day before Easter, 1918. It was the week of the beginning of the 
Hindenburg drive. Yet on that Saturday afternoon the boulevard 
in Tours was lined for a length of over half a mile with beautiful flowers 
which crowds of people were buying. There were hundreds if not 
thousands of lilacs forced in pots, forced I do not know how, for there 
was practically no wood or coal for artificial heat, but in quaHty they 
compared very favorably with lilacs that you see in the New York 
flower stores; there were also huge bunches of Golden Spur Narcis- 
sus being offered for sale with the bulb attached to the bottom of 
the stem, and big flats of pansies and forget-me-nots, carnations and 
other spring flowers. 
Curiously enough, the next time I saw fine flowers was again in a 
very critical period, about the first of June. For a week or more, the 
papers had been telling us about the glorious victories of the Allies 
and printing on the same page a map which each day showed the 
Germans to be nearer Paris. As a consequence no one believed the 
papers and there were constant terrible rumors in the air. On this 
particular Sunday, Paris papers had failed to come at all and imme- 
diately all the French people made up their minds that Paris had been 
captured by the Germans. I went that evening to call on a French 
family in the little village of Jonchery who had a really beautiful 
garden filled with all kinds of flowers. I found the two ladies of the 
family, who were by no means young, hoeing the garden, and as they 
greeted me they said "Well, if Paris has fallen, Paris has fallen; that 
does not mean that the war is over and we must continue to work in 
our garden." 
I would like to give you one more example of the French spirit 
of continuing gardening. For four and one-half years Emile Lemoine 
of Nancy, whose work you all know, lived subject to constant Ger- 
man air raids, never knowing at night whether he and his family 
would be killed in their beds before morning. For many months 
during this time he was within range of the shell fire of the German 
artillery. The Lemoine house bears marks on its plaster of fragments 
of a bomb which burst in front of it. Lemoine's sons were absent in 
the French army, but he and his wife continued to live there and to 
care for their plants and to ship them to America each year as in 
normal times. When I spoke to him about the war, his only comment 
was that the concussion of the anti-air craft guns had often broken 
the plants in the green houses. And then he turned to me and said: 
"Monsieur Wister, I am ashamed to show you my garden, it is so full 
of weeds." I am still wondering what manner of man it can be who 
can live through such a war almost on the verge of the German armies 
and really not knowing from month to month whether his city would 
be captured and suffer the fate of Belgium, and then calmly apologize 
14 
