fairs is measured by the shadow of their
village steeple. They are no more curious of the laws of causation
than the thousands overwhelmed at Avezzano. They were ploughing and
sowing, spinning and weaving and minding their business, when
suddenly a great darkness full of fire and blood came down on them.
And now they are here, in a strange country, among unfamiliar faces
and new ways, with nothing left to them in the world but the memory
of burning homes and massacred children and young men dragged to
slavery, of infants torn from their mothers, old men trampled by
drunken heels and priests slain while they prayed beside the dying.
These are the people who stand in hundreds every day outside the
doors of the shelters improvised to rescue them, and who receive, in
return for the loss of everything that makes life sweet, or
intelligible, or at least endurable, a cot in a dormitory, a
meal-ticket--and perhaps, on lucky days, a pair of shoes...

What are the Parisians doing meanwhile? For one thing--and the sign
is a good one--they are refilling the shops, and especially, of
course, the great "department stores." In the early war days there
was no stranger sight than those deserted palaces, where one strayed
between miles of unpurchased wares in quest of vanished salesmen. A
few clerks, of course, were left: enough, one would have thought,
for the rare purchasers who disturbed their meditations. But the few
there were did not care to be disturbed: they lurked behind their
walls of sheeting, their bastions of flannelette, as if ashamed to
be discovered. And when one had coaxed them out they went through
the necessary gestures automatically, as if mournfully wondering
that any one should care to buy. I remember once, at the Louvre,
seeing the whole force of a "department," including the salesman I
was trying to cajole into showing me some medicated gauze, desert
their posts simultaneously to gather about a motor-cyclist in a
muddy uniform who had dropped in to see his pals with tales from the
front. But after six months the pressure of normal appetites has
begun to reassert itself--and to shop is one of the normal appetites
of woman. I say "shop" instead of buy, to distinguish between the
dull purchase of necessities and the voluptuousness of acquiring
things one might do without. It is evident that many of the
thousands now fighting their way into the great shops must be
indulging in the latter delight. At a moment when rea