ed bridge brought it
home to me how very near to Paris the Boche had been.

As I stepped out of the Gare du Nord all the people were looking
skywards at two Taubes which had just dropped several bombs. Some
welcome, I thought to myself!

Paris in War time at that period (June, 1915) wore rather the
appearance of a deserted city. Every third shop had notices on the doors
to the effect that the owners were absent at the war. Others were being
run by the old fathers and mothers long since retired, who had come up
from the country to "carry on." My friend told me that when she had
returned to Paris in haste from the country, at the beginning of the
war, there was not a taxi available, as they were all being used to rush
the soldiers out to the battle of the Marne. Fancy taxi-ing to a
battlefield!

The Parisians were very interested to see a girl dressed in khaki, and
discussed each item of my uniform in the Metro quite loudly, evidently
under the same impression as the old _commercant_! My field boots took
their fancy most. _"Mon Dieu!"_ they would exclaim. "Look then, she
wears the big boots like a man. It is _chic_ that, hein?"

In one place, an old curiosity shop in the Quartier St. Germain, the
woman was so thrilled to hear I was an _infirmiere_ she insisted on me
keeping an old Roman lamp I was looking at as a souvenir, because her
mother had been one in 1870. War has its compensations.

I also discovered a Monsieur Jollivet at Neuilly, a job-master who had a
few horses left, among them a little English mare which I rode. We went
in the Bois nearly every morning and sometimes along the race course at
Longchamps, the latter very overgrown. "Ah, Mademoiselle," he would
exclaim, "if it was only in the ordinary times, how different would all
this look, and how Mademoiselle would amuse herself at the races!"

One day walking along near the "Observatoire" an old nun stopped me, and
in broken English asked how the war was progressing. (The people in the
shops did too, as if I had come straight from G.H.Q.!) She then went on
to tell me that she was Scotch, but had never been home for thirty-five
years! I could hardly believe it, as she talked English just as a
Frenchwoman might. She knew nothing at all as to the true position of
affairs, and asked me to come in to the Convent to tea one day, which I
did.

They all clustered round me when I went, asking if I had met their
relation so-and-so, who was fighting at the fron