of the war and wrote pathetically asking if their parents and little
sister were ill, or how they had offended. A wife enclosed a letter
from her husband, telling how he was suffering from the cold because of
insufficient clothing; a doctor wrote protesting because there was not a
single bottle of antitetanic serum in his field-hospital.

We found M. Clemenceau in his lodgings late one afternoon--a leonine old
gentleman bundled up in cap and overcoat before a little grate fire,
while a secretary ran through the big heap of letters piled on the bed.
In the corner of the room was a roll-top desk--the sanctum, evidently,
of The Chained Man.

As M. Clemenceau was insistent that he should not be interviewed, I may
not repeat the exceedingly lively talk on all sorts of people and things
with which he regaled us once--and it didn't take long--he "got going."

One purely personal little bit of information may be passed on, however,
in the hope that it may be as interesting to other practitioners of a
laborious trade as it was to me.

We were talking of the facility with which he reeled off, day after day,
columns of lively, finished prose, and I asked whether he wrote in
longhand, dictated, or used a typewriter.

This question seemed to amuse and interest the old war-horse greatly. He
went to his desk and brought back a sheet of paper, half of which was
covered with a small, firm handwriting. It was his next day's
broadside, not yet finished.

"There is nothing mysterious about it," he said. "I get up at half past