onderful the women of
the working class in France were, how absolutely different and
infinitely superior they were to the same class at home; in fact no
class in England corresponded to them at all. Clean, neat, prim women,
working from early dawn till late at night, apparently with unceasing
energy, they never seemed to tire and usually wore a smile.

I remember one girl, a widow; her name was Madame Blanche, who worked
at the "Hotel Sauvage." She was about twenty-two years of age, and she
owned a house in Cassel. A few months before I arrived there her
husband had contracted some sort of poisoning in the trenches and had
been brought back to Cassel, where he died. Madame Blanche interested
me; she was very slim and prim and neat and tightly laced. Her fair
hair was always very carefully crimped. She looked like a girl out of
a painting by Metsu or Van Meer. I could see her posing at a piano for
either, calm, gentle and silent; and could imagine her in the midst of
all the refined surroundings in which these artists would have painted
her. But now her surroundings were khaki, and her background was the
wonderful Flemish view from the windows--miles and miles of country, (p. 034)
with the old sausage balloons floating sleepily in the distance.

I must have looked at Madame Blanche a lot--perhaps too much. I
remember she used to smile at me; but that was as far as our
friendship could get--smiles, as I only knew about ten words of
French, and she less of English.

But one day she surprised me, and left me thinking and wondering more
of the strange, unbelievable things that happen to one in this world.

It was after lunch one Sunday: I had just got back to my room to work
when there was a knock on the door, and in walked Madame Blanche, who,
after much trouble to us both, I gathered wished me to go for a walk
with her. Impossible! I, a major, a Field Officer, to walk at large
through the streets of Cassel, 2nd Army H.Q., with a serving-girl from
the "Hotel Sauvage"! I succeeded in explaining this after some time;
and then, to my amazement, she broke down and wept. The convulsive
sobbing continued, and I thought and wondered, and in the end decided
that I was crazy to make a woman weep because I would not go for a
walk with her. So I told her I would do so; and she dried her eyes and
asked me to meet her in the hotel yard in ten minutes.

When I got down to the yard the rain was coming down in torrents, and
there she