The truth is, the salle is fully as interesting to me as the performance, good as that is—­with a handsome, delicate-looking young professor of music playing the violin, an actor from the Palais Royale showing a diction altogether remarkable, two well-known gymnasts doing wonderful stunts on horizontal bars, a prize pupil from the Conservatory at Nantes acting, as only the French can, in a well-known little comedy, two clever, comic monologists of the La Scala sort, and as good as I ever heard even there, and a regimental band which plays good music remarkably.  There is even a Prix de Rome in the regiment, but he is en conge, so I ’ve not heard him yet.  I wonder if you take it in?  Do you realize that these are the soldiers in the ranks of the French defence?  Consider what the life in the trenches means to them!

They even have artists among the poilus to paint back drops and make properties.  So you see it is one thing to go to the theatre and quite another to see the soldiers from Verdun giving a performance before such a public—­the men from the trenches going to the play in the highest of spirits and the greatest good humor.

At the first experience of this sort I did long to have you there.  It was such a scene as I could not have believed possible in these days and under these conditions if I had not actually taken part in it.

As soon as the officers had filed in and taken their seats the doors and windows were thrown open to admit “la vague,” and we all stood up and faced about to see them come.  It was a great sight.

In the aisle down the centre of the hall—­there is only one,—­between the back row of reserved seats, stood Mlle. Henriette, in her white uniform, white gloved, with the red cross holding her long white veil to the nurse’s coiffe which covered her pretty brown hair.  Her slight, tall, white figure was the only barrier to prevent “la vague” from sweeping right over the hall to the stage.  As they came through the door it did not seem possible that anything could stop them—­or even that they could stop themselves—­and I expected to see her crushed.  Yet two feet from her, the mass stopped—­the front line became rigid as steel and held back the rest, and, in a second, the wave had broken into two parts and flowed into the benches at left and right, and, in less time than it takes you to read this, they were packed on the benches, packed in the windows, and hung up on the walls.  A queer murmur, half laugh and half applause, ran over the reserved seats, and the tall, thin commandant beside me said softly, “That is the way they came out of the trenches at Verdun.”  As I turned to sit down I had impressed on my memory forever that sea of smiling, clean-shaven, keen-eyed, wave on wave of French faces, all so young and so gay—­ yet whose eyes had looked on things which will make a new France.

I am sending you the programme of the second matinee—­I lost that of the first.