was become, since the armistice, the exclusive monopoly of the
capitalist or the _nouveau-riche_ in the rear. To obtain a ration of
sugar he or his wife had to stand in a long queue for hours, perhaps go
away empty-handed and return on the following morning. When his
sugar-card was eventually handed to him he had again to stand in line
outside the grocer's door and, when his turn came to enter it, was
frequently told that the supply was exhausted and would not be
replenished for a week or longer. Yet his newspaper informed him that
there was plenty of colonial sugar, ready for shipment, but forbidden by
the authorities to be imported into France. I met many poor people from
the provinces and some resident in Paris who for four years had not once
eaten a morsel of sugar, although the well-to-do were always amply
supplied. In many places even bread was lacking, while biscuits,
shortbread, and fancy cakes, available at exorbitant prices, were
exhibited in the shop windows. Tokens of unbridled luxury and glaring
evidences of wanton waste were flaunted daily and hourly in the faces of
the humbled men who had saved the nation and wanted the nation to
realize the fact. Lucullan banquets, opulent lunches, all-night dances,
high revels of an exotic character testified to the peculiar psychic
temper as well as to the material prosperity of the passive elements of
the community and stung the poilus to the quick. "But what justice,"
these asked, "can the living hope for, when the glorious dead are so
soon forgotten?" For one ghastly detail remains to complete a picture to
which Boccaccio could hardly have done justice. "While all this wild
dissipation was going on among the moneyed class in the capital the
corpses of many gallant soldiers lay unburied and uncovered on the
shell-plowed fields of battle near Rheims, on the road to
Neuville-sur-Margival and other places--sights pointed out to visitors
to tickle their interest in the grim spectacle of war. In vain
individuals expostulated and the press protested. As recently as May