The French soldier remains, even in this bloodiest of wars, always a civilian, a man, capable of laughter and tears, of heroic heights, of chivalrous sacrifices,--with the soul's image of what manhood requires, with the vision of a state of free individual men like himself. * * * * * The New France is inspired with qualities of Old France, qualities which I call Latin, which have emerged into high relief under grief and suffering and effort. It is above all gallant and high-minded. The wounded Frenchman never complains or whimpers. "_C'est la guerre--que voulez-vous!_" To the surgeon who has operated on him,--"_Merci, mon major_." And they lie legless or armless, perhaps with running sores, a smile on the face in answer to the sympathetic word, in long hospital rows.... The fundamental element in this New France is the gravity, the seriousness of it. Of all the warring peoples the French seem to realize most clearly what it all means, what it is for, and the deep import of the decision not merely to them, but to the whole world. They are fighting, not for territory, but for principles. Peace must be not a rearrangement of maps, but of men's ideas, of men's wills. They are the conscious protagonists of a long tradition of ideals that have once more been put in jeopardy. It is the character of this human world of ours which they are struggling to mould, and like actors in a Greek tragedy they are suitably impressed with the gravity of the issue in their hands. The New France has been born in the travail of the monstrous desolation of trench-land that stretches, scabby with shell-holes, leprous with gray wire, pitted with countless graves, scarred with crumbled villages for four hundred miles across the fair fields of _la douce France_. In this savage desert, inhumanly silent except for the shrieking of shells, for now more than a year's time France has struggled with the incarnated spirit of evil, rearing its head again, armed with all the enginery of modern science. The little, dirty-bearded soldiers squat there in their burrows, white-faced, tense, silent, waiting, watching, month after month, or plunge over their walls to give their lives on that death-field outside. They are the simple martyrs of the New France. * * * * *