Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net HOME FIRES IN FRANCE By DOROTHY CANFIELD Author of "The Bent Twig," "The Squirrel-Cage," "Hillsboro People," etc. NEW YORK HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 1918 COPYRIGHT, 1918, BY HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY PRINTED IN THE U. S. A. THE QUINN & BODEN CO. PRESS RAHWAY, N. J. DEDICATED TO GENERAL PERSHING PUBLISHER'S NOTE This book is fiction written in France out of a life-long familiarity with the French and two years' intense experience in war work in France. It is a true setting-forth of personalities and experiences, French and American, under the influence of war. It tells what the war has done to the French people at home. In a recent letter, the author said, "What I write is about such very well-known conditions to us that it is hard to remember it may be fresh to you, but it is so far short of the actual conditions that it seems pretty pale, after all." CONTENTS Notes from a French Village in the War Zone The Permissionaire Vignettes from Life at the Rear A Fair Exchange The Refugee A Little Kansas Leaven Eyes for the Blind The First Time After Hats A Honeymoon ... Vive l'Amérique! La Pharmacienne HOME FIRES IN FRANCE NOTES FROM A FRENCH VILLAGE IN THE WAR ZONE Perhaps the first thing which brought our boys to a halt, and a long, long look around them, was the age of the place. Apparently it has--the statement is hardly exaggerated--always been there. As a matter of historical fact it has been there for more than a thousand years. On hearing that, the American boys always gasped. They were used to the conception of the great age of "historical" spots, by which they meant cities in which great events have occurred--Paris, Rome, Stratford-on-Avon, Granada. But that an inconsiderable settlement of a thousand inhabitants, where nothing in particular ever happened beyond the birth, life, and death of its people, should have kept its identity through a thousand years gave them, so they said, "a queer feeling." As they stood in the quiet gray street, looking up and down, and taking in the significance of the fact, one could almost visibly see their minds turning away from the text-book idea of the Past as an unreal, sparsely settled period with violent historical characters in doublet and ruff or chain mail thrusting broadswords into one another or signing treaties which condemned all succeeding college students to a new feat of memory; you could almost see their brilliant, shadowless, New World youth deepened and sobered by a momentary perception of the Past as a very long and startlingly real phenomenon, full, scaringly full of real people, entirely like ourselves, going about the business of getting born, being married and dying, with as little conscious regard as we for historical movements and tendencies.