eaten a morsel of sugar, although the well-to-do were always amply supplied. In many places even bread was lacking, while biscuits, shortbread, and fancy cakes, available at exorbitant prices, were exhibited in the shop windows. Tokens of unbridled luxury and glaring evidences of wanton waste were flaunted daily and hourly in the faces of the humbled men who had saved the nation and wanted the nation to realize the fact. Lucullan banquets, opulent lunches, all-night dances, high revels of an exotic character testified to the peculiar psychic temper as well as to the material prosperity of the passive elements of the community and stung the poilus to the quick. "But what justice," these asked, "can the living hope for, when the glorious dead are so soon forgotten?" For one ghastly detail remains to complete a picture to which Boccaccio could hardly have done justice. "While all this wild dissipation was going on among the moneyed class in the capital the corpses of many gallant soldiers lay unburied and uncovered on the shell-plowed fields of battle near Rheims, on the road to Neuville-sur-Margival and other places--sights pointed out to visitors to tickle their interest in the grim spectacle of war. In vain individuals expostulated and the press protested. As recently as May persons known to me--my English secretary was one--looked with the fascination of horror on the bodies of men who, when they breathed, were heroes. They lay there where they had fallen and agonized, and now, in the heat of the May sun, were moldering in dust away--a couple of hours' motor drive from Paris...."[17]