So, too, for this war, the soldier needed has arisen.  After so many heroes he has invented a new form of heroism.

I say the soldier, for the soldier is what one must say.  Here begins what is clearly expressed in one phrase only—­the French miracle.  This national union in which all opinions have become fused is merely a reflection of the unity which has been suddenly created in our army.

When War Broke Out.

When war broke out it found military France ready and armed; mere troopers, officers none of whom ever thought that he would one day lead his men under fire, and that admirable General Staff which, never allowing itself to be deflected from its purpose, did its work silent and aloof.

But there was beside this France another France, the France of civilians, accustomed by long years of peace to disbelieve in war; which, in conjuring up a picture of Europe delivered over to fire and blood, could not conceive that any human being in the world would assume the responsibility for such an act before history.  War surprised the employe at his desk, the workman in his workshop, the peasant in his field.  It snatched them from the intimacy of their hearths, from the amenities of family life which in France is sweeter than elsewhere.  These men were obliged to leave behind beings whom they loved tenderly.  For the last time they clasped in their arms the beloved partners of their lives, so deeply moved yet so proud, and their children, the eldest of whom have understood and will never forget.  And all of them, artist and artisan, priest and teacher, those who dreamed of revenge and those who dreamed of the fraternity of nations, those of every mind, every profession, every age, as they stepped into their places, were endowed with the soul of the soldier of France, every one of them, and became thus the same soldier.

The war which lay in wait for these men, many of whom did not seem made for war, was a war of which nobody had ever seen the like.  We have heard tell of wars of giants, of battles of nations, but nobody had ever seen a war extending from the Marne to the Vistula, nor battles with a front of hundreds of kilometers, lasting weeks without respite day or night, fought by millions of men.  Never in its worst nightmares had hallucinated imagination conjured up the progress made in the art of mowing down human lives.  The German Army, to which the German Nation has never refused anything, either moral support or money, the nerve of war, has been able to profit by all this progress, to reduce to a formula the violence which drives forward the attack, to prepare the spy system which watches over the unarmed foe, to organize even incendiarism, and to become thus, forged by forty-four years of hatred, the most formidable tool of destruction that has ever sown ruin and death.

German Meets Belgian.

The Germans arrived, with the irresistible impetus of their masses, with the fury of a tempest, with the roar of thunder, enraged at having been confronted on their road by that little Belgian Nation which has just inscribed its name among the first on the roster of heroism.  Already the German chiefs imagined themselves lords of Paris, which they threatened to reduce to ashes—­and which did not tremble.