The French fully realize what the English alliance has meant to them, and are grateful for Engish aid.  As the titanic character of England’s mighty effort becomes clearer, the sympathy with England will increase.  Of course one cannot expect the French to understand the state of mind which insists upon a volunteer system in the face of the deadliest and most terrible foe.  The attitude of the English to sport has rather perplexed them, and they did not like the action of some English officers in bringing a pack of hounds to the Flanders front.  It was thought that officers should be soldiers first and sportsmen afterward, and the knowledge that dilettante English officers were riding to hounds while the English nation was resisting conscription and Jean, Jacques, and Pierre were doing the fighting and dying in the trenches, provoked a secret and bitter disdain.

But since the British have got into the war as a nation, this secret disdain has been forgotten, and the poilu has taken “le Tommie” to his heart.

I heard only the friendliest criticism of the Russians.

It is a rather delicate task to say what the French think of the Americans, for the real truth is that they think of us but rarely.  Our quarrel with Germany over the submarines interested them somewhat, but this interest rapidly died away when it became evident that we were not going to do anything about it.  They see our flag over countless charity depots, hospitals, and benevolent institutions, and are grateful.  The poilu would be glad to see us in the fray simply because of the aid we should bring, but he is reasonable enough to know that the United States can keep out of the melee without losing any moral prestige.  The only hostile criticism of America that I heard came from doctrinaires who saw the war as a conflict between autocracy and democracy, and if you grant that this point of view is the right one, these thinkers have a right to despise us.  But the Frenchman knows that the Allies represent something more than “virtue-on-a-rampage.”

In Lyons I saw a sight at once ludicrous and pathetic.  Two little dragoons of the class of 1917, stripling boys of eighteen or nineteen at the most, walked across the public square; their uniforms were too large for them, the skirts of their great blue mantles barely hung above the dust of the street, and their enormous warlike helmets and flowing horse-tails were ill-suited to their boyish heads.  As I looked at them, I thought of the blue bundles I had seen drying upon the barbed wire, and felt sick at the brutality of the whole awful business.  The sun was shining over the bluish mists of Lyons, and the bell of old Saint-Jean was ringing.  Two Zouaves, stone blind, went by guided by a little, fat infirmier.  At the frontier, the General Staff was preparing the defense of Verdun.

One great nation, for the sake of a city valueless from a military point of view, was preparing to kill several hundred thousand of its citizens, and another great nation, anxious to retain the city, was preparing calmly for a parallel hecatomb.  There is something awful and dreadful about the orderliness of a great offensive, for while one’s imagination is grasped by the grandeur and the organization of the thing, all one’s faculties of intellect are revolted by the stark brutality of death en masse.