I watched the men as they spoke.  They had the faces of murderers, with bloodshot eyes and coarse features, swollen with drink and vice.  There was a life of cruelty in the lines about their mouths, and in their husky laughter.  Their hands twitched and their muscles gave convulsive jerks, as they worked themselves into a fever of blood-lust.  In the French Revolution it was such men as these who leered up at the guillotine and laughed when the heads of patrician women fell into the basket, and who did the bloody Work of the September massacre.  The breed had not died out in France, and war had brought it forth from its lairs again.

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These men were not typical of the soldiers of France.  In the headquarters at Nancy, where I was kept waiting for some time in one of the guard-rooms before being received by the commandant, I chatted with many of the men and found them fine fellows of a good, clean, cheery type.  When they heard that I was a war correspondent, they plied me with greetings and questions.  “You are an English journalist?  You want to come with us?  That is good!  Every Englishman is a comrade and we will give you some fine things to write about!”

They showed me their rifles and their field kit, asked me to feel the weight of their knapsacks, and laughed when I said that I should faint with such a burden.  In each black sack the French soldier carried—­in addition to the legendary baton of a field-marshal—­a complete change of underclothing, a second pair of boots, provisions for two days, consisting of desiccated soup, chocolate and other groceries, and a woollen night-cap.  Then there were his tin water-bottle, or bidon (filled with wine at the beginning of the war), his cartridge belt, rifle, military overcoat strapped about his shoulders, and various other impedimenta.

“It’s not a luxury, this life of ours,” said a tall fellow with a fair moustache belonging to the famous 20th Regiment of the line, which was the first to enter Nancy after the German occupation of the town in 1870.

He pointed to the rows of straw beds on which some of his comrades lay asleep, and to the entire lack of comfort in the whitewashed room.

“Some of you English gentlemen,” he said, “would hardly like to lie down here side by side with the peasants from their farms, smelling of their barns.  But in France it is different.  We have aristocrats still, but some of them have to shake down with the poorest comrades and know no distinction of rank now that all wear the same old uniform.”

It seemed to me a bad uniform for modern warfare—­the red trousers and blue coat and the little kepi made famous in many great battle pictures—­but the soldier told me they could not fight with the same spirit if they wore any other clothes than those which belong to the glorious traditions of France.

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