bread; but why must several million people go on cracking their teeth
because of that idiosyncrasy?

The government is obdurate. If fancy bread were made, only the big
bakers would have time to make it, little ones would be without clients,
and that this highly centralized, paternal government cannot allow.
Hard bread it is, then, for another while at least--"C'est la guerre!"

Thursday.

We have a dining-car on our Bordeaux express to-day, the first since war
was declared. To-morrow night sleeping-cars go back again--more
significant than one might think who had not seen the France of a few
months ago, when everything was turned over to the army and people sat
up all night in day coaches to cover the usual three hours from Dieppe
to Paris.

Down through the heart of France--Tours, Poitiers, Angouleme--past trim
little French rivers, narrow, winding, still, and deep, with rows of
poplars close to the water's edge, and still a certain air of coquetry,
in spite of bare branches and fallen leaves--past brown fields across
which teams of oxen, one sedate old farm horse in the lead, are drawing
the furrow for next spring's wheat. It's the old men who are ploughing
--except for those in uniform, there is scarce a young man in sight. And
everywhere soldiers--wounded ones bound for southern France, reserves
not yet sent up.

Vines begin to appear, low brown lines across stony fields; then, just
after dark, across the Garonne and into Bordeaux, where the civil
government obligingly fled when the enemy was rolling down on Paris in