My Second Year of the War

heart of France stood still-The bravery of the race-Germany's mistaken estimate of France-Why the French will fight this war

the other side of a certain dividing road where French and British transpor

ld hand in the chateau where General Foch directed the Northern Group of French Ar

ter of method I am inclined to think. If they have limited quarters there is no room for the intrusion of an

iates with the French military type. He simplified victory, which was the result of the same arduous preparation as on the British side, with a single gesture as he swept his pencil acro

subordinates in a co?rdinated execution; and I should meet the men who had carried out his plans, from artillerists who had blazed the way to infa

ore he could understand what was in the heart of the French after their drive on the Somme. I imagined that day that I was a Frenchman. By proxy

ation. I had the feeling that the pulse of every citizen in France had quickened a few beats. All the peasant women as they walked along the road stood a little straighter

vation through their sacrifice, and their relief was so profound that to the outsider they seemed hardly like the French in their stoic gratitude. This

to be present. They make victory no raucous-voiced, fleshy woman, shrilly gloating, no superwoman, cold and efficient, who considers it her right as a superior being, but a grac

mans could not mean half what it would to the French. The Germans had expected victory and had organized for it for years as a definite goal in their ambitions. To the French it was a v

d to them. They had been the great martial people of Europe and because Napoleon III. tripped them by the fetish of the Bonaparte name in '70, people thought that they were no longer martial. This puts the world in the wrong, as it implies that success in war is the test of greatness. When the

e did in Napoleon's time; a man cured of the idea of conquest, advanced a step farther than the stage of the conqueror, and his courage, though slower to respond to wrath, the finer. He had proven that the more highly civilized a people, the more content and the

thrift and refinement mean enervation. We should have believed in the alarmists who tal

realize that they must first destroy the French Army as the continental army most worthy of their steel and, at the same time, they could not convi

, was that he would have no peace that was given-only a peace that was yielded. France would win by the strength of her manhood or she would die. When the war

re bluest over reports of the retreat from the Marne or losses at Verdun they had no thought of making terms. Depression merely meant that they would all have to succumb without winning. Thus, after the weary stalling and r

re concrete, sometimes correct but usually incorrect; and all that the women and the old men and the children at home could do was to keep on with the work. And this they did; it is in

alley of the Somme. He swung his hand toward the waving fields of grain, the villages and plots of woods, as the train flew along t

ke some of Germany i

em do as they please with what is their own. They are brave

each to survive through all the centuries has been by force of arms and, after the Marne and Verdun, the Somme put the seal on the French privilege to survive. If there be any hope of true internationalism among the continental peoples I think that it can rely on the Frenchman, who only wants to make the mos

man seems the most soldierly of men; again, a superficial observer might wonder if the French Army had any real discipline. And there, again, you have French temperament; the old civilization that has defined itself in

democracy. An officer may talk with a private soldier and the private may talk back because of French politeness and equality, which yield fellowship at one moment and the next slip back into the bonds of discipline which, by consent of public opinion, have tightened until they are as strict as in Napoleon's day. Gregariousness was supreme on this day

to the trenches seems not to have any particular order, but when it goes over the parapet in an attack it has the essence of military spirit which is co?rdination of action. No two French soldiers seem quite alike on the march or when moving about a village on leave.

; other races lack the quality which it expresses, a quality which you get in the wave of a hand from a peasant girl to a passing

the word, movement, for the blue river of men and transport along the roads to the front. We were back to the "war of movement" for the