hardly
twisted in its tragic silent woe.

I called Mrs. Hill's attention to her, for I, a stranger, could not
intrude upon a grief like that, and the idol of all those children
immediately ran over to the desolate figure. She questioned her, she
put her arms about her. She might as well have addressed one of the
broken stone nymphs in the woods. That young mind, startled from the
present, it may be, by witnessing the endearments lavished upon
prettier and smaller children, had traveled far. She was in the past,
a past that anteceded even that past of death and thundering guns and
rocking walls and empty stomachs; a past when the war, of whose like
she had never heard, was still in the sleepless brains of the monster
criminals of history, when she lived in a home in a quiet village with
the fields beyond; where she had a mother, a father, sisters,
brothers; where her tears had been over childish disappointments, and
her mother had dried them. Small and homely and insignificant she
stood there in her tragic detachment the symbol of all the woe of
France, and of the depraved brutality of a handful of ambitious men
who had broken the heart of the world.

XV

THE MARRAINES

It is hardly too much to say that every woman in France, from noblesse
to peasant, has her filleul (godson) in the trenches; in many cases,
when she still has a considerable income in spite of taxes,
moratoriums, and all the rest of it, she is a marraine on the grand
scale and has several hundred. Children have their filleul, correspond
with him, send him little presents several times a month and weep
bitterly when word comes that he is deep in his last trench.

Servants save their wages so that when the filleuls of their
mistresses come home on their six days' leave they at least can
provide the afternoon wine and entertain them royally in the kitchen.
Old maids, still sewing in their attic for a few sous a day, have
found a gleam of brightness for the first time in their somber lives
in the knowledge that they give a mite of comfort or pleasure to some
unknown man, offering his life in the defence of France, and whose
letters, sentimental, effusive, playful, almost resign these poor
stranded women to the crucifixion of their country.

Busy women like Madame d'Andigne sit up until two in the morning
writing to their grateful filleuls. Girls, who once dreamed only of
marrying and living the brilliant life of the _femme du monde_ spend
ho