econd. They shelter
safely in the prison of Louis the Pious. An ineffective shell from a
German seventy-seven burst in the walled garden close at hand as I came
out from those thousand-year-old memories again.

The cathedral at Soissons had not been nearly so completely smashed up
as the one at Arras; I doubt if it has been very greatly fired into.
There is a peculiar beauty in the one long vertical strip of blue sky
between the broken arches in the chief gap where the wall has tumbled
in. And the people are holding on in many cases exactly as they are
doing in Arras; I do not know whether it is habit or courage that is
most apparent in this persistence. About the chief place of the town
there are ruined houses, but some invisible hand still keeps the grass
of the little garden within bounds and has put out a bed of begonias. In
Paris I met a charming American writer, the wife of a French artist, the
lady who wrote _My House on the Field of Honour._ She gave me a queer
little anecdote. On account of some hospital work she had been allowed
to visit Soissons--a rare privilege for a woman--and she stayed the
night in a lodging. The room into which she was shown was like any other
French provincial bedroom, and after her Anglo-Saxon habit she walked
straight to the windows to open them.

They looked exactly like any other French bedroom windows, with neat,
clean white lace curtains across them. The curtains had been put there,
because they were the proper things to put there.

"Madame," said the hostess, "need not trouble to open the glass. There
is no more glass in Soissons."

But there were curtains nevertheless. There was all the precise delicacy
of the neatly curtained home life of France.

And she told me too of the people at dinner, and how as the little
serving-maid passed about a proud erection of cake and conserve and
cream, came the familiar "Pheeee---woooo---_Bang!_"

"That must have been the Seminaire," said someone.

As one speaks of the weather or a passing cart.

"It was in the Rue de la Bueire, M'sieur," the little maid asserted with
quiet conviction, poising the trophy of confectionery for Madame Huard
with an unshaking hand.

So stoutly do the roots of French life hold beneath the tramplings of
war.

II. THE GRADES OF WAR

1 Soissons and Arras when I visited them were samples of the deadlock
war; they were like Bloch come true. The living fact about war so far
is that Bloch has not co