oks toward the trenches, and the desolate towns
and villages back of the German lines. My curiosity got the better of my
courtesy, and I asked her, in my poor French, why she was living there.
She was silent for a moment, and then she pointed toward that part of
France which was on the other side of the world to us.

"Monsieur! Mes enfants! La-bas!"

Her children were over there, or had been at the outbreak of the war.
That is all that she told me of her story, and I would have been a beast
to have asked more. In some way she had become separated from them, and
for nearly a year she had been watching there, not knowing whether her
little family was living or dead.

To many of the soldiers she was just a plain, thrifty little Frenchwoman
who knew not the meaning of fear, willing to risk her life daily, that
she might put by something for the long hard years which would follow the
war. To me she is the Spirit of France, splendid, superb France. But more
than this she is the Spirit of Mother-love which wars can never alter.

Strangely enough, I had not thought of the firing-line as a boundary, a
limit, during all those weeks of trench warfare. Henceforth it had a new
meaning for me. I realized how completely it cut Europe in half,
separating friends and relatives as thousands of miles of ocean could not
have done. Roads crossed from one side to the other, but they were
barricaded with sandbags and barbed-wire entanglements. At night they
were deluged with shrapnel and the cobblestones were chipped and scarred
with machine-gun bullets.

Tommy had a ready sympathy for the women and children who lived near the
trenches. I remember many incidents which illustrate abundantly his quick
understanding of the hardship and danger of their lives. Once, at
Armentieres, we were marching to the baths, when the German artillery
were shelling the town in the usual hit-or-miss fashion. The enemy knew,
of course, that many of our troops in reserve were billeted there, and
they searched for them daily. Doubtless they would have destroyed the
town long ago had it not been for the fact that Lille, one of their own
most important bases, is within such easy range of our batteries. As it
was, they bombarded it as heavily as they dared, and on this particular
morning, they were sending them over too frequently for comfort.

Some of the shells were exploding close to our line of march, but the
boys tramped along with that nonchalant air which