It was not a large park; but it lay close down to the main street—­“right in the heart of the city,” we would say at home.  Everyone in town who moved about, to the stores from the residential streets, had to pass through that park.  In it were certain long rows of grey-barked trees—­trees with trunks that shimmered like the trunks of sycamores, but that rose sheer from the ground forty feet before branching, and then spread widely and calmly into mighty sprays of foliage.  One could not walk under those trees day after day and year after year through life and not feel their spell upon his heart.  “From the old grey trunks that mingled their mighty boughs high in the heaven,” to those whose lives lay underneath, in busy and perhaps more or less sordid routine, must inevitably come “the thought of boundless power and inaccessible majesty!” And that is a good thought to keep in the heart.  That grove in the midst of that little French town was worth more to it than sewers, more than a daily newspaper, more than a trolley line or a convention hall.  For it called incessantly to men a mute inexorable summons to the things outside ourselves that make for righteousness in this earth.  We in America, we in the everlasting Wichitas and Emporias, are prone to feel that we can make for righteousness what or when we will by calling an election, by holding a public meeting, by getting a president, a secretary and a committee on ways and means, by voting the bonds!  But they who walk daily through groves like this, must in very spite of themselves give some thought to the hand that “reared these venerable columns and that thatched the verdant roof!” Now in every French town, we did not find a grove like this.  But in every French town we did find something to take its place, a historic spot marked with a beautiful stone or bronze; a gently flowing river, whose beauty was sacredly guarded; a group of old, old buildings that recalled the past, a cathedral that had grown almost like the woods themselves, out of the visions of men into the dreams of men.  And these dumb teachers of men have put into the soul of France a fine and exquisite spirit.  It rose at the Marne and made a miracle.

And ever since the Marne that spirit has ruled France.  Essentially it is altruistic.  Men are not living for themselves.  They are living for something outside themselves; beyond themselves, even beyond the objects of their personal affection.  Men are living and dying today not for any immediate hope of gain for their friends or families, but for that organized political unit which is a spiritual thing called France.  We Americans who go to France are agreed that we have never in our lives seen anything like the French in this season of their anguish.  They are treading the winepress as no other modern nation has trodden it, pressing their hearts’ blood into the bitter wine of war.  They grumble, of course, as they do their hard stint.  The French proverbially are a nation of grumblers.  Napoleon