In ordinary times I dare say some of those French boys would have been frankly annoyed at the prospect of giving up their civil employment and their personal freedom for a period of enforced military service. But now as they came pouring up the stairs after us into the big bare room—decorated only by a tricolor flag and a white bust of the République Française, crowned with a wreath of oak leaves—there was no mistaking their extraordinary enthusiasm or the reason for it. The soldiers of the Kaiser when they went to the war, believed firmly that they were going to fight because the Fatherland was in danger, because otherwise it would inevitably be crushed by the ring of jealous nations by which it was surrounded. That was the idea which had been carefully drilled into them. That was what they had been told by the ignoble and servile army of professors and sergeants. But these boys of Lorraine needed no telling. They knew. If they did not all actually come from the blackened and ruined villages and towns which marked the track of the retreating incendiaries, they lived without exception within a few miles of them. Saint Nicholas-du-Port had only just escaped occupation by the enemy. Dombasle was only two miles off. For weeks the Germans’ guns had been thundering in their ears, for weeks they had heard—and known—of the murder of innocent women and children and old men; for weeks they had been familiar with the effects of pillage and incendiarism and rape. No wonder they were willing to die for _la patrie_. If the things that were done in Lorraine and the Vosges had been done in Kent and Norfolk the shirkers of England would long ago have repented in khaki and ashes. There would have been no need of lurid posters and cinematograph films and compulsion to bring them in. They would have fought because they would have known—as these French boys knew—that otherwise their country and all that they loved must die. And if they had been rejected because, though the spirit was willing, the flesh was too weak to make a fighting soldier, they would have been as bitterly disappointed as these boys of Lorraine were whenever they failed to pass the doctor’s tests. Among the boys, in one of the batches that came in a dozen at a time to be examined, there was, I remember, a man of well over fifty, long past the military age but still perfectly fit and strong, who had been called up owing to some mistake made by a clerk. It was curious and it was exhilarating to see this greybeard standing up stripped to the skin, quietly and with proud dignity explaining to the uniformed full-dressed committee in front of him that he had already served his terms as active soldier, reservist, and territorial, but that he was still able to fight and asked nothing better than to be reckoned _bon pour service_ if the country had need of him.