I do not know whether the author who has spoken so well of France in the great English newspaper has ever visited this country.  But he has surely meditated on our history and has divined the reason of the very existence of France; why she merits love beyond her frontiers, and why she should be defended “like a treasure.”  England is not made up of traders, soldiers, sailors, politicians, but also—­and that is what the French people will learn better every day—­of poets, subtle philosophers, and of thoughtful and religious spirits.

In truth, the day which Joan of Arc foresaw has arrived.  She did not hate the English.  It was only their intolerable rule of the kingdom which was hateful to her.  The good maid of Lorraine said that after having driven the English out of France she would reconcile them with the French and lead them together in a crusade.  This has become true.  Her dream is accomplished.  The crusade is not against the Saracens, but it is a crusade all the same.

France

From The London Times Literary Supplement

Among all the sorrows of this war there is one joy for us in it:  that it has made us brothers with the French as no other two nations have ever been brothers before.  There has come to us, after ages of conflict, a kind of millennium of friendship; and in that we feel there is a hope for the world that outweighs all our fears, even at the height of the worldwide calamity.  There were days and days, during the swift German advance, when we feared that the French armies were no match for the German, that Germany would be conquered on the seas and from her eastern frontier, that after the war France would remain a power only through the support of her Allies.  For that fear we must now ask forgiveness; but at least we can plead in excuse that it was unselfish and free from all national vanity.  If, in spite of ultimate victory, France had lost her high place among the nations, we should have felt that the victory itself was an irreparable loss for the world.  And now we may speak frankly of that fear because, however unfounded it was, it reveals the nature of the friendship between France and England.

That is also revealed in the praise which the French have given to our army.  There is no people that can praise as they can:  for they enjoy praising others as much as some nations enjoy praising themselves, and they lose all the reserve of egotism in the pleasure of praising well.  But in this case they have praised so generously because there was a great kindliness behind their praise, because they, like us, feel that this war means a new brotherhood stronger than all the hatreds it may provoke, a brotherhood not only of war but of the peace that is to come after it.  That welcome of English soldiers in the villages of France, with food and wine and flowers, is only a foretaste of what is to be in both countries in a happier time.  It is what we have desired in the past of silly wrangles and misunderstandings, and now we know that our desire is fulfilled.