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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
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