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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 their 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.