joy of initial successes.  He confessed the amazement and pain of the first checks and the headlong retreat which followed them.  He spoke of the famous Joffre’s “ordre du jour” when, in the battle of the Marne, the men were told to take the offensive.  They stopped the enemy.  They pursued him.  They experienced the intoxication of a victory that gave back to France her old prestige and felt with certainty, although at first confusedly, that their battle was a decisive event in human history.

[Sidenote:  The wounded of 1918 reflect the long tragedy.]

[Sidenote:  They have faced terrible new weapons.]

To this brilliant and epic beginning succeeded a long and sombre tragedy, to this Iliad worthy of a Homer an Inferno worthy of a Dante.  So we cannot wonder that the wounded of 1918 differed from those of 1914, and that their faces, like the face of the Florentine poet returning from hell, reflected the terrible things through which they had passed.  The suffering of years, the eternal waiting for a decision of arms that did not come, the increasing horror of confronting weapons unknown in the early months—­heavy artillery, gas, liquid fire, aeroplane attacks—­left their mark upon our soldiers.

Dante imagines the terrible things he recounts.  Our soldiers have seen them face to face.  New Year after New Year has come and gone, and found them living underground, in constant danger of unseen and unavoidable forms of death, huddled together in damp, dark holes, exposed to rain and snow and shell fire.  Rarely was there fighting—­as we used to understand the term—­but daily death took its toll, and ill and wounded were evacuated to the rear.

[Sidenote:  Modern battle has become a scientific operation.]

Ardor they certainly retained for the assault, and heroism for confronting sheets of fire, or clouds of asphyxiating gas; but in the scientific operation which the modern battle has become, most things that are purely personal are more to be dreaded than desired, a fiery temper counts for much less than coolness, discipline, mastery of self, the spirit of abnegation and self-sacrifice.  And when the battle was won, that is to say, when they had taken, not a town with a resounding name, but the ruins of a village, a treeless forest, a dismantled fort, a hill thirty metres high, the survivors still had a task before them which had lost none of its roughness or austerity.  They had to organize the new position in haste, dig other shelters, undergo bombardments and reject counter-attacks, all the more violent because the enemy, supported in the rear by positions prepared in advance, was more furious than ever after defeat.  Thus it continued—­until now, even now, when under the irresistible pressure of the French, the English and the Americans, the German wall is crumbling.  At last it will be broken, and the victorious flood of the armies of democracy will pass through.  Then our invaded provinces and the sacred soil of Belgium will be freed; then the conditions of just and honorable peace among all the nations of the earth may be dictated on the banks of the Rhine—­or farther, if necessary.