“Self-preservation,” he muttered, cynically.
“Monsieur le Président, that is unworthy.” (He bowed ironically at the rebuke.) “It is the contemptible argument of the materialist. What drew our young men to fight in 1914? Self-preservation. Never! I doubt if half of them knew the meaning of it. It was the conviction that an evil thing was being done, and the belief that it was their duty to prevent it.”
“Some of your Statesmen,” he continued, as if my remark had not been made, “are so kind as to teach my Government his business. They stand up in public and lecture us, warn us. Italy go wild with rage, because some lying journalist attribute to me what I have not said. England and America link arms and get drunk on formulas of disarmament, that perhaps mean nothing in the light of science to-day. Japan disguise herself as a mandarin and go behind the scenes in China ... and Germany and Russia look on with sardonic satisfaction to see the isolation of France, and prepare for the next ‘Day’! That give one great encouragement to disarm. And all the time to be uncertain—uncertain of one’s friends.... You say your people, they have love for France. Ma foi, they take a strange method to show it!... I do not understand. No, I do not understand.”
“Must one,” I asked him, “must one always understand? Cannot one have faith in a friendship, tried and proved?”
“You say to have faith,” he mused. “Yes, but that is not so easy. For every belief there must be a foundation—the rock on which the Church is build. Where is my rock?”
“The English dead,” I murmured.
His voice suddenly softened.
“Ah, M’sieu, those dead. I was forgetting.... We have all lived at so much pressure since the Peace, that we forget too often the fundamentals. We live for so many such strenuous years steeped in sentiment, that now we have a reaction.... Those dead in their quiet graves in the North of France—sleeping there till the end of time.
“Yes. We have been too impatient, and we say things that we do not mean. It is not only here in France; your Ministers, too, have been at fault. But, au fond, it means nothing.
“Listen. I shall tell you. Let us speak no more of L’Entente Cordiale. It is a phrase of politicians and tradesmen. We shall say in future La Grande Amitié. It shall be—it is—a great love between two peoples, sanctified in a bitter struggle for a common aim.... I am glad to have talked with you, M’sieu. Perhaps our conversation can be having good results.