eir first experience of indescribable horrors, among
dead and dying comrades, they had a beauty of manhood which I
found sublime. They were bronzed and dirty and hairy, but they had
the look of knighthood, with a calm light shining in their eyes and with
resolute lips. They had no gaiety in those days, when France was in
gravest peril, and they did not find any kind of fun in this war. Out of
their baptism of fire they had come with scorched souls, knowing the
murderous quality of the business to which they were apprenticed;
but though they did not hide their loathing of it, nor the fears which
had assailed them, nor their passionate anger against the people
who had thrust this thing upon them, they showed no sign of
weakness. They were willing to die for France, though they hated
death, and in spite of the first great rush of the German legions, they
had a fine intellectual contempt of that army, which seemed to me
then unjustified, though they were right, as history now shows. Man
against man, in courage and cunning they were better than the
Germans, gun against gun they were better, in cavalry charge and in
bayonet charge they were better, and in equal number irresistible.

There was in England a hidden conviction, expressed privately in
clubs and by women over their knitting, that the French soldiers were
poor fellows as fighting men, filled with sentimentality, full of brag,
with fine words on their lips, but with no strength of courage or
endurance. British soldiers coming back wounded from the first
battles and a three weeks' rearguard action, spread abroad the tale
that "those French fellows were utterly useless and had run like rabbits
before the German advance." They knew nothing but what they had
seen in their own ditches on the fighting ground, they were sick with
horror at the monstrous character of the war, and they had a rankling
grudge against the French because they had not been supported
strongly enough during those weeks in August between Charleroi
and Compiegne.

Later the English Press, anxious, naturally enough, to throw into high
relief the exploits of our own troops in France, and getting only scraps
of news from the French lines, gave a distorted view of the general
situation, and threw the whole picture of the war out of perspective,
like the image of a man in a convex mirror. The relative importance of
the British Expedition was vastly exaggerated, not because its
particular importance was o