It was past eleven, and the packet had been steady some time when we
went on deck and found her moving slowly in bright moonlight up the
haven towards the houses of Le Havre. A night approach to a city by
water has the quality of other-worldness. I remember the same sensation
twice before: coming in to San Francisco from the East by the
steam-ferry, and stealing into Abingdon-on-Thames in a rowing-boat. Le
Havre lay, reaching up towards the heights, still and fair, a little
mysterious, with many lights which no one seemed using. It was cold, but
the air already had a different texture, drier, lighter than the air we
had left, and one's heart felt light and a little excited. In the
moonlight the piled-up, shuttered houses had colouring like that of
flowers at night--pale, subtle, mother-o'-pearl. We moved slowly up
beside the quay, heard the first French voices, saw the first French
faces, and went down again to sleep.
In the Military Bureau at the station, with what friendly politeness
they exchanged our hospital passes for the necessary forms; but it took
two officials ten minutes of hard writing! And one thought: Is victory
possible with all these forms? It is so throughout France--too many
forms, too many people to fill them up. As if France could not trust
herself without recording in spidery handwriting exactly where she is,
for nobody to look at afterwards. But France _could_ trust herself. A
pity!
Our only fellow-traveller was not a soldier, but had that indefinable
look of connection with the war wrapped round almost everyone in France.
A wide land we passed, fallow under the November sky; houses hidden
among the square Normandy court-yards of tall trees; not many people in
the fields.
Paris is Paris, was, and ever shall be! Paris is not France. If the
Germans had taken Paris they would have occupied the bodily heart, the
centre of her circulatory system; but the spirit of France their heavy
hands would not have clutched, for it never dwelt there. Paris is hard
and hurried; France is not. Paris loves pleasure; France loves life.
Paris is a brilliant stranger in her own land. And yet a lot of true
Frenchmen and Frenchwomen live there, and many little plots of real
French life are cultivated.
At the Gare de Lyon _poilus_ are taking trains for the South. This is
our first real sight of them in their tired glory. They look weary and
dusty and strong; every face has character, no face looks empty or as if
its thought were being done by others. Their laughter is not vulgar or
thick. Alongside their faces the English face looks stupid, the English
body angular and--neat. They are loaded with queer burdens, bread and
bottles bulge their pockets; their blue-grey is prettier than khaki,
their round helmets are becoming. Our Tommies, even to our own eyes,
seem uniformed, but hardly two out of all this crowd are dressed alike.
The French soldier luxuriates in extremes; he can go to his death in
white gloves and dandyism--he can glory in unshavenness and patches. The
words _in extremis_ seem dear to the French soldier; and, _con amore_,
he passes from one extreme to the other. One of them stands gazing up at
the board which gives the hours of starting and the destinations of the
trains. His tired face is charming, and has a look that I cannot
describe--lost, as it were, to all surroundings; a Welshman or a
Highlander, but no pure Englishman, could look like that.
Our carriage has four French officers; they talk neither to us nor to
each other; they sleep, sitting well back, hardly moving all night; one
of them snores a little, but with a certain politeness. We leave them in
the early morning and get down into the windy station at Valence. In
pre-war days romance began there when one journeyed. A lovely word, and
the gate of the South. Soon after Valence one used to wake and draw
aside a corner of the curtain and look at the land in the first level
sunlight; a strange land of plains, and far, yellowish hills, a land
with a dry, shivering wind over it, and puffs of pink almond blossom.
But now Valence was dark, for it was November, and raining. In the
waiting-room were three tired soldiers trying to sleep, and one sitting
up awake, shyly glad to share our cakes and journals. Then on through
the wet morning by the little branch line into Dauphiné. Two officers
again and a civilian, in our carriage, are talking in low voices of the
war, or in higher voices of lodgings at Valence. One is a commandant,
with a handsome paternal old face, broader than the English face, a
little more in love with life, and a little more cynical about it, with
more depth of colouring in eyes and cheeks and hair. The tone of their
voices, talking of the war, is grave and secret. "_Les Anglais ne
lâcheront pas_" are the only words I plainly hear. The younger officer
says: "And how would you punish?" The commandant's answer is inaudible,
but by the twinkling of his eyes one knows it to be human and sagacious.
The train winds on in the windy wet, through foothills and then young
mountains, following up a swift-flowing river. The chief trees are bare
Lombardy poplars. The chief little town is gathered round a sharp spur,
with bare towers on its top. The colour everywhere is a brownish-grey.
We have arrived. A tall, strong young soldier, all white teeth and
smiles, hurries our luggage out, a car hurries us up in the rainy wind
through the little town, down again across the river, up a long avenue
of pines, and we are at our hospital.
Round the long table, at their dinner-hour, what a variety of type among
the men! And yet a likeness, a sort of quickness and sensibility, common
to them all. A few are a little _méfiant_ of these newcomers, with the
_méfiance_ of individual character, not of class distrustfulness, nor of
that defensive expressionless we cultivate in England. The French
soldier has a touch of the child in him--if we leave out the Parisians;
a child who knows more than you do perhaps; a child who has lived many
lives before this life; a wise child, who jumps to your moods and shows
you his "sore fingers" readily when he feels that you want to see them.
He has none of the perverse and grudging attitude towards his own
ailments that we English foster. He is perhaps a little inclined to pet
them, treating them with an odd mixture of stoic gaiety and gloomy
indulgence. It is like all the rest of him; he feels everything so much
quicker than we do--he is so much more impressionable. The variety of
type is more marked physically than in our country. Here is a tall
Savoyard cavalryman, with a maimed hand and a fair moustache brushed up
at the ends, big and strong, with grey eyes, and a sort of sage
self-reliance; only twenty-six, but might be forty. Here is a real
Latin, who was buried by an explosion at Verdun; handsome, with dark
hair and a round head, and colour in his cheeks; an ironical critic of
everything, a Socialist, a mocker, a fine, strong fellow with a clear
brain, who attracts women. Here are two peasants from the Central South,
both with bad sciatica, slower in look, with a mournful, rather
monkeyish expression in their eyes, as if puzzled by their sufferings.
Here is a true Frenchman, a Territorial, from Roanne, riddled with
rheumatism, quick and gay, and suffering, touchy and affectionate, not
tall, brown-faced, brown-eyed, rather fair, with clean jaw and features,
and eyes with a soul in them, looking a little up; forty-eight--the
oldest of them all--they call him _Grandpère_. And here is a printer
from Lyon with shell-shock; medium-coloured, short and roundish and
neat, full of humanity and high standards and domestic affection, and
so polite, with eyes a little like a dog's. And here another with
shell-shock and brown-green eyes, from the "invaded countries";
_méfiant_, truly, this one, but with a heart when you get at it; neat,
and brooding, quick as a cat, nervous, and wanting his own way. But they
are all so varied. If there are qualities common to all they are
impressionability and capacity for affection. This is not the impression
left on one by a crowd of Englishmen. Behind the politeness and
civilised bearing of the French I used to think there was a little of
the tiger. In a sense perhaps there is, but that is not the foundation
of their character--far from it! Underneath the tiger, again, there is a
man civilised for centuries. Most certainly the politeness of the French
is no surface quality, it is a polish welling up from a naturally
affectionate heart, a naturally quick apprehension of the moods and
feelings of others; it is the outcome of a culture so old that,
underneath all differences, it binds together all those types and
strains of blood--the Savoyard, and the Southerner, the Latin of the
Centre, the man from the North, the Breton, the Gascon, the Basque, the
Auvergnat, even to some extent the Norman, and the Parisian--in a sort
of warm and bone-deep kinship. They have all, as it were, sat for
centuries under a wall with the afternoon sun warming them through and
through, as I so often saw the old town gossips sitting of an afternoon.
The sun of France has made them alike; a light and happy sun, not too
southern, but just southern enough.
And the women of France! If the men are bound in that mysterious
kinship, how much more so are the women! What is it in the Frenchwoman
which makes her so utterly unique? A daughter in one of Anatole France's
books says to her mother: "_Tu es pour les bijoux, je suis pour les
dessous_." The Frenchwoman spiritually is _pour les dessous_. There is
in her a kind of inherited, conservative, clever, dainty capability; no
matter where you go in France, or in what class--country or town--you
find it. She cannot waste, she cannot spoil, she makes and shows--the
best of everything. If I were asked for a concrete illustration of
self-respect I should say--the Frenchwoman. It is a particular kind of
self-respect, no doubt, very much limited to this world; and perhaps
beginning to be a little frayed. We have some Frenchwomen at the
hospital, the servants who keep us in running order--the dear cook whom
we love not only for her baked meats, proud of her soldier son once a
professor, now a sergeant, and she a woman of property, with two houses
in the little town; patient, kind, very stubborn about her dishes,
which have in them the essential juices and savours which characterise
all things really French. She has great sweetness and self-containment
in her small, wrinkled, yellowish face; always quietly polite and grave,
she bubbles deliciously at any joke, and gives affection sagaciously to
those who merit. A jewel, who must be doing something _pour la France_.
And we have Madame Jeanne Camille, mother of two daughters and one son,
too young to be a soldier. It was her eldest daughter who wanted to come
and scrub in the hospital, but was refused because she was too pretty.
And her mother came instead. A woman who did not need to come, and
nearly fifty, but strong, as the French are strong, with good red blood,
deep colouring, hair still black, and handsome straight features. What a
worker! A lover of talk, too, and of a joke when she has time. And
Claire, of a _languissante_ temperament, as she says; but who would know
it? Eighteen, with a figure abundant as that of a woman of forty, but
just beginning to fine down; holding herself as French girls learn to
hold themselves so young; and with the pretty eyes of a Southern nymph,
clear-brown and understanding, and a little bit wood-wild. Not
self-conscious--like the English girl at that age--fond of work and
play; with what is called "a good head" on her, and a warm heart. A
real woman of France.
Then there is the "farmeress" at the home farm which gives the hospital
its milk; a splendid, grey-eyed creature, doing the work of her husband
who is at the front, with a little girl and boy rounder and rosier than
anything you ever saw; and a small, one-eyed brother-in-law who drinks.
My God, he drinks! Any day you go into the town to do hospital
commissions you may see the hospital donkey-cart with the charming grey
donkey outside the Café de l'Univers or what not, and know that Charles
is within. He beguiles our _poilus_, and they take little beguiling.
Wine is too plentiful in France. The sun in the wines of France quickens
and cheers the blood in the veins of France. But the gift of wine is
abused. One may see a poster which says--with what truth I know
not--that drink has cost France more than the Franco-Prussian War.
French drunkenness is not so sottish as our beer-and-whiskey-fuddled
variety, but it is not pleasant to see, and mars a fair land.
What a fair land! I never before grasped the charm of French colouring;
the pinkish-yellow of the pan-tiled roofs, the lavender-grey or dim
green of the shutters, the self-respecting shapes and flatness of the
houses, unworried by wriggling ornamentation or lines coming up in
order that they may go down again; the universal plane trees with their
variegated trunks and dancing lightness--nothing more charming than
plane trees in winter, their delicate twigs and little brown balls
shaking against the clear pale skies, and in summer nothing more green
and beautiful than their sun-flecked shade. Each country has its special
genius of colouring--best displayed in winter. To characterise such
genius by a word or two is hopeless; but one might say the genius of
Spain is brown; of Ireland green; of England chalky blue-green; of Egypt
shimmering sandstone. For France amethystine feebly expresses the
sensation; the blend is subtle, stimulating, rarefied--at all events in
the centre and south. Walk into an English village, however
beautiful--and many are very beautiful--you will not get the peculiar
sharp spiritual sensation which will come on you entering some little
French village or town--the sensation one has looking at a picture by
Francesca. The blue wood-smoke, the pinkish tiles, the grey shutters,
the grey-brown plane trees, the pale blue sky, the yellowish houses, and
above all the clean forms and the clear air. I shall never forget one
late afternoon rushing home in the car from some commission. The setting
sun had just broken through after a misty day, the mountains were
illumined with purple and rose-madder, and snow-tipped against the blue
sky, a wonderful wistaria blue drifted smoke-like about the valley; and
the tall trees--poplars and cypresses--stood like spires. No wonder the
French are _spirituel_, a word so different from our "spiritual," for
that they are not; pre-eminently citizens of this world--even the pious
French. This is why on the whole they make a better fist of social life
than we do, we misty islanders, only half-alive because we set such
store by our unrealised moralities. Not one Englishman in ten now
_really_ believes that he is going to live again, but his disbelief has
not yet reconciled him to making the best of this life, or laid ghosts
of the beliefs he has outworn. Clear air and sun, but not so much as to
paralyse action, have made in France clearer eyes, clearer brains, and
touched souls with a sane cynicism. The French do not despise and
neglect the means to ends. They face sexual realities. They know that to
live well they must eat well, to eat well must cook well, to cook well
must cleanly and cleverly cultivate their soil. May France be warned in
time by our dismal fate! May she never lose her love of the land; nor
let industrialism absorb her peasantry, and the lure of wealth and the
cheap glamour of the towns draw her into their uncharmed circles. We
English have rattled deep into a paradise of machines, chimneys,
cinemas, and halfpenny papers; have bartered our heritage of health,
dignity, and looks for wealth, and badly distributed wealth at that.
France was trembling on the verge of the same precipice when the war
came; with its death and wind of restlessness the war bids fair to tip
her over. Let her hold back with all her might! Her two dangers are
drink and the lure of the big towns. No race can preserve sanity and
refinement which really gives way to these. She will not fare even as
well as we have if she yields; our fibre is coarser and more resistant
than hers, nor had we ever so much grace to lose. It is by grace and
self-respect that France had her pre-eminence; let these wither, as
wither they must in the grip of a sordid and drink-soothed
industrialism, and her star will burn out. The life of the peasant is
hard; peasants are soon wrinkled and weathered; they are not angels;
narrow and over-provident, suspicious, and given to drink, they still
have their roots and being in the realities of life, close to nature,
and keep a sort of simple dignity and health which great towns destroy.
Let France take care of her peasants and her country will take care of
itself.
Talking to our _poilus_ we remarked that they have not a good word to
throw to their _députés_--no faith in them. About French politicians I
know nothing; but their shoes are unenviable, and will become too tight
for them after the war. The _poilu_ has no faith at all now, if he ever
had, save faith in his country, so engrained that he lets the
life-loving blood of him be spilled out to the last drop, cursing
himself and everything for his heroic folly.
We had a young Spaniard of the Foreign Legion in our hospital who had
been to Cambridge, and had the "outside" eyes on all things French. In
his view _je m'en foutism_ has a hold of the French army. Strange if it
had not! Clear, quick brains cannot stand Fate's making ninepins of
mankind year after year like this. Fortunately for France, the love of
her sons has never been forced; it has grown like grass and simple wild
herbs in the heart, alongside the liberty to criticise and blame. The
_poilu_ cares for nothing, no, not he! But he is himself a little,
unconscious bit of France, and, for oneself, one always cares.
State-forced patriotism made this war--a fever-germ which swells the
head and causes blindness. A State which teaches patriotism in its
schools is going mad! Let no such State be trusted! They who, after the
war, would have England and France copy the example of the
State-drilled country which opened these flood-gates of death, and
teach mad provincialism under the nickname of patriotism to their
children, are driving nails into the coffins of their countries. _Je
m'en foutism_ is a natural product of three years of war, and better by
far than the docile despair to which so many German soldiers have been
reduced. We were in Lyon when the Russian Revolution and the German
retreat from Bapaume were reported. The town and railway station were
full of soldiers. No enthusiasm, no stir of any kind, only the usual
tired stoicism. And one thought of what the _poilu_ can be like; of our
Christmas dinner-table at the hospital under the green hanging wreaths
and the rosy Chinese lanterns, the hum, the chatter, the laughter of
free and easy souls in their red hospital jackets. The French are so
easily, so incorrigibly gay; the dreary grinding pressure of this war
seems horribly cruel applied to such a people, and the heroism with
which they have borne its untold miseries is sublime. In our little
remote town out there--a town which had been Roman in its time, and
still had bits of Roman walls and Roman arches--every family had its
fathers, brothers, sons, dead, fighting, in prison, or in hospital. The
mothers were wonderful. One old couple, in a _ferblanterie_ shop, who
had lost their eldest son and whose other son was at the front, used to
try hard not to talk about the war, but sure enough they would come to
it at last, each time we saw them, and in a minute the mother would be
crying and a silent tear would roll down the old father's face. Then he
would point to the map and say: "But look where they are, the Boches!
Can we stop? It's impossible. We must go on till we've thrown them out.
It is dreadful, but what would you have? Ah! Our son--he was so
promising!" And the mother, weeping over the tin-tacks, would make the
neatest little parcel of them, murmuring out of her tears: "_Il faut que
ça finisse; mais la France--il ne faut pas que la France--Nos chers fils
auraient été tués pour rien!_" Poor souls! I remember another couple up
on the hillside. The old wife, dignified as a duchess--if duchesses are
dignified--wanting us so badly to come in and sit down that she might
the better talk to us of her sons: one dead, and one wounded, and two
still at the front, and the youngest not yet old enough. And while we
stood there up came the father, an old farmer, with that youngest son.
He had not quite the spirit of the old lady, nor her serenity; he
thought that men in these days were no better than _des bêtes féroces_.
And in truth his philosophy--of an old tiller of the soil--was as
superior to that of emperors and diplomats as his life is superior to
theirs. Not very far from that little farm is the spot of all others in
that mountain country which most stirs the æsthetic and the speculative
strains within one. Lovely and remote, all by itself at the foot of a
mountain, in a circle of the hills, an old monastery stands, now used as
a farm, with one rose window, like a spider's web, spun delicate in
stone tracery. There the old monks had gone to get away from the
struggles of the main valley and the surges of the fighting men. There
even now were traces of their peaceful life; the fish-ponds and the
tillage still kept in cultivation. If they had lived in these days they
would have been at the war, fighting or bearing stretchers, like the
priests of France, of whom eleven thousand, I am told--untruthfully, I
hope--are dead. So the world goes forward--the Kingdom of Heaven comes!
We were in the town the day that the 1918 class received their
preliminary summons. Sad were the mothers watching their boys parading
the streets, rosetted and singing to show that they had passed and were
ready to be food for cannon. Not one of those boys, I dare say, in his
heart wanted to go; they have seen too many of their brethren return
war-worn, missed too many who will never come back. But they were no
less gay about it than those recruits we saw in the spring of 1913, at
Argelès in the Pyrenees, singing along and shouting on the day of their
enrolment.
There were other reminders to us, and to the little town, of the
blood-red line drawn across the map of France. We had in our hospital
men from the invaded countries without news of wives and families mured
up behind that iron veil. Once in a way a tiny word would get through to
them, and anxiety would lift a little from their hearts; for a day or
two they would smile. One we had, paralysed in the legs, who would sit
doing macramé work and playing chess all day long; every relative he
had--wife, father, mother, sisters--all were in the power of the German.
As brave a nature as one could see in a year's march, touchingly
grateful, touchingly cheerful, but with the saddest eyes I ever saw.
There was one little reminder in the town whom we could never help going
in to look at whenever we passed the shop whose people had given her
refuge. A little girl of eight with the most charming, grave, pale,
little, grey-eyed face; there she would sit, playing with her doll,
watching the customers. That little refugee at all events was beloved
and happy; only I think she thought we would kidnap her one day--we
stared at her so hard. She had the quality which gives to certain faces
the fascination belonging to rare works of art.
With all this poignant bereavement and long-suffering amongst them it
would be odd indeed if the gay and critical French nature did not rebel,
and seek some outlet in apathy or bitter criticism. The miracle is that
they go on and on holding fast. Easily depressed, and as easily lifted
up again, grumble they must and will; but their hearts are not really
down to the pitch of their voices; their love of country, which with
them is love of self--the deepest of all kinds of patriotism--is too
absolute. These two virtues or vices (as you please)--critical faculty
and _amour propre_ or vanity, if you prefer it--are in perpetual
encounter. The French are at once not at all proud of themselves and
very proud. They destroy all things French, themselves included, with
their brains and tongues, and exalt the same with their hearts and by
their actions. To the reserved English mind, always on the defensive,
they seem to give themselves away continually; but he who understands
sees it to be all part of that perpetual interplay of opposites which
makes up the French character and secures for it in effect a curious
vibrating equilibrium. "Intensely alive" is the chief impression one has
of the French. They balance between head and heart at top speed in a
sort of electric and eternal see-saw. It is this perpetual quick change
which gives them, it seems to me, their special grip on actuality; they
never fly into the cloud-regions of theories and dreams; their heads
have not time before their hearts have intervened, their hearts not time
before their heads cry: "Hold!" They apprehend both worlds, but with
such rapid alternation that they surrender to neither. Consider how
clever and comparatively warm is that cold thing "religion" in France. I
remember so well the old _curé_ of our little town coming up to lunch,
his interest in the cooking, in the practical matters of our life, and
in wider affairs too; his enjoyment of his coffee and cigarette; and the
curious suddenness with which something seemed "to come over him"--one
could hear his heart saying: "O my people, here am I wasting my time; I
must run to you." I saw him in the court-yard talking to one of our
_poilus_, not about his soul, but about his body; stroking his shoulder
softly and calling him _mon cher fils_. Dear old man! Even religion here
does not pretend to more than it can achieve--help and consolation to
the bewildered and the suffering. It uses forms, smiling a little at
them.
The secret of French culture lies in this vibrating balance; from quick
marriage of mind and heart, reason and sense, in the French nature, all
the clear created forms of French life arise, forms recognised as forms
with definite utility attached. Controlled expression is the result of
action and reaction. Controlled expression is the essence of culture,
because it alone makes a sufficiently clear appeal in a world which is
itself the result of the innumerable interplay of complementary or dual
laws and forces. French culture is near to the real heart of things,
because it has a sort of quick sanity which never loses its way; or,
when it does, very rapidly recovers the middle of the road. It has the
two capital defects of its virtues. It is too fond of forms and too
mistrustful. The French nature is sane and cynical. Well, it's natural!
The French lie just halfway between north and south; their blood is too
mingled for enthusiasm, and their culture too old.
I never realised how old France was till we went to Arles. In our
crowded train _poilus_ were packed, standing in the corridors. One very
weary, invited by a high and kindly colonel into our carriage, chatted
in his tired voice of how wonderfully the women kept the work going on
the farms. "When we get a fortnight's leave," he said, "all goes well,
we can do the heavy things the women cannot, and the land is made clean.
It wants that fortnight now and then, _mon colonel_; there is work on
farms that women cannot do." And the colonel vehemently nodded his thin
face. We alighted in the dark among southern forms and voices, and the
little hotel omnibus became enmeshed at once in old, high, very narrow,
Italian-seeming streets. It was Sunday next day; sunny, with a clear
blue sky. In the square before our hotel a simple crowd round the statue
of Mistral chattered or listened to a girl singing excruciating songs; a
crowd as old-looking as in Italy or Spain, aged as things only are in
the South. We walked up to the Arena. Quite a recent development in the
life of Arles, they say, that marvellous Roman building, here cut down,
there built up, by Saracen hands. For a thousand years or more before
the Romans came Arles flourished and was civilised. What had we mushroom
islanders before the Romans came? What had barbaric Prussia? Not even
the Romans to look forward to! The age-long life of the South stands for
much in modern France, correcting the cruder blood which has poured in
these last fifteen hundred years. As one blends wine of very old stock
with newer brands, so has France been blended and mellowed. A strange
cosmic feeling one had, on the top of the great building in that town
older than Rome itself, of the continuity of human life and the futility
of human conceit. The provincial vanity of modern States looked pitiful
in the clear air above that vast stony proof of age.
In many ways the war has brought us up all standing on the edge of an
abyss. When it is over shall we go galloping over the edge, or, reining
back, sit awhile in our saddles looking for a better track? We were all
on the highway to a hell of material expansion and vulgarity, of cheap
immediate profit, and momentary sensation; north and south in our
different ways, all "rattling into barbarity." Shall we find our way
again into a finer air, where self-respect, not profit, rules, and rare
things and durable are made once more?
From Arles we journeyed to Marseilles, to see how the first cosmopolitan
town in the world fared in war-time. Here was an amazing spectacle of
swarming life. If France has reason to feel the war most of all the
great countries, Marseilles must surely feel it less than any other
great town; she flourishes in a perfect riot of movement and colour.
Here all the tribes are met, save those of Central Europe--Frenchman,
Serb, Spaniard, Algerian, Greek, Arab, Khabyle, Russian, Indian,
Italian, Englishman, Scotsman, Jew, and Nubian rub shoulders in the
thronged streets. The miles of docks are crammed with ships. Food of all
sorts abounds. In the bright, dry light all is gay and busy. The most
æsthetic, and perhaps most humiliating, sight that a Westerner could see
we came on there: two Arab Spahis walking down the main street in their
long robe uniforms, white and red, and their white linen bonnets bound
with a dark fur and canting slightly backwards. Over six feet high, they
moved unhurrying, smoking their cigarettes, turning their necks slowly
from side to side like camels of the desert. Their brown, thin, bearded
faces wore neither scorn nor interest, only a superb self-containment;
but, beside them, every other specimen of the human race seemed cheap
and negligible. God knows of what they were thinking--as little probably
as the smoke they blew through their chiselled nostrils--but their
beauty and grace were unsurpassable. And, visioning our western and
northern towns and the little, white, worried abortions they breed, one
felt downcast and abashed.
Marseilles swarmed with soldiers; Lyon, Valence, Arles, even the
smallest cities swarmed with soldiers, and this at the moment when the
Allied offensive was just beginning. If France be nearing the end of her
man-power, as some assert, she conceals it so that one would think she
was at the beginning.
From Marseilles we went to Lyon. I have heard that town described as
lamentably plain; but compared with Manchester or Sheffield it is as
heaven to hell. Between its two wide rolling rivers, under a line of
heights, it has somewhat the aspect of an enormous commercialised
Florence. Perhaps in foggy weather it may be dreary, but the sky was
blue and the sun shone, a huge _Foire_ was just opening, and every
street bustled in a dignified manner.
The English have always had a vague idea that France is an immoral
country. To the eye of a mere visitor France is the most moral of the
four Great Powers--France, Russia, England, Germany; has the strongest
family life and the most seemly streets. Young men and maidens are never
seen walking or lying about, half-embraced, as in puritanical England.
Fire is not played with--openly, at least. The slow-fly amorousness of
the British working classes evidently does not suit the quicker blood of
France. There is just enough of the South in the French to keep
demonstration of affection away from daylight. A certain school of
French novelist, with high-coloured tales of Parisian life, is
responsible for his country's reputation. Whatever the Frenchman about
town may be, he seems by no means typical of the many millions of
Frenchmen who are not about town. And if Frenchwomen, as I have heard
Frenchmen say, are _légères_, they are the best mothers in the world,
and their "lightness" is not vulgarly obtruded. They say many domestic
tragedies will be played at the conclusion of the war. If so, they will
not be played in France alone; and compared with the tragedies of
fidelity played all these dreadful years they will be as black rabbits
to brown for numbers. For the truth on morality in France we must go
back, I suspect, to that general conclusion about the French
character--the swift passage from head to heart and back again, which,
prohibiting extremes of puritanism and of licence, preserves a sort of
balance.
From this war France will emerge changed, though less changed very
likely than any other country. A certain self-sufficiency that was very
marked about French life will have sloughed away. I expect an opening of
the doors, a toleration of other tastes and standards, a softening of
the too narrow definiteness of French opinion.
Even Paris has opened her heart a little since the war; and the heart of
Paris is close, hard, impatient of strangers. We noticed in our hospital
that whenever we had a Parisian he introduced a different atmosphere,
and led us a quiet or noisy dance. We had one whose name was Aimé,
whose skin was like a baby's, who talked softly and fast, with little
grunts, and before he left was quite the leading personality. We had
another, a red-haired young one; when he was away on leave we hardly
knew the hospital, it was so orderly. The sons of Paris are a breed
apart, just as our Cockneys are. I do not pretend to fathom them; they
have the texture and resilience of an indiarubber ball. And the women of
Paris! Heaven forfend that I should say I know them! They are a sealed
book. Still, even Parisians are less intolerant than in pre-war days of
us dull English, perceiving in us, perhaps, a certain unexpected
usefulness. And, _à propos_! One hears it said that in the regions of
our British armies certain natives believe we have come to stay. What an
intensely comic notion! And what a lurid light it throws on history, on
the mistrust engendered between nations, on the cynicism which human
conduct has forced deep into human hearts. No! If a British Government
could be imagined behaving in such a way, the British population would
leave England, become French citizens, and help to turn out the damned
intruders!
But _we_ did not encounter anywhere that comic belief. In all this land
of France, chockful of those odd creatures, English men and women, we
found only a wonderful and touching welcome. Not once during those long
months of winter was an unfriendly word spoken in our hearing; not once
were we treated with anything but true politeness and cordiality.
_Poilus_ and peasants, porters and officials, ladies, doctors, servants,
shop-folk, were always considerate, always friendly, always desirous
that we should feel at home. The very dogs gave us welcome! A little
black half-Pomeranian came uninvited and made his home with us in our
hospital; we called him Aristide. But on our walks with him we were
liable to meet a posse of children who would exclaim, "_Pom-pom! Voilà,
Pom-pom!_" and lead him away. Before night fell he would be with us
again, with a bit of string or ribbon, bitten through, dangling from his
collar. His children bored him terribly. We left him in trust to our
_poilus_ on that sad afternoon when "Good-bye" must be said, all those
friendly hands shaken for the last time, and the friendly faces left.
Through the little town the car bore us, away along the valley between
the poplar trees with the first flush of spring on their twigs, and the
magpies flighting across the road to the river-bank.
The heart of France is deep within her breast; she wears it not upon her
sleeve. But France opened her heart for once and let us see the gold.
And so we came forth from France of a rainy day, leaving half our hearts
behind us.
1917.