"_Et toi, mon trésor_--you must have a great deal to do.... Well, do all you can to save those poor wounded!--left there in the snow and blood. My blood boils to be staying on here, when there is so much to do over there, in picking up those poor fellows. Why won't they have a woman?--there, where she could really help! It is the business of mothers to pick up those poor lads, and give them a good word. Well, you must replace the mothers, you, _mon chéri_, you must do all you can--do the impossible--to help. I see you running--creeping along--looking for the wounded. If I could only be there too!--Yes, it is my place, _mon petit_, near you. Courage, courage!--I know it is the beginning of the end--and the end will be grand for all those who have fought in the just cause." A month later thousands of English, Scotch, Welsh and Irish lads, men from Canada, South Africa, New Zealand, and Australia, were passing on the Somme through a similar furnace of death and suffering to that borne by the French at Verdun. But the English ways of expression are not the French; and both differ from the American. The instinct for ringing and dramatic speech rarely deserts the Frenchman--or Frenchwoman. It is present in the letter written by Roger Vamier's mother, as in the _Ordres du Jour_ of Castelnau or Pétain. Facility of this kind is not our _forte_. Our lack of it suggests the laughter in that most delightful of recent French books, _Les Silences du Colonel Bramble_, which turns upon our national taciturnities and our minimising instinct in any matter of feeling, an instinct which is like the hiding instinct, the protective colouring of birds--only anxious to be mistaken for something else. The Englishman, when emotion compels him, speaks more readily in poetry than prose; it is the natural result of our great poetic tradition; and in the remarkable collections of war poetry written by English soldiers we have the English counterpart to the French prose utterance of the war--so much more eloquent and effective, generally, than our own. * * * * *