of the crowd
came a pretty Frenchwoman and, understanding the man, though
she had not met him before, she held out her arms to him and raised
her face.

"Allons-donc, mon vieux!" she said. The man put his arms about her
and kissed her, while tears streamed down his face, covered in sweat
and dust. He was comforted, like a boy who had hurt himself, in his
mother's arms. It was a queer little episode--utterly impossible in the
imagination of an Englishman--but a natural thing in France.

So when a Frenchman lies dying, almost unconscious before the last
breath, it is always a woman's name that he cries out, or whispers,
though not always the name of his wife or mistress. One word is
heard again and again in the hospital wards, where the poilus lie,
those bearded fellows, so strong when they went out to the war, but
now so weak and helpless before death.

"Maman! Maman!"

It is to the bosom of motherhood that the spirit of the Frenchman
goes in that last hour.

"Oh, my dear little mamma," writes a young lieutenant of artillery, "it
would be nice to be in my own room again, where your picture hangs
over my bed looking down on the white pillows upon which you used
to make the sign of the Cross before I went to sleep. I often try to
dream myself into that bedroom again, but the cold is too intense for
dreams, and another shell comes shrieking overhead. War is nothing
but misery, after all."

3

Yet if any English reader imagines that because this thread of
sentiment runs through the character of France there is a softness in
the qualities of French soldiers, he does not know the truth. Those
men whom I saw at the front and behind the fighting lines were as
hard in moral and spiritual strength as in physical endurance. It was
this very hardness which impressed me even in the beginning of the
war, when I did not know the soldiers of France as well as I do now.

After a few weeks in the field these men, who had been labourers
and mechanics, clerks and journalists, artists and poets, shop
assistants and railway porters, hotel waiters, and young aristocrats of
Paris who had played the fool with pretty girls, were fined down to the
quality of tempered steel. With not a spare ounce of flesh on them--
the rations of the French army are not as rich as ours--and tested by
long marches down dusty roads, by incessant fighting in retreat
against overwhelming odds, by the moral torture of those rearguard
actions, and by th