ver-estimated, but because the French
operations received very scant notice. There are still people in
England who believe with a pious and passionate faith that our
soldiers sustained the entire and continual attack of the German
army, while the French looked on and thanked God for our work of
rescue. The fact that we only held a front of thirty miles, at most,
during the first nine months of war, and that the French were
successfully holding a line of five hundred miles through which the
Germans were trying to smash their way by repeated attacks of
ferocious character, never took hold of the imagination of many
honest souls at home, who thrilled with patriotic pride at the heroism
of the British troops, according to the old tradition of "How England
saved Europe."

4

Well, nothing will ever minimise our services to France. The graves of
our men will stand as records of the help we gave, paying our debt of
honour with priceless blood. But England must know what France did
in self-defence and understand the fine enduring heroism of those
armies of France which, after the first mistakes, built a wall of steel
against which the greatest fighting machine in Europe shattered itself
in vain.

Not a mile along all that five hundred miles of front was without its
battle, and not a mile there but is the grave of young Frenchmen who
fought with a martyr's faith and recklessness of life. As far back as the
last days of September 1914 I met men of the eastern frontier who
had a right already to call themselves veterans because they had
been fighting continuously for two months in innumerable
engagements--for the most part unrecorded in the public Press.

At the outset they were smart fellows, clean-shaven and even spruce
in their new blue coats and scarlet trousers. Now the war had put its
dirt upon them and seemed to have aged them by fifteen years,
leaving its ineffaceable imprint upon their faces. They had stubble
beards upon their chins, and their cheeks were sunken and hollow,
after short rations in the trenches and sleepless nights on the
battlefields, with death as their bedfellow. Their blue coats had
changed to a dusty grey. Their scarlet trousers had deep patches of
crimson, where the blood of comrades had splashed them. They
were tattered and torn and foul with the muck and slime of their
frontier work. But they were also hard and tough for the most part--
though here and there a man coughed wheezily with bro