French digging in to receive the onslaught of the supposedly
phlegmatic German. When the time came for the charge--ah, you can
always depend on a Frenchman to charge!

Those reserves were pawns on a chessboard. They appeared like it;
one thought that they realized it. Their individual intelligence
and democracy had reasoned out the value of obedience and
homogeneity, rather than accepted it as the dictum of any war lord.
Difficult to think that 'each one had left a vacancy at a family board;
difficult to think that all were not automatons in a process of endless
routine of war; but not difficult to learn that they were Frenchmen
once we had thrown our bombs in the midst of the group.

Of old, one knew the wants of soldiers. One needed no hint of what
was welcome at the front. Never at any front were there enough
newspapers or tobacco. Men smoke twice as much as usual in the
strain of waiting for action; men who do not use tobacco at all get the
habit. Ask the G.A.R. men who fought in our great war if this is not
true. Then, too, when your country is at war, when back at home
hands stretch out for every fresh edition and you at the front know
only what happens in your alley, think what a newspaper from Paris
means out on the battle-line seventy miles from Paris! So I had
brought a bundle of newspapers and many packets of cigarettes.

Monsieur, the sensation is beyond even the French language to
express--the sensation of sitting down by the roadside with this
morning's edition and the first cigarette for twenty-four hours.

"C'est épatant! C'est chic, ça! C'est magnifique! Alors, nom de Dieu!
Tiens! Hélas! Voilà! Merci, mille remerciments!"--it was an army of