joiced in many public
institutions that were turned into hospitals and offices; the
wounded limped its wide, dusty streets, detachments of
Infantry went through it swiftly; and utterly bored
motor-lorries cruised up and down roaring, I suppose, for
something to look at or to talk to. In the centre of it I found
one Janny, or rather his marble bust, brooding over a minute
iron-railed garden of half-dried asters opposite a shut-up
school, which it appeared from the inscription Janny had founded
somewhere in the arid Thirties. It was precisely the sort of
school that Janny, by the look of him, would have invented. Not
even French adaptability could make anything of it. So Janny
had his school, with a faint perfume of varnish, all to himself
in a hot stillness of used-up air and little whirls of dust.
And because that town seemed so barren, I met there a French
General whom I would have gone very far to have encountered.
He, like the others, had created and tempered an army for
certain work in a certain place, and its hand had been heavy on
the Boche. We talked of what the French woman was, and had
done, and was doing, and extolled her for her goodness and her
faith and her splendid courage. When we parted, I went back and
made my profoundest apologies to Janny, who must have had a
mother. The pale, overwhelmed town did not now any longer
resemble a woman who had fainted, but one who must endure in
public all manner of private woe and still, with hands that
never cease working, keeps her soul and is cleanly strong for
herself and for her men.

FRENCH OFFICERS

The guns began to speak again among the hills that we dived
into; the air grew chillier as we climbed; forest and wet
rocks closed round us in the mist, to the sound of waters
trickling alongside; there was a tang of wet fern, cut pine,
and the first breath of autumn when the road entered a tunnel
and a new world--Alsace.

Said the Governor of those parts thoughtfully: "The main
thing was to get those factory chimneys smoking again." (They
were doing so in little flats and villages all along.) "You
won't see any girls, because they're at work in the textile
factories. Yes, it isn't a bad country for summer hotels, but
I'm afraid it won't do for winter sports. We've only a metre
of snow, and it doesn't lie, except when you are hauling guns
up mountains. Then, of course, it drifts and freezes like
Davos. That's our new railway below there. Pity it'