The Living Present | Page 3

other big brown envelopes and drove over to the
Ministère de la Guerre. I explained my predicament. Would they seal it
with the formidable seal of the War Office and write Propagande
across it? Of course if they wished I would leave my garnerings for a
systematic search. They merely laughed at this unusual evidence on my
part of humble patience and submission. The French are the acutest
people in the world. By this time these preternaturally keen men in the
War Office knew me better than I knew myself. If I had, however
unconsciously and in my deepest recesses, harbored a treacherous

impulse toward the country I so professed to admire and to desire to
serve, or if my ego had been capable of sudden tricks and perversions,
they would long since have had these lamentable deformities, my
spiritual hare-lip, ticketed and docketed with the rest of my dossier.
As it was they complied with my request at once, gave me their
blessing, and escorted me to the head of the stair--no elevators in this
great Ministère de la Guerre and the Service de Santé is at the top of the
building. I went away quite happy, more devoted to their cause than
ever, and easy in my mind about Bordeaux--where, by the way, my
trunks were not opened.
Therefore, that remarkable experience in France is altogether still so
vivid to me that to write about it reportorially, with the personal
equation left out, would be quite as impossible as it is for me to refrain
from execrating the Germans. When I add that during that visit I grew
to love the French people (whom, in spite of many visits to France, I
merely had admired coolly and impersonally) as much as I abominate
the enemies of the human race, I feel that the last word has been said,
and that my apology for writing what may read like a memoir, a
chronicle of personal reminiscences, will be understood and forgiven.
G.A.

=THE LIVING PRESENT=
I
MADAME BALLI AND THE "COMFORT PACKAGE"
One of the most striking results of the Great War has been the
quickening in thousands of European women of qualities so long
dormant that they practically were unsuspected. As I shall tell in a more
general article, the Frenchwomen of the middle and lower bourgeoisie
and of the farms stepped automatically into the shoes of the men called
to the colors in August, 1914, and it was, in their case, merely the
wearing of two pairs of shoes instead of one, and both of equal fit. The

women of those clearly defined classes are their husbands' partners and
co-workers, and although physically they may find it more wearing to
do the work of two than of one, it entails no particular strain on their
mental faculties or change in their habits of life. Moreover, France
since the dawn of her history has been a military nation, and generation
after generation her women have been called upon to play their
important rôle in war, although never on so vast a scale as now.
Contrary to the prevailing estimate of the French--an estimate formed
mainly from sensational novels and plays, or during brief visits to the
shops and boulevards of Paris--the French are a stolid, stoical, practical
race, abnormally acute, without illusions, and whose famous ebullience
is all in the top stratum. There is even a certain melancholy at the root
of their temperament, for, gay and pleasure loving as they are on the
surface, they are a very ancient and a very wise people. Impatient and
impulsive, they are capable of a patience and tenacity, a deep
deliberation and caution, which, combined with an unparalleled mental
alertness, brilliancy without recklessness, bravery without bravado,
spiritual exaltation without sentimentality (which is merely perverted
animalism), a curious sensitiveness of mind and body due to
over-breeding, and a white flame of patriotism as steady and dazzling
as an arc-light, has given them a glorious history, and makes them, by
universal consent, preëminent among the warring nations to-day.
They are intensely conservative and their mental suppleness is quite as
remarkable. Economy is one of the motive powers of their existence,
the solid pillars upon which their wealth and power are built; and yet
Paris has been not only the home and the patron of the arts for centuries,
but the arbiter of fashion for women, a byword for extravagance, and a
forcing-house for a thousand varieties of pleasure. No race is so
paradoxical, but then France is the genius among nations. Antiquity,
and many invasions of her soil have given her an inviolable solidity,
and the temperamental gaiety and keen intelligence which pervades all
classes have kept her eternally young. She is as far from decadence as
the crudest community in the United