tubborn disgust, for German soldiers look as if they despised
you, but French soldiers as if they despised you and themselves even
more than you. It is a part, I suppose, of the realism of the nation
which has made it good at war and science and other things in which what
is necessary is combined with what is nasty. And the soldiers and the
civilians alike had most of them cropped hair, and that curious kind of
head which to an Englishman looks almost brutal, the kind that we call a
bullet-head. Indeed, we are speaking very appropriately when we call it
a bullet-head, for in intellectual history the heads of Frenchmen have
been bullets--yes, and explosive bullets.

.....

But there was a second reason why in this place one should think
particularly of the open-air politics and the open-air art of the
French. For this town of Belfort is famous for one of the most typical
and powerful of the public monuments of France. From the cafe table at
which I sit I can see the hill beyond the town on which hangs the high
and flat-faced citadel, pierced with many windows, and warmed in the
evening light. On the steep hill below it is a huge stone lion, itself
as large as a hill. It is hacked out of the rock with a sort of gigantic
impression. No trivial attempt has been made to make it like a common
statue; no attempt to carve the mane into curls, or to distinguish
the monster minutely from the earth out of which he rises, shaking the
world. The face of the lion has something of the bold conventionality
of Assyrian art. The mane of the lion is left like a shapeless cloud of
tempest, as if it might literally be said of him that God had clothed
his neck with thunder. Even at this distance the thing looks vast, and
in some sense prehistoric. Yet it was carved only a little while ago.
It commemorates the fact that this town was never taken by the Germans
through all the terrible year, but only laid down its arms at last at
the command of its own Government. But the spirit of it has been in
this land from the beginning--the spirit of something defiant and almost
defeated.

As I leave this place and take the railway into Germany the news comes
thicker and thicker up the streets that Southern France is in a flame,
and that there perhaps will be fought out finally the awful modern
battle of the rich and poor. And as I pass into quieter places for the
last sign of France on the sky-line, I see the Lion of Belfort stand at
bay, the last si