Germans would amuse themselves raking the valley with the guns. Then
the women would simply throw themselves flat and remain
motionless--sometimes for hours--until "Les Boches" concluded to waste
no more ammunition.

In Rheims the women have never closed their shops. They have covered
their windows with sandbags, and by the light of lamp or candle do a
thriving business while the big guns thunder. The soldiers, both
British and French, like their trinkets and post-cards, to say nothing
of more practical objects, and, admiring their inveterate pluck, not
only patronize them liberally but sit in their coverts and gossip or
flirt with the pretty girls for whom shells bursting in the street are
too old a story for terror.

[Illustration: DELIVERING THE MILK IN RHEIMS]

III

Many of the women of the industrial classes who have been accustomed
all their hard dry lives to live on the daily wage of father or
husband have refused to work since the war began, preferring to
scrape along on the Government allocation (allowance) of
one-franc-twenty-five a day for the wives of soldiers, plus fifty
centimes for each child (seventy-five in Paris). These notable
exceptions will be dealt with later. France, like all nations,
contains every variety of human nature, and, with its absence of
illusions and its habit of looking facts almost cynically in the face,
would be the last to claim perfection or even to conceal its
infirmities. But the right side of its shield is very bright indeed,
and the hands of many millions of women, delicate and toil-hardened,
have labored to make it shine once more in history.

The Mayoress of a small town near Paris told me of three instances
that came within her personal observation, and expressed no surprise
at one or the other. She probably would not have thought them worth
mentioning if she had not been asked expressly to meet me and give me
certain information. One was of a woman whose husband had been a
wage-earner, and, with six or eight children, had been able to save
nothing. The allocation was not declared at once and this woman lost
no time bewailing her fate or looking about for charitable groups of
ladies to feed her with soup. She simply continued to run her
husband's estaminet (wine-shop), and, as the patronage was
necessarily diminished, was one of the first to apply when munition
factories invited women to fill the vacant places of men. She chose to
work at night that she might kee