rom Meaux regularly. But there
is never anything illuminating in it. The attitude of the world to the
Belgian question is a shock to me. I confess to have expected more
active indignation at such an outrage.

Everything is very quiet here. Our little commune sent two hundred men
only, but to take two hundred able-bodied men away makes a big hole, and
upsets life in many ways. For some days we were without bread: bakers
gone. But the women took hold and, though the bread is not yet very
good, it serves and will as long as flour holds out. No one complains,
though we already lack many things. No merchandise can come out yet on
the railroads, all the automobiles and most of the horses are gone, and
shops are shy of staple things.

Really I don't know which are the more remarkable, the men or the women.
You may have read the proclamation of the Minister of Agriculture to the
women of France, calling on them to go into the fields and get in the
crops and prepare the ground for the sowing of the winter wheat that the
men on returning might not find their fields neglected nor their crops
lost. You should have seen the old men and the women and the youngsters
respond. It is harvest-time, you know, just as it was in the invasion
of 1870.

In a few weeks it will be time to gather the fruit. Even now it is time
to pick the black currants, all of which go to England to make the jams
and jellies without which no English breakfast table is complete.

For days now the women and children have been climbing the hill at six
in the morning, with big hats on their heads, deep baskets on their
backs, low stools in their hands. There is a big field of black-currant
bushes beside my garden to the south. All day, in the heat, they sit
under the bushes picking away. At sundown they carry their heavy
baskets to the weighing-machine on the roadside at the foot of the
hill, and stand in line to be weighed in and paid by the English buyers
for Crosse and Blackwell, Beach, and such houses, who have, I suppose,
some special means of transportation.

That work is, however, the regular work for the women and children.
Getting in the grain is not. Yet if you could see them take hold of it
you would love them. The old men do double work. Amelie's husband is
over seventy. His own work in his fields and orchard would seem too
much for him. Yet he and Amelie and the donkey are in the field by
three o'clock every morning, and by nine o