the French. In
general it is not flattering. Though I don't sympathize at all with
the boys in this feeling toward the French, whom I love, yet I see
perfectly how it has come about. It springs from the limitations of
both nations. Our boys are terribly homesick and restless. Separated
by time and distance from their country, they have come to glorify it
even more than it deserves. Coming for the most part from thriving
towns and farms, accustomed to work, but with the most modern
appliances, they are disgusted by the lack of sanitation and the
primitive methods of the peasants in these tiny old villages. It is
the contempt of young, pressing, large-scale methods of getting
results, for ancient, tranquil ways. It is our fierce elimination of
waste versus their huge quantity of tiny savings. Nor is our
efficiency more materialistic than this French thrift, though each
appears sordid to the other. We are different, that is all. We are
both greedy.

And then our soldiers meet mostly the worst sort of French girl, which
gives them a bad impression of the country. Also, the French are
making money off of us for all they are worth. Not the authorities,
perhaps, but the people, in all their transactions. It is, in truth,
rather disgusting and ungrateful of them, but perfectly inevitable
after the glowing descriptions of the wealth of America which they
continually hear, and since our boys _will_ pay almost anything for
what they want, and since they are foolish enough to buy tawdry and
worthless souvenirs by the thousands at ridiculously high prices.

And then again, we _never_ see an example of fine, strong, and young
French manhood. We see the poor old tottering men and the degenerate.
Once in a while a French soldier comes through town, and he is usually
a poor specimen. We forget that our towns would be equally desolate if
we had been at war four years.

It is difficult for this army of simple, honest, normal boys to
imagine what they have not seen. Also the weather gets on everybody's
nerves. You are inclined to despise anybody so poor-spirited as to
settle down and live in such a climate. This continuous, everlasting,
never-ending cold rain taxes your temper to the limit. And yet, many
very sweet friendships have sprung up between our soldiers and the old
women in whose houses they are billeted, their "French mothers" as
they call them. And I feel perfectly sure that when they all get home
and the dream of America ha