d girls who understood their execrable French, even English
spoken with a Glasgow accent, and were pleased to flirt for five minutes
with any group of young fighting-men--who broke into roars of laughter
at the gallantry of some Don Juan among them with the gift of audacity,
and paid outrageous prices for the privilege of stammering out some
foolish sentiment in broken French, blushing to the roots of their hair
(though captains and heroes) at their own temerity with a girl who, in
another five minutes, would play the same part in the same scene with a
different group of boys.

I used to marvel at the patience of these girls. How bored they must
have been with all this flirtation, which led to nothing except,
perhaps, the purchase of a bit of soap at twice its proper price! They
knew that these boys would leave to go back to the trenches in a few
hours and that some of them would certainly be dead in a few days. There
could be no romantic episode, save of a transient kind, between them
and these good-looking lads in whose eyes there were desire and hunger,
because to them the plainest girl was Womanhood, the sweet, gentle,
and feminine side of life, as opposed to the cruelty, brutality, and
ugliness of war and death. The shopgirls of Amiens had no illusions.
They had lived too long in war not to know the realities. They knew the
risks of transient love and they were not taking them--unless conditions
were very favorable. They attended strictly to business and hoped
to make a lot of money in the shop, and were, I think, mostly good
girls--as virtuous as life in war-time may let girls be--wise beyond
their years, and with pity behind their laughter for these soldiers who
tried to touch their hands over the counters, knowing that many of
them were doomed to die for France and England. They had their
own lovers--boys in blue somewhere between Vaux-sur-Somme and
Hartmanns--weilerkopf--and apart from occasional intimacies with English
officers quartered in Amiens for long spells, left the traffic of
passion to other women who walked the streets.

II

The Street of the Three Pebbles--la rue des Trois Cailloux--which
goes up from the station through the heart of Amiens, was the crowded
highway. Here were the best shops--the hairdresser, at the left-hand
side, where all day long officers down from the line came in to have
elaborate luxury in the way of close crops with friction d'eau de
quinine, shampooing, singeing,