the earning
power on which the house depends is the man's. When he is taken away
he is very badly missed and the home suffers or even collapses. In
France the women are more independent economically. They can carry on
the business or the farm sufficiently well without the man.

But I did not get permission to visit M.'s cavalry division that I
might observe the French peasantry. I went to give lectures to the
men. I did that, faithfully exerting myself to the uttermost, but I
did it very badly. I suppose I am not adaptable. Certainly the
conditions under which I lectured destroyed any faint chance of my
succeeding, before I began.

It has been my lot to lecture under various circumstances to widely
different kinds of audiences. I have been set up at the end of a
drawing-room in a house of culture in the middle west of the U.S.A. I
have stood beside a chairman on a platform in an English hall. Never
before had I been called upon to lecture in a large open field,
standing in the sunlight, while my audience reclined peacefully on
the grass under a grove of trees. Never before had I watched my
audience marched up to me by squadrons, halted in front of me by the
stern voices of sergeants, and sitting down, or lying down, only
after I had invited them to do so. It was a very hot afternoon. I do
not wonder that half the men went to sleep. I should have liked to
sleep too.

I lectured that same day in another field to a different body of men.
There I was even more uncomfortable. Two thoughtful sergeants
borrowed a table from a neighbouring house and I stood on it. That
audience stayed awake, perhaps in hope of seeing me fall off the
table, but made no pretence of enjoying the lecture.

Yet it was not altogether the strange conditions of the performance
which worried me. I should, I think, have come to grief just as badly
with those audiences if they had been collected into rooms or halls.
I was out of touch with the men I was talking to. I did not
understand them or how to address them. I had some experience,
experience of six months or so, of soldiers; but that was no help to
me. These were soldiers of a kind quite new to me. They belonged to
the old army. Officers and men alike were professionals, not amateurs
soldiering by chance like the rest of us.

The cavalry is, with the possible exception of the Guards, the only
part of our force in which the spirit of the old army survives. Every
infantry battalion has been de