In the heart of the wood was a small house, spared by some freak of chance by the German shells which came dropping on every side of it.  Here I took tea with the officers, who used it as their headquarters, and never did tea taste better than on that warm spring day, though it was served with a ladle out of a tin bowl to the music of many guns.  The officers were a cheery set who had become quite accustomed to the menace of death which at any moment might shatter this place and make a wreckage of its peasant furniture.  The colonel sat back in a wooden armchair, asking for news about the outer world as though he were a shipwrecked mariner on a desert isle; but every now and then he would listen to the sound of the shells and say, “Depart! ...  Arrive!” just like the officer who had walked with me through the wood.

Two of the younger officers sat on the edge of a truckle-bed beneath the portrait of a buxom peasant woman, who was obviously the wife of the late proprietor.  Two other officers lounged against the door-posts, entertaining the guests of the day with droll stories of death.  Another came in with the latest communique received by the wireless station outside, and there was a “Bravo! bravo!” from all of us because it had been a good day for France.  They were simple fellows, these men, and they had the manners of fine gentlemen in spite of their mud-stained uniforms and the poverty of the cottage in which they lived.  Hardly a day passed without one of their comrades being killed or wounded, but some officer came to take his place and his risk, and they made him welcome to the wooden chair and his turn of the truckle-bed.  I think in that peasant’s hut I saw the whole spirit of the French army in its surrender of self-interest and its good-humoured gallantry.

The guns were still thundering as I drove back from the wood.  The driver of the car turned to me for a moment with a smile and pointed a few yards away.

“Did you see that shell burst then?  It was pretty close.”

Death was always pretty close when one reached the fighting-lines of France.

Soldiers of France, for nearly a year of war I have been walking among you with watchful eyes, seeing you in all your moods, of gaiety and depression, of youthful spirits and middle-aged fatigues, and listening to your tales of war along the roads of France, where you have gone marching to the zone of death valiantly.  I know some of your weaknesses and the strength of the spirit that is in you, and the sentiment that lies deep and pure in your hearts in spite of the common clay of your peasant life or the cynical wit you learnt in Paris.  Sons of a great race, you have not forgotten the traditions of a thousand years, which makes your history glorious with the spirit of a keen and flashing people, which century after century has renewed its youth out of the weariness of old vices and reached forward to new beauties of science and art with quick intelligence.