In the Gavarnie Valley, the Pyrenees

upon the turf. Far above the valleys, among the topmost pastures, above the fir-line close beside the snows, where throughout the summers graze the mountain herds, here now are found the women. Their dark-clad figures move sharply silhouetted against the glittering peaks. No sound is here. Far removed from noises of the valleys, from tumult of the towns, these vast and upper regions of the mountains wait silently beneath the dome of heaven. Perhaps a gurgle from a melting snow-bed may come, a note from deep-toned cowbell, an eagle's whir; but these intensify the stillness.

Women of the mountains, war's cloud is lifted from the heart of France; but yet a little while and to your hamlets in the valleys, to your cottages that nestle at the foot of giant crags, loved ones will return. Ahead lies not another winter such as those through which you have just passed. Soon heroes will be standing at your side, will be taking up again the work which five long years ago they entrusted to your hands. more will dreary months drag on.

No

No

alone within your barns. Those months to you seemed endless, to you cut off by snow from all the world. You were prisoners in your huts. Outside howled the winds, Snows mounted to your roofs. From windows, through the drifts, you cut alleys to get light; while always, as you toiled with spindle, shovel, even while questioning children clung about your knees and spluttering fires filled the dim interiors of your cottages with smoke, were you weighted down with apprehension, torn by hopes and fears and longings, waiting feverishly for news from husbands at the front.

In

As in Brittany, as in the Alps and the Pyrenees, so throughout all France today women do the work of men. cities this may not at once be evident, for cities appear as ever crowded with trousered folk. Troops throng the streets; the railroad stations of the major towns are jammed with military. Indeed, at stations one might think the work of women was now over. The platforms are no longer filled with waiting nurses, those never-wearying Red Cross nurses who throughout the war were to be found in every town in France, in every station, at all hours of the days and nights, ready for the trains of wounded, eager with their bandages, their stimulants, their pitchers of cold grenadin.

It is, however, when your train has left the towns and is steaming across country that the scarcity of men becomes apparent. At the rural villages the station folk are always women. Ouvriers have vanished. Baggage and freight are handled by young girls. The chef-de-gare is nowhere to be seen; in his place officiates an important-looking person in skirt and visored cap. On local locomotives soot-stained women in blue jeans shovel coal, and at stops come down to oil the drivers. Upon the passing country scarce a man is visible. One looks in vain for the blue-bloused tillers of the soil, the peasants with their darkblue bérets who before the war dotted thick the landscape. Their absence tells vividly the tale of conflict, how pitiless, how inexorable, has been the trenches'

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 cooliethat is all. Those upon whom France still depends for cultivation of the soil

are women.

In

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 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!"

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

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!"

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

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.

And

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. 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 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