ing, singing in a human fashion, whether
she is greeting winning generals or privates or is looking in at the
door of a chateau or a peasant's cottage.

An old race, the French, tried out through many victories and defeats
until a vital, indescribable quality which may be called the art of
living governs all emotions. Victory to the Germans 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 visitation, a reward of courage and kindly fortune and
the right to be the French in their own world and in their own way,
which to man or to State is the most justifiable of all rights.

Twice the heart of France had stood still in suspense, first on the
Marne and then at the opening onslaught on Verdun; and between the Marne
and Verdun had been sixteen months when, on the soil of their France and
looking out on the ruins of their villages, they had striven to hold
what remained 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 world expressed its surprise and admiration at
French courage France smiled politely, which is the way of France, and
in the midst of the shambles, as she strained every nerve, was a little
amused, not to say irritated, to think that Frenchmen had to prove again
to the world that they were brave.

Whether the son came from the little shops of Paris, from stubborn
Brittany, the valley of the Meuse, or the vineyards, war made him the
same kind of Frenchman that he was in the time of Louis XIV. and
Napoleon, fighting now for France rather than for glory as he 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 more they had to lose by
war, the less likely they were to be drawn into war, the more
resourceful and the more stubborn in defense they might
become--especially that younger generation of Frenchmen with their
exemplary habits and their fondness for the open air.

If France had been beaten at the Marne, notice would have been served o