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it is worth while repeating them here.

She had observed that although Clemenceau had always been one of the bitterest enemies of the Second Empire, she could willingly embrace him now, so magnificently had he served France in the hour of her greatest need. Nevertheless she considered he had made a great mistake in not waiving, for the moment, his anti-clericalism, and attending the recent eelebration of the Armistice at Notre Dame. "It would have been a grand lesson," she exclaimed, "in union and moderation," and went on to point out that he could still retrieve his error by attending the similar celebration that was shortly to be held in Strassburg Cathedral. Here Mr Steed asked her if he might give M. Clemenceau a message to that effect? but she said, "Non je suis morte en 1870." A few days later Mr Steed repeated her words, though 8 message, to M. Clemenceau, who remarked: "Well, she will be disappointed again; I shall not attend that celebration in Strassburg Cathedral!" But he did; and what is more, in publicly recounting his impressions of the ceremony, he told how he had seen a little old nun softly singing the Marseillaise under her ooif, "which," he added, "is a lesson to all of us in moderation and unity." He may, as Mr Steed remarks, have forgotten the Empress's words, but

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That day Mr Steed brought down with him a copy of Le Journal. In it was a picture of a woman and her little boy, standing beside one of the many battle crosses that were the only orop I saw in the north of France after the war; and the little boy is saying: "Mère, est-ce que père sait que nous sommes vainqueurs?" The paper was lying on a sidetable, and I called the Empress's attention to the picture, reading aloud the text, which I knew her dim eyes could not decipher. I shall never forget how she gripped my arm in her amazingly strong fingers, and, looking aoress the park towards the Mausoleum, whispered: "Je l'ai bien dit aux miens là-bas!"

Another vivid recollection of mine is the account given me a few weeks previously in Paris by her friend and dentist, M. Hagenschmitt, of the celebrated letter written to her after Sedan by the King of Prussia, which letter she passed on during the late war to the Archives of France. It was in reply to one from her, in which she had implored him, for the sake of future peace, not to make the mistake of annexing Alsace-Lorraine; and the point is, that, far from looking on these provinces as ancient German territory, which was the claim put up in later years by the Germans, the King wrote, that if they should decide to annex French territory, it would not be from any desire to enlarge Germany, "which," he adds, "is large enough already," but in order to guarantee themselves against

future attack by France. Knowing that Clemenceau was one of M. Hagenschmitt's patients, the Empress bade him take a copy of the letter to show the Minister, who at once saw the immense importance of the document, and begged that the original might be deposited in the Archives.

Together with that letter were others from the Emperors of Russia and Austria, which M. Hugenschmitt was also permitted to read; and in returning the packet to the Empress he asked if he might take copies of these as well. "They are a wonderful justification of your Majesty," he added. But the Empress snatched the parcel from him, saying: "I will have nothing said or done in my own justification. I have long ceased to care about that." And nothing that M. Hugenschmitt could say would move her from that position.

When I came home I spoke of all this to the Empress, who confirmed it in every detail, adding: "I told Hugenschmitt to impress upon M. Clemenceau that I gave up the letter, not to the Government, but to France... that I wished it put in the Archives . . . and that if he chose to use it, I could not prevent him!" Watching her proud face, the flash of her eyes, that at such moments seemed undimmed, the incredible transformation of an old into a young woman that always happened when she was deeply moved, I could not help

wondering if M. Clemenceau would catch the nuance of that message....

Afterwards the conversation veered in the direction of William II., who, it may be remembered, had paid her a surprise visit in her yacht years ago, somewhere in the North Sea. She remarked that he had obviously taken pains to make that visit an agreeable one... and succeeded. I reminded her of what she had said to him, almost as farewell word: "For the sake of the principle of monarchy don't upset any more thrones!" and we spoke of the downfall of his own throne, utterly without what the Germans call "Schadenfreude on her part, that is, pleasure in the misfortunes of others. Speaking of revolutions in general, not of 1870 in particular, she said: "It is not that your enemies dethrone you... o'est que le vide se fait autour de vous;" and I thought of what Napoleon had written about the battle of Waterloo-"tout d'un coup je me trouvais seul sur le champs de bataille. . . ." That same

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day she had been reading the account of the cheering of our King at Buckingham Palace : "It is the most intoxicating sound mortal ears can hear," she said, . . . and then her face changed suddenly . . . "and no one who has not heard it can realise the horror of its pendant . . . the roar of a crowd that has only one desire to tear you to pieces.”

(To be concluded.)

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"WHEN Allah made the slow processions of eattle desert, he laughed." So say heming to the byre-wildthe Arabs, but he who has looking, mud-streaked, black seen the Waziri frontier, with buffaloes, with staring china its arid summers of blinding blue eyes, and slim white dust storms and scorching exen, under the charge of heat; its bleak killing winters, keen-eyed unwashen urchins; when the biting gales from the while to east of you the pinebare grey hillsides sweep down elad Murree hills fade into the tangis across the ice of the purple haze of the eventhe nullah-beds,-must wonder ing sky. what Allah said when he made Waziristan.

Thus, indeed, did I wonder when first I came to this land of desolation, and, with the Arabs, thought of of Allah's laugh as he made such places -a sardonic, cynical, mooking laugh-the laugh of a Maheud squatting astride a helpless wounded man as he twists the knife in slowly, for my soul was bitter within me.

I passed in time by devious paths and many, by roads of fatigue and tracks of pain, and came in the end to a reading which pleased me better, and think that my soul Was somewhat healed thereby. If you, oh reader, care to follow these pages, you shall see, with such skill as I can portray them, the scenes and paths we passed.

If you take train at Pindi, you crawl out slowly through the rich cultivation of the Panjab with its teeming villages and fertile fields, its

You awake in the morning in a new country, the rolling sea of cactus - strewn sanddunes which is the divide between the Western Punjab and the North-West Frontier Province, that feound land of Romance for the Indian novelist.

If you are young and all athirst for war and glory, you hang out of the oarriage windows as the train passes the little wayside stations, with their bastioned loopholed keeps; and oraning your gaze to the far horizon, where, amarynth against the cobalt background, a fringe of sharp-toothed mountains stabs the sky, rejoice your soul at your first view of the Promised Land of the frontier.

If, however, you are older and war-weary, as many of us are now, you look out in the cold dawn air at the distant hills, and murmuring "same old fly-blown frontier,"

snuggle up in your blankets again. You think of your last leave, years and years ago, hope for your next one, and ourse army headquarters for sending you to grill and freeze on the border hills, when your only prayer is for leave, long leave, to the flesh-pots of home or the bliss of an old puttoo suiting in a smiling dreamy Kashmir valley, with the iris all abloom and the snows of Haramukh rose - pink above the Wular.

Later in the morning you sort yourself out, and, either on horse or afoot if you be with a regiment, or in a tonga if you be a "reinforcement," or in a car if you be 8 distinguished globe-trotter or merely a common hired assassin returning from leave with a friend on the staff, you take the road to Mahsudland. You hie you from Darya Khan, along miles of low-lying sandy road to where, across the rapid streams of the Indus, a little oasis in a dusty, thirsty land, lies Dera Ismail Khan, "Dreary Dismal," Queen of the Derajat, a olump of scented rose-gardens and green lawns fringed with feathery palms.

This is a new country, you realise, even merely from the fresh types you see and the speech you hear-from the fact that the police go armed, and the men wear "chaplis" (leather sandals) rather than shoes.

Also you know it when your car is halted at the swaying boat-bridges, to let the long Afghan powindah caravans pass-great shaggy camels laden with the with the skins and

fleece and merchandise of Bokhara, led by bushy-bearded burly men in baggy trousers, with the ruddy complexions of Italian mountaineers or fairskinned strapping women in shapeless black overall garments and braided hair.

From Dera Ismail you drive your forty miles into Tank, along a dusty white tree-lined road, dead flat all the way. On one side of it now runs the little Decauville railway, with its two-foot gauge toytrains puffing along at eight miles an hour, truck after truck heaped high with bales of bhoosa for the transport animals, or sacks of atta for the troops, and 8 drowsy guard of sepoys in the rear truck.

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Mile after mile of glaring flat, sandy riveraine country, but ohanging nathless as you go, for the powindahs are more often armed, each man's belt orammed with cartridges; the villages are walled, and here and there have high watch-towers, with look-outs, and ever the hills in front draw nearer, grow higher, more menacing. last, passing Hathala restcamp, with its sandbagged picquets and its barbed wire, you realise that you really are in the "daman," the comparatively rich flat country at the foot of the hills, where the Mahsud and the Wazir olaim, as their hereditary right, the privilege of raiding a night's run from the hills.

The government of the Punjab, whether Moghul, Sikh, or British, has continuously disputed this claim; while Mahsud

and Wazir alike contend equally continuously their age-old right to raid, punotuating their claim with stark oorpse, blood-trail, and flaming thatch all up and down the Derajat. Consequently this year of grace 1919, when the Big Four sit at Versailles to conjure up the millennium, sees us, the P.B.I., out again on the edge of empire trying to impress on the sceptical Pathan the beauty or, failing the beauty, the stern necessity of peace. Peace, however, implies the Pathan's refraining from outting the throat of the Derajat villager merely because he tills better land and owns more cattle than that shiftless anachronism, the frontier tribesman. A hard task when the said seeptical Pathan knows that the week's work spent in a successful raid will set him beyond the need of work for a couple of years or 80. When he knows further that once back in his foothills he is safe from all retribution, save after every twenty or thirty years, when his accumulated misdeeds cause long-suffering India to turn out a punitive force, it is small wonder that he prefers raiding to honest toil.

The evening sees you in Tank, a dusty, uncomfortable wired camp sprung up around the nucleus of the old Militia post and the political bungalows. You drive in over the level crossing where the main line from Kalabagh enters, for the toy railway from Dera Ismail Khan is only a subsidiary route, of much diminished value when the

Indus floods down from the melting snows in the het weather and the boat-bridges have to go.

Tank is a city in the plain, well into raiderland, and if you are new to the game you may lie awake and listen to the "Barder," as the frontier constabulary are locally called, firing at raiders-or shadows

and the picquets loosing off Very lights, or chucking bombs to keep up their spirits.

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Next morning sees you away in a car (always postulating your high globe trotting estate, or the existence of that useful friend on the staff) down the metalled highway to Kaur Bridge, where the Gumal road runs through Murtaza into the hills, the dereliot piers of the unfinished bridge marking the present limits of the Pax Britannica, somewhat a shadowy pax this year, alas! Then you turn up the slope righthanded to Manzai, another wired camp, now advanced Headquarters of the Waziristan force, telegraphically addressed 88 "Wazirforce," and described by the irreverent as "Was-a-force."

The frequent roadside picquets, and the little Ford Vannette Lewis gun patrols with their big brothers, the armoured cars, threading their way through the long straggling fleets of motor transport which run between the railhead at Kaur Bridge and Khirgi, show that you really are on the frontier; and looking to your left, you see nestling at the foot of the hills Girni Post, which not so long

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