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I doubt whether the political and military regeneration of Russia can be accomplished during the war except with external military help. But if that help can be given, the war of partisans now being carried on by Russians will assume a different character. It was the presence of Wellington's army in Spain that rendered both possible and efficacious the Spanish rising against Napoleon, because the dispositions of armies to wage a guerilla war, and those needed to meet organized armies, are wholly different and irreconcilable. When columns are broken up to fight partisans they become an easy prey to hostile armies, and when they are collected to fight these armies the partisans become masters of all the country around, cut off stragglers and supplies, and render the life of the invader intolerable. To the consideration of ways and means for carrying President Wilson's declared policy into effect American soldiers and sailors will no doubt give their most earnest attention, and I can only say that time presses, seasons are fleeting, and that all we Allies in Europe desire nothing better than to see Russia restored to her rightful position among the nations.

The Great Things.-I hope that Americans, looking across the ocean that unites rather than divides us, will see only the great things and take no notice of the little ones. The British Empire after nearly four years of war remains absolutely united and determined to prosecute the struggle till victory is achieved. We, looking across the water at you, see the same great things, a people united and resolute in effort to accomplish a great and unselfish purpose. We care nothing for the criticism which must fall on all administrations during the progress of such a war as this. We knew that you had to pass through all the difficulties that beset us. We welcome your sons and brothers as our own, trusting that they will learn, in the great comradeship of arms, to like us more as they know us better, and that mighty consequences, pregnant with good for the world, will come out of this terrible evil which has fallen upon humanity.

We appreciate with the deepest feelings of respect the high moral standard which your President has set up, his firm guidance in great affairs, and the grandeur of his conceptions. Far removed from the heat and dust of the conflict he sees clearly the magnitude of the issues at stake, and with penetrating and unfailing clearness of vision points out to us all the path of honour and of safety. These things, the leadership of your President and the energy and patriotism of your people, are exceedingly helpful to us and enable us to regard the future with confidence in the firm belief that America, having set her hand to this giant's task of overthrowing the most dangerous despotism that has ever threatened the world's peace, will never turn back nor faint by the way until her mission is accomplished. C. À C. REPINGTON

A VISION OF PARIS IN JUNE 1918

I

ON a fine summer's evening the Abbeville road is a pleasant one to travel. After leaving Doullens, by easy gradations and gentle stages it follows the meandering course of the River Authie, and for many a league accompanies that slow-flowing stream on its journey to the sea. Yes; after passing through heavily timbered meadows and skirting the edge of a forest it joins its undulating fortune to a wide and charming valley-that valley which to the Englishman cannot but recall the Vale of the Kennet and the stretch of the Bath Road between Newbury and Marlborough. This road of ours follows the northern slope, so that from a wooded gently falling hill-side you look across the well-timbered and cultivated vale-with occasional glimpses of the winding rivertowards a similar slope some two miles distant.

On this calm, hot, and somewhat hazy June evening the windings of the highway as a motor-car speeds along, the placid scenery, the white and pale grey villages grouped at intervals of three or four kilometres beneath tumbling woods, the lush green and rich yellow meadows, the contented grazing cattle, the quiet and peculiar wayside incidents, even the provoking call of the cuckoo occasionally heard all these are sheer fascination to a mind long attuned to the ceaseless banging and barking of batteries, the whistle of shells, and the infinitely wearisome sight of trenches, used, disused, and half-used. There is found in this glimpse of a landscape bathed in failing and dreamy sunshine, in this playing of the wind among graceful poplars and scintillating willows, a sense of infinite reaction, of curiosity, and of profound peace. You seem to enter a new world, and all things in it are fresh, clean, and beautiful. The life of the villages--though half asleep is surprising: so many people, so much doing! And how happy everybody looks! Here the cows being driven in to milking, there the children wandering home from school. Of course the soldiery are everywhere. At one place it is the Americans; at another the Army Service Corps or Air Service; somewhere else signs of cavalry; and then a great lorry park or tool depot. Here you have the band of one of the famous Welsh

1

regiments playing retraite in the village street, headed by its famous silky white billy-goat, which, led by the drum-major, provokes the unspeakable admiration of a vivacious crowd of onlookers.

Nor in the evening sunlight can one fail to admire the white, green-shuttered, and cool-looking châteaux which, surrounded by their lawns, orchards, and background of woodland, so numerously accompany the Abbeville road. These are not old, not in the smallest sense architecturally striking, yet somehow they greatly please the eye, seeming completely to belong to the leisurely and smiling aspect of that countryside. Nor is the highway without surprises. At Saint-Ricquier, for instance, one comes quite unwittingly upon a magnificent ornate Gothic church, rising immensely out of the trivial village, with its jackdaws, pigeons, a square piazza in front, and, clinging to it, some dim legend of the enthroned Joan of Arc. And almost immediately you are at Abbeville.

II

Abbeville station at ten o'clock of a sultry morning, waiting for the Paris express, is a busy place. All now is noise, clamour, and vociferous energy as might be expected of one of the chief railway centres behind the Western Front. A hooting of sirens, a blowing of horns, a backing in and out of long supplyand troop-trains, a shouting and a crying of railway officials, a wild bustling and wrestling with luggage, R.T.O.'s and the Mission Militaire. And what a crowd on the station platform! The uniforms of all the Allies seem to be here in one representative gathering and your photographer, your cinematographerwhere are they? Certainly the predominant note is khaki-the khaki of the heavy and solid English, the square, thick-set English with their unromantic, imperturbable calm of the Americans, lithe and slim, rather like keen commercial travellers, with nasal voices, odd cynical faces, and an air of being perpetually amused: of the Belgians, bearded, learned, new-looking, too new-looking according to our ideas, with their bright yellow boots and belts. The requisite dash of colour is found among the French officers, who in sky-blue of the smartest rush wildly hither and thither. And there are many poilus in steel helmets and rather battered uniforms going on permission or returning therefrom. On the platform opposite is a group of Portuguese in grey uniforms, whose dark sallow complexions speak of Oporto, orange-groves, and the sun-baked South. There are Australians and Canadians, quite another but equally well-known type, and standing by himself a little Japanese of the Staff. Behind all these the background of the crowd--the demure-looking V.A.D.'s, grip in hand, the severer hospital nurses. A motley collection, a curious spectacle in the fierce morning sunshine.

Then the Paris train comes in. The scene is indescribable-the confusion, the rushing to and fro, the perilous shifting of luggage on trucks, the blowing of horns and of whistles. In a first-class compartment are found a middle-class Frenchman and his wife, the owner of a factory and brickfield near the coast-a prosperous-looking couple with charming manners and execrable clothes-who are returning from a visit to their property; a reserved, white-haired civilian Englishman, for twenty years resident in Armentières as agent of a big British firm thoroughly commercial; a French jeune personne; and a British officer.

Through all that long and sultry day the train rolls on its circuitous way towards Paris-faster, mercifully, than of yore. First it touches the sea-and there our British officer gets out ---then turns inland, passing through a rather monotonous country whose broad marshy valleys, traversed by streams, are bounded by low and often wooded hills. The meadows are richly clothed with cowslips, buttercups, and marigolds, on the folding woods is a still spring-time green, the corn ripening visibly waves in the wind, whilst flippant magpies-those typical birds of Northern France-flit from tree to railway embankment and back again. The journey, though wearisome, is not without diversion. At déjeuner in the restaurant-car, a French infantryman sits opposite reading La Revue de Paris! (Can one imagine an English Tommy reading the Hibbert Journal ?) He has been gassed, this erudite fellow, in the fighting at Kemmel, has just been discharged from hospital, and is on a week's leave to his home in the Midi. Every hour or two the train stops at some station of mediocre importance, whereupon everybody clambers out to walk up and down, talking and smoking, beside the line.

At Abancourt many descend. At Beauvais the remainder make an exodus to the dining-car. In our compartment there remains a solitary young lady at once elegant, very pretty, mistress of her English, and willing to use it to the best advantage. And as afternoon wears into evening the journey becomes so burdensome that it is natural to fall into a conversation even though this attractive creature is obviously of the strictest and the most exclusive. At first the conversation is of books, of writers, of Napoleon (this girl's peculiar passion), of travel; then of affairs and of Life in general. There is to be found in this bloom of the French noblesse (at most twenty-one years old)-as in so many well-educated Frenchwomen to-day--that peculiar blend of hard and matter-of-fact worldliness and common sense with the exquisiteness, the spirituelle, the semi-detachment, the almost fatalism of the still first and proudest class in Europe.

This sentiment, for instance: "With the shams, the teaparty ladies, the bazaar ladies, the ladies whose work is done in

motor-cars, self-advertisement, and rushing from place to place--with these I have no patience." (In the mid-Victorian era she would have stamped her foot.) 'We have no time for such

people. There is work and for everybody."

She speaks with conviction. For two solid years she has buried herself in a bleak sand-dune village on the sea-coast, doing the routine work of a French hospital, and during that time only once revisiting her home. It is her first visit to Paris for twelve months, now she is going to buy her trousseau for the wedding with an Englishman. Here is one who in spite of all has never lost her character of the Parisienne-her instinct for wonderful clothes, her passion for the ballroom and for dancing, for the life of restaurants and theatres, for gaiety, for being amusing and being amused. Yes, this young lady (unlike the world in general) has preserved her intuition-her sense of humour, of tragedy, of delicacy, and of discrimination. She can laugh with Dickens and with Pickwick, cry with Turgenev, satirize with Wilde, adore Loti, talk well of Kipling, like Jan Hay, condemn imperiously Balzac, Zola, and the materialists; she can englamour her Napoleon, she can defend her Clemenceau, and discuss (with conviction) the politics of France, of England, and of Europe. And she can tell you exactly how many glasses of champagne a well-behaved young lady can imbibe without showing the effect!

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Your Englishwoman pales by comparison, not for lack of ability, but by her insularity, her lack of a point of view, and of the "cosmopolitan sense. She is interested in her luncheon, but the other is interested in literature-and champagne. And on a long railway journey these latter often carry one farthest.

But there is a view-point which seems to unite the young femininity of all aristocracies of all races of all generations!

"Ah, one's family! They are impossible! With them it is always the same. It does not matter whether I wear open-work stockings, wish to stay late at a ball, or choose for myself a husband-they raise a scandal no matter. And always one must be attended. Now I go to face them and I know there will be a scene. My father, he won't be so bad, but my maman . . .! It is not she who is going to marry; it is I who am going to settle myself for life, and surely I may choose the man. But one's familythey are impossible!"

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Paris in the gathering dusk of a sultry June evening. The German armies are forty miles away. . . . Is there any sign of this in the roar and bustle of the Gare du Nord, in the whirl of humanity that seems to press convulsively without, in the surging tide that sweeps through the swing doors and besieges every mode of conveyance and

VOL. LXXI

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