Hospital ships berth below the bridge, and are filled from the motor ambulances with an awful celerity. You may always know when an ambulance train is at the Rive Gauche Gare by the long procession of Red Cross motors streaming from the station over the Grand Pont to the hospital berth, and by the wide-eyed crowd making a slow-swaying cordon round the military police to watch the procession of stretchers ascending the gangways. The Red Cross ship may get her complement in two or three hours. Then she turns business-like and heads down-stream for _le Havre_. And then!--_Blighty_, for comfort and fitting alimentation, and _home_ for the tortured. The Seine is a tragic stream at Rouen. Corpses are fished up daily. Parisian suicides float down and are intercepted, and dogs and other beasts seem to get drowned in plenty. This is hard on so fair and happy a city. Why can't Paris look after her own weary-of-breath? The Ile la Croix stands at the heart of the city. The Pont Corneille rests across it. The island is a town in itself, with theatres, churches, factories, baths, and thick residential quarters, and groves, and well-defined streets. Here is another little world in itself, consistent with the barges that lie about it. All over the island--and, still more ubiquitously, all over the quay-sides--are girls and women hawking fruit and cakes and chocolate. The girls are pretty. They better custom by fooling English Tommies to the top of their bent by that French-Arcadian intersexual frankness of discourse and gesture of which English girls know so little, and which Tommy adores so ardently and furtively. This gives the right to put up the price. Tommy, in this land of vines, and in the season--finds himself paying her two francs a pound for grapes. "_Très cher aujourd'hui, Monsieur!_"--"_Mais oui, m'selle--voulez-vous m'embrasser?_"--."_Nothin' doin', ole shap!_" ... These girls are quick-brained, as alertful in mind as you could expect by their well-moulded features and their lithe, straight bodies. There is no insistence, in France, upon the ugly vulgarism of rotundity in women and girls. The girls of France spell, in their bodies, anything but sombreness in spirit or clumsiness in brain. They have never been out of Rouen, but they fling repartee in Arabic at Australians as though they had lived in Cairo. Their only source of such an accomplishment is the Australian soldier himself, and the persistence of Arabic with him. And he does not go out of his way to teach anyone. He learns French with halting slowness, even when some Rouennaise is making efforts to teach him. But these girls take up his English and his incidental Arabic in their swift and light mental stride. CHAPTER IV ROUEN _REVUE_