And no one but a thrifty French housewife could have contrived to get that wee round table and little chair into that tiny angle.
Yet I felt very cosy and comfortable there, and the old grey-haired French mother, preparing supper for her household, and for any soldier who might be passing by, seemed perfectly satisfied with her cramped surroundings, and kept begging me graciously to remain where I was, drinking the hot tea she had just made for me, while my boots (that were always wet out there) dried under her big charcoal stove. And always she smiled away; and I smiled too. Who could help it?
She and her kitchen were the most charming study imaginable.
Every now and then her fine, old, brown, thin, wrinkled hand would reach over my head for a pot, or a brush, or a pan, from the wall behind, or the shelf above me, while the other hand would stir or shake something over the wee gas-ring or the charcoal stove. For so small was the kitchen that by stretching she could reach at the same time to the wall on either side.
Then she began to pick over a pile of rough-looking green stuff, very much like that we in England should contemptuously call weeds.
Pick, pick, pick!
A diamond merchant with his jewels could not have been more careful, more delicate, more, watchful. And as I thought that, it suddenly came over me that to this old, careful, thrifty Frenchwoman those weedy greens were not weeds at all, but were really as precious as diamonds, for she was a Frenchwoman, clever and disciplined in the art of thrift, and they represented the most important thing in all the world to-day—food.
Food means life.
Food means victory.
Food means the end of the War, and PEACE.