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Title: France at War
Author: Maugham, W. Somerset [William Somerset] (1874-1965)
Date of first publication: 1940
Edition used as base for this ebook:
   London: Heinemann, 1940
   [first edition]
Date first posted: 8 March 2016
Date last updated: 8 March 2016
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #1305

This ebook was produced by Al Haines


PUBLISHER'S NOTE

Italics in the original printed edition are indicated _thus_.

As part of the conversion of the book to its new digital
format, we have made certain minor adjustments in its layout.






  FRANCE AT WAR

  _By_
  W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM



  LONDON
  WILLIAM HEINEMANN LTD.




FIRST PUBLISHED 1940




I

Since the outbreak of war many articles have appeared in the papers
dealing with conditions in France, and the war correspondents have
narrated what has been happening at the front from day to day, but I do
not believe that we in England yet realize how intense the French
effort is and with what determination the whole country has applied its
energies to the prosecution of the struggle.  Nor do I think we yet
realize the spirit that has enabled the nation to accept with fortitude
and resignation the sacrifices they have been called upon to make.  I
have spent six weeks making a survey of the activities of France; I
have been to the front, I have visited a naval base; I have seen the
factories in which are manufactured all things necessary for modern
war, from great cannon to shirts for the troops; I have stayed in the
districts to which the refugees from Alsace and Lorraine have been
evacuated; I have talked to hundreds of people, from generals in
command of army corps to the humble priests of country parishes; and
though twice the time I had at my disposal would have been needed to
give me even a bird's-eye view of all that strenuous endeavour, I have
at least learnt a variety of things which I think it would be well for
the people of this country to know.

An acquaintance of mine was spending the summer holiday in his native
village, and because he has an official position, he received, before
the announcement was made to the public, a telegram telling him that
the order for mobilization had been signed.  He was walking to the post
office when he met a poor woman whom he had known all his life.  She
was coming up from the _lavoir_--the public wash-house--with a load of
washing that she was taking home to dry, and since he knew that her
husband and both her sons would be called up, he stopped and told her
the news.  She shifted a little the heavy bundle on her shoulder, her
eyes filled with tears and she said: "_Nous ferons ce que nous
pourrons; le Bon Dieu fera le reste_" ("We will do what we can; God
will do the rest").

In 1914 the call to the colours was accepted with enthusiasm, men with
flowers in their hats joined up shouting and singing; " Berlin," they
cried; the cafs were full of excited, eager people; it seemed a
thrilling adventure they were starting on.  But this time the spirit
was different.  There was no enthusiasm; there was determination and an
angry acquiescence, a firm courage and resignation.  Everyone knows
with what efficiency the mobilization was completed.  But what many
people are apt to forget is that the French nation has been mobilized
three times in one year.  In September of 1938, in the following March,
and then again last August men were taken away from their peaceful
avocations, the peasant from his field, the working man from his
factory, the clerk from his office, all the able-bodied men of France
between the ages of twenty and fifty, to put on their uniforms and
assist the country in its peril.  Three times in one year every
activity in the pleasant land of France was dislocated.  Is it
surprising that they said: "It is too much"?  Is it surprising that
they said to one another: "This time we must make an end of it: _il
faut en finir_"!  They set their teeth.  I think there are few men in
France who do not share the common feeling that this time they are
going to see it through.  They are going to fight now to the bitter
end, and they will never accept a peace that will expose them again,
perhaps in a short time, to the affliction, loss and inconvenience of
another mobilization.  I have known the French all my life; I have
never known them more calm, more resolute and more single-minded.  They
have a sufficient confidence in their leaders and a whole-hearted trust
in the generals who command their great armies.  Everyone who has lived
long in France knows how bitter are its political antagonisms, and none
can have seen without admiration the way in which, when the country was
in peril, these were composed; but everyone who knows France must have
seen it without surprise, for however bitter the quarrels that agitate
the French in times of peace--and really the foreigner gets the
impression that they are the breath of their nostrils--you can be
certain that when the occasion demands it they will be set aside to be
resumed at a more convenient moment, and each man will combine with his
neighbour to defend the land which they all so proudly love.  What
ignorance of the French temper it showed when the Germans thought that
in France they were fighting a house divided against itself!

I think what has most impressed me during the journeys I have taken
from end to end of France is the immense, the splendid seriousness with
which the French are confronting their ordeal.  It is not honour and
glory they are fighting for--that will come, but that is by the way--it
is security.  We live on an island in England, and, whatever the
deluded Hitler may say, that is a great safeguard.  It is many
centuries since an invader has set foot upon 'this precious stone set
in the silver sea'.  It has been very different in France.  Twice in
seventy years the German armies have invaded it, laying waste the land,
burning houses and farms, bombarding churches and cathedrals,
destroying factories; and three times peaceful populations have been
forced to desert their homes, taking such of their poor belongings as
they could carry with them, and seek refuge among strangers.  When I
was on the front I met one of the ablest generals that the army
possesses; he told me his mother was eighty-six and she had seen
Germany at war with France three times.  "It is too much," he said.
And when I was visiting the refugees I talked with a funny little old
woman with white hair.  "I'm over eighty," she told me, "and this is
the third time I've had to flee from my house in Lorraine."  And she
added: "It is too much."  It gave me a curious little pang in my heart
to hear that poor old peasant woman use the self-same words that the
distinguished general had used.

In England politicians have been making speeches, journalists have been
writing articles and correspondents have been writing to the papers,
about the war aims.  And much of what has been said and written has
been disconcerting to the French, for it has seemed to them that there
is in Great Britain a strong current of opinion which on this question
is not in accord with their own.  But what are they fighting for?  One
thing only, I repeat: security.  They want to be free for ever from the
danger presented by an aggressive and belligerent neighbour; they want
to be sure that for at least a century they will be safe from invasion;
they want to spare their children from the horror of war which they
have had to endure twice within twenty-five years; they want to be
allowed to till their fields and tend their vineyards and devote
themselves to the arts of peace.  Most intelligent Frenchmen will tell
you that France is not essentially an industrial nation, it is a nation
above all of peasants and of peasant-farmers; its artificers are little
interested in mass-production: they prefer to give their time and
attention to articles that require for their manufacture taste and the
personal touch.  Frenchmen have a deep-seated feeling that what they
have to give the world does not compete with the products of the
industrial nations.  Their most valuable exports are those spiritual
values which enlarge the mind and add to the elegance, variety and
beauty of life.

There is a bitter feeling among the people of France that the present
war has been thrust upon them by the obstinacy of the Allies at the
Peace Conference which prevented them from obtaining the safeguards
which they were convinced were necessary in order to preclude a
resumption of the struggle for existence.  Many of them already foresaw
in 1920 that, with Germany united as it had never been before, it was
inevitable.  They realize that the attitude that the Allies adopted was
due to their fear of French imperialism.  But the French are not an
imperialistic nation.  I am not now giving my own opinions, but merely
repeating what I have heard from the mouths of all manner of persons,
persons in all walks of life.  It is very generally admitted that the
Napoleonic imperialism was a disaster to France.  The colonial empire
has been won almost by accident, and the sense of it has never entered
into the consciousness of the French as our own empire has into that of
the English.  The feeling is universal, I think, that with a democracy
like that of France, imperialism is out of the question; in the
fierceness of political animosities a government that showed any
tendencies in that direction would stand no chance of subsisting.  But
the census offers the conclusive argument against the possibility of
imperialism.  There are forty million people in France and the number
is diminishing; unless urgent measures are taken after the war to
augment it, in another generation the population will be alarmingly
smaller.  Jean Giraudoux, who is not only a distinguished official at
the Quai d'Orsay, but also an author of great talent, told me recently
that he ascribed it to the wars from which France had suffered during
the last century, for before 1870 the natality of the country continued
to increase; he suggested that the fear of war and the uncertainty of
the future had made people unwilling to burden themselves with large
families, and he expressed the opinion that the certainty of an
enduring peace would cause a great change in this respect.  In the
country they told me that the responsibility must be attributed to the
Code Napolon, which obliged the peasant-farmer to divide his land
equally between his children, and so, rather than break up his farm, he
limited his family to one son who could carry on, with at the most
perhaps a second in case the first one died.  Others have told me that
the cause was to be sought in the selfishness of parents who hesitated
to sacrifice their comforts to the needs of numerous children; others
again have ascribed it to the dwindling influence of the Catholic
Church.  But whatever the cause the fact stands that the French are a
nation of forty million people and they are confronted by a nation
twice as large.  "How can we hope to go on holding our own against that
vast number," they ask you, "unless this time at last we succeed in
making ourselves unassailable?"  It is not territories they need--they
have not the population to occupy them--it is security.  To get it they
are prepared for any sacrifice, for any sacrifice of ease and money and
for great sacrifice of life, and I think it is as well that the world
at large should realize that they are determined not to allow
themselves again to be cheated of it.  They are not prepared to wage
another war in five or ten or fifteen years.  They will fight to a
finish so that their children may be spared the pain and anguish, the
danger of death, which they, many of them for the second time, are now
forced to endure.  But this also should be known abroad.  The French do
not believe that they can attain security merely by overthrowing Hitler
and his Government.  It makes them both anxious and impatient when
their papers tell them that many persons in England are of opinion that
we have no quarrel with Germany, but only with the company of
adventurers that have seized supreme power.  The French are not at war
with a band of gangsters; they are at war with Germany.  They are
convinced that if the Nazi leaders were overthrown Germany would in a
short time spawn other leaders as ruthless and as dangerous.  They have
not forgotten Bismarck and William II.  One brought an army to invade
their land in 1870 and the other in 1914.  They look upon Hitler as an
embodiment of all the instincts of aggression and the desire of
domination of the German people, and these his destruction will do
nothing to eradicate.  He is a symbol and a rallying point.  To
eliminate him and think you have gained anything is as absurd as to
imagine you have rendered a battleship impotent because you have shot
away its colours.  No.  France is at war, doggedly, resignedly,
heroically, not with Hitler and the Nazis only, but with Germany.  She
is prepared to live at peace with Germany, but only with a Germany
powerless to threaten her security.




II

I spent a week with the French Armies in Alsace and Lorraine.  In that
short time I could not hope to get more than a superficial notion of
that great machine.  The casemate I visited was well in front of the
Maginot Line.  The Commandant who showed me over it had the look of a
well-fed burgher in an old Dutch picture; he was a thick-set, rubicund,
jovial man with a red moustache.  He took the same pride in his
fortress as the commander of a man-of-war takes in his ship.  I asked
him how long he could hold out against an attacking force.  "If
necessary I could stand a siege of six months," he said, and with his
eyes twinkling added: "But I should hope they'd come and rescue us
before then."  I spent an hour and a half seeing one thing and another
and then he said to me: "I'm sorry your time is so short, I haven't
shown you half yet."  When he showed me one of his big machine guns and
demonstrated how it could be brought into action, he remarked, he eyes
twinkling again: "The one thing a gunner dreams of at night is that he
will sight an enemy tank passing within range when there's no superior
officer by and he can have a shot at it on his own."  I saw the men's
quarters.  There is not much room and the beds are close together, one
row above another; some were lying on their beds reading, others were
clustered at the farther end of the dormitory playing cards or
chatting.  They were all young men, it seemed to me; they had made
themselves at home in their narrow space, and you felt that with youth
and good humour to help them they were finding life good enough.  They
knew how much better off they were than the men in the cold and mud of
the advanced posts, and though ready to take their place there when the
time came, meanwhile enjoyed the warmth, the comfort and the security
of their tremendous fortress.  They had a neat little canteen where
they could buy cigarettes, beer, chocolates and toilet necessaries;
they could even buy hair-wash and scent.  There were tables in the
canteen where they could sit in their leisure hours, drink a glass of
beer, listen to the radio and almost think themselves back in the
estaminet of their native village.

But one casemate is like another, and when you have read a description
of one you have read a description of them all.  The war correspondents
have said all there is to say about those wonderful and truly
awe-inspiring constructions, with their lifts that take you deep
underground, their endless passages with their useful trolleys, their
electric plant and their air-conditioning, the great stores of food,
their armaments and their vast supply of ammunition.

This is not what I have set out to tell.  I went to learn how the
French soldier fares when he is not in the fighting line, what his
relations are with the civil population in the midst of which he is
quartered, how he gets on with his comrades in arms and what is the
feeling he has towards his officers.  I tried to find out how he
regards his English allies and what he thinks about the war.  With
respect to this a general with whom I lunched told me an anecdote.  He
had been reviewing some troops and on the way back to his car passed a
bugler.  The bugler saluted smartly, but in the agitation of the moment
forgot to bring his feet together; smiling, the general stopped, asked
him his name, where he came from and what his occupation was in civil
life.  When, with some embarrassment, he had answered these questions,
the general said: "Well, my boy, and why are you fighting this war?"
"_Pour la Patrie_."  ("For my country.")  The general laughed.  "Yes, I
know all about that.  That's what they taught you to say at school.
But why are you fighting this war?"  A smile broke on the bugler's
honest face and he said: "_Eh, bien,  cause des Boches, j'en ai
marre_."  ("Well, because I'm fed to the teeth with the Germans.")  I
thought the anecdote significant for the insight it gave one into the
soldier's frame of mind.  I would not go so far as to say that it is
universal in the French army, but I am sure it is very common.  There
is no hatred there, no desire to hurt, no irreconcilable antagonism;
but impatience--impatience with those Teutons who will not let their
neighbours live in the peace they love so well, impatience and the
feeling that things have gone too far.  Two wars already and three
mobilizations in one year; _il faut en finir_.  They've asked for it,
the Germans, and now they're for it.

But the anecdote seemed to me significant also for the glimpse it gave
of the relation that existed between the general and his men.  I am
sure that, as in all armies, there are in the French army many officers
who are stupid, inconsiderate and conceited.  I was so fortunate as not
to meet any.  The French have a peculiar aptitude for expression and
they are able to put their thoughts into orderly, lucid and often
eloquent language; but putting aside this natural advantage, it seemed
to me that the officers I came across were men of unusual intelligence.
They were keen soldiers, proud of their profession and absorbed in it;
and they gave me the impression of knowing their business with extreme
thoroughness.  Modern war is a science and these were scientists.  But
what particularly struck me was their solicitude for their men, their
humanity and their reasonableness.  In the course of conversation one
of the most brilliant generals on the front told me how he had on one
occasion shown an order he had just written to a brother general.  They
had gone through the last war together in the trenches.  My general
asked his friend: "If you were in command of a company again and
received an order like this, what would you think of it?"  "I should
think it lousy," was the reply.  (That is the only decent word I can
find for the emphatic and Rabelaisian word actually used.)  "So should
I, to tell you the truth," said my general, with a laugh, "so I won't
send it."  I was told another little story, which, trivial as it may
be, seemed to me rather touching.  Half a dozen men, sent out to do
some job, had been splashing about all day in the mud and wet, and when
they got back to their quarters were soaked to the skin; the company
commander knew they had no change of socks and so distributed his own
among them till theirs were dry.  I imagine that such a story would
make a German officer stare.

A real comradeship exists between officers and men.  Discipline is
maintained as well as in any other army, but there is in the French
army a feeling of solidarity between the various ranks which is truly
democratic.  I think there is in France less class-consciousness than
there is in England, and this in any case makes the relations of men,
whatever their social status, more fraternal.  Now with the whole
nation in arms, men in every rank of society are together, bearing the
same discomforts and exposed to the same risks.  The rather shabby,
ill-fitting uniform of the private soldier may well clothe the body of
the smart man about town, the bearer of a great title or a millionaire.
Whatever their position in private life, all will carry out with
perfect good humour whatever work they are called upon to do.  A French
reporter told me that he and a number of his colleagues had been taken
along the front for a trip that lasted several days, and at the end of
it a suggestion was made that the drivers of their cars should be
tipped.  "Watch your step," said the officer who had charge of them,
"some of your drivers could buy you all up a dozen times over."

At the beginning of the last war the French soldier was badly fed, and
though later on the food was better, it was never so good as it is now.
I made it my business to ask a number of men how they ate, and I found
none who had a complaint to make.  They begin the morning with a cup of
black coffee and a hunk of bread; at ten they have a snack which they
call the _casse-crote_, and this consists of sardines or sausages with
another cup of coffee.  The midday meal is copious: _hors d'oeuvres_,
meat with rice, potatoes or lentils, cheese or stewed fruit to follow,
and a quarter of a litre of wine.  The evening meal is the same except
that soup replaces the _hors d'oeuvres_.  The ration of wine has now
been increased to a litre a day.  "You should see how the German
prisoners stare when they are given our food," they told me.  "At first
they can't believe it's what we have every day; they think it's a
special meal prepared to impress them."

But of course the days are long.  Except for the men who are in the
front line there are interminable hours in which there is nothing much
to do but to kill time.  The French suffer from the lack of the
organized games which enable the British soldier to occupy his leisure,
and the General Staff are hard put to it to find ways of combating the
boredom which must inevitably affect their men.  During the first
months of the war it was possible to employ them to help get in the
harvest which the mobilization had so rudely interrupted.  Up in the
Vosges the fir-trees were heavy with snow and on each side of the road
it lay thick, but in the valleys, boys and women were gathering in the
beet.  A peaceful scene.  It was hard, as you drove through that
undulating country, with its wide views, to remember that on each side
of the Rhine, so near, great armies faced one another.  In every field
soldiers were helping.  You had the feeling as you watched them that
they were glad to do it; that for many of them this was the work they
had been bred to do and it brought them a sense of relief.  You did not
need then to be told that the French soldier was fighting not for a
frontier, but for his field and his vineyard.  But by now the crop has
been gathered.  Night falls early and there are limits to the number of
hours you can play _belotte_.  Boredom is one of the enemies that the
General Staff has to overcome, for with boredom comes home-sickness and
the feeling that when nothing much is going on in the front line it is
sad waste of time to stay up in Alsace-Lorraine when your farm, your
business or your little shop, needs your attention.  Books are wanted,
books by the thousand, and radios, with programmes that will cheer and
amuse, and without too many patriotic harangues: they do not want their
patriotism aroused, these men, it is there deep in their bones; they
want to know what is going on, of course, but they want to laugh and
sigh at songs, comic and sentimental; and they want entertainments.
Heaven knows they deserve all that the kindly and generous can do to
help them to pass the cold winter away from their homes in conditions
of little comfort.

They'd heard that the British troops were somewhere up the line, and
they'd heard that their equipment was better than theirs and their food
was as good as in a first-class hotel--bacon and eggs for breakfast and
jam for tea.  This they said not with envy, but with good humour.  If
the British were more sumptuously fed than they, well, good luck to
them.  It must be remembered that the French soldier is above all an
infantry man.  He heard with sincere distress of the loss of the
_Courageous_ and the _Royal Oak_.  That close upon two thousand
officers and men should have lost their lives had a peculiar effect on
him.  Even though these were lamentable catastrophes, they heartened
him, for they brought it home to him that he was being supported by the
British navy.  But the activities of Great Britain on the sea and in
the air do not mean very much to him, any more than do those of his own
navy and air force.  The arm in which he puts his confidence is the
infantry.

I will finish this slight, sadly inadequate sketch of a great subject
by a little story I was told by a doctor.  Three English planes, flying
over the German lines, were attacked and two were brought down in
flames; the pilot of the third, though badly wounded, managed to bring
it down in France; but when French troops got up to him they found that
he was unconscious.  They took him to the hospital at Nancy.  When he
recovered consciousness his first question was about the two men in the
planes that had gone up with him.  The doctor told him they were dead.
The pilot was just a boy.  He raised himself up in bed and brought his
hand up to his bandaged head in a salute.  "Never mind," he said, "it's
for England."




III

I visited Strasbourg while I was at the front.  It is a city of death.
Of its population of 200,000 only such municipal employees remain as
are necessary for its essential services and the police, the customs
officers and a certain number of soldiers who are there to guard the
city and keep it swept and garnished.  The wide streets, the narrow
lanes with their old houses, are unnaturally neat and clean.  They are
empty and the silence is uncanny.  No trams run, and it startles you
when now and then a military car speeds by.  The city seems to be
waiting for something, and you have the impression that those deserted
streets are holding their breath in a terrified foreboding.  For a
wonder on the day I was there the sun shone brightly; it was high noon,
but you had the sinister feeling of a city at dead of night.  It was
like a city in a fairy-tale where everyone who dwelt in it was wrapped
in a magic sleep.  Here and there, in a house or a flat, a window has
remained unshuttered, and you cannot resist the notion that someone is
living behind that closed window, closed because there is a nip in the
air, and that at any moment a face will appear behind it; but you know
that not a soul is there.  These hundreds and hundreds of houses,
street after street, lane after lane, are empty.

Most of the shops have their shutters up, but some had none to put up,
and in these the goods for sale remain on display.  Women's underwear,
silk stockings, hats; they have a strangely forlorn look.  At a
pastry-cook's little cakes, sweets and what not lie mouldering in the
window.  There was no time to put anything away when the evacuation
took place.  Things had to be left just as they were, while the owners
huddled a few clothes into a bag, such household linen as they could
carry, and fled.  They had to leave their cats behind, and now, fed by
the soldiers, they wander disconsolate and mew.  The pigeons are fed
too, flocks of them, and they gather round hungrily when a man comes
along with a great hunk of bread and, crumbling it up, throws the
pieces into the fluttering crowd.

The Cathedral was rose-red against the pale blue of the wintry sky and
here men in khaki were still busy making a protection for the central
porch.  The stained glass of the windows has been removed to a place of
safety and the wind blew bitter through the aisle.  The lovely pulpit
with its delicate carving had been boarded up.  All was cold and grim
and bare.  It had already the look of the wreck of a church.  The city
is waiting for destruction.  Of that cathedral, which in the Middle
Ages was considered one of the marvels of the world, it may be that not
one stone will stand upon another.  That graceful spire which till
modern times was the tallest building in the world may be levelled with
the ground.  The palace of the Cardinal and Prince Bishop de Rohan, one
of the most exquisite buildings in Europe of the first half of the
eighteenth century, may be no more than a smouldering ruin.

And as if to call attention to this dreadful possibility, presently,
high up, I saw half a dozen planes.  They were Allied planes and were,
I was told, hunting a Messerschmidt that had been signalled.  I watched
them till they were lost in a cloud, and walked on.  Then on a sudden
the sinister note of the siren broke the unearthly silence that wraps
the city like a shroud; it rang through the stillness with a merciless
intensity, echoing through those empty streets so that it seemed to
assail you from every direction; and though I had heard it more than
once before, it had in that deserted city an ominous horror.  Two or
three men started running, and following them I found myself at the
police station.  There were perhaps a dozen of us, policemen, employees
of the municipality and three or four soldiers.  They were impatient
and exasperated, but facetious.  One friendly stranger told me that a
German plane came over the city twice a day at such regular hours that
they had called it after the popular French paper _Paris Midi_ and
_Paris Soir_, just as you might say _Midday Standard_ and _Evening
Standard_.

I lunched with the Mayor, a large, heavy man with an open, friendly
face, who spoke French with an Alsatian accent.  He loves his city and
he looks forward with anguish to what he fears will be its inevitable
ruin.  He remains there with his wife to take care of it and with
courage awaits the catastrophe which may at any moment befall.  Trying
to reassure him, I suggested that the Germans were unlikely to bomb
what they still regarded as a German city.  "They shelled it in 1870,"
he answered.  "They ran excursion trains from towns on the other side
of the Rhine so that sightseers might see Strasbourg burn."  But even
should the city be spared the ravages of war its future fills him with
misgiving.  He reminded me that this was the third time in seventy
years that its economic life had been confounded by war.  Many of the
manufacturers have removed to places where they could set up their
factories in safety, and unless peace brought them security for the
future they would never return.  "It is a dead city," he said.  "No," I
answered, "only sleeping."  He sighed.  "That is what I hope, but it is
a sleep from which the awakening will be bitter."

A little while later I visited the districts in the Charente to which
the refugees from Alsace and Lorraine have been evacuated.  There are
altogether about half a million of them, but I will only deal with
those, amounting to 150,000, who inhabit the region in front of the
Maginot Line.  This stretches from the Luxembourg border to the Vosges,
and it is the richest part of Lorraine.  The order for evacuation was
issued as soon as it became known that the Germans had entered Poland;
and by train, by car, on foot, the refugees set out for the centre,
roughly fifty miles at the rear to which they had been instructed to
go.  Interminable processions passed along the roads, men and women on
foot pushing hand-carts and perambulators, whole villages, at their
head the Maire and the Cur telling his rosary, carts by the thousand
in which were the old people, children and such effects as it had been
found possible to bring away.  At night, exhausted, they got what rest
they could by the wayside.  They flung their weary bodies into the
ditches.

From these centres they were entrained for the South-west.  They were
piled into trucks, often open ones, and they suffered from the heat by
day and from the cold at night, from vermin, from hunger and thirst.
The trains remained stationary for hours in the open country to allow
the passage of troop-trains, and at the stations the halt was so brief
that it was impossible for the assistance that had been arranged for to
be effective.  Those who died on the way, those who fell ill, women in
labour, were taken off the train.  When finally the refugees reached
their destination their state was pitiable.

The department which I visited is a poor one, and its habits and its
standards of life are very different from those to which the people of
prosperous Lorraine have been accustomed.  It has 300,000 inhabitants,
and 85,000 refugees have been distributed among its towns and villages.
It was not easy for the authorities to find lodging for this great
number of persons; from 10,000 to 15,000 arrived every day at Angoulme
alone; and it was necessary to put very many in quarters which were in
every way unsuitable.  The population of the Charente has dwindled by
50,000 since the beginning of the century and there are plenty of empty
houses and abandoned cottages, but for the most part they are in a sad
state of dilapidation.  The refugees set to with a will to make them
habitable.  They have repaired leaking roofs and mended broken doors.
However filthy the hovel was when it was assigned to them--and many of
them were deep with the dirt of years--they have made it spotlessly
clean; so that now you could eat off the floor.  It cannot be easy to
keep things clean in an overcrowded room in which two families or more
have to live and cook and wash and sleep.  Kindly people have provided
a good many with small stoves, those who had money bought their own,
but in many rooms you see the makeshift stoves they have rigged up for
themselves by putting two stones on each side of the hearth and a sheet
of iron over them.  They have to sleep on straw mattresses, sometimes
on the floor, sometimes on deal trestles that they have made
themselves.  The authorities are providing wooden beds as fast as they
can, but there is a shortage of wood, and it takes time to provide beds
in war-time for such numbers.  There is still a lot of overcrowding.
But for all these inconveniences, these real hardships, life still goes
on.  The general health is good.  The children, blue-eyed, with
apple-red cheeks, are neat and clean.  Though there are no books for
their lessons, they go to school, bringing wood with them in the
morning to heat the room, and the nuns teach them as best they can in
the circumstances.  They are bright, nice-mannered children, and for
them, indeed, the whole thing is rather a lark.  It is wonderful with
what spirit these people, snatched away from comfortable homes, bear
their lot.  They are uncomplaining, and the phrase "_mann muss Geduld
haben_" ("one must have patience") is constantly on their lips.  I
should add here that many of them cannot speak French, especially the
older ones, and this makes it more difficult for them to get along
comfortably with the natives of the district.  It is hard when you have
been driven out of your home to be called a boche.  But they are a
kindly, industrious people and they do what is humanly possible to make
the best of things.  They understand the difficulties of the situation;
conditions have already greatly improved since first they arrived, and
this helps them to await a better future with fortitude.  They are
amazingly cheerful.  I went to see an old powder-factory, disused for
two hundred years, opposite which was a long row of dwellings where the
workmen had their quarters.  They have been so long unoccupied that
they are in a ruinous state.  Here the refugees have been crowded in.
They are lucky if there is only one family in a room.  The roof leaks
and on rainy nights the water splashes down on them.  One old girl said
to me with a laugh: "Lucky I have an umbrella to sleep under."  It was
there I saw an elderly wrinkled woman feeding a baby from a bottle.  I
asked her if it was hers.  "No, I'm a widow," she said.  "It's a love
child, but at the evacuation there was no one to take it, so I did.  I
couldn't leave it behind, could I?"  I went to see some stables
standing in the grounds of a chateau; there were six stalls and in each
was a straw mattress on the ground, without sheets, and in each stall
two persons slept.  A tiny room at the side, I suppose the old
harness-room, was their living-room.  There was an open fireplace with
a pot boiling over two sticks.  I asked a woman whether there was
anyone at the chateau.  "No," she said, "the proprietors only come down
in the summer."  A smile broke on her healthy face.  "It would be nice
if they let us sleep in the servants' rooms," she said.  "To sleep in a
stable--well, Our Saviour was born in one."  A woman with a sense of
humour.

There is a great deal of suffering among these unfortunate people, and
some of it could be relieved if the natural selfishness of rich and
well-to-do householders were more firmly dealt with.  But it is useless
to draw too harrowing a picture of conditions which war unhappily makes
inevitable.  There are mitigations to their state.  The country is
pretty and undulating, truly rural, and it is well wooded; the
landlords allow them to take all the wood in reason that they want, so
that at least they can keep warm.  They are anxious to work, but it is
not easy to find anything to do.  Still, work is gradually being
secured for them, on the land or in factories, with adequate wages.
The unemployed receive from the State ten francs a day for each adult
and six francs for each child under thirteen.  They have large
families, and two or three families often pool their resources, so that
their meals are good and copious.  I saw some at their dinners, others
I saw preparing them, and what they were going to eat was very
appetizing.  My mouth watered at the sight of a _Pfannkuchen_ which a
sturdy housewife had just set before her eager children.  They are
people of a religious turn of mind and they find solace in the services
they attend not only on Sundays but on weekdays; their priests are
there, full of kindness and energy, to console, cheer and encourage
them.  With time their housing will be improved.  For the rest,
generous people can do much to alleviate their hard lot.  They left in
the middle of summer, thinking they would not be gone long, for they
were convinced that this was one more bluff of the Germans and that war
would not be declared, so they came away without any warm clothes or
any means of coping with the cold winter.  Now they need stoves, both
to keep warm and to cook, blankets, heavy clothes for cold weather,
babies' clothes, and shoes.  Shoes especially, since for lack of them
many are going about the muddy farm-yards, the country roads, in felt
slippers.  They do not ask for charity, but they are in sore need.  If
any persons who read these pages are moved to do something for these
poor folk, their gifts will be gratefully received by the Centre Social
Mosellan, Cognac, Charente.  It would be an encouragement to these
brave, energetic and determined people to think they had friends in
England and in America who sympathized with them in their unmerited
distress.  I have said that they are people of a deeply religious
spirit.  Few of them in the hurry of departure, gathering together the
essential things they could not afford to do without, forgot to bring
with them their crucifix.  I remember one old woman with a red, lined
face and a shock of white hair cut short.  She talked to me of the
cottage she had left in Lorraine.  She must have been over seventy, but
she was strong and active still.  She had been a working woman all her
life and had borne many children.  The tears streamed down her cheeks
as she told me it was hard at her age to have to leave the little house
in her native village.  There was a crucifix standing on the table, the
figure of Christ in silver on an ebony cross.  Suddenly she snatched it
up and pressed it to her heart.  Her face was lit up as though a ray of
sunshine had fallen on it, and with a sob in which, mingled with her
pain, was pride and hope, in a strong, full voice she cried out: "Es
lebe Lothringen."  ("Long Live Lorraine.")  They are fine, brave
people, and they deserve our help.  I nearly forgot to say how glad the
children would be if they could be sent some toys.




IV

When I went to see Monsieur Dautry to thank him for enabling me to
visit the munition factories, I ventured to ask him whether he thought
flesh and blood could stand the long hours of labour, day after day,
which he was demanding of the workers.  He told me that there was no
help for it; this was a war of material to an unprecedented extent, and
material must be produced at whatever cost.  He said that he was well
aware that men could not be expected indefinitely to continue to work
with such intensity, but in the tragic emergency he felt that he could
ask them without hurt to themselves to persevere for a few months; then
he added; "Tell your friends in England that for every 100,000 men they
send over, 100,000 men now at the front can be released to work in my
factories.  That will give me 800,000 more hours of work a week, and
that means an hour's work less a day for 800,000 men."

But first I must tell you who Monsieur Dautry is.  He is Minister of
Armaments.  He is not a politician, but an engineer and a great
organizer.  It was he who reduced to order the confusion of the French
State railways, and characteristic stories are told of his efficiency,
his indefatigability and his determination.  He is a small man, with a
sallow face and decided features, a thick head of greying hair and an
eye of piercing brightness.  He gives you an impression of enormous
energy and you cannot talk to him for ten minutes without realizing
that here is a man with a quick, logical brain, who has the gift of
summing up a situation so rapidly that it looks as though the process
were intuitive, who then without hesitation decides upon a course of
action, and who has the individuality to enforce its performance.  He
is untiring; and himself, it appears, able to do without sleep or rest,
he expects an equal activity from his fellow-workers; but such is the
enthusiasm with which his personality inspires them, such is the
loyalty to himself which his force of character has aroused in them,
that they, his fellow-workers, happy and proud to be associated with
him, find it possible to fulfil his demands.  He is at his office from
early in the morning till late at night, and then often goes to some
factory or other to see how the work is proceeding and to talk to the
men on the night-shift.  On the second occasion on which I saw him he
mentioned casually that he had been up all the three preceding nights,
but he was as alert, his mind was as nimble, as though he had slept
soundly through all three of them.  It was late one evening that they
rang Monsieur Dautry up from the Bureau des Informations to ask him if
he would grant me the necessary facilities; he gave me an appointment
for the following morning at nine o'clock, and when I presented myself
at the Ministry he had already prepared for me a programme, which he
had himself made out for me during the night, and which would enable me
to visit a sufficient number of factories to get an impression of the
effort France was making to supply the troops with all the material
needed for the prosecution of the war.  I felt bound to tell him that
of all the subjects of which I know nothing there was none of which I
was more ignorant than of machinery.  He said: "I will have you
accompanied by two engineers, a military and a naval one, and they will
explain to you everything you cannot understand."  I had to my shame to
tell him then that in all probability I should not be able to
understand their explanations.  Nor did I; so the reader must not
expect me to give him any details of the manufacture of the latest guns
nor to describe to him the newest models of armoured cars.  I saw them
make powder and explosives; I saw them make planes, and the guns for
them; anti-aircraft guns, armoured cars, cannon.  When I was on the
front I would have said that the whole nation is under arms, but after
a week spent in visiting the armament works I was almost inclined to
say that the whole country is one huge factory.

I will speak first of three factories I visited on the front.  One was
a sugar factory almost on the banks of the Rhine and so near the
advanced posts of the enemy that it was well within range of a big
machine-gun; but except that the women were evacuated, work was
proceeding as quietly as in peace-time.  The general in command of the
troops in that region was eager to maintain the economic life of the
country, and my visit chanced to come aptly because, owing to the lack
of raw material, the factory was to close next day.  Hardly more than
half the beet crop had been gathered, and what remained could not be
got in because the horses necessary for cartage had been requisitioned.
We learnt that 300 horses were needed for six weeks to collect the rest
of the crop, and these were immediately promised.  I saw also a factory
which in peace-time produces woollen goods and under-linen, but now is
busily turning out shirts, socks and pull-overs for the troops.  It is
within range of a not very heavy gun.  I think at least 300 women must
have been occupied there, but the only indication I could discover that
they felt themselves to be working under peculiar conditions was that
the permanent wave of a good many seemed to be wearing a trifle thin.
I went to a foundry which is, strange as it may seem, in front of the
Maginot Line.  It could of course be easily bombed by the Germans, but
they have so far left it alone for fear, presumably, of the reprisals
which would immediately follow.  Still, the directors are taking
precautions; the women and children have been evacuated; shelters have
been built in case of air-raids; and arrangements have been made to
remove essential parts, should the Germans advance, so that it would
take them the better part of a year to get the factory working again.
The steel manufactured is shipped away every night, so that they would
find at best only the produce of one day's work.  I think what most
struck me in those enormous works, employing now close on 2000 men, was
the sense of emptiness.  In a vast shed where work was going on at full
blast there was only a handful of men, and they seemed to be there
merely to supervise the almost human, the strangely purposeful,
activity of the machines which pressed and cut and carried the huge
ingots of red-hot steel.

It was a very different impression I got when I visited various
factories in the neighbourhood of Paris, where in one I saw the
manufacture of armoured cars, in another of shells, in a third of
aeroplane guns; in these and others which it would be tedious to
enumerate, the crowded workers, the serried rows of machines, gave one
the feeling of an intense, a fierce but regulated animation.  I cannot
attempt to describe the wonderful things I saw; I will only mention a
few details that peculiarly interested me.  One thing that struck me
was the pains that are taken to make the powerful and yet wonderfully
manageable tank as spick and span as a private car.  Every part is
quite exquisitely finished.  The machines that are used for the
manufacture of all these lethal weapons are miracles of ingenuity.
They work automatically, so that the man in charge has little more to
do than to keep a watchful eye.  They have the elegance of perfect
adaptation to their use.  I could quite understand that the workman
took pride in, even feel in love with, this beautiful instrument, so
spruce and clean, that could do such delicate and accurate work.
Machines are arriving from America with regularity.  I saw one huge
hall where in February last there was but one automatic machine and
where now there are 150.  I wish I could give the reader some
impression of the immense complication of the labour that goes to
produce almost everything that is needed to kill men with.  I have
seldom seen a more elegant instrument than an aeroplane gun.  It was
staggering to me to learn that one part, not more than a foot long,
went through 109 hands before it was ready, and another part, three
inches long, went through 50.  Though it takes no more than ten minutes
of actual time to make a machine-gun shell, its fabrication, so many
are the processes necessary, so many hands must it pass through,
requires a week for its completion.  There is a multitude of machines,
each doing its delicate little job, a string of women, each occupied on
a different operation that must be done by hand.  The fuse, that
elaborate and ingenious part so exquisitely devised, needing such
accurate care, is as beautifully turned out as a jewel.

This is the work of miniaturists.  It is a very different impression
you get when you visit the Government factories where they make heavy
guns and big shells.  The factory is spacious, and the machines needed
to bore those huge steel rods, to manufacture those tremendous
carriages, are so enormous that you have none of the crowded effect of
other factories.  The din is not so terrific, and although work is
incessant, going on night and day, day after day for seven days a week,
there is an odd effect of dignified leisure.  Everything is on a
gigantic scale.  These monsters, looking ridiculously like the toy guns
made for children, take six months to make, and in the factory I saw
they produced two a week.

I spent one morning at a powder-factory.  It is situated in a wood,
nearly 400 acres in extent, which must be charming in spring and
summer.  The factory was founded in 1870; it was smaller then, and the
director rode and shot in those pleasant woods.  He has been ousted
now, and buildings are to be seen among the trees wherever you look;
they are of small size for the most part, and separated from one
another, so that should an accident occur in one it would not bring
disaster to its neighbour.  For the moment you enter you are made aware
that danger is close; at the gateway your matches and lighter are taken
from you; and so that you may be preserved from temptation you are
asked to give up your cigarettes.  The workmen wear wooden sabots in
case a nail in a leather sole should strike a spark on the concrete
floor.  They wear black overalls which are fire-proofed, and this
uniform sombreness gives them a kind of mystery.  The director who
showed me round told me that his immediate predecessor was the victim
of an explosion.  Not a trace of him, not even a trouser button, was
ever found; he simply disappeared.  I saw the whole process of
manufacture from the white cotton flock saturated with ether and
alcohol that looks so innocent, to the final operation which is so
dangerous that only two men are allowed together into the shed where it
is performed, and there is a trench full of water within a few feet of
the doors, so that if there is a fire they should immediately plunge
in.  But in all the buildings in which the complicated business is
transacted there are ingenious automatic devices for flooding in case
some of the material catches fire.  In another factory I saw, where
they made explosives, the last part of the process takes place in
little cubicles so made that the roof and front will blow out if there
is an explosion, and each man works alone, so that he alone may be
killed.  Grim!  And yet so true is it that familiarity breeds contempt,
that these workmen--and there are 12,000 of them at the
powder-factory--go about their business with as little concern as the
women I had seen at the front making shirts and sweaters.

My visits to these various factories had taken me north, east and south
in France; I had seen a great deal that was strange to me, and to make
head or tail of all this I should have had to be an expert in half a
dozen professions; but one thing I could not help growing conscious of,
and that is the tremendous effort the country is making and the
wonderful spirit that possesses the men and women who are engaged in
it.  Monsieur Dautry, amazing organizer as he is, could not have kept
this gigantic machine going with such efficiency except for the willing
collaboration of this army of workmen, and it is of them I wish to say
a final word.  They have cheerfully accepted the much longer hours of
work which the needs of the moment have made essential.  The day-shifts
work eleven hours, the night-shifts ten, and in many factories they
work seven days a week.  They earn good money.  A proportion of their
wages is withheld for the benefit of the poor families of mobilized
men; but besides that, once a month each workman makes a voluntary
contribution of ten francs, which is sent as a gift to the mobilized
workers who in peace-time are engaged in the factory.  They were
wonderfully alert, with keen faces and intelligent eyes.  I could not
but be struck by the pride each workman seemed to take in his
particular job.  He would explain to me, the most ignorant of persons,
with technical detail, points that I could only pretend to understand.
Not only foremen, but even ordinary workmen, explained almost with
eloquence the mechanism of the complicated instrument they dealt with.
They were professional men every bit as much as lawyers or doctors.
The heartening impression I brought away with me was that they are
prepared to endure as long as necessary the interminable hours of
arduous toil which are demanded of them, for they are aware that this
effort which they are making is for the security of their country and
the welfare of their children.  One after another they repeated the
phrase to me which Mr. Chamberlain has made famous: _Il faut en finir_.




V

In many provincial towns in France there is a shop called Aux Dames de
France.  I have never ventured inside, but I suppose these are shops
where women can buy at a moderate price whatever they need to clothe
their slender or opulent shapes; there are generally trestles on the
pavement, and here bargains are displayed: ribbands, remnants,
stockings, bust-bodices, which you see women--tempted, doubtful or
merely curious--interminably turning over and fingering, while a
grim-faced female in a smock watches them with a beady eye.  It is Aux
Dames de France that the following pages are dedicated.

I think that no one who has not seen them at work can have a notion how
great is the effort that the women of France have been making since the
war broke out and how much it is due to them that the economic life of
the country has been maintained.  When war broke out the harvest was
still in progress.  Between four and five million men were mobilized.
Women took their places.  They set out at once to gather the beet and
to pick the grapes; you saw them working in every field and you saw
them driving the heavily laden carts along the roads.  Up at the front,
busy with their pressing toil, they hardly troubled to give a passing
glance to the planes, enemy planes for all they knew, that flew over
them.

A vast number of shops had to close because the owners were called up,
but in many, the smaller ones especially, their wives took over and
kept the business going.  Somehow or other they managed to do the men's
work and find time besides to look after the home, take care of the
children and cook the dinner.  In the districts to which the evacuees
have been sent--for the women of Alsace and Lorraine, though many of
them speak hardly a word of French, are women of France too--they went
to work to render their wretched lodgings habitable.  They scrubbed the
floors and the stairs, cooked meals on makeshift stoves, washed and
mended; and by their courage and good humour preserved the decencies
and beauty of family life.  Of all the ladies of France it is to the
women of Alsace and Lorraine, whose unconquerable spirit has surmounted
the difficulties of an unbelievably difficult situation, that most
praise is perhaps due.  No shipwrecked mariners cast away on a desert
island could have given evidence of a more practical inventiveness so
to deal with the circumstances as in a little while to reduce confusion
to order and restore to life something of a pattern.

Thousands of women are working in factories.  In most of them, I think,
the wife was offered the job of her mobilized husband, and it is
strange to see them, middle-aged women of determined aspect, the
mothers of families, young women, evidently not long married, with
painted lips and a permanent wave, tending an automatic machine in the
crowded din of an armament works.  Many of them had never before worked
in a factory, but I was told by various directors that they got into
the way of it very quickly; I was not surprised, for after what I have
seen I am ready to believe that the French woman can do anything she
has a mind to.  But they have their homes to look after and their
children to care for; by a wise decree arrangements have been made to
enable them in some measure to do this.  In some factories they only
work two weeks out of three, in others they are given every third day
off, in either case with full pay, so that they should not lose touch
with what, after all, are their essential interests, and so that their
children should run as little chance as possible of neglect.  But it is
grim to see this multitude of women occupied in making all manner of
things to kill and maim the husbands and brothers of other women.  In
some work--the delicate and accurate work, for instance, that has to be
put into the making of a fuse--they are better than men.  It is grim to
see them so neatly painting and varnishing the cases of big shells.  It
is grim to see rows and rows of them making the bags in which powder is
to be poured, and when they are filled tying them up into neat parcels
or packing them into metal cylinders.

I have dwelt so far on the work that is being done by the women of
France in the more modest ranks of society, but it must not be thought
that the others have remained idle.  In France, as in England, alas!
there are still women who look upon the war as an unparalleled nuisance
because it interferes with the comfort and amusement of their lives.
There are women who want to give parties and go to them and who are
exasperated because the mobilization of men-servants renders it
difficult to get perfect service and because with a chauffeur at the
front it is awkward to get about.  There are women who still play
bridge half the day and flatter themselves they are doing something for
the country when they bring their knitting to the bridge-table and set
their maids to making pull-overs.  But there are many more who have
given their money and their time to the numerous associations that have
been instituted to cope with the manifold difficulties of the moment.
There are many who have set themselves, alone and obscure, to alleviate
the distress, financial and moral, of their neighbours.  The Red Cross
has founded 150 auxiliary hospitals, with nearly 20,000 beds, and has
placed thousands of adequately trained nurses at the disposal of the
authorities.  The evacuation of half a million people from Alsace and
Lorraine was a distressing necessity, and its attendant hardships would
have been scarcely tolerable without the willing aid given by the Girl
Guides.  They helped families to pack such few things as they could
take with them, and on train journeys that might well last three or
four days they exerted themselves to comfort those frightened and
unhappy people, herded sometimes in cattle-trucks, and mitigate their
discomforts.  Day and night the Girl Guides were at the wayside
stations to give what refreshment and help was possible to the
refugees.  They met them in Paris, fed them, encouraged them and
convoyed them across the city to the station from which they were to
entrain for their destination.  There again the Girl Guides met them,
interpreted for them, acted as intermediaries between them and the
population which was obliged, somewhat unwillingly, to receive them,
distributed clothes among them, provided them with books, and, in
short, did everything that human kindness could do to ease the tragic
lot of these strangers in a land strange to them.

But this is only a part of the activities of the women of France; I
should never end if I attempted to describe them all.  Among the many
societies engaged in admirable and useful work I will name only L'Union
des Femmes de France.  It sends parcels to the soldiers and has
enrolled a host of women and girls to make jumpers, socks and scarves
for the soldiers; but besides this, it has embarked upon two
undertakings, one of which shows, to my mind, a touching
thoughtfulness, and of which the other peculiarly interests me as a
professional writer.  Men on leave, or transferred from one post to
another, often arrive at a station where they have to spend the best
part of the night before their train starts.  They are tired and
hungry, maybe wet through, and they have perhaps little money in their
pockets.  L'Union des Femmes de France offers them shelter.  A woman
opens a door and invites the weary soldier to come in.  He finds a warm
room, with beds in it, rugs to cover him and hot coffee.  There are
paper and pencils on a table so that he can write to his family or his
girl, and the fact that in one station alone from 250 to 300 letters
are written every night shows that he is glad of the opportunity.
There is a lavatory where he can wash his feet and put on a clean pair
of socks; his own are washed and mended and passed on to another man.
He gets a good sleep, and a kindly woman wakes him when his train is
due.  He leaves rested not only in body, but in spirit.

But a great change has come over the French soldier since 1914; then
attack followed attack, and the man in the trenches had to be
constantly on the alert.  In such leisure as he had he was contented to
smoke his pipe and play a game of cards.  But since then education has
spread, inexpensive books, magazines and innumerable papers have
aroused in men who had never read before the desire to do so.  Books
now are a need almost as urgent as the chocolate, sausages and sardines
which the soldier likes best to find in his parcel.  For four months
now he has had to stand the hardest possible trial to one of his ardent
temper: he has had to wait; and his spirit, craving for occupation,
demands reading matter.  L'Union des Femmes de France issued an appeal
for this, and it is heartening to know that the response has been
great.  One old lady brought in a lot of picture-papers carefully
wrapped up in tissue paper, one young man brought his text-books so
that a student under arms might continue his studies, an elderly
gentleman offered his whole library.  The books are sorted, those that
are obviously unsuitable are withheld, and the rest are sent to the
front to give a soldier a few hours of happy forgetfulness, to give him
perhaps some new thought to ponder over and to bring into his
monotonous life a little romance or a little laughter.  But more books
are needed, and anyone who has French books he has read (and, let us
admit it, few books are worth reading twice) might do worse than send
them to: Le Livre du Combattant, 104 Avenue des Champs Elyses, Paris.

I said just now that I believed that there was little French women
could not do if they had a mind to, and the variety of tasks they have
undertaken since war was declared is truly amazing.  As is well known,
at its outbreak steps were taken to remove to places of safety the
innumerable treasures of art which France possesses.  Among the most
important of these is the stained glass in the cathedrals and churches.
Rouen has many lovely windows, and an architect was commissioned to do
the necessary work, but he had barely begun when he and his skilled
workmen were called up.  His wife immediately took his place.  Since to
take down stained glass is a delicate business which requires technical
knowledge and she had to make do with what labour she could get, she
was obliged to give it her unceasing attention.  And no time could be
lost.  From early morning till the failing light made further work
impossible she stayed up in the scaffolding, watching and directing,
and at last succeeded in putting that precious glass in safety.  And
here is a little story which might well serve as the theme for a
success novel.  There is a factory where not only most of the
employees, but also the owner, were young; they were called up and the
factory closed down.  But the owner's secretary, whom I know only as
Mademoiselle B., could not bear to think that these busy works should
stay idle and its many women employees be thrown out of a job; so, with
feminine astuteness, she pulled all the strings she could to get the
factory requisitioned by the State, by which means work for National
Defence could be secured.  She was thus able to keep her women workers
and, because what the factory produces is of essential service, get
such men as were necessary.  The machines were set going again and soon
work was in full swing.  But Mademoiselle B. is evidently a young woman
of determination, for during the luncheon hour--lunch being served at a
canteen--she has set the women to knit scarves, socks and sweaters for
the employees of the factory who are mobilized.  There is a fund to
which each worker contributes a few sous so that little luxuries may be
added to the parcels.  Mademoiselle B. must be a person of
intelligence, energy and initiative; and of course the end of the story
should be orange blossom and marriage bells; but whether she should
marry the owner of the factory or a young son of toil who has returned
from the front with the Croix de Guerre, the reader must decide for
himself.

But there is an excitement in running a factory and a thrill in saving
a precious work of art from destruction.  There are vast numbers of
women in France who are quietly doing obscure and humble tasks of which
no one will ever hear.  There was a baker in the Poitou who made bread
for the whole district, and his wife with her handcart delivered it in
the surrounding hamlets.  He was called up, and since he was the only
baker in the neighbourhood, it would have been a poor look-out for
everyone if the wife he had left behind had not set to work to make and
bake the bread herself at night and deliver it as usual by day.  And in
Auvergne there is a lady living in an old chateau to which people round
about have been accustomed for generations to come for help in their
troubles.  It is a poor part of the country, with scattered hamlets and
lonely farms.  The men are gone and the women are left to shoulder
burdens which only their courage prevents from being intolerable.  This
lady has revived the old custom of sewing bees.  Those who do not live
too far away she gathers together of an evening so that they may work
together in a warm and cosy room, while the children play or learn
their lessons, and since almost she alone knows how to read, she reads
the paper to them; and they chat together, about their men at the front
and the peace they long for and their hope that peace will be a good
peace so that there may be no danger that their children when they are
grown up will have to go to war again.  But, since some of the hamlets
are distant, this lady has arranged similar gatherings in them, and in
the winter night, by snow and wind, she goes out to hearten and cheer
those poor, humble, hard-worked women, for they too, she knows, are
working for their country.

I think I have said enough to show how gallantly the ladies of France
are taking their share in the tragic struggle and with what valiance,
what energy, what intelligence they are coping with the unimaginable
difficulties of the situation.  With wonderful patience, with their
sense of affairs and with fortitude, they are in a large part
maintaining the prosperity of the country.  In rural districts they are
looking after the horses and cattle that have not been requisitioned
and getting the fruitful soil ready for next year's harvest; in the
towns they are keeping the shops open and running their men's business.
Women are taking over the practice of the doctors who have been
mobilized.  In the schools women teachers have taken over the work of
men teachers and uncomplainingly added it to their own.  In short, they
are all doing with energy, good sense and patriotism whatever wants
doing.

I cannot finish without mentioning a circumstance which has not a
little excited my curiosity.  Since the beginning of the war the hair
of many of the ladies in France has been growing rapidly darker at the
roots, but whether this is due to the anxiety natural to the times, or
to some more obscure cause, I am not competent to say.  I will,
however, hazard the surmise that if the war continues much longer there
will be few blondes in France for gentlemen to prefer.




VI

The French people are justly proud of their army.  It is well armed,
well led and the spirit of the men is as admirable as it has always
been.  The pages of history are rich with the story of its exploits,
and the great victories it has won are of imperishable memory.  I
suppose every Frenchman could roll you off a long list of its famous
generals, from Turenne and Cond, Napoleon and his marshals to Joffre,
Gallieni and Foch; but I doubt whether one in a hundred could give you
the name of any admiral of his country's fleet but Suffren, and I am
not sure that even he could tell you why exactly this great sailor has
achieved renown.  For the French have never taken the same interest nor
taken the same pride in their navy.  Governments have always been
parsimonious in the supplies they granted it.  It needed the
determination of M. Leygues, Minister of Marine, inspired by the
enthusiasm of a young officer who is now Admiral Darlan, Commander in
Chief, to induce the reluctant deputies to vote at last sufficient
funds to reorganize the French navy and thus in due course bring it to
its present high state of efficiency.  The French navy does not
advertise its accomplishments, it goes about its job modestly and
discreetly, with the result that the public, both in France and in
England, has little notion either of its strength or of the splendid
work it has been doing since war broke out.  By the end of November the
French navy had sunk at least ten German submarines and had seized
200,000 tons of German goods; and since then it has further
achievements to its credit.  It has made the Mediterranean as safe as
the Lake of Lucerne.  It has protected the great Atlantic ports in
France and Morocco and has transported vast numbers of troops to and
from French Colonies.  It has convoyed the British troopships on the
latter part of their passage of the Channel till their arrival in
French harbours.

But to give an account anything like adequate of the French navy at the
present moment I should have to be an expert in naval matters.  My
object in this article is very modest.  I was fortunate enough to be
invited to spend a little time in a heavy cruiser and in a torpedo boat
and go to sea with them while they carried out certain routine
exercises.  Hoping to interest the reader, I will tell him what I saw.
The first difficulty that confronts the stranger in a French man-of-war
is the mode of address.  In the army you address a general as _mon
general_, a major and a captain as _mon commandant_ and _mon
capitaine_, respectively; but in the navy you do nothing of the sort:
you say, _oui, amiral_, to an admiral, and you address captains,
commanders and lieutenant-commanders as _Commandant_; other officers
you address by their names.  On meeting for the first time in the day,
a junior officer salutes his superior; they shake hands and exchange a
few words.  The junior says: "_Mes respects, Commandant_," while the
senior replies: "_Comment allez-vous?_" or "_Ca va bien?_"  It would be
foolish to make any definite statements on the casual observations I
was able to gather on so short a visit; I received the impression that
the officers' relations with one another were cordial and polite
without being intimate.  One of the great differences between the
English and the French is the closeness of the family tie.  With the
Englishman it binds him loosely, but with the Frenchman the family is
the centre, the mainstay and the justification of his life.  It was
very evident that the commander was proud of his ship, as a racing
motorist might be proud of the car that had served him well, but it was
not his home; his home was the house at Brest or Toulon where his wife
and children waited for him.  And perhaps it is natural that the naval
officer of to-day, a highly trained specialist, should look upon the
modern battleship as an instrument under his hand, a delicate, powerful
but inanimate instrument, rather than with the warm feeling with which
the sea captain of old looked upon his sailing-vessel.  There are
doubtless many thousand Englishmen who know nothing of the sea, just as
there are many thousand Frenchmen who know nothing of the soil, yet the
sea has for the English the same deeply spiritual significance that the
soil has for the French, so that the British officer can still look
upon the great and complicated machine which is a battleship as his
home, and his messmates of the wardroom as his family.  I have a notion
that his French colleague chooses the sea for his profession, loving it
certainly, but as other men choose a career in the city, and when he
leaves his ship does so as they would leave their office.  He enjoys
the opportunities the treacheries of the element give him for the
exercise of his will and intelligence, but I think he keeps the
tenderness of his emotion for the countryside of his birthplace.  It is
a difference of temperament, and in no way impairs his efficiency.  The
officers I was fortunate enough to meet appeared to me clever, keen and
able.  They worked so hard that I could not believe the French navy
would ever produce another Loti.  In the French navy promotion is
automatic up to the rank of commander; after that it is by merit; and I
think it will be hard in future for a naval officer, obliged to
concentrate on his ceaseless duties, to attain high rank and to achieve
as well the distinction as a novelist which was won by the author of
_Pcheurs d'Islande_.  I seemed to discern that, though discipline was
perfect, there was the same pleasantly democratic feeling in the French
navy as I had found in the French army.  Orders are given in a less
peremptory fashion than in our own ships.  The sailor when he is
speaking to an officer does not say _monsieur_ to him, but addresses
him by his rank.  Officers and men smoke where and when they please on
board, during working hours and out of them.  I had a feeling that
there existed between officers and men not only confidence, but a sort
of quiet friendliness.  The French soldier is a conscript, but he is a
man, often of education, and he is an intelligent man; and he carries
out an order better if he knows the meaning of it; he likes to know
what he is up to and likes to be treated as a rational being.  I should
be inclined to say that compared with a man in the British navy he is
rather slovenly and untidy, and again from that standpoint, I dare say
a good deal is done in a rather happy-go-lucky fashion, but the fact
remains that things are done and done well.  These are minor details;
essentially sailors are the same in every country and the brotherhood
of the sea unites them.  I happened to be in a torpedo boat when the
news came in of the battle between the _Rawalpindi_ and the
_Deutschland_.  Officers and men exulted in the British ship's heroic
struggle as frankly as if it had been a ship of their own that had
endured for so many hours the unequal contest.  Each man seemed to take
a personal pride in the magnificent exploit.  Shortly before, they had
heard of the good fortune the _Sirocco_ had had in sinking two
submarines in three days.  "What a bit of luck!" said the commander of
my torpedo boat; "but it's enough, she must leave a few for the rest of
us."  He would have been superhuman if he had not felt a trace of envy
for the commander who, with all the odds of the sea against him, had
run across the submarines, but it was offset by a great good will.

I must not forget that in a French ship the food is extremely good.
Lunch is at noon, and is a substantial and well-cooked meal.  I could
not have eaten better in a first-class restaurant, and a patriotic bias
shall not prevent me from saying that lunch in a French torpedo boat is
a vastly more palatable meal than any I have eaten in an admiral's
flagship in the British navy.  Dinner, served according to
circumstances between seven and eight, is slighter, but well cooked,
and the quality of the food is as good.  Messing is paid for by the
Government, and this covers all drinks, so that there is no mess bill
except for cigarettes.  I am told that in some ships bridge in normal
circumstances is played after dinner, but officers use the mess little
except for meals.  As a rule they turn in early.

I will now relate what I saw when I went to sea first in a heavy
cruiser, then in a torpedo boat.  They were just the ordinary exercises
of the fleet, but they may be interesting to someone who, like myself,
till then had never seen them.  It was splendid to steam out of harbour
in that great ship, and we must have made an imposing procession as we
set forth, with two aeroplanes flying over us, preceded by a torpedo
boat, the mine dredger sweeping behind it, and escorted by two other
torpedo boats.  We passed through the channel in the mine-fields, and
when we reached the appointed spot for the gunnery practice we were to
do, the torpedo boats left us.  It was strangely uncanny to me to see
the stealthy ease with which the heavy guns slewed round in their great
steel turrets.  They were like huge primeval monsters lurking in their
caves for their prey.  With powerful glasses one could see quite well
the great fountain of water that was thrown up when a shell fell a
trifle short or a trifle wide of its mark and the staggering of the
target when there was a direct hit.  The gunnery was wonderfully
accurate.  We spent the day in various exercises, we were attacked by a
flotilla of torpedo boats, and we practised with anti-aircraft
machine-guns.  It was beautiful to see the shells speed through the air
like a flight of red-hot hornets.  Then at night, returning, we fired
again at the target at which we had practised in the morning.  In the
silence and darkness the sound was terrific and awe-inspiring.  The
lighting shells were wonderfully pretty as they shot through the night,
ricocheting when they struck the water and bouncing on the surface like
great balls of fire.

In the torpedo boat aboard which I was afterwards taken we were set
first of all to act as a target to a shore battery.  The guns aimed at
us, but their direction was deflected so that the shells fell 600
metres to the right of us.  Except for this, their first shell would
have sent us to the bottom.  Nineteen shots were fired, and of these
five were direct hits and two others fell so close that we should have
been badly damaged.  If it had been real warfare not many of that crew
would ever have seen their homes again.  Later in the day we were
attacked by a flotilla of torpedo boats, but, owing to a mishap to one
of these, only a few torpedoes were fired, and we were instructed to
accompany the disabled ship back to harbour.  We arrived at dead of
night, the boom was opened and we steamed slowly in to attach ourselves
to the buoy of which the number had been wirelessed to us.  The harbour
was in pitch darkness, one could just discern the shapes of ships at
anchor, and to find the particular buoy we wanted was a long and
ticklish job.  Next morning we set out again to escort to harbour the
cruiser on which I had been before.  When we found her we put out our
dredger and steamed ahead of her, thus minimizing the danger of her
striking a mine, which the smaller torpedo boat might miss, and, if it
did not, would prove a less serious loss.

It was about four in the afternoon when the cruiser dismissed us, and
then we put on steam to join a flotilla which was already on the way
out to sea.  They were waiting for us twenty miles away.  We were to
find and attack a cruiser which had been ordered to go from a certain
point on the mainland to a certain island, a distance of 120 miles.  By
the rules of the game the cruiser had to stick to her course, but, once
sighted, could do whatever she chose to get away.  The light was
failing when we came up with the flotilla.  It looked imposing and
powerful sitting there in the empty sea.  It consisted of two light
cruisers, and after we joined it of six torpedo boats.  A place had
been left for us, and when we had taken it we set out.  The two
cruisers had the central position, while the torpedo boats flanked
them; the formation had the shape of a cock-eyed diamond on a
playing-card.  The distance we kept from one another was about 1000
metres, but when we reached the appointed spot from which we were to
start our search we separated, and then I think there was about 4000 to
5000 metres from ship to ship.  Night had fallen now, a heavy sea was
running and with all our speed on we were rolling a good deal.  I was
glad, standing on the bridge, to have a rail to cling to.  "This is
nothing," the commander told me: "sometimes she rolls so that when
you're hanging on to that rail your feet are swept away from under you."

We tore on through the night, with all lights out, trying through our
glasses to get a glimpse of the cruiser we were looking for.  Nothing
could be seen of the rest of our flotilla.  I had a sudden realization
of the immense loneliness of the sea and of its vastness.  It needs an
experience like that to make you feel how immense it is, and then you
cannot wonder that with dozens of ships looking for her, a raider may
escape detection.  My commander was a big, vigorous, energetic man, and
now as he stood on the bridge his spirits rose with the excitement of
the chase.  His face was set and even in the darkness you could see the
shining of his eyes.  His whole body was taut.  "Ah, if it were only
the real thing," he cried, "and if it were an enemy cruiser we were
after!"  The moon rose and he looked at it with misgiving.  He feared
that it would betray us and so give the cruiser a chance to escape.  We
pounded on into the empty night and heavy seas swept over our bows.
Then a wireless from one of the torpedo boats told us that the cruiser
had been sighted; we changed our course and suddenly there was a cry
from a dozen throats.  The moon was favourable and showed us a vague
black mass faintly silhouetted against the sky.  Although it was only
make-believe, it was a thrilling moment.  The commander gave an order,
we changed our course again to get into position; a sudden crash of
thunder and we had fired our torpedoes.  "D'you think you got her?" I
asked.  "I don't know, we shall hear to-morrow."  Then from the
flagship they wirelessed to us that the rest of the flotilla were
taking on the pursuit, so with one torpedo boat ahead of us and another
astern we started back for harbour.  The moon now was hidden in cloud,
and we pounded through the heavy sea in pitch darkness.  My
unaccustomed eyes could see nothing, but the officers could make out
the boat ahead of us, and we followed her between the islands.  After
the excitement there was a faint sensation of being let down, and the
journey home seemed very long.  The cold was bitter, but as we were
approaching land we saw a dark mass, a ship we did not know.  Instantly
everyone was on the alert; we turned our search-light on her, messages
flickered to and fro, and we discovered, somewhat to my commander's
disappointment, I think, that she was a French auxiliary cruiser
setting out on a legitimate errand.  At last we crept into harbour.  We
were to tie up at a quay where a whole line of torpedo boats were
moored, in a space between two, and the commander took his ship of 3000
tons in as neatly and as delicately to its appointed berth as though it
were a small roadster that he was laying along the crowded kerb in an
opening left by a departing car.  I was taken off in a launch and
landed at another quay from which I could get into the town.  I was
sorry to say good-bye to my charming and hospitable host.  It was the
small hours of the morning and it was hard to find the way in the inky
blackness through those silent, empty streets.  Not a soul was to be
seen.  It might have been an evacuated city.




VII

There is a cathedral in France in the transept of which, on the wall,
is a memorial tablet.  In the centre are the arms of Great Britain, and
surrounding them those of India, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South
Africa and Newfoundland; and the inscription runs: "To the Glory of God
and to the Memory of One Million Dead of the British Empire who fell in
the Great War, 1914-1918, and of whom the greater part rest in France."
These are simple and solemn words, and they give the lie to the gibes
of German propaganda that the British are prepared to fight to the last
drop of French blood.

The cathedral was utterly destroyed by the Germans in the last war, but
it has been built anew with taste and discretion; its lines are pure
and it has a fine austerity.  It is a handsome and dignified edifice
and needs now only a century or two, which will soften the sharpness of
its outlines and give mellowness to its honey-coloured stone, to
acquire the shattering tenderness of beauty.  But who can tell whether
time will have the chance to paint it with its lovely patina?  The
stained glass has been taken out of the windows and the high altar is
protected by sandbags, for though there is now no possibility that the
German guns will again bombard it, there is still the danger of attack
from the air, and none can be sure that this noble structure, so
recently completed, will not once more be brought to ruin.  The
bishop's palace was destroyed too, and it was at the door of a very
new, spick-and-span building that I rang the bell to keep the
appointment the bishop had made with me.  I was ushered into a smallish
room with an ugly flowered paper, a suite of stiff furniture and
portraits of ecclesiastics on the walls.  On a table stood a photograph
of His Holiness the Pope.  The bishop entered, a dark, stoutish man, of
middle height, with shining, deep brown eyes.  He wore a black cassock
and a violet skull-cap.

I think I should explain why I had desired to see him.  While waiting
in Paris for the arrangements to be made which would enable me to see
for myself, both at the front and elsewhere, the great effort France
was making in this moment of trial, I went one afternoon to Notre Dame
des Victoires.  The church was founded by Louis XIII and was so named
in memory of his victories.  It is held in peculiar devotion.  There
are many who believe that on September 8th, 1914, German soldiers saw
the Blessed Virgin, who is the protector of Paris, with arms
outstretched barring the passage of the enemy, in answer to the prayers
that were addressed to her before the image in this church.  Now the
faithful pray to our Lady of Victories so that she may safeguard them
from the scourge of war and that all men may live as brothers.  It was
a cold, grey afternoon when I went there.  There was no service, but in
the chapel of Our Lady of Victories was a great crowd.  Rich and poor
together, they sat and knelt in silence, men of all ages, women young
and old, and prayed, and some of them wept.  There were high officers
with the Legion of Honour on their tunics and private soldiers in their
drab uniform.  I saw a young, strapping boy come in--he might have been
just twenty and soon would go to the war--and standing at the back,
ashamed perhaps to join the throng, with a set, serious face, his lips
just moving, utter his silent supplication.  Now and again someone
stepped forward with a tall candle and gave it to the attendant, who
lit it and placed it in one of the great stands on each side of the
altar.  The altar blazed with candles, so that you could only just
discern the shadowed statue of the Blessed Virgin, with the imperial
crown on her head and the crowned Child in her arms.  Though all the
candles, on the altar and on each side of it, were subject, I should
have thought, to the same draught, it was strange that it had not the
same effect on all.  Some burnt with a clear, motionless flame, and
they were like the souls of men steadfast in their faith who faced the
dark future with serenity, and some flickered with a wavering, restless
light, and they were like the anguished, faltering souls of men who did
not know, who feared and doubted, and yet with desperate longing sought
that peace which passeth all understanding.  When I left the church
night had fallen on the darkened streets of Paris.

It is generally said that the French are a nation of sceptics.  I have
never believed it.  They are a mocking people, with a keen sense of
irony and a lively wit, but deep down in their inner-most being,
notwithstanding their protestations of agnosticism and their ribald
jesting at sacred things, there is a religious sense which, however
much they would, they can seldom altogether escape.  Catholicism is in
their bones.  It is inextricably connected with their love of the soil;
it has its roots in their powerful sense of the family which we in
England know so little.  It is natural that in times of deadly danger,
when the existence of the nation is at stake, the thoughts of men
should turn to matters which in other times are crowded out by the
multifarious occupations of the day.  And while I was visiting the
armies in the field, going round the armament factories, talking to the
refugees from Alsace and Lorraine, chatting with officers in a
man-of-war, I kept my ears open, I slipped in a discreet question when
the opportunity presented itself; I wanted to discover what spiritual
effect this war was having on those who were engaged in it; I wanted to
know whether this great disaster had restored men's faith in God and
whether, face to face with death as so many of them were, they found in
that faith strength and solace.  I beg the reader to believe that this
was no idle curiosity on my part.  The things of the spirit are
all-important, and a people can neglect them only at its peril.  But
these are difficult things to get anyone to talk to you about and,
thinking that priests must know a good deal which it was only natural
would never be disclosed to me, I thought it wiser to address myself to
them.

The bishop I was then visiting told me that in his diocese alone 500
priests have been mobilized.  They have taken with them portable
chapels, with for altar the consecrated tablet which can be placed on
any support, the Host, miniature vessels for the celebration of Mass,
and vestments made for them by charitable ladies in the diocese.  If
they can, they get the little case that contains these precious objects
put on a truck, but if not, they carry it themselves with their
accoutrement.  They say Mass, often before dawn if there is work to do,
even in the advanced trenches.  Mass is served by another priest.  I
asked the bishop how the priests got on with the soldiers.  Very well,
he told me.  They ate with them, fought with them, sharing their pains,
material and spiritual, so that the men who had been accustomed only to
see the priest flying by on his bicycle, his cassock tucked round his
legs, and after their Confirmation had never had any communication with
him, discovered that he was a man like themselves.  His spiritual side
inspired their respect.  I asked the bishop whether in his opinion the
war had occasioned in France a revival of religious feeling.  "There is
no doubt of it," he answered.  "It is unmistakable."  I asked him then
whether he thought this was due to the fear of death.  "Partly, of
course," he replied, "but not entirely.  For it has affected not only
the men at the front, but also the reservists at the rear who know they
will never be called upon to risk their lives."  Men this time, he
said, had not gone to the war with cheering and singing as they went to
the last war, but with dismay, yet with determination, with sadness,
yet with fortitude; they went as to a crusade; they went to fight in
defence of their country with the same holy ardour as possessed the
knights of the Middle Ages when they crossed the sea to wrest the Holy
Sepulchre from the hands of the Saracen.  "Without knowing it, they are
mystics," he added, "and that is why they can never be vanquished."  He
told me also that since the outbreak of the war services were attended
as never before; soldiers in large numbers came, officers too, and
officials of the republic, who in the past would have feared, _par
respect humain_, to be seen at Mass.

This phrase greatly puzzled me.  _Le respect humain_ does not mean what
one would think it meant, and I had to have it explained to me two or
three times before I could make sure that I understood it.  I think it
can best be translated as the fear of public opinion.  A priest told me
that when he met a parishioner working in the fields he would take off
his hat and pass the time of day, but when he met him in company with
others he would look the other way.  "Why?" I asked.  "_Le respect
humain_."  The priesthood recognize this powerful sentiment, and indeed
regard it, if I am not mistaken, with a resigned and ironic tolerance,
for none more than they know what allowances must be made for human
weakness; but it is a sentiment strange to us English, who, I suggest,
are on the whole indifferent to what others think of us.  Perhaps we
are less sensitive to disapproval and more obstinate in our self-will.
In France you can kill a man by ridicule; in England you only have to
laugh at him enough to make him an important public character.  I have
sometimes been inclined to think that one reason why the French and the
English understand one another so little is that in England you can
think anything you like so long as you behave like everybody else,
while in France you can do pretty well anything you choose so long as
you think like your neighbours.  _Le respect humain_ has had an
important influence in France, but the war, by all accounts, has
largely broken its power.

Another bishop, whom I met later, told me a little story he had heard
from one of his seminarists.  A hard-bitten old soldier who had been
through the last war was in an advanced post with the seminarist, and
he said to him: "Look here, my boy, you're only a half-baked priest,
you don't know enough to open the gates of Heaven for me, but after all
you're in the business and you can do something; if I'm hit and you
think I'm for it, you just give me three good thumps on the chest to
remind me to make my peace with God."  This bishop, who during the last
war was in command of a regiment, gave me a number of letters which he
had received from his priests and deacons in the fighting line.  They
are infinitely moving, and I cannot but regret that I have only space
to quote part of one of them.  It begins as follows: "We have just been
passing six days in the second line under the German guns and to-morrow
we are going back to the front.  Trench life will begin again.  We
shall have to work by day and fight by night.  We shall have to dig
trenches, build shelters and pump out the water that is flooding
everything.  Then by night we shall have to take our arms, our
machine-guns and grenades and be ready to use them at the first alarm."
And it ends thus: "Another time they called me to a man who had just
been mortally wounded.  They told him: 'Here's R.  He's by your side.'
He opened his eyes and looked at me, and when I said the act of
contrition he repeated the words after me.  I asked him if he would
take the Communion, and he nodded.  I put my little case on the corner
of my cloak and I took the body of Christ in my hands and with tears in
my eyes I said: '_Corpus Domini nostri Jesu Christi custodiat animam
tuam in vitam aeternam._' He had no sooner communicated than he died.
So to-morrow I'm going up once more to join the men in the front line,
but this time without guns or grenades, taking with me only the body of
Christ to give to those who are to meet Him.  We are all on the way
towards Him and our souls are uplifted.  Our souls are athirst for the
truth, the justice, the love, of which too long they have known
nothing."

Thinking, however, that from dignitaries of the Church I was likely to
get only the official view, as it were, of this change of heart which
so deeply interested me, I made it my business to get in touch with
parish priests in rural districts.  I went to see one, the cur of a
village in the depths of the country, a red-faced man with waving thick
hair and blunt features, who had been through the last war as a private
soldier and had been severely gassed.  He still suffered from the
effects.  He was a friendly, hearty soul, a peasant still, as his
fathers had been before him for generations, and there clung to him a
pleasant savour of the soil from which they had through the years wrung
their bread.  "It does me good to see how they're coming back," he
said, his eyes shining with kindliness.  I asked him too whether it was
from the fear of death.  "No," he answered; "they have gone to war from
a sense of duty, and their duty to their country has made them
recollect their duty to God."  He told me that he had had a letter from
a friend of his at the front, a priest, who told him how men took him
aside and started a casual conversation, then made their confession to
him; and how others came up to him as he was about to say his Mass and
asked him to pray for their wives and children and for their mothers.
"And what," I asked him, "do you priests think of being asked to
fight?"  He laughed.  "There would not be enough stones on the road to
stone us with, there wouldn't be enough slanders for our enemies to
fling at us, if when every man in the country is answering the call of
duty and honour, we stood aside.  But we are glad to go.  It is a war
of defence, and so as holy as a crusade.  Our lives cut us off in many
ways from the lives of other men, but the war has brought us nearer to
them.  We wear the same uniform, we live with them in barracks and
suffer with them in the trenches; we share their bread, their dangers,
their sacrifices, and often we are united with them in death.  The
kindness they show us fills our hearts with humility."

But I do not want to bore the reader with an account of my visits to
these country priests.  I will only ask him to have patience with me
while I tell him of one more, and I will speak of him because he was an
Englishman and it was strange to find him as cur of this tiny parish
in the middle of France.  He had been in France for ten years, and his
French, though his accent was terrible, was fluent and idiomatic.  He
told me that often he did not speak a word of English for months at a
time.  He lived in a little stone house, two centuries old, next to the
church, and when the front door was opened I found myself in the
kitchen.  On the stove was cooking in a casserole the solitary dish of
the priest's evening meal.  An old woman led me along a dark and narrow
passage to his living-room.  It was untidy and comfortless, but a small
stove in front of the chimney-piece afforded a grateful warmth.  A
shelf of books added a friendly note.  The priest was a youngish man,
tall and thin, with a weather-beaten face, brown hair receding from the
forehead and a tonsure large enough to suggest that nature had left the
barber little to do.  At first he was very shy and kept trying to tie
his long limbs into complicated knots, but he gained confidence over a
cup of tea.  "That's the one thing I've never given up, my cup of
afternoon tea," he said.  "I don't know what I'd do without it."  So
many priests have been mobilized that now he has had to take charge of
six parishes.  He says Mass in three on alternate Sundays and in the
other three holds services on Sunday afternoons.  "It's a bit of a job
to get round to them all on my bicycle," he said.  "I can manage it
now, but I really don't know what I shall do if the winter's bad and
the whole country's under snow.  Who's that chap I've read about in the
papers who gives so much away?  Something to do with motor-cars, he
is."  I suggested a well-known name.  "That's it.  I wonder if he'd
lend me one of his old second-hand cars for the duration so that I
could get round my parishes.  I could say Mass every Sunday then,
instead of every other."  He had the same story to tell me as the
others.  He talked to me of such of his parishioners as had gone to the
front.  He wrote to them constantly, and they told him that they were
pleased to receive his letters.  He hunted all over the room to find
the answer he had just had from one of them, and at last found it under
his nose.  He wanted to read it to me because it was from an uneducated
man, whose father worked in the fields, and who had never before shown
any interest in spiritual things.  The priest put on his spectacles.
"It's written in such a shocking bad hand that it's hard to read," he
said.  It was very short, but it seemed to me that no educated man
could have said better.  "I was called up to fight for France.  It was
hard to leave my home and my family.  But of course it was my duty to
go.  Thank you for your prayers for me.  I hope that God will give us
the peace with justice that we are fighting for and that by His mercy
we shall have security for our children."

I thought the dish in the casserole must be boiling away by now, and
with regret I left the sweet-natured English priest, so willing an
exile, to his lonely supper.



  PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY
  RICHARD CLAY AND COMPANY, LTD.,
  BUNGAY, SUFFOLK.




      *      *      *      *      *      *      *      *




  By W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM

  LIZA OF LAMBETH
  MRS. CRADDOCK
  THE MERRY-GO-ROUND
  THE EXPLORER
  THE MAGICIAN
  THE MOON AND SIXPENCE
  OF HUMAN BONDAGE
  THE TREMBLING OF A LEAF
  ON A CHINESE SCREEN
  THE PAINTED VEIL
  THE CASUARINA TREE
  ASHENDEN
  THE GENTLEMAN IN THE PARLOUR
  CAKES AND ALE OR, THE SKELETON IN THE CUPBOARD
  SIX STORIES WRITTEN IN THE FIRST PERSON SINGULAR
  THE NARROW CORNER
  AH KING
  ALTOGETHER (_Collected Short Stories_)
  DON FERNANDO
  COSMOPOLITANS
  THEATRE
  THE SUMMING UP
  THE MIXTURE AS BEFORE
  BOOKS AND YOU

  _Plays_

  JACK STRAW
  LADY FREDERICK
  THE EXPLORER
  MRS. DOT
  PENELOPE
  THE TENTH MAN
  SMITH
  LANDED GENTRY
  A MAN OF HONOUR
  THE UNKNOWN
  THE CIRCLE
  CSAR'S WIFE
  EAST OF SUEZ
  THE LAND OF PROMISE
  OUR BETTERS
  THE UNATTAINABLE
  HOME AND BEAUTY
  LOAVES AND FISHES
  THE LETTER
  THE CONSTANT WIFE
  THE SACRED FLAME
  THE BREADWINNER
  FOR SERVICES RENDERED
  SHEPPEY






[End of France at War, by W. Somerset Maugham]
