This reawakening of the people was a natural reaction—the demand of life for its own rights. As with individuals, sorrow’s tedium had evoked in the entire occupied country a certain helpless resignation to circumstances that after two years’ patient endurance and discouragement offered no promise of change. Oppression and deprivation had become permanent elements of existence. Tragedies even failed to impress us so deeply as of yore; incidents of heart-breaking pathos no longer brought tears to the eyes of those who could still dress warmly in winter, and indulge adequately, if not luxuriously, in the high-priced food. All had made such sacrifices for the poorer classes as each considered possible without serious menace to himself. Many had given the last centime they could spare, others substantial donations which they probably did not miss. Nevertheless, evidences of distressing want increased, more especially among those too proud to ask alms, who, before the war, had been comfortably off. During that summer and the following winter these once well-to-do and industrious citizens swelled the long lines of hunger-driven, ill-clad beings who, in rain, snow, or sunshine, stood for hours outside soup-kitchens to obtain the loaf of bread and jug of hot broth provided by charity. I think no visible sign of the country’s calamity was more painfully impressive than the sight of those silent, patient files of heterogeneous humanity, extending at certain hours along whole blocks of the city’s streets. Chiefly were they eloquent during the early dusk of winter, when, exposed to the blast of cold winds, to sleety rain, or penetrating fog, refined men and women, old and young, stood shivering side by side with the lowest inhabitants of rue Haute! Some faces seen in those sad gatherings I shall never forget; faces of haggard, hopeless men, whose brave efforts to live honestly had been frustrated when success was almost attained; of wan women, whose husbands were dead or fighting in the trenches, whose children starved in a heatless home; old women and young, in whose eyes all human reasoning was eclipsed by an animal hunger—old men and young with that same anguish in their eyes, but with the hard and morose expression of embryo criminals lurking about their down-drooping, sullenly closed lips.