allads on untuned pianos. There was champagne as
well as tea to be had in these bun--shops, but the A. P. M. was down on
disorder or riotous gaiety, and there were no orgies. "Pas d'orgies,"
said the young ladies severely when things were getting a little too
lively. They had to think of their business.

Down side-streets here and there were houses where other women lived,
not so severe in their point of view. Their business, indeed, did not
permit of severity, and they catered for the hunger of men exiled year
after year from their own home-life and from decent womanhood. They gave
the base counterfeit of love in return for a few francs, and there were
long lines of men--English, Irish, and Scottish soldiers--who waited
their turn to get that vile imitation of life's romance from women who
were bought and paid for. Our men paid a higher price than a few francs
for the Circe's cup of pleasure, which changed them into swine for a
while, until the spell passed, and would have blasted their souls if God
were not understanding of human weakness and of war. They paid in their
bodies, if not in their souls, those boys of ours who loved life and
beauty and gentle things, and lived in filth and shell-fire, and were
trained to kill, and knew that death was hunting for them and had all
the odds of luck. Their children and their children's children will
pay also for the sins of their fathers, by rickety limbs and
water--on-the-brain, and madness, and tuberculosis, and other evils
which are the wages of sin, which flourished most rankly behind the
fields of war.

The inhabitants of Bethune--the shopkeepers, and brave little families
of France, and bright-eyed girls, and frowzy women, and heroines,
and harlots--came out into the streets before the battle of Loos, and
watched the British army pouring through--battalions of Londoners and
Scots, in full fighting-kit, with hot sweat on their faces, and
grim eyes, and endless columns of field-guns and limbers, drawn by
hard-mouthed mules cursed and thrashed by their drivers, and ambulances,
empty now, and wagons, and motor-lorries, hour after hour, day after
day.

"Bonne chance!" cried the women, waving hands and handkerchiefs.

"Les pauvres enfants!" said the old women, wiping their eyes on dirty
aprons. "We know how it is. They will be shot to pieces. It is always
like that, in this sacred war. Oh, those sacred pigs of Germans! Those
dirty Boches! Those sacred bandits!"

"They ar