grey wagons--winding
down the hill in the winter landscape, so different from the France I
had always known. Hardly a sound came back--no music, no colors--
the long, grey column moved in a silent, almost colorless world. I
shifted the heavy flag from one hand to the other as my fingers got
stiff, but, alas! I could not shift my feet. Long before the line had
passed I was forced to fasten the flag to a post in the hedge and
leave it to float by itself, and limp into the house. As a volunteer color-
bearer I was a failure. I had to let Amelie take off my shoes and rub
my feet, and I had hard work not to cry while she was doing it. I was
humiliated, especially as I remembered that the boys had a five
hours' march as their first etape, and a bivouac at the end of it.

I had intended to go out later on the route Madame to watch the
cavalry coming down from the hills on the other side of the Morin, but
I could not face the cold. There is nothing heroic about me. So I
contented myself with helping Amelie set the house in order.

Needless to tell you that no one knows what this unexpected big
movement of troops means.

It is inevitable that we should all imagine that it concerns the coming
spring offensive. At any rate, the cavalry is being put back into its
saddles, and the crack regiments are coming out of Verdun--the
famous corps which has won immortal fame there, and written the
name of Verdun in letters of flame in the list of the world's great
battles, and enshrined French soldiers in the love of all who can be
stirred by courage in a noble cause, or know what it means to have
the heart swell at the thought of the "sacred love of home and
country."

Although I have sworn--and more than once--that I will not talk politics
with you again, or discuss any subject which can be considered as its
most distant blood relation, yet every time you reiterate "Aren't the
French wonderfully changed? Aren't you more and more surprised at
them?" it goes against the grain.

Does it never occur to you that France held her head up wonderfully
after the terrible humiliation of 1870? Does it never occur to you what
it meant to a great nation, so long a centre of civilization, and a great
race, so long a leader in thought, to have found herself without a
friend, and to have had to face such a defeat,--a defeat followed by a
shocking treaty which kept that disaster forever before her? Do you
never think of the hidden shame, the cankering