were at Soissons,
many of our officers and men came into Paris like this, on special
missions or on special leave, and along the boulevards one heard all
accents of the English tongue from John o' Groats to Land's End and
from Peckham Rye to Hackney Downs. The Kilties were the wonder
of Paris, and their knees were under the fire of a multitude of eyes as
they went swinging to the Gare du Nord The shopgirls of Paris
screamed with laughter at these brawny lads in "jupes," and
surrounded them with shameless mirth, while Jock grinned from ear
to ear and Sandy, more bashful, coloured to the roots of his fiery hair.
Cigarettes were showered into the hands of these soldier lads. They
could get drunk for nothing at the expense of English residents of
Paris--the jockeys from Chantilly, the bank clerks of the Imperial Club,
the bar loungers of the St. Petersbourg. The temptation was not
resisted with the courage of Christian martyrs. The Provost-Marshal
had to threaten some of his own military police with the terrors of
court-martial.

The wounded were allowed at last to come to Paris, and the
surgeons who had stood with idle hands found more than enough
work to do, and the ladies of France who had put on nurses' dresses
walked very softly and swiftly through long wards, no longer thrilled
with the beautiful sentiment of smoothing the brows of handsome
young soldiers, but thrilled by the desperate need of service, hard
and ugly and terrible, among those poor bloody men, agonizing
through the night, helpless in their pain, moaning before the rescue of
death. The faint-hearted among these women fled panic-stricken,
with blanched faces, to Nice and Monte Carlo and provincial
chateaux, where they played with less unpleasant work. But there
were not many like that. Most of them stayed, nerving themselves to
the endurance of those tragedies, finding in the weakness of their
womanhood a strange new courage, strong as steel, infinitely patient,
full of pity cleansed of all false sentiment. Many of these fine ladies of
France, in whose veins ran the blood of women who had gone very
bravely to the guillotine, were animated by the spirit of their
grandmothers and by the ghosts of French womanhood throughout
the history of their country, from Genevieve to Sister Julie, and putting
aside the frivolity of life which had been their only purpose, faced the
filth and horrors of the hospitals without a shudder and with the virtue
of nursing nun