but they make up for these deficiencies by inexhaustible willingness and sympathy.  And it has been easy for them to become good war-nurses, because every Frenchwoman who nurses a French soldier feels that she is caring for her kin.  The French war-nurse sometimes mislays an instrument or forgets to sterilize a dressing; but she almost always finds the consoling word to say and the right tone to take with her wounded soldiers.  That profound solidarity which is one of the results of conscription flowers, in war-time, in an exquisite and impartial devotion.

This, then, is what “France is like.”  The whole civilian part of the nation seems merged in one symbolic figure, carrying help and hope to the fighters or passionately bent above the wounded.  The devotion, the self-denial, seem instinctive; but they are really based on a reasoned knowledge of the situation and on an unflinching estimate of values.  All France knows today that real “life” consists in the things that make it worth living, and that these things, for France, depend on the free expression of her national genius.  If France perishes as an intellectual light and as a moral force every Frenchman perishes with her; and the only death that Frenchmen fear is not death in the trenches but death by the extinction of their national ideal.  It is against this death that the whole nation is fighting; and it is the reasoned recognition of their peril which, at this moment, is making the most intelligent people in the world the most sublime.

THE END