Before we came to Lorraine we had both seen a little of the early fighting in Belgium—at Namur and Mons, and Charleroi and Dinant. But it was at Nancy that I really got to know something of French soldiers and learnt to admire the wonderful cheerfulness and courage of the XXth Army Corps and the other splendid troops who talked with the enemy in the gate of France, and blocked the passage with their dead bodies. All that is long ago, though not so long as it seems after the weary waiting of more than a year’s work in the trenches. But the end is not yet. Those army corps, or their successors—for nearly all of the original officers and men are dead or wounded—are still steadily pressing the enemy back, almost on the same ground as when we were there, and, though the full story cannot be told even now, it is neither too late nor too soon for an Englishman to try and give some idea of the debt which England owes to the French armies of the east. But I should like to say a word about England too. It is always difficult to see ourselves as others see us. Till long after I had gone abroad for this war—to be quite frank, till the end of 1915—I had no real idea of the view which other nations held at the beginning of the chances of our taking a hand in it. I knew, of course, that many Germans had declared since it began that they for their part had never believed that we would draw the sword. I knew from Englishmen who were in Berlin two days, and even I believe one day, before we did declare war, that Englishmen at that time were received in the streets with cries of “Vive l’Angleterre,” or rather “Hoch! England!” and that the bitter revulsion of feeling against us only began when we had thrown down the glove. But that—as I then thought—extraordinary miscalculation and misunderstanding of our national temper, the infuriated reaction from which found vent in the “Gott strafe England” campaign and the “Song of Hate,” I put down to an inexplicable blindness peculiar to the German nation, and to the sort of fury to which we are all liable when other people on important occasions do not act as we wish and expect that they will. Since then—but only lately—I have learnt better, from the vantage ground of a neutral nation.