ought never to have been. Perhaps they also have been surprised by us;
for it is certain that we have not known each other, and have been
content with those loose general opinions about each other which are the
common result of ignorance and indifference.

What we need then is understanding; and these letters will help us to
it. They are, as we should have said before the war, very French, that
is to say, very unlike what an Englishman would write to his mother, or
indeed to any one. Many Englishmen, if they could have read them before
the war, would have thought them almost unmanly; yet the writer
distinguished himself even in the French army. But perhaps unmanly is
too strong a word to be put in the mouth even of an imaginary and stupid
Englishman. No one, however stupid, could possibly have supposed that
the writer was a coward; but it might have been thought that he was
utterly unfitted for war. So the Germans thought that the whole French
nation, and indeed every nation but themselves, was unfitted for war,
because they alone willed it, and rejoiced in the thought of it. And
certainly the French had a greater abhorrence of war even than
ourselves; how great one can see in these letters. The writer of them
never for a moment tries or pretends to take any pleasure in war. His
chief aim in writing is to forget it, to speak of the consolations which
he can still draw from the memories of his past peaceful life, and from
the peace of the sky and the earth, where it is still unravaged. He is,
or was, a painter (one cannot say which, for he is missing), and the
moment he has time to write, he thinks of his art again. It would hardly
be possible for any Englishman to ignore the war so resolutely, to
refuse any kind of consent to it; or, if an Englishman were capable of
such refusal, he would probably be a conscientious objector. We must
romanticise things to some extent if we are to endure them; we must at
least make jokes about them; and that is where the French fail to