made my profoundest apologies to Janny, who must have had a
mother. The pale, overwhelmed town did not now any longer
resemble a woman who had fainted, but one who must endure in
public all manner of private woe and still, with hands that
never cease working, keeps her soul and is cleanly strong for
herself and for her men.

FRENCH OFFICERS

The guns began to speak again among the hills that we dived
into; the air grew chillier as we climbed; forest and wet
rocks closed round us in the mist, to the sound of waters
trickling alongside; there was a tang of wet fern, cut pine,
and the first breath of autumn when the road entered a tunnel
and a new world--Alsace.

Said the Governor of those parts thoughtfully: "The main
thing was to get those factory chimneys smoking again." (They
were doing so in little flats and villages all along.) "You
won't see any girls, because they're at work in the textile
factories. Yes, it isn't a bad country for summer hotels, but
I'm afraid it won't do for winter sports. We've only a metre
of snow, and it doesn't lie, except when you are hauling guns
up mountains. Then, of course, it drifts and freezes like
Davos. That's our new railway below there. Pity it's too
misty to see the view."

But for his medals, there was nothing in the Governor to show
that he was not English. He might have come straight from an
Indian frontier command.