It may be thought that this sentiment would not comfort a man lying on his stomach as sentinel on outpost duty, staring through the mist and rain, and listening for the slightest sound of an approaching enemy, or a man crouching beneath a ledge of earth, waiting for the quiet words of En avant! which would make him scramble up and go into a storm of shells with a fair chance of being cut to bits by flying scythes.  But in truth the sentiment that came welling up to those men at the front was of infinite comfort and kept alight a flame in them which no winter wind could douse.  That sentinel on his stomach, gripping a cold rifle with numbed hands, and cursing silently the fate which had brought him to this agony, checked the fear that Avas creeping up to his heart—­was that a line of Boches stealing through the mist?—­when he thought that the women he knew, the folk in the Normandy village, the old cure, and all the spirit of France had made a hero of him and expected him to bear himself bravely, and in imagination stood beside him to share his vigil.  In order not to spoil the image they had made of him, to live up to their ideals of him he must hold on and kill these little devils of fear, and die, if need be, as a gallant soldier of France.  It would be fine to come back with a stripe on his arm, perhaps with the military medal on his breast...  But oh, the pain in those frozen feet of his! and the coldness of this bed of mud!

Poor devils! hundreds of them have told me their stories and at the end of a tale of misery have said:  “I do not complain, you know.  It’s war, and I am glad to do my duty for the sake of France.”  And yet sometimes, when they thought back, to the homes they had left, and their old ways of civil life, they had moments of weakness in which all the strength of their souls seemed to ebb away.

“It’s fatal to think of one’s life before the war,” said a young Frenchman who sat with me at the table of a little cafe not far from the front.  He was a rich young man, with a great business in Paris which had been suspended on the first day of mobilization, and with a pretty young wife who had just had her first baby.  Now he was a simple soldier, and for nine months he had not seen Paris or his home or his pretty wife.  The baby’s eyes were grey-blue, it seemed, but he had not been able to test the truth of that description.

“As a rule,” he said, “one doesn’t think back to one’s old life.  A great gulf lies between us and the past and it is as though one had been born again just to be a soldier in this war.  The roots of our former existence have been torn up.  All one’s old interests have been buried.  My wife?  I hardly ever think of her.  My home?  Is there such a place?  It is only at night, or suddenly, sometimes, as one goes marching with one’s company that one’s thoughts begin to roam back over old grounds for a moment or two.  The other fellows know what one’s silence means, and one’s deafness, so that one doesn’t hear a neighbour’s joke or answer his question.  It gives one a horrible heartache and one is overwhelmed with depression...  Great God, how long is this war going to last?”