I used to marvel at the patience of these girls. How bored they must have been with all this flirtation, which led to nothing except, perhaps, the purchase of a bit of soap at twice its proper price! They knew that these boys would leave to go back to the trenches in a few hours and that some of them would certainly be dead in a few days. There could be no romantic episode, save of a transient kind, between them and these good-looking lads in whose eyes there were desire and hunger, because to them the plainest girl was Womanhood, the sweet, gentle, and feminine side of life, as opposed to the cruelty, brutality, and ugliness of war and death. The shopgirls of Amiens had no illusions. They had lived too long in war not to know the realities. They knew the risks of transient love and they were not taking them--unless conditions were very favorable. They attended strictly to business and hoped to make a lot of money in the shop, and were, I think, mostly good girls--as virtuous as life in war-time may let girls be--wise beyond their years, and with pity behind their laughter for these soldiers who tried to touch their hands over the counters, knowing that many of them were doomed to die for France and England. They had their own lovers--boys in blue somewhere between Vaux-sur-Somme and Hartmanns--weilerkopf--and apart from occasional intimacies with English officers quartered in Amiens for long spells, left the traffic of passion to other women who walked the streets. II The Street of the Three Pebbles--la rue des Trois Cailloux--which goes up from the station through the heart of Amiens, was the crowded highway. Here were the best shops--the hairdresser, at the left-hand side, where all day long officers down from the line came in to have elaborate luxury in the way of close crops with friction d'eau de quinine, shampooing, singeing, oiling, not because of vanity, but because of the joyous sense of cleanliness and perfume after the filth and stench of life in the desolate fields; then the booksellers' (Madame Carpentier et fille) on the right-hand side, which was not only the rendezvous of the miscellaneous crowd buying stationery and La Vie Parisienne, but of the intellectuals who spoke good French and bought good books and liked ten minutes' chat with the mother and daughter. (Madame was an Alsatian lady with vivid memories of 1870, when, as a child, she had first learned to hate Germans.) She hated them now with a fresh, vital hatred, and would have seen her own son dead a hundred times--he was a soldier in Saloniki--rather than that France should make a compromise peace with the enemy. She had been in Amiens, as I was, on a dreadful night of August of 1914, when the French army passed through in retreat from Bapaume, and she and the people of her city knew for the first time that the Germans were close upon them. She stood in the crowd as I did--in the darkness, watching that French column pass with their