ne with the merry eyes! Were they not engaged?
Not formally, perhaps, but in honor and in love. For a time letters
arrived, eagerly waited for by girls with aching hearts. Then picture
post-cards with a line or two of affectionate greeting. Then nothing.
Nothing at all, month after month, in spite of all the letters addressed
with all the queer initials for military units. So it happened again
and again, until bitterness crept into girls' hearts, and hardness and
contempt.

"In my own little circle of friends," said a lady of Amiens, "I know
eighteen girls who were engaged to English officers and have been
forsaken. It is not fair. It is not good. Your English young men seem
so serious, far more serious than our French boys. They have a look of
shyness which we find delightful. They are timid, at first, and blush
when one pays a pretty compliment. They are a long time before they
take liberties. So we trust them, and take them seriously, and allow
intimacies which we should refuse to French boys unless formally
engaged. But it is all camouflage. At heart your English young men are
just flirts. They play with us, make fools of us, steal our hearts, and
then go away, and often do not send so much as a post-card. Not even one
little post-card to the girls who weep their hearts out for them! You
English are all hypocrites. You boast that you 'play the game.' I know
your phrase. It is untrue.

"You play with good girls as though they were grues, and that no
Frenchman would dare to do. He knows the difference between good girls
and bad girls, and behaves, with reverence to those who are good.
When the English army goes away from France it will leave many bitter
memories because of that."

X

It was my habit to go out at night for a walk through Amiens before
going to bed, and generally turned river-ward, for even on moonless
nights there was always a luminance over the water and one could see to
walk along the quayside. Northward and eastward the sky was quivering
with flashes of white light, like summer lightning, and now and then
there was a long, vivid glare of red touching the high clouds with rosy
feathers; one of our dumps, or one of the enemy's, had been blown up
by that gun-fire, sullen and menacing, which never ceased for years. In
that quiet half-hour, alone, or with some comrade, like Frederic Palmer
or Beach Thomas, as tired and as thoughtful as oneself after a long
day's journeying in the swirl of wa