It was well he
did so. For the advancing French troops belonged to a French
regiment changing their position under cover of darkness. If my little
friend had lost his nerve and fired too soon they would have been
shot down by their own comrades.
"It's one's imagination that gives one most trouble," he said, and I
thought of the words of an English officer, who told me one day that
"No one with an imagination ought to come out to this war." It is for
that reason--the possession of a highly developed imagination--that
so many French soldiers have suffered more acutely than their
English allies. They see the risks of war more vividly, though they
take them with great valour. They are more sensitive to the sights and
sounds of the fighting lines than the average English "Tommy," who
has a tougher temperament and does not allow his mind to brood
over blood and agony. They have the gift, also, of self-analysis and
self-expression, so that they are able to translate their emotions into
vivid words, whereas our own men are taciturn for the most part
about their side of the business and talk objectively, looking
outwards, and not inwards.
5
Some of the letters from French soldiers, scrawled in the squalor of
the trenches by men caked in filth and mud, are human documents in
which they reveal themselves with extraordinary intimacy, and in
which they put the whole truth, not disguising their terror or their
blood-lust in the savage madness of a bayonet charge, or the
heartache which comes to them when they think of the woman they
love, or the queer little emotions and sentiments which come to them
in the grim business of war.
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