She had already sent two and had received happy letters from them. Other mothers are suspicious of us, and flatly refuse, keeping their children in the danger zone till death comes. During a shelling, the cure would telephone for our ambulance. He would collect the little ones and sick old people. Miss Fyfe could persuade them to come more easily when the shells were falling. At the moment of parting, everybody cries. The children are dressed. The one best thing they own is put on--a pair of shoes from the attic, stiff new shoes, worked on the little feet unused to shoes. Out of a family of ten children we would win perhaps three. Back across the fields they trooped to our car, clean faces, matted dirty hair, their wee bundle tied up in a colored handkerchief, no hats, under the loose dark shirt a tiny Catholic charm. We lifted the little people into the big yellow ambulance--big brother and sister, sitting at the end to pin them in. We carried crackers and chocolate. They are soon happy with the sweets, chattering, enjoying their first motor-car ride, and eager for the new life. LES TRAVAILLEURS DE LA GUERRE The boy soldier is willing to make any day his last if it is a good day. It is not so with the middle-aged man. He is puzzled by the war. What he has to struggle with more than bodily weakness is the malady of thought. Is the bloody business worth while? I SAW him first, my middle-aged man, one afternoon on the boards of an improvised stage in the sand-dunes of Belgium. On that last thin strip of the shattered kingdom English and French and Belgians were grimly massed. He was a Frenchman, and he was cheering up his comrades. With shining black hair and volatile face, he played many parts that day. He recited sprightly verses of Parisian life. He carried on amazing twenty-minute dialogues with himself, mimicking the voice of girl and woman, bully and dandy. His audience had come in stale from the everlasting spading and marching. They brightened visibly under his gaiety. If he cared to make that effort in the saddened place, they were ready to respond. When he dismissed them, the last flash of him was of a smiling, rollicking improvisator, bowing himself over to the applause till his black hair was level with our eyes. And then next day as I sat in my ambulance, waiting orders, he trudged by in his blue, "the color of heaven" once, but musty now from nights under the rain. His head of hair, which the glossy black wig had covered, was gray-white. The sparkling, pantomimic face had dropped into wrinkles. He was patient and old and tired. Perhaps he, too, would have been glad of some one to cheer him up. He was just one more territorial--trench-digger and sentry and filler-in. He became for me the type of all those faithful, plodding soldiers whose first strength is spent. In him was gathered up all that fatigue and sadness of men for whom no glamour remains.