checkered fields. The sun was slanting through the plain. Tall
dark poplars slashed it with sombre greens. As we whizzed through
the quaint little villages dashes of colour seemed doused in our
faces; soldiers in horizon blue with crimson trimmings and gold on
their uniforms, black Moroccans with their gaudy red fezes, flags
of staff and line officers fluttering from doors and window sills,
all refreshed our eyes with new, strange, gorgeous combinations of
colours. And when we passed a town where no soldiers were quartered,
there the dooryards were brilliant with phlox and dahlias--even
the door yards of those poor wrecked villages deserted after the
German bombardment--villages roofless and grey and gaunt and wan,
from which the population fled in July, 1914, and from which the
Germans themselves a few weeks later were forced to flee, running
pell-mell as they scurried before the wrath of the French soldiers.

As we went down into the valley of the Marne where division after
division of the French army was quartered upon the population,
thousands in a village, where normally hundreds were sheltered, we
realized what social chaos must stalk in the train of war. Every
few weeks these soldiers go to the front and other soldiers come
in. Fathers, husbands, sweethearts of peace times are at the front
or dead. The visiting soldiers come "from over the hills and far
away," but they are young, and the women are young and beautiful,
and they live daily with these women in their houses. Moreover,
the emotions of France are tense. Death, doubt, fear and hope lash
the home-staying hearts every day. And amid those raw emotions
comes the daily and hourly call of the deepest emotion in the human
heart. It comes honestly. It comes inevitably. And then, in a day
or an hour, the lover is gone, and new faces appear in the village,
in the street, in the home. Five millions of men during the last