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Then we crowded into a third-class carriage filled with soldiers permissionnaires, blessés, réformés, men from all corners of France and her colonies. Their uniforms were faded and weather-stained with long service. The stocks of their rifles were worn smooth and bright with constant usage, and their packs fairly stowed themselves upon their backs.
Poor women far from Paris, where, at least, thousands of these permissionnaires linger for a few hours on their way home, toil all night over their letters to men for whom they conceive a profound sentiment but never can hope to see. Shop girls save their wages and lady's maids pilfer in a noble cause.
And I recall one pathetic sight which I witnessed by accident the arrival of one of the long trains from the front bringing back the first "permissionnaires" those soldiers who had been given a three or four days' leave after nine months in the trenches.
As the young men of the aristocracy and haute bourgeoisie have lost more and more of their old friends they have replaced them with men they like for good masculine reasons alone, and these they have taken to bringing home, when permissionnaires at the same time. Nothing can be more certain than that girls, once haughty and exacting, will marry these young men and be glad to get them.
We appeared to forget the war, but we didn't, for it was in the background of all our minds. Somewhere in the north there was raging a desperate fight, and its issue was the true test of our success or failure. Mary showed it by bidding me ask for news at every stopping-place. I asked gendarmes and Permissionnaires, but I learned nothing. Nobody had ever heard of the battle.
It is true that these men at the front are heroes in the eyes of their women, worshiped by the majority when they come home briefly as permissionnaires, and it is also true that France is an old military nation and that the brain-cells of its women are full of ancestral memories of war.
Here is conducted all the correspondence with the agents in other cities, here come thousands of letters and presents by every mail to be forwarded to the Front, and here come the grateful and hopeful permissionnaires, who never depart without a present and sometimes leave one, generally an ingenious trinket made in the trenches.
And she had her own ouvroir "L'Aide Immédiate" for providing things for the permissionnaires, who came to the door and asked for them. She ran, with a committee of other ladies, a café in Paris, where the permissionnaires or the réformés could go and have their afternoon coffee and smoke all the cigarettes that their devoted patrons provided.
When the combats that gave the Bois-le-Prêtre its sinister nickname began to peter out, the poilus who had done the fighting were accorded these little vacations, and almost every afternoon the straggling groups of joyous permissionnaires were seen on the road between the trenches and the station.
A large crowd of permissionnaires had left the train with us. We were not at ease among these men, many of them well along in middle life, bent and streaming with perspiration under their heavy packs.
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