These were the sights of the first half of our journey.  And as they recur to me, I understand so well the anxious and embittered mood of France, which was so evident a month ago;[2] though now, I hope, substantially changed by the conditions of the renewed Armistice.  No one who has not seen with his or her own eyes the situation in Northern France can, it seems to me, realise its effects on the national feeling of the country.  And in this third journey of mine, I have seen much more than Northern France.  In a motor drive of some hundreds of miles, from Metz to Strasburg, through Nancy, Toul, St. Mihiel, Verdun, Chalons, over the ghastly battle-fields of Champagne, through Rheims, Chateau-Thierry, Vaux, to Paris, I have always had the same spectacle under my eyes, the same passion in my heart.  If one tried to catch and summarise the sort of suppressed debate that was going on round one, a few weeks ago, between Allied opinion that was trying to reassure France, and the bitter feeling of France herself, it seemed to fall into something like the following dialogue: 

  [2] These pages were written in the first week of February.

“All is well.  The Peace Conference is sitting in Paris.”

“Yes—­but what about France?”

“President Wilson and Mr. Lloyd George have gradually brought the recalcitrant elements into line.  The League of Nations is a reality.”

“Yes—­but what about France? Has the President been to see these scores of ruined towns, these hundreds of wiped-out villages, these fantastic wrecks of mines and factories, these leagues on leagues of fruitful land given back to waste, these shell-blasted forests, these broken ghosts of France’s noblest churches?”

“The President has made a Sunday excursion from Paris to Rheims.  He saw as much as a winter day of snow and fog would allow him to see.  France must be patient.  Everything takes time.”

“Yes!—­so long as we can be sure that the true position is not only understood, but felt.  But our old, rich, and beautiful country, with all the accumulations on its soil of the labour, the art, the thought of uncounted generations, has been in this war the buffer between German savagery and the rest of Europe.  Just as our armies bore the first brunt and held the pass, till civilisation could rally to its own defence, so our old towns and villages have died, that our neighbours might live secure.  We have suffered most in war—­we claim the first thought in peace.  We live in the heart and on the brink of danger.  Our American Allies have a No Man’s Land of the Atlantic between them and the formidable and cruel race which has wreaked this ruin, and is already beginning to show a Hydra-like power of recuperation, after its defeat; we have only a river, and not always that.  We have the right to claim that our safety and restoration, the safety of the country which has suffered most, should at this moment be the first thought of Europe.  You speak