between them and the formidable and cruel race which has wreaked this
ruin, and is already beginning to show a Hydra-like power of
recuperation, after its defeat; we have only a river, and not always
that. We have the right to claim that our safety and restoration, the
safety of the country which has suffered most, should at this moment
be the first thought of Europe. You speak to us of the League of
Nations?--By all means. Readjustments in the Balkans and the East?--As
much as you please. But here stands the Chief Victim of the war--and
to the Chief Victim belongs of right the chief and first place in
men's thoughts, and in the settlement. Do not allow us even to _begin_
to ask ourselves whether, after all, we have not paid too much for the
alliance we gloried in?"

Some such temper as this has been showing itself since the New Year,
in the discontent of the French Press, in the irritation of French
talk and correspondence. And, of course, behind the bewildered and
almost helpless consciousness of such a loss in accumulated wealth as
no other European country has ever known before, there is the
ever-burning sense of the human loss which so heavily deepens and
complicates the material loss. One of the French Ministers has lately
said that France has lost three millions of population, men, women,
and children, through the war. The fighting operations alone have cost
her over a million and a half, at least, of the best manhood of France
and her Colonies. _One million and a half!_ That figure had become a
familiar bit of statistics to me; but it was not till I stood the
other day in that vast military cemetery of Châlons, to which General
Gouraud had sent me, that, to use a phrase of Keats, it was "proved"
upon "one's own pulses." Seven thousand men lie buried there, their
wreathed crosses standing shoulder to shoulder, all fronting one way,
like a division on parade, while the simple monument that faces them