The Spirit of France
I remember the mobilisation in Paris on the day before war was declared, and that day. The French people had a different, sharper, more immediate fear. The frontier was in danger. France herself was menaced by the greatest army in the world. In one day, two days, all her life would be at stake. There was a sense of stupefaction among the common people. They too had been taken by surprise by the suddenness of the challenge. And they knew better than the English what war meant in horror and agony. In those crowds among whom I went there were many who remembered 1870—that nightmare of terror and shame and tears. There was no cheering, as when fifty years before the people in Paris had shouted á Berlin! in an ecstasy of war fever. In Paris there was the hush of souls who looked into the face of great death. In the streets men were parting from their women—for the last time. Some wept, not many, after the kiss of eternity. Emotion strangled one’s heart. In those days France seemed to me divine in courage, in sacrifice, in suffering. Anarchists, revolutionists, the scum of the underworld, the poor drabs, were cleansed of all evil, for a time, by love and passion—for France. They themselves did not matter. They held their lives as nothing so that France might live. The Pacifists said: “This is a war to end war.” The Socialists said: “This is a war against militarism.” The old women said: “Our sons will die, but France will be saved.” The young women said: “We give our lovers to France.” From the fields, the workshops and the factories, the manhood of France, quicker than in England, came down to the railways to join their depôts, and for hundreds of miles on the first night of war, in a train taking the first troops to the eastern frontier, I heard on the warm breeze the “Marseillaise,” the song of Liberty and France, and the tramp of marching men, and the rattle of gun waggons; and I felt the spirit of an heroic people like a physical vibration about me. After that come a thousand memories, strangely distant now, like an old dream, of roads black with fugitive people, retreating from the red flame of war; of French and Belgian towns under the first shell-fire, until they fell into flame and ruin; of wounded men, clotted with mud and blood, very quiet, on dirty stretchers, lying in rows under brown blankets, on railway platforms, in improvised hospitals, piled in farm carts, huddled under broken walls, in endless caravans of ambulances; the reek of blood, disinfectants, death; troops on the march, guns going forward, the French cavalry riding on saddle-galled horses, machine-guns in cornfields; troop trains; stations crowded with regiments; fields strewn with dead; women wheeling perambulators with babies and household goods, boys pushing old men along in wheelbarrows, farmcarts laden with children, furniture, grandmothers; the cry reiterated of “Sales Boches!”; the words “C’est la guerre!” repeated as an endless reason for infinite resignation to all this agony, and terror of civilian folk trapped in chaos; the phantasmagoria of war in modern civilisation; and always the courage of women, the valour of men, the immortal spirit of France rising above the torture of its soul and body, while the enemy thrust closer to its heart. In those days—ten years ago—an Englishman in France dedicated his heart to these people....