“He may forget what she has gone through, but how can he endure the presence of the child? What will be the future of those children, intruders in the family? I do not know.” What has happened to thousands of women and girls in invaded Belgium and France could just as well happen in this country. It would happen without the smallest doubt if the Huns landed on our shores. Can you picture it? Can you imagine what it would be, fathers and mothers of America, to stand with German guns leveled at your heads while beasts in human form violated your young daughters before your eyes? Can you imagine what it would be for our soldiers to come home from the war and find their wives and daughters with German babies in their arms? This is what many French and Belgian soldiers have had to endure. You will not persuade any of these men to listen to arguments in favor of a peace without victory. All over France you will see in homes, in shop windows, on blank walls a poster. There are just three words on this poster: “Frenchmen, never forget!” In the upper right-hand corner of the poster there is a picture of some woeful thing that has happened since the German hordes began to overrun the world. Sometimes the picture is of a burned and desolated village, a shattered hulk of what was once a beautiful old church. Oftener it is a picture of ruined womanhood, blasted childhood. In the lower left-hand corner of the poster is a picture of a smooth German salesman trying to sell something in France. “Frenchmen, never forget!” They never will forget. They have tenacious memories, our French allies. Can any one who has visited Paris forget the statue of Strasbourg in the Place de la Concorde? It is one of eight splendid monuments in that square, each representing a city of France. When the Germans filched Alsace and Lorraine from France, after the war of 1870, Strasbourg was lost to the French. On that day they laid funeral wreaths on the statue in the Place de la Concorde, and they have kept funeral wreaths there ever since. Until August, 1914. Then they took away the emblem of mourning, because they knew Strasbourg would be theirs again. The statue is gay with flowers now, and with flags of all the allies. Our flag is there, the flag the French call _le drapeau étoilé_, the bestarred banner. May it stay there until what it has gone to France for has been accomplished, until the utterly crushed and vanquished German army has been pursued beyond the Rhine, until something of what the women of France and of martyred Belgium have endured has been paid for. Not in the same coin, however. The men who have suffered so bravely are incapable of such crimes. CHAPTER XXIII THE NEW WOMAN IN FRANCE