It was to meet this colossus of war that our little soldier marched forth.  And he made it fall back.

To this new war he brings his old qualities, the qualities of all time.  Courage—­let us not speak of that.  Can one speak of courage?  Just read the short sentences in the army orders.

Corporal Voituret of the Second Dragoons, mortally wounded on a reconnoissance, cries:  “Vive la France!  I die for her!  I die happy!” Private Chabannes of the Eighteenth Chasseurs, unhorsed and wounded, replies to the Major who asks him why he had not surrendered:  “We Frenchmen never surrender!” And remember those who, mortally wounded, stick to their posts so as to fight to the end with their men, and those wounded men who have but one desire—­every one of us can vouch for this—­to return to the firing line!  And that one who, hopelessly mutilated, said to me:  “It is not being crippled that hurts me; it is that I shall not be able to see the best part of the thing!” These, and the others, the thousands of others, shall we speak of their courage? —­what would it mean to speak of their courage?

And the dash of them!—­the only criticism to which they lay themselves open is that they are too fiery, that they do not wait the right moment for the charge, in order to drive back the enemy at the point of the bayonet.  What spirit!  What gayety!  All the letters from our soldiers are overflowing with cheerfulness.  Where, for instance, does that nickname come from applied by them to the enemy—­the “Boches”?  It comes from where so many more have come; its author is nobody and everybody; it is the spontaneous product of that Gallic humor which jokes at danger, takes liberities with it.

What pride!  What sense of honor!  Whereas the German officer, posted behind his men, drives them forward like a flock of sheep, revolver in his hand and insults on his lips, we, on our side, hear nothing but those beautiful, those radiant words:  “Forward!  For your country!”—­the call of the French officer to his children, whom he impels forward by giving them the example, by plunging under fire first, before all of them, at their head.

The Password:  “Smile!"

And—­supreme adornment of all—­with what grace they deck their gallantry!  A few seconds before being killed by an exploding shell, Col.  Doury, ordered to resist to the last gasp, replies:  “All right!  We will resist.  And now, boys, here is the password:  Smile!” It is like a flower thrown on the scientific brutality of modern war, that memory of the days when men went to war with lace on their sleeves.  There we recognize the French soldier such as we have always known him through fifteen centuries of the history of France.

But now we look upon him in a form of which we did not suspect the existence, the form in which he has just revealed himself to us.