So it was with them in the first weeks of the war, and it was a pitiable
thing to watch the long queues of women waiting patiently outside the
mairies, hour after hour and sometimes day after day, to get that one
franc twenty-five which would buy their children's bread. Yet the
patience of these women never failed, and with a resignation which
had something divine in it, they excused the delays, the official
deliberations, the infinite vexations which they were made to suffer,
by that phrase which has excused everything in France: "C'est la
guerre!" Because it was war, they did not raise their voices in shrill
protest, or wave their skinny arms at imperturbable men who said,
"Attendez, s'il vous plaît!" with damnable iteration, or break the
windows of Government offices in which bewildering regulations were
drawn up in miles of red tape.

"C'est la guerre!" and the women of Paris, thinking of their men at the
front, dedicated themselves to suffering and were glad of their very
hunger pains, so that they might share the hardships of the soldiers.

By good chance, a number of large-hearted men and women, more
representative of the State than the Ministry in power, because they
had long records of public service and united all phases of intellectual
and religious activity in France, organized a system of private charity
to supplement the Government doles, and under the title of the
Secours Nationale, relieved the needs of the destitute with a prompt
and generous charity in which there was human love beyond the
skinflint justice of the State. It was the Secours Nationale which saved
Paris in those early days from some of the worst miseries of the war
and softened some of the inevitable cruelties which it inflicted upon
the women and children. Their organization of ouvroirs, or workshops
for unemployed girls, where a franc a day (not much for a long day's