January 19, 1918
I'm expecting to go to American Headquarters on Tuesday and to see something of work immediately behind the lines. I find what I am doing exceptionally interesting, and hope to do a good book on it.
Wherever one goes the best men one meets are Hoover's disciples from Belgium. They tell extraordinary stories of the heroism of the patriots whom they knew there—people by the score who duplicated Miss Cavell's courage and paid the penalty. Their experience of Hun brutality has somehow dulled their sense of horror—they speak of it as something quite commonplace and to be expected.
On Friday I saw Miss Holt's work for the blind. She bears out for France all that I have said about the amazing sharing of the wounded in England. One man in her care was not only totally blind, but he had also lost both arms. In the hospital there were men less grievously mutilated than himself, who hardly knew how to endure their loss. For the sake of the cheeriness of his example, he used to go round the ward with gifts of cigarettes, which he almost thought he lit for the men himself, for he used to say to Miss Holt before undertaking such a journey, “You are my hands.”
We, in England, and still less in America, have never approached the loathing which is felt for the Boche in France. Men spit as they utter his name, as though the very word was foul in the mouth. Wherever you go lonely men or women are pointed out to you; all of his or her family are behind the German lines. We think we have suffered, but we have not sounded one fathom of this depth of agony. On every hand I hear that the French Army is stronger than ever, better equipped and more firm in its moral. As an impassioned Frenchman said to me yesterday, his eyes blazing as he banged the table, “They shall not pass. I say so—and I am France.”
In the face of all this I do not wonder that the French misunderstand the easy good-humour with which we English go out to die. In their eyes and with the throbbing of their wounds, this war is a matter for neither good-humour nor sportsmanship, but only for the indignant, inarticulate wrath of a Hebrew god. If every weapon was taken from their hands and all the young men were gone, with clenched fists those who were left would smite and smite to the last. It is fitting that they should feel this way, but I'm glad that our English boys can still laugh while they die.
And now I'm going out on the Boulevards to get lunch.
XXVIII
Paris
January 30, 1918