The French are a temperamental people, and consequently are most easily affected by circumstances. In former times the mass of the people were inclined to be demonstrative, insincere, somewhat selfish, and rather egotistical. These characteristics could never pass the tests, and now the true spirit of France, the Phœnix, is rising from the ashes of the past a freed and glorified being, radiant in the joy of accomplishment. From the torture she has endured, an understanding of the feelings and desires of others must be born which will banish the taint of selfishness forever. Those who do things are never egotistical—they have no time to talk, and France has been doing things these past years. Those who rub elbows with the elementals and sacrifice for each other and a cause can never be insincere again. And what harm is there in demonstration? The bad characteristics removed, this becomes merely an effervescence, a bubbling over of a joyous, unrestrained nature—Ponce de Leon’s true fountain of perpetual youth. The difference between the men who have served at the front and either seen or felt great suffering, and those who have not, is most marked. One evening I was in an _abri_ where some new recruits were wrangling over unimportant things, and showing their selfish character in every speech and act, when a desperately wounded man was brought in. After serving for some time in the trenches he had been given a few days’ leave to see his family. He went back happily, thinking of the wife and the little children he was soon to see again. Having left the third-line trenches, he was walking through the woods down the _boyau_ which leads to the outer world, when a shell broke overhead. The _brancardiers_ patched him up and brought him in with his head bound so that his eyes and mouth alone were visible. The doctor handed him a cup of _Pinard_ and a cigarette, neither of which would he touch until he had offered it to the rest of us. I picked up his helmet which he had put down for an instant, although his eye never left it. There was a hole in it through which I could have rolled a golf ball. To illustrate the reverse—I was standing in a town a little ways back, waiting for a car to give me a lift up to the lines, when a kitten rubbed against my leg. I picked it up and started to play with it. Instantly a peasant—not too old to serve—rushed out and snatched the kitten from my arms: “_Ce nest pas à vous!_” was his comment. * * * * * THE English can never be called a temperamental race, but even their stolid worth has needed much shaking up for the best in it to come to the surface. The example they have set since their awakening is one which any nation may well emulate, and it will be a proud people indeed which can ever equal the record they have made in this war for courage and devotion, never surpassed in the history of the world.