could spare; more, much more, than Paris had, and at his bidding the
cake-shops flowered with _eclairs, millefeuilles, brioches, choux a la
creme_, and cakes more marvellous with German names.

France, poor and hungry, flung all she had into Alsace and Lorraine,
that she might make her entry with the assuring dazzle of the
benefactress. The Lorraines, like children, were fed with sugar while
the meat shops were empty--were kept dancing in national costume that
they might forget to ask for leather boots, to wonder where wool and
silk were hiding.

Fetes were organised, colours were paraded in the square, torchlight
processions were started on Saturday nights, when the boys of the town
went crying and whooping behind the march of the flares. Artists were
sent for from Paris, took train to Nancy, and were driven laboriously
through hours of snow, over miles of shell-pitted roads, that they might
sing and play in the theatre or in the house of the Governor. To the
dances, to the dinners, to the plays came the Lorraine women, wearing
white cotton stockings to set off their thick ankles, and dancing in
figures and set dances unknown to the officers from Paris.

The Commandant Dormans, head of all motor transport under the Grand
Quartier General, having prepared his German drawing-room as a ballroom,
having danced all the evening with ladies from the surrounding hills,
found himself fatigued and exasperated by the side of the head of
Foreign Units attached to the Automobile Service.

"I thought you had Englishwomen at Bar-le-Duc," he said to the latter.

"I have--eight."