This book is fiction written in France out of a life-long familiaritywith the French and two years' intense experience in war work in France.It is a true setting-forth of personalities and experiences, French andAmerican, under the influence of war. It tells what the war has done tothe French people at home. In a recent letter, the author said, "What Iwrite is about such very well-known conditions to us that it is hard toremember it may be fresh to you, but it is so far short of the actualconditions that it seems pretty pale, after all."
PUBLISHER'S NOTE
NOTES FROM A FRENCH VILLAGE IN THE WAR ZONE
THE PERMISSIONAIRE
VIGNETTES FROM LIFE AT THE REAR
A FAIR EXCHANGE
THE REFUGEE
A LITTLE KANSAS LEAVEN
EYES FOR THE BLIND
THE FIRST TIME AFTER
HATS
A HONEYMOON ... VIVE L'AMERIQUE!
LA PHARMACIENNE
BY DOROTHY CANFIELD
BY SIMEON STRUNSKY
BY MARGARET WIDDEMER
By ROMAIN ROLLAND
Perhaps the first thing which brought our boys to a halt, and a long,long look around them, was the age of the place. Apparently it has—thestatement is hardly exaggerated—always been there. As a matter ofhistorical fact it has been there for more than a thousand years. Onhearing that, the American boys always gasped. They were used to theconception of the great age of "historical" spots, by which they meantcities in which great events have occurred—Paris, Rome,Stratford-on-Avon, Granada. But that an inconsiderable settlement of athousand inhabitants, where nothing in particular ever happened beyondthe birth, life, and death of its people, should have kept its identitythrough a thousand years gave them, so they said, "a queer feeling." Asthey stood in the quiet gray street, looking up and down, and taking inthe significance of the fact, one could almost visibly see their mindsturning away from the text-book idea of the Past as an unreal, sparselysettled period with violent historical characters in doublet and ruff orchain mail thrusting broadswords into one another or signing treatieswhich condemned all succeeding college students to a new feat of memory;you could almost see their b