office for the minister of foreign affairs--the red tape is unwound
which eventually sends the life-blood of the remotest province flowing
up to its appointed place at the front.

There must be plenty of real work, for an army like that of France,
stretching clear across the country from Switzerland to the Channel,
could not live unless it had a smoothly running civil machine in the
quiet country behind. Neither of the chambers is in session, and except
that the main streets are busy--one is told that one hundred thousand
extra people are in town--you might almost never know that anything out
of the ordinary had occurred. Things must be very different, of course,
from '71, when, beaten to her knees and threatened with revolution,
France had to decide between surrendering Alsace and Lorraine and going
on with the war.

The theatres are closed, but there are moving-picture shows, an
occasional concert, and twice a week, under the auspices of one of the
newspapers, a conference. I went to one of these, given by a French
professor of English literature in the University of Bordeaux, on the
timely subject: "Kipling and Greater England."

You can imagine the piquant interest of the scene--the polite matinee
audience, the row of erudite Frenchmen sitting behind the speaker, the
table, the shaded lamp, and the professor himself, a slender, dark
gentleman with a fine, grave face, pointed black beard, and penetrating
eyes--suggesting vaguely a prestidigitateur--trying, by sheer
intelligence and delicate, critical skill, to bridge the gaps of race
and instinctive thought and feeling and make his audience understand
Kipling.