To this soldier it is an intolerable thought that he should hear the hymn of victory sung at a “prize distribution,” or in a music-hall scented with the perfume of women.  But even in a music-hall in Paris, or in a third-rate cabaret in a provincial town, the song may be heard with all its magic.  I heard it one night in such a place, where the song was greater than the singer.  French poilus were in the hall, crippled or convalescent, after their day of battle, and with their women around them they stood at attention while the national hymn was sung.  They knew the meaning of it, and the women knew.  Some of them became quite pale, with others faces flushed.  Their eyes were grave, but with a queer fire in them as the verses rang out. ...  It seemed to me as I stood there in this hall, filled with stale smoke and woman’s scent, that I smelt blood, and gunpowder, and heard through the music of the Marseillaise the shouts of hoarse voices, charging with the bayonet, the screams of wounded, and then the murmur of a battlefield when dawn comes, lighting the tattered flags of France.

20

The soldiers of France in that strange land called la-bas had one consolation which should have helped them a little—­did help them, I think, more than a little—­to endure the almost intolerable misery of their winter quarters at the front in one of the wettest half years within living memory.  They stood in the waterlogged trenches, shivering and coughing, they tramped through cotton-wool mists with heavy overcoats which had absorbed many quarts of rain, they slept at nights in barns through which the water dripped on to puddled straw, or in holes beneath the carts with dampness oozing through the clay walls, or in boggy beetroot fields under a hail of shrapnel, and their physical discomfort of coldness and humidity was harder to bear than their fear of death or mutilation.

But throughout those months of mud and blood a spirit came to visit them in their trenches, and though it could not cure frozen feet or put a healing touch for men spitting blood and coughing their lungs away, it warmed the hearts of men who otherwise would have been chilled to a moral death.  The love of women and of all those people who had not been called upon to fight went out to those poilus at the front, in waves of emotion which reached as far as the advanced trenches.  By millions of letters, which in spite of an almost hopeless muddle of the postal service did at last reach the soldier, they knew that France, the very heart of France, was full of pity and hero-worship and yearning for them.  By the gifts which came to them—­after months of delay, sometimes—­not only from their own kinsfolk but from unknown benefactors, school children, convents, societies, and all classes of men and women, they knew that their sufferings were understood and that throughout the country there was a great prayer going up—­ from freethinkers as well as from Catholic souls—­that the soldiers of France might be blessed with victory and that they might have the strength to endure the cruelties of war.