ittle luxuries of life in
order that out of their poor wages in Government offices they might
keep the woman to whom they owed their being. Always the greater
part of the people of Paris lives precariously on the thin edge of a
limited income, stinting and scraping, a sou here, a sou there, to
balance the week's accounts and eke out a little of that joie de vivre,
which to every Parisian is an essential need. Now by the edict of war
all life's economies had been annihilated. There were no more wages
out of which to reckon the cost of an extra meal, or out of which to
squeeze the price of a seat at a Pathe cinema. Mothers and wives
and mistresses had been abandoned to the chill comfort of national
charity, and oh, the coldness of it!

The French Government had promised to give an allowance of 1
franc 25 centimes a day to the women who were dependent on
soldier husbands. Perhaps it is possible to live on a shilling a day in
Paris, though, by Heaven, I should hate to do it. Nicely administered it
might save a woman from rapid starvation and keep her thin for quite
a time. But even this measure of relief was difficult to get. French
officials are extraordinarily punctilious over the details of their work,
and it takes them a long time to organize a system which is a
masterpiece of safeguards and regulations and subordinate clauses.
So it was with them in the first weeks of the war, and it was a pitiable
thing to watch the long queues of women waiting patiently outside the
mairies, hour after hour and sometimes day after day, to get that one
franc twenty-five which would buy their children's bread. Yet the
patience of these women never failed, and with a resignation which
had something divine in it, they excused the delays, the official
deliberations, the infinite vexations which they were made to suffer,
by that phrase which has excused everything in France: "C'est la
guerre!" Because it was war, they did not raise their voices in shrill
protest, or wave their skinny arms at imperturbable men who said,
"Attendez, s'il vous plait!" with damnable iteration, or break the
windows of Government offices in which bewildering regulations were
drawn up in miles of red tape.

"C'est la guerre!" and the women of Paris, thinking of their men at the
front, dedicated themselves to suffering and were glad of their very
hunger pains, so that they might share the hardships of the soldiers.

By good chance, a number of large-hearted men a