The poilus who come to the village en repos are from every part of France, and are of all ages between nineteen and forty-five.  I remember seeing a boy aged only fourteen who had enlisted, and was a regular member of an artillery regiment.  The average regiment includes men of every class and caste, for every Frenchman who can shoulder a gun is in the war.  Thus the dusty little soldier who is standing by Poste A, may be So-and-So the sculptor, the next man to him is simple Jacques who has a little farm near Bourges, and the man beyond, Emile, the notary’s clerk.  It is this amazing fraternity that makes the French army the greatest army in the world.  The officers of a regiment of the active forces (by l’armee active you are to understand the army actually in the garrisons and under arms from year to year) are army officers by profession; the officers of the reserve regiments are either retired officers of the regular army or men who have voluntarily followed the severe courses in the officers’ training-school.  Thus the colonel and three of the commandants of a certain regiment were ex-officers of the regular army, while all the other officers, captains, lieutenants, and so forth, were citizens who followed civilian pursuits.  Captain X was a famous lawyer, Captain B a small merchant in a little known provincial town, Captain C a photographer.  Any Frenchman who has the requisite education can become an officer if he is willing to devote more of his time, than is by law required, to military service.  Thus the French army is the soul of democracy, and the officer understands, and is understood by, his men.  The spirit of the French army is remarkably fraternal, and this fraternity is at once social and mystical.  It has a social origin, for the poilus realize that the army rests on class justice and equal opportunity; it has a mystical strength, because war has taught the men that it is only the human being that counts, and that comradeship is better than insistence on the rights and virtues of pomps and prides.  After having been face to face with death for two years, a man learns something about the true values of human life.

The men who tramp into the village at one and two o’clock in the morning are men who have for two weeks been under a strain that two years of experience has robbed of its tensity.  But strain it is, nevertheless, as the occasional carrying of a maniac reveals.  They know very well why they are fighting; even the most ignorant French laborer has some idea as to what the affair is all about.  The Boches attacked France who was peacefully minding her own business; it was the duty of all Frenchmen to defend France, so everybody went to the war.  And since the war has gone on for so long, it must be seen through to the very end.  Not a single poilu wants peace or is ready for peace.  And the French, unlike the English, have continually under their eyes the spectacle of their devastated land.  Yet I heard no ferocious talk about the Germans, no tales of French cruelty toward German prisoners.