bullets.  Was it the enemy?  They were coming at right angles to the French lines.  The foremost were even within twenty yards of him now.  His nerves were all trembling.  He broke out into a hot sweat.  His eyes straining through the darkness were shot through with pain.  He had almost an irresistible desire to fire and shout out, so as to end the strain of suspense which racked his soul.  At last he gave the challenge, restraining himself from firing that first shot.  It was well he did so.  For the advancing French troops belonged to a French regiment changing their position under cover of darkness.  If my little friend had lost his nerve and fired too soon they would have been shot down by their own comrades.

“It’s one’s imagination that gives one most trouble,” he said, and I thought of the words of an English officer, who told me one day that “No one with an imagination ought to come out to this war.”  It is for that reason—­the possession of a highly developed imagination—­that so many French soldiers have suffered more acutely than their English allies.  They see the risks of war more vividly, though they take them with great valour.  They are more sensitive to the sights and sounds of the fighting lines than the average English “Tommy,” who has a tougher temperament and does not allow his mind to brood over blood and agony.  They have the gift, also, of self-analysis and self-expression, so that they are able to translate their emotions into vivid words, whereas our own men are taciturn for the most part about their side of the business and talk objectively, looking outwards, and not inwards.

5

Some of the letters from French soldiers, scrawled in the squalor of the trenches by men caked in filth and mud, are human documents in which they reveal themselves with extraordinary intimacy, and in which they put the whole truth, not disguising their terror or their blood-lust in the savage madness of a bayonet charge, or the heartache which comes to them when they think of the woman they love, or the queer little emotions and sentiments which come to them in the grim business of war.  They watch the dawn, and in a line or two put some of its beauty into their letters home.  They describe with a literary skill that comes from strong emotions the gloom and horror of long nights near the enemy’s trenches from which at any moment a new attack may come.  And yet, though they do not hide their moments of spiritual misery or despair, there is in all these letters the splendid courage of men who are ready for the last sacrifice and eager for their chance of honour.