all extraordinarily
neat and compact. In another room was a staff engaged in
correspondence with officers, doctors and surgeons at the Front,
poilus, or the hundred and one sources that contribute to the great
oeuvre. Girls, young widows, young and middle-aged married women whose
husbands and sons were fighting, all give their days freely and work
far harder and more conscientiously than most women do for hire.

All of these presents, when they arrive at the depots, are given out
personally by the officers, and this as much as the genuine democracy
of the men in command has served to break down the suspicious or surly
spirit of the French peasant on his first service, to win over the
bumptious industrial, and even to subdue the militant anarchist and
predatory Apache. This was Mlle. Javal's idea, and has solved a
problem for many an anxious officer.

She said to me with a shrug: "My brother and I are now run by our
servants. I have quite lost control. Our home is like a bachelor
apartment. After the war is over I must turn them all out and get a
new staff."

And this is but one of the minor problems for men and women the Great
War has bred.

VII

Magic lanterns and cinemas are also among the presents sent to the
eclope depots in the War Zone; some of which, by the way, are
charmingly situated. I visited one just outside of a town which by a
miracle had escaped the attention of the enemy during the retreat
after the Battle of the Marne. The buildings of the depot have been
built in the open fields but heavily ambushed by fine old trees. Near
by is a river picturesquely winding and darkly shaded. Here I saw a
number of eclopes fishing as calmly as if the roar of the guns that
came down the wind from Verdun were but the precursor of an evening
storm.

In the large refectory men were writing home; reading not only books
but the daily and weekly newspapers with which the depots are
generously supplied by the editors of France. Others were exercising
in a gymnasium or playing games with that childish absorption that
seems to be as natural to a soldier at the Front when off duty as the
desire for a bath or a limbering of the muscles when he leaves the
trenches.

Another of Mlle. Javal's ideas was to send to the War Zone automobiles
completely equipped with a dental apparatus in charge of a competent
dentist. These automobiles travel from depot to depot and even give
their services to hospitals where there are no