I often try to
dream myself into that bedroom again, but the cold is too intense for
dreams, and another shell comes shrieking overhead. War is nothing
but misery, after all."
3
Yet if any English reader imagines that because this thread of
sentiment runs through the character of France there is a softness in
the qualities of French soldiers, he does not know the truth. Those
men whom I saw at the front and behind the fighting lines were as
hard in moral and spiritual strength as in physical endurance. It was
this very hardness which impressed me even in the beginning of the
war, when I did not know the soldiers of France as well as I do now.
After a few weeks in the field these men, who had been labourers
and mechanics, clerks and journalists, artists and poets, shop
assistants and railway porters, hotel waiters, and young aristocrats of
Paris who had played the fool with pretty girls, were fined down to the
quality of tempered steel. With not a spare ounce of flesh on them--
the rations of the French army are not as rich as ours--and tested by
long marches down dusty roads, by incessant fighting in retreat
against overwhelming odds, by the moral torture of those rearguard
actions, and by their first experience of indescribable horrors, among
dead and dying comrades, they had a beauty of manhood which I
found sublime.
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