The Parisians were very interested to see a girl dressed in khaki, and discussed each item of my uniform in the Metro quite loudly, evidently under the same impression as the old commercant!  My field boots took their fancy most. "Mon Dieu!" they would exclaim.  “Look then, she wears the big boots like a man.  It is chic that, hein?”

In one place, an old curiosity shop in the Quartier St. Germain, the woman was so thrilled to hear I was an infirmiere she insisted on me keeping an old Roman lamp I was looking at as a souvenir, because her mother had been one in 1870.  War has its compensations.

I also discovered a Monsieur Jollivet at Neuilly, a job-master who had a few horses left, among them a little English mare which I rode.  We went in the Bois nearly every morning and sometimes along the race course at Longchamps, the latter very overgrown.  “Ah, Mademoiselle,” he would exclaim, “if it was only in the ordinary times, how different would all this look, and how Mademoiselle would amuse herself at the races!”

One day walking along near the “Observatoire” an old nun stopped me, and in broken English asked how the war was progressing. (The people in the shops did too, as if I had come straight from G.H.Q.!) She then went on to tell me that she was Scotch, but had never been home for thirty-five years!  I could hardly believe it, as she talked English just as a Frenchwoman might.  She knew nothing at all as to the true position of affairs, and asked me to come in to the Convent to tea one day, which I did.

They all clustered round me when I went, asking if I had met their relation so-and-so, who was fighting at the front.  They were frightfully disappointed when I said “No, I had not.”

I went to their little chapel afterwards, and later on, the Reverend Mother, who was so old she had to be supported on each side by two nuns, came to a window and gave me her blessing.  My Scotch friend before I left pressed a little oxidized silver medal of the Virgin into my hand, which she assured me would keep me in safety.  I treasured it after that as a sort of charm and always had it with me.

A few days later I was introduced to Warneford, V.C., the man who had brought down the first Zeppelin.  He had just come to Paris to receive the Legion d’Honneur and the Croix de Guerre, and was being feted and spoilt by everybody.  He promised towards the end of the week, when he had worked off some of his engagements, to take me up—­strictly against all rules of course—­for a short flight.  I met him on the Monday, I think, and on the Wednesday he crashed while making a trial flight, and died after from his injuries, in hospital.  It seemed impossible to believe when first I heard of it—­he was so full of life and high spirits.

We went to Versailles one day.  The loneliness and general air of desertion that overhang the place seemed more intensified by the war than ever.  The grass had grown very long, the air was sultry, and not a ripple stirred the calm surface of the lake.  It seemed somehow very like the Palace of a Sleeping Beauty.  I wondered if the ghost of Marie Antoinette ever revisited the Trianon or flitted up and down the wooden steps of the miniature farm where she had played at being a dairymaid?