f only madame will tenir ses cheveux
on." In the courtyards of ancient farmhouses, so old in their timbers
and gables that the Scottish bodyguard of Louis XI may have passed them
on their way to Paris, modern Scots with khaki-covered kilts pumped up
the water from old wells, and whistled "I Know a Lassie" to the girl who
brought the cattle home, and munched their evening rations while Sandy
played a "wee bit" on the pipes to the peasant--folk who gathered at
the gate. Such good relations existed between the cottagers and their
temporary guests that one day, for instance, when a young friend of mine
came back from a long spell in the trenches (his conversation was of
dead men, flies, bombs, lice, and hell), the old lady who had given him
her best bedroom at the beginning of the war flung her arms about him
and greeted him like a long-lost son. To a young Guardsman, with
his undeveloped mustache on his upper lip, her demonstrations were
embarrassing.

It was one of the paradoxes of the war that beauty lived but a mile or
two away from hideous squalor. While men in the lines lived in dugouts
and marched down communicating trenches thigh-high, after rainy
weather, in mud and water, and suffered the beastliness of the primitive
earth-men, those who were out of the trenches, turn and turn about, came
back to leafy villages and drilled in fields all golden with buttercups,
and were not too uncomfortable in spite of overcrowding in dirty barns.

There was more than comfort in some of the headquarters where our
officers were billeted in French chateaux. There was a splendor of
surroundings which gave a graciousness and elegance to the daily life of
that extraordinary war in which men fought as brutally as in prehistoric
times. I knew scores of such places, and went through gilded gates
emblazoned with noble coats of arms belonging to the days of the Sun
King, or farther back to the Valois, and on my visits to generals
and their staffs stood on long flights of steps which led up to old
mansions, with many towers and turrets, surrounded by noble parks and
ornamental waters and deep barns in which five centuries of harvests had
been stored. From one of the archways here one might see in the mind's
eye Mme. de Pompadour come out with a hawk on her wrist, or even Henri
de Navarre with his gentlemen-at-arms, all their plumes alight in the
sun as they mounted their horses for a morning's boar-hunt.

It was surprising at first whe