When walking about in Nice one gets the impression that France's military resources are almost unlimited. I don't know how many soldiers are in the town at the present moment, but certainly more than half the men one meets in the streets are in uniform. The long, straight Avenue de la Gare, the Oxford Street of Nice, is the favourite promenade of the military element. Chasseurs des Alpes and Turcos, Colonial troops and helmeted cavalry, lend a gay look to the wide, handsome street, and the red and gold of their uniforms moving about in all directions reminds one of the bright setting of a patriotic ballet. Here are the offices of the leading local newspaper. The latest war news is written in large characters on a huge board hanging from the second-floor windows. A permanent crowd waits there, commenting on the cables, with an astonishing abundance of gestures, in a curious mixed dialect of Italian, French, and Provençal. Inside the offices is a sort of picture gallery. Photographs of all the officers and soldiers, natives of Nice who have fallen during the war, with a record of their deeds, and newspaper cuttings about them, sometimes in English as well as in French, are hung round the room, to the respectful admiration of the people. Pious hands daily place fresh flowers beneath these photographs. All the men inspect the collection with hats off. An old lady placed some superb white roses round the picture of a young lieutenant; a black-haired young girl of the working-class went round with a bunch of scarlet carnations, and decorated the photos of those soldiers who had no other fresh flowers. * * * PARIS, _February_. "Paris is desperately dull," said a club acquaintance whose weakness it is to affect a _blasé_ manner. He made the remark to me just before I left London, he being newly returned from a tour in France. "Nothing on; nothing left of what we call Paris! It is really the most boring place on earth." So it would be for most people, I am afraid--people who have always refused to see Paris as it is, but who pretend to see it as a town in which pleasure and habits, life and morals, are abnormal, different, and possibly opposite to those of all other places on earth. Such people have never seen--or, at any rate, never understood Paris. They have only seen the gay if somewhat professional, amusing if somewhat vulgar, mask the capital of France shows to most foreigners who do not trouble or who do not wish to see her real face. At the moment of the declaration of war this mask suddenly dropped, and Paris appeared to the few foreigners who were there at that time to be completely altered; anxiety instead of cynicism; patriotism instead of that curious pose of French people which makes them enjoy running down their rulers and reading about Government scandals.