is no sign of anything but peace and pleasant
life in the surroundings. But these black-clad women do know--know
that the cool green clump of trees over on the hill-side hides a
roofless ruin with fire-blackened walls; that the church spire that for
all their lives they had seen out there over the sky-line is no longer
visible because it lies shell-smitten to a tumbled heap of brick and
stone and mortar; that the glint of white wood and spot of scarlet
yonder in the field is the rough wooden cross with a _kepi_ on top
marking the grave of a soldier of France; that down in the hollow just
out of sight are over a score of those cap-crowned crosses; that a
broad belt of those graves runs unbroken across this sunlit face of
France. They know, too, that those dull booms that travel faintly to
the ear are telling plain of more graves and of more women that will
wear black. It is little wonder that there are few smiles to be seen
on the faces of these women by the wayside. They have seen and heard
the red wrath of war, not in the pictures of the illustrated papers,
not in the cinema shows, not even by the word-of-mouth tales of chance
men who have been in it; but at first-hand, with their own eyes and
ears, in the leaping flames of burning homes, in the puffing white
clouds of the shrapnel, the black spouting smoke of the high-explosive,
in the deafening thunder of the guns, the yelling shells, the crash of
falling walls, the groans of wounded men, the screams of frightened
children. Some of them may have seen the shattered hulks of men borne
past on the sagging stretchers; all of them have seen the laden
ambulance wagons and motors crawling slowly back to the hospitals.

And of these women you do not say, as you would of our women at home,
that they may perhaps have friend or relation, a son, a brother, a
husband, a lover, at the front. You say with certainty they have one
or other of these, and may have all, that every man they know, of an
age between, say, eighteen and forty, is serving his country in the
field or in the workshops--and mostly in the field--if so be they are
still alive to serve.

The men in the marching khaki regiment know all these things, and there
are respect and sympathy in the glances and the greetings that pass
from them to the women. 'They're good plucked 'uns,' they tell each
other, and wonder how our women at home would shape at this game, and
whether they would go on living in a house tha