Afterwards, during many months as
a wanderer in this war, I came to know the French soldier with the
intimacy of long conversations to the sound of guns, in the first line of
trenches facing the enemy, in hospitals, where he spoke quietly while
comrades snored themselves to death, in villages smashed to pieces
by shell-fire, in troop trains overcrowded with wounded, in woods and
fields pockmarked by the holes of marmites, and in the restaurants of
Paris and provincial towns where, with an empty sleeve or one
trouser-leg dangling beneath the tablecloth, he told me his
experiences of war with a candour in which there was no
concealment of truth; and out of all these friendships and revelations
of soul the character of the soldiers of France stands before my mind
in heroic colours.
Individually, of course, the qualities of these men differ as one man
from another in any nation or class. I have seen the neurasthenic,
quivering with agony in his distress of imaginary terrors, and the man
with steady nerves, who can turn a deaf ear to the close roar of guns
and eat a hunk of bread-and-cheese with an unspoilt appetite within a
yard or two of death; I have seen the temperament of the aristocrat
and the snob in the same carriage with the sons of the soil and the
factory whose coarse speech and easy-going manners jarred upon
his daintiness.
Pages:
415
416
417
418
419
420
421
422
423
424
425
426
427
428
429
430
431
432
433
434
435
436
437
438
439