You had a sense of the loathing, the horror, above all the sadness that
was in their hearts that this thing, this war, this destruction had to
be. They had come here through all the waste of ruined villages and
shell-torn hillsides; all the men that you saw would not measure the
cost of a single hour of trench fighting if the real attack began. This
these men knew, and the message of the artillery fire, which was only
one of unknown terrors for you, was intelligible to the utmost to each
of them.
And yet with the weariness there was a certain resignation, a certain
patience, a certain sense of comprehending sacrifice that more than
all else is France to-day, the true France. This, and not the empty
forts, not even the busy guns, was the wall that defended France, this
line of men. If it broke there would come thundering down again out of
the north all the tornado of destruction that had turned Northeastern
France into a waste place and wrecked so much of the world's store of
the beautiful and the inspiring.
Somehow you felt that this was in the minds of all these men. They
had willed to die that France might live. They were going to a death
that sounded ever more clearly as they marched. This death had eaten
up all that was young, most of what was young at the least, of France;
it might yet consume France, and so these men marched to the sound of
the guns.... Instinctively I thought of what Kipling had said to me in
London:
"Somewhere over there," he had said, "the thing will suddenly grip your
throat and your heart; it will take hold of you as nothing in your life
has ever done or ever will." And I know that I never shall forget those
lines of quiet, patient, middle-aged men marching to the sound of the
guns, leaving at their backs the countless graves that hold the youth
of France, the men who had known the Marne, the Yser, Champagne, who
had known death for nearly two years, night and day, almost constantly.
Yet during the fifteen minutes I watched there was not one order, not
one straggler; there was a sense of the regularity with which the blood
flows through the human arteries in this tide, and it was the blood of
France.