I determined to observe, during my permission, the new France which has come into being since the outbreak of the war, and the attitude of the French toward their allies.  I knew the old France pretty well.  Putting any ridiculous ideas of French decadence aside, the France of the last ten years did not have the international standing of an older France.  The Delcasse incident had revealed a France evidently untaught by the lesson of 1870, and if the Moroccan question ended in a French victory, it was frankly won by getting behind the petticoats of England.  The nation was unprepared for war, torn by political strife, and in a position to be ruthlessly trampled on by the Germans.  The France of 1900-13 is not a very pleasant France to remember.

For one thing, the bitter strife aroused by the breaking of the Concordat and the seizure of the property of the Church was slowly crystallizing into an icy hatred, the worst in the world, the hatred of a man who has been robbed.  The Church Separation Law may have been right in theory, and with the liberal tendencies of the reformers one may have every sympathy, but the fact remains that the sale and dispersion of the ecclesiastical property passed in a storm of corruption and graft.  Properties worth many thousands of dollars were juggled among political henchmen, sold for a song, and sold again at a great profit.  Even as the Southerners complain of the Reconstruction rather than of the Civil War, so do the French Catholics complain, not of the law, but of its aftermath.  The Socialist- Labor Party exultant, the Catholic Party wronged and revengeful, and all the other thousand parties of the French Government at one another’s throats, there seemed little hope for the real France.  The tragedy of the thing lay in the fact that this disunion and strife was caused by the excess of a good quality; in other words, that the remarkable ability of every Frenchman to think for himself was destroying the national unity.

Meanwhile, what was the state of the army and navy?

The Minister of War of the radicals who had triumphed was General Andre, a narrow, bigoted doctrinaire.  The force behind the evil work of this man can be hardly realized by those who are unfamiliar with the passion with which the French invest the idea.  There are times when the French, the most brilliant people in the world as a nation, seem to lack mental brakes—­when the idea so obsesses them, that they become fanatics,—­not the emotional, English type of fanatic, but a cold, hard-headed, intellectual Latin type.  The radical Frenchman says, “Are the Gospels true?” “Presumably no, according to modern science and historical research.”  “Then away with everything founded on the Gospels,” he replies; and begins a cold-blooded, highly intellectual campaign of destruction.  Thus it is that the average French church or public building of any antiquity, whether it be in Paris or in an obscure village, has been so often mutilated that it is only a shadow of itself.  France is strewn with wrecks of buildings embodying disputed ideas.  And worst of all, these buildings were rarely sacked by a mob; the revolutionary commune, in many cases, paying laborers to smash windows and destroy sculpture at so much a day.