But there is a term to the flight of the most soaring elan.  It is likely, after a while, to come back broken-winged and resign itself to barn-yard bounds.  National judgments cannot remain for long above individual feelings; and you cannot get a national “tone” out of anything less than a whole nation.  The really interesting thing, therefore, was to see, as the war went on, and grew into a calamity unheard of in human annals, how the French spirit would meet it, and what virtues extract from it.

The war has been a calamity unheard of; but France has never been afraid of the unheard of.  No race has ever yet so audaciously dispensed with old precedents; as none has ever so revered their relics.  It is a great strength to be able to walk without the support of analogies; and France has always shown that strength in times of crisis.  The absorbing question, as the war went on, was to discover how far down into the people this intellectual audacity penetrated, how instinctive it had become, and how it would endure the strain of prolonged inaction.

There was never much doubt about the army.  When a warlike race has an invader on its soil, the men holding back the invader can never be said to be inactive.  But behind the army were the waiting millions to whom that long motionless line in the trenches might gradually have become a mere condition of thought, an accepted limitation to all sorts of activities and pleasures.  The danger was that such a war—­static, dogged, uneventful—­might gradually cramp instead of enlarging the mood of the lookers-on.  Conscription, of course, was there to minimize this danger.  Every one was sharing alike in the glory and the woe.  But the glory was not of a kind to penetrate or dazzle.  It requires more imagination to see the halo around tenacity than around dash; and the French still cling to the view that they are, so to speak, the patentees and proprietors of dash, and much less at home with his dull drudge of a partner.  So there was reason to fear, in the long run, a gradual but irresistible disintegration, not of public opinion, but of something subtler and more fundamental:  public sentiment.  It was possible that civilian France, while collectively seeming to remain at the same height, might individually deteriorate and diminish in its attitude toward the war.

The French would not be human, and therefore would not be interesting, if one had not perceived in them occasional symptoms of such a peril.  There has not been a Frenchman or a Frenchwoman—­save a few harmless and perhaps nervous theorizers—­who has wavered about the military policy of the country; but there have naturally been some who have found it less easy than they could have foreseen to live up to the sacrifices it has necessitated.  Of course there have been such people:  one would have had to postulate them if they had not come within one’s experience.  There have been some to whom it was harder than they imagined to give up a certain way of living, or a certain kind of breakfast-roll; though the French, being fundamentally temperate, are far less the slaves of the luxuries they have invented than are the other races who have adopted these luxuries.