STREET OF THE PRETTY HEART.
It might have been a street once, that shell-pocked thoroughfare, its cobbles piled awry, its curbing bitten out as though by the teeth of a stone-crunching giant. Scarcely one of the houses that lined it but had gaping shell-holes in walls, piles of clattered-down bricks before it, heaps of dust—all mute tokens of the devastation wrought by the enemy airmen during the raid of the night before. But, in the middle of that pathetic and ruined apology for a street the children were playing away, as merrily as if nothing at all had happened, shouting to one another in glee. And the name of that street—as the battered and half obliterated sign on the corner of the caved-in house at the end testified—was "Rue du Joli Coeur"—"Street of the Pretty Heart!"
The "Street of the Pretty Heart!" It is symbolic of the way France has borne her struggle, her devastation—with the heart-free, care-free spirit of childhood. One may crush, but not conquer, a race whose children can find happiness amid such surroundings, can abandon themselves to play under the very shadow of disaster. The "Street of the Pretty Heart"—in that title is the secret of triumph of the spirit over the powers of darkness, the secret of the triumph of the spirit of France over the malignant and evil genius of her arch enemy.