I know of a case of the wife of a Colonel at the front, who heard one day at lunch that the War Office needed 50,000 sacks of flour for the army at Saloniki.  That same day she put the matter before some American brokers in Paris, who wired to their New York firm and received the usual American reply:  “Am not interested in the French trade now.  Will wait until after the war.”

With the utmost difficulty the woman was able to secure 10,000 sacks by way of Italy and Switzerland.  She is not likely to seek American sources of supply soon again.

An American got a tip one day that a certain contract for machine tools was available.  He had an appointment for lunch, so he said to himself:  “Why hurry?  These French people are slow.  I’ll get busy this afternoon or to-morrow.”

When he went to the establishment in question the next day, he found that an exquisitely gowned woman had just preceded him; indeed, the fragrance of the perfume she used still hovered about the outer office.  The man cooled his heels for half an hour when the lovely feminine vision flashed by him going out.  He started to make his selling talk to the Purchasing Agent, who said, at the first opening: 

“I am extremely sorry, Monsieur, but we have just closed the contract with Madam Blank who left a few moments ago.”

The New France has brought forth a New Woman!

Through all the organised approach to Self-Sufficiency and Economic Rehabilitation, France has not lost sight of her grudge against the Germans.  Indeed, no phase of her business life to-day is more picturesque than the campaign now in full swing not only against Teutonic trade, but against any resumption of commercial relation with the hated enemy across the Rhine.  Right here you get a striking difference between English and French methods.  While Britain takes out some of her enmity against German trade in eloquent conversation, France has gone about it in a practical way, shot through with all the colour and imagination that only the French could employ upon such procedure.

Preliminary to this campaign was a characteristic episode.  Almost with the flareup of war, the French mind turned sentimentally to those fateful early Seventies when Germany in the flush of her great victory seized the fruits of that triumph.  Some of those fruits were embodied in the famous Treaty of Frankfort in which the Teuton clamped the mailed fist down on every favoured French trade relation.

The war automatically annulled this treaty, and although the nation was in the first throes of a struggle that threatened existence, it celebrated the revocation in characteristic fashion.  Millions of copies of the Frankfort Treaty were printed and sold on the streets of Paris and elsewhere.  The excited Frenchman rushed up and down brandishing his copy and saying:  “Now we will ram this treaty down the throat of the Boche!”