies of men who, when they breathed, were heroes.  They lay there where they had fallen and agonized, and now, in the heat of the May sun, were moldering in dust away—­a couple of hours’ motor drive from Paris...."[17]