In the great munition factories most of the
women wore mourning, too, and the eyes of many
were disturbingly like the eyes of the widow. It
was not easy at first to watch their slender, dark-clothed figures, their soft and pretty faces, bent
over tasks of preparing death and mutilation for
men. You wanted to turn straightway from the
contemplation of their deft fingers pouring shrapnel bullets into completed casings, or from the
easy skill with which they moulded and polished
ammunition. Then that look and the dryness of
their eyes stripped from their labour something
of its dreadful incongruity, gave to it a tinge
of justifiable revenge. And it was impressed upon the observer more than ever that in the fragile
hands of the women lies the power that some day may obliterate war.
It is this grim, matter-of-fact determination of both sexes, of all classes of the French, that arrests one. It is, in a sense, hypnotic. Even from the little boys playing at soldiering in the street it projects itself. For me it found its culmination in a review I watched one afternoon in the Place des Invalides.
Infantry, cavalry, and several batteries of the famous soixante-quinzes filled with sober colour the place where many times Napoleon reviewed his brilliant corps. Eyes wandered from the
