Another aspect of French character which is both old and new is the quality of humorous "sportsmanship" the French have displayed. When Germany's crack aviator made a daily visit to Paris, dropping bombs, in the afternoon during the early weeks of the war, the Parisians took his arrival as a spectacle and thronged the boulevards to watch him and applaud. When at last he was shot through the head, the French press lamented his loss with genuine appreciation of his nerve and his skill. A young cavalry officer at the front told me this story: One of the younger officers of his regiment, to encourage his men, had offered rewards for German shoulder straps, that is, prisoners. Two simple peasants, misunderstanding his words, proudly brought in a couple of pairs of German ears strung on a string like game. The officer, brooding over the incident, resolved to explain and apologize to the enemy. Putting his handkerchief on the point of his sword, he crawled out of the trench and advanced across the field of death between the lines. Tales from the trenches by the hundreds prove that the French have not lost the sparkle of wit even under the dreary conditions of trench-fighting. When Italy joined the Allies, some soldiers of a front-line trench hoisted the placard,--"Macaroni mit uns!" Again, when boasting placards of German successes in Galicia were displayed, the French _poilus_ retorted,--"You lie. You have taken ten thousand officers and ten millions of troops." When in a German military prison the keepers boasted of their recent successes on the western front, the French prisoners began to sing the _Marseillaise_ to the astonishment of their German guards, "because," as they explained, "we know if you have killed all those French soldiers, you must have lost at least four times as many!" The barbarian misread the Gallic love of wit and laughter. To joke and quip seemed to him beneath the dignity of men. It is, rather, the safety-valve of a highly intelligent people--the outlet for their ironic perceptions of life. The most amusing songs of the war that I have heard were given by the _poilus_ on a little stage near Commercy while the cannon thundered a few miles away. This ability to turn upon himself and see his life in a humorous light is an invaluable quality of the French soldier. So, too, is his love of handicraft which finds many ingenious expressions even in the trenches. The French soldier is always a civilian, with a love of neatly arranged gardens and terraces, and he lays out a _potager_ in the curve of a shell-swept hillside, or a neat flower garden in the crumbled walls of a village house. He makes rings from the aluminum found in German shell-caps, carves the doorposts of his stone dugout, or likenesses of his officers on beam-ends, as I saw in a colonel's quarters in the Bois-le-Prêtre.