amused themselves watching these women pruning and trimming as
fatalistically as if guns were not thundering east and west of them,
shells singing overhead. For the most part they were safe enough, and
nerves had apparently been left out of them; but once in a while the
Germans would amuse themselves raking the valley with the guns. Then
the women would simply throw themselves flat and remain
motionless--sometimes for hours--until "Les Boches" concluded to waste
no more ammunition.

In Rheims the women have never closed their shops. They have covered
their windows with sandbags, and by the light of lamp or candle do a
thriving business while the big guns thunder. The soldiers, both
British and French, like their trinkets and post-cards, to say nothing
of more practical objects, and, admiring their inveterate pluck, not
only patronize them liberally but sit in their coverts and gossip or
flirt with the pretty girls for whom shells bursting in the street are
too old a story for terror.

[Illustration: DELIVERING THE MILK IN RHEIMS]


III


Many of the women of the industrial classes who have been accustomed
all their hard dry lives to live on the daily wage of father or
husband have refused to work since the war began, preferring to
scrape along on the Government allocation (allowance) of
one-franc-twenty-five a day for the wives of soldiers, plus fifty
centimes for each child (seventy-five in Paris). These notable