call upon the fields. A few old men driving carts,-carts drawn by horses so advanced in years as to have escaped the Government's requisitioning hand, -boys yet too young for service, returned wounded soldiers working with one arm, maybe a foreigner or two, a

In Arles, Provence

Spaniard, Hindu, or a Chinese coolie that is all. Those upon whom France still depends for cultivation of the soil are women. One sees women bending to the rake, swinging the scythe, tugging at the harrow. Here and there they drive the plow, struggling with handles, reins, and horse, and ox. deed, where horse and ox as well as men are few, women may themselves be seen in harness, bent double as they pull slowly and rigorously, overturning all too reluctant furrows.

In

In Normandy, where once the sturdy peasant men harvested the orchards and to the railroads drove their overflowing loads behind their stalwart horses, now horses and men have all but vanished. Beneath their hampers women stagger to the trains.

Mont-Saint-Michel rises wonderously as ever from the sands, but about her feet no longer wade the fishermen. Fishwives, with skirts rolled up, displaying lean, bare legs, with nets and baskets, now brave the water, risking quicksands and sudden tides.

Along Biscayan coasts, where surf and tide, uncaring for the petty strifes of men, ever cast on the rocks their harvests of the deep-sea kelp, men have

disappeared. With blowing skirts and bending backs women gather in the weed, spread it out to dry, rake it into piles, and set fire to them in order to obtain the iodine in the ashes the iodine needed for the armies and all too difficult to get in these days. Smoke pours off, hangs in haze along the shores. With cries the gulls sweep overhead. The air is filled with brine and smell of ocean. Here by the wild beaches and the rocks, were it not for the absence of the trousered folk, war, tragedy, and trenches, devastation, neutral zones, and armistice, treaties, armies of occupation, might be a dream.

It is in southern France perhaps that one most keenly realizes the loneliness of women. In Provence, that land of vineyards, olives, wealth of sunshine, laughter, fullness of life, men have melted quite away. The gay throngs of swarthy-skinned young figures, loosely clad, many with the square-cut, bushy, blue-black beards wholly Provençal in type, are no longer to be seen. In Arles, in Tarascon, in all Provence's quaint and medieval-looking towns, the streets lie silent, nigh devastated. Women only, some solitary, some in groups of twos and threes, make to and fro along the narrow, tortuous ways. At night all is still. Maybe a single-skirted figure goes about lighting a street lamp here and there. The clatter of her sabots echoes startlingly. The lamps throw inky shadows, unbroken by a passer-by.

Leave Arles, drive along the sunlit, dusty roads that wind among the miles of olive-groves or by the endless reaches of the vineyards, and you will behold only women. You will see them, with their overflowing hampers, gathering the grapes, their arms stained crimson to the elbows, or on ladders climbing amidst the olive-boughs. Lacking now are the joyous voices of bygone days. Earnestly they work away. Harvests must be taken in, life go on, but a stillness hangs about the gatherers, speaking all too eloquently of the yearnings of their hearts. And their coifscoifs of the Arlésiennes-is it that they seem no longer to flutter gaily as in days before the war?

"Ah, oui, monsieur," the bent old driver at your side remarks, nodding to your question, "the war is over. God be thanked! Nos braves garçons will soon again be here among the olives. Les Boches sont battus America be praised! Would that I, too, could have gone to fight the accursed race! But I am old, monsieur. My scar-1870-I got it in Alsace.

"Ah, oui, monsieur," clucking between words to his halting horse, muttering to it, "s'il vous plaît, s'il vous plaît," as though the nag were human-"ah, oui, monsieur, it is the women who have won the war as much as men. They have never given up, monsieur. They have never rested. Their harvests have not failed. And the sheep, monsieur, give always wool. Is it that monsieur has visited Les Saintes-Maries, and seen on the Camargue the women with their flocks? It is wild down there, monsieur. The mistral blows bitter cold, but always one may see the women and the flocks. They have courage to brave hardships, monsieur, more than men. And now at last leurs braves garçons come home!"

The old man pauses, clucking to his feeble nag. The road has passed the olives, vineyards, has dwindled now, and stretches on, a thin white line, into widening reaches of flat country. Windblown tamarisks are seen. Mares'-tails sweep the sky. A white flamingo rises from a bog. The old man speaks again.

"But all will not come home, monsieur. Some will stay away forever, and in the fields here that they left behind the women will work on alone. Que voulez-vous? La guerre! Toujours la guerre!"

self, St.-Etienne, Lyons, Bordeaux, Marseilles- are all alive with hurrying multitudes. Here the war, the armistice, and of late the long suspense until the final climax of the treaty, have combined rather to increase the busy throngs than to diminish them. But look more searchingly, and you will see these men upon the streets can be readily resolved into two main groups, far different from the great profusion of all classes in former days.

The first of these two groups is that of the business man-the merchant, manufacturer, the professional man, civil officialwho, either because of the importance to the town or nation of his work, or because of his advancing years, has been exempted from military service. The second group is that of the army itself. Soldiers choke the pavements, crowd the cafés, fill the trams and busses, march continually to and fro in squads and companies and regiments. There are young ones, still in training, seasoned veterans on furloughs, wounded ones with canes and crutches displaying the Croix de Guerre. And not only are they French, but men from every Allied nation. In Paris, now the melting-pot of all the world, in Bordeaux, Marseilles, where ships bring in and take away the troops from distant lands, all is a surge of uniforms, a mixture of strange tongues, kaleidoscopic blues and grays and khakis, glittering insignia. Beyond these major groups, the military and the somber civilian-clothed figures of the business folk, not many men are seen. The ouvriers, the porters, drivers, waiters, smaller shopkeepers, newsmen, peddlers, market folk, have dropped away, and as you look you suddenly discover, which at first, amidst the crowds of soldiers, you had not noticed, that all this humbler work is done by women. You realize with evergrowing keenness the part played by

IN the cities, as has been said, the work of women does not thrust itself upon one's notice as in the country. There seems no dearth of men in cities. The streets of the major towns-Paris her

tricians, repairing the arc lamps; others, painters, carpenters, and joiners, work with brush and saw and' hammer. Jills there are of all trades. In the market-places all are skirted folk.

Down by the wharves, however, the work of women is seen most clearly.

There by the long stone stretches of the quays, where ships from all the world load and discharge their troops and cargoes, the call of war on France's men is tellingly revealed. where once only French longshoremen could be seen, foreigners and women now abound. With mobile bodies, with faces, blouses, trousers, soiled and streaked with dust and perspiration, the women bend and swing and lift and haul and shovel. Beneath their hands the mounds of boxes, bags, and crates, the coal, drop into the yawning hulls, or, heaped upon the waiting drays, make off into the city.

city women in the winning of the Titan struggle.

Perhaps in no French town is this so evident as in Marseilles. There upon the Cannebière, amidst the hurly-burly of the trams and troops and drays; amidst all the foreign crowds that pour in and out the city's gates, the sailor folk that line the quays, darkskinned, yellow-skinned, turbaned, strangely pantalooned-there upon that broad and teeming boulevard that leads downward from the shadows of the Allées de Meilhan to the Vieux Port, with its masts and sails and old-time bowsprits, the women never rest. The shops that still are open are kept by women, for many have been closed, awaiting the return of men. In the cafés women serve the tables, serve the ever-crowding hosts of soldiers that throughout the war have replaced the dusky beauties of Provence who once with blackbearded escorts thronged the Cannebière. Women run the trams. The huge two-wheeled carts typical of Marseilles at least those that are left of them- are driven by the women. With axles creaking, the cumbrous drays, laden with sacks and vats and barrels from the wharves, follow their tandemharnessed horses. Ahead, beside the animals, the women run, swirling their long whips, crying out with all the gusto of the departed men. Girls sell papers. "Le Soleil!" they keep shouting shrilly, "Le Radical!" waving last editions in the air. Figures in short skirts, women in flapping trousers, bear giant loads upon their heads, carry kits of tools, long ladders. Some are elec

As you look upon the women, their ceaseless bending, lifting, straining, the brutality, the cruelty of war, presses close upon you. Why, you keep repeating, has not man yet found the way of living in the world in peace? Why did it have to be that the multitudes of France's manhood, the multitudes of strong young manhood of many lands, were called from work of ships and fields and cities, from work of normal happy lives, to be flung into the caldron of the trenches? Why did it have to be that women, surely not born for industrial toil, were summoned to give their men to battle, and with bleeding hearts to take upon themselves the work of men?