understand us, like the Germans. If a thing is bad to a Frenchman, it is
altogether bad; and he will have no dealings with it. He may have to
endure it; but he endures gravely and tensely with a sad Latin dignity,
and so it is that this Frenchman endures the war from first to last. For
that reason the Germans, after their failure on the Marne, counted on
the nervous exhaustion of the French. It was a favourite phrase with
them--one of those formulæ founded on knowledge without understanding
which so often mislead them.--Their formula for us was that we cared for
nothing but football and marmalade.--But reading these letters one can
understand how they were deceived. The writer of them seems to be
always enduring tensely. It is part of his French sincerity never to
accept any false consolation. He will not try to believe what he knows
to be false, even so that he may endure for the sake of France. Yet he
does endure, and all France endures, in a state of mind that would mean
weakness in us and utter collapse in the Germans. The war is to him like
an incessant noise that he tries to forget while he is writing. He does
not write as a matter of duty, and so that his mother may know that he
is still living; rather he writes to her so that he may ease a little
his desire to talk to her. We are used to French sentiment about the
mother; it is a commonplace of French eloquence, and we have often
smiled at it as mere sentimental platitude; but in these letters we see
a son's love for his mother no longer insisted upon or dressed up in
rhetoric, but naked and unconscious, a habit of the mind, a need of the
soul, a support even to the weakness of the flesh. Such affection with
us is apt to be, if not shamefaced, at least a little off-hand. Often it
exists, and is strong; but it is seldom so constant an element in all
joy and sorrow. The most loving of English sons would not often rather
talk to his mother than to any one else; but one knows that this
Frenchman would rather talk to his mother than to any one else, and that
he can talk to her more intimately than to any woman or man. One can see