f home-coming
soldiers, and this was currently ascribed to the greed of merchants, the
disorganization of transports, the strikes of workmen, and the
supineness of the authorities, whose main care was to keep the nation
tranquil by 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