improving.  In the neighbourhood of Grecourt they have equalled, if not surpassed, their own best efforts.  I would suggest to the Kaiser that this manly performance calls for a distribution of iron crosses.  It is true that his armies were beaten and retiring; but does not that fact rather enhance their valour?  They were retiring, yet there were those who were brave enough to delay their departure till they had achieved this final victory over old women and children to the lasting honour of their country.  Such heroes are worthy to stand beside the sinkers of the Lusitania.  It is not just that they should go unrecorded.

In the midst of this hell I came across a tumbled chateau.  Its roof, its windows, its stairways were gone; only the crumbling shell of its former happiness was left standing.  A high wall ran about its grounds.  The place must have been pleasant with flower-gardens once.  There was an impressive entrance of wrought-iron, a porter’s lodge and a broad driveway.  At the back I found rows of little wood-huts.  There was a fragrance of log-fires burning.  I was glad of that, for I had heard of the starving cold these women had had to endure through the first winter months of their tenure.  On tapping at a door, I found the entire colony assembled.  It was tea-time and Sunday.  Ten out of the seventeen who form the colony were present.  A box-stove, such as we use in our pioneer shacks in Canada, was throwing out a glow of cheeriness.  Candles had been lighted.  Little knicknacks of feminine taste had been hung here and there to disguise the bareness of the walls.  A bed, in one corner, was carefully disguised as a couch.  Save for the fact that there was no glass in the window—­glass being unobtainable in France at present—­one might easily have persuaded himself that he was back in America in the room of a girl-undergraduate.

The method of my greeting furthered this illusion.  Americans, both men and women, have an extraordinary self-poise, a gift for remaining normal in the most abnormal surroundings.  They refuse to allow themselves to be surprised by any upheaval of circumstances.  “I should worry,” they seem to be saying, and press straight on with the job in hand.  There was one small touch which made the environment seem even more friendly and unexceptional.  One of the girls, on being introduced, promptly read to me a letter which she had just received from my sister in America.  It made this oasis in an encircling wilderness seem very much a part of a neighbourly world.  This girl is an example of the varied experiences which have trained American women into becoming the nursemaids of the French peasantry.