than between man and man. Only duty is masculine and hard.

9

The theatres and music-halls of Paris opened one by one in the
autumn of the first year of war. Some of the dancing girls and the
singing girls found their old places behind the footlights, unless they
had coughed their lungs away, or grown too pinched and plain. But
for a long time it was impossible to recapture the old spirit of these
haunts, especially in the music-halls, where ghosts passed in the
darkness of deserted promenoirs, and where a chill gave one goose-
flesh in the empty stalls,

Paris was half ashamed to go to the Folies Bergeres or the
Renaissance, while away la-bas men were lying on the battlefields or
crouching in the trenches. Only when the monotony of life without
amusement became intolerable to people who have to laugh so that
they may not weep, did they wend their way to these places for an
hour or two. Even the actors and actresses and playwrights of Paris
felt the grim presence of death not far away. The old Rabelaisianism
was toned down to something like decency and at least the grosser
vulgarities of the music-hall stage were banned by common consent.

The little indecencies, the sly allusions, the candour of French
comedy remained, and often it was only stupidity which made one
laugh. Nothing on earth could have been more ridiculous than the
little lady who strutted up and down the stage, in the uniform of a
British Tommy, to the song of "Tipperary," which she rendered as a
sentimental ballad, with dramatic action. When she lay down on her
front buttons and died a dreadful death from German bullets, still
singing in a feeble voice: "Good-bye, Piccadilly; farewell, Leicester
Square," there were British officers in the boxes who laughed until
they wept, to the great astonishment of a French audience, who saw
no humour in the exhibition.

The kilted ladies of the Olympia would have brought a blush to the
cheeks of the most brazen-faced Jock from the slums of Glasgow,
though they were received with great applause by respectable
French bourgeois with elderly wives. And yet the soul of Paris, the big
thing in its soul, the spirit which leaps out to the truth and beauty of
life, was there even in Olympia, among the women with the roving
eyes, and amidst all those fooleries.

Between two comic "turns" a patriotic song would come. They were
not songs of false sentiment, like those patriotic ballads which thrill
the gods in Lon