them, to sit in the glamour of shaded lights, to watch a woman's
beauty through the haze of cigarette-smoke, and to listen to the
music of her voice. There was always a woman by the soldier's side,
propping her chin in her hands and smiling into the depths of his
eyes. For the soul of a Frenchman demands the help of women, and
the love of women, however strong his courage or his self-reliance.
The beauty of life is to him a feminine thing, holding the spirit of
motherhood, romantic love and comradeship more intimate and
tender than between man and man. Only duty is masculine and hard.


9


The theatres and music-halls of Paris opened one by one in the
autumn of the first year of war. Some of the dancing girls and the
singing girls found their old places behind the footlights, unless they
had coughed their lungs away, or grown too pinched and plain. But
for a long time it was impossible to recapture the old spirit of these
haunts, especially in the music-halls, where ghosts passed in the
darkness of deserted promenoirs, and where a chill gave one goose-
flesh in the empty stalls,

Paris was half ashamed to go to the Folies Bergères or the
Renaissance, while away là-bas men were lying on the battlefields or
crouching in the trenches. Only when the monotony of life without
amusement became intolerable to people who have to laugh so that
they may not weep, did they wend their way to these places for an
hour or two. Even the actors and actresses and playwrights of Paris
felt the grim presence of death not far away. The old Rabelaisianism