England, what would they be in France? This was the question I repeatedly put to myself. But when I got to France a surprise awaited me.

   It was a surprise deferred, because for the first week of my sojourn upon French soil I was the guest of the British military authorities at a château maintained for the entertainment of visiting Americans who bore special credentials from the British Foreign Office.

   Here, because Britain took such good and splendid care to provide amply for her men in uniform, there was a wide variety of good food and an abundance of it for the guests and hosts alike. I figured, though, that when I had passed beyond the zone of this gracious hospitality there would be slim pickings. Not at all!

   In Paris there was to be had all the food and nearly all the sorts of food any appetite, however fastidious, might crave. This was before the French borrowed the card system of ration control in order to govern the consumption of certain of the necessities. Of poultry and of sea foods the only limits to what one might order were his interior capacity and his purse. Of red meats there was seemingly a boundless supply.

   One reason for this plenitude lay in the fact that France, to a very great extent, is a self-contained, self-supporting land, which England distinctly is not; and another reason undoubtedly was that the French, being more frugal and careful than their British or their American brethren ever have been, make culinary use of a great deal of healthful provender which the English-speaking races throw away. Merely by glancing at the hors d'œuvres served at luncheon in a medium-priced café in Paris one can get a good general idea of what discriminating persons declined to eat at dinner the night before.

   The Parisian garbage collector must work by the day and not by the job. On a piecework contract he would starve to death. And a third reason was that all through the country the peasants, by request of the Government, were slaughtering their surplus beeves and sheep and swine, so there might be more forage for the army horses and more grain available for the flour rations of the soldiers.

   In Paris the bread was indifferently poor. An individual was restricted to one medium-sized roll of bread at a meal. Butter was not by any means abundant, and of sugar there was none to be had at all unless the traveller had bethought him to slip a supply into the country with him. The bulk of the milk supply was requisitioned for babies and invalids 

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