Down side-streets here and there were houses where other women lived, not so severe in their point of view. Their business, indeed, did not permit of severity, and they catered for the hunger of men exiled year after year from their own home-life and from decent womanhood. They gave the base counterfeit of love in return for a few francs, and there were long lines of men⁠—English, Irish, and Scottish soldiers⁠—who waited their turn to get that vile imitation of life’s romance from women who were bought and paid for. Our men paid a higher price than a few francs for the Circe’s cup of pleasure, which changed them into swine for a while, until the spell passed, and would have blasted their souls if God were not understanding of human weakness and of war. They paid in their bodies, if not in their souls, those boys of ours who loved life and beauty and gentle things, and lived in filth and shellfire, and were trained to kill, and knew that death was hunting for them and had all the odds of luck. Their children and their children’s children will pay also for the sins of their fathers, by rickety limbs and water-on-the-brain, and madness, and tuberculosis, and other evils which are the wages of sin, which flourished most rankly behind the fields of war.