men who cannot make.

The immediate approach of this death and the cold wind of it face to
face produced in the French people a singular reaction, which even
now, after eight months of war, is grimly seen. Their irony was
resolved into a strained silence. Their expectation was halted and
put aside. They prophesied no future; they supported the soul neither
with illusions nor with mere restraint; but they threw their whole
being into a tension like that of the muscles of a man's face when it
is necessary for him to pass and to support some overmastering moment.
There was no will at issue with the small group of united wills whose
place was at the headship of the army. The folly of the politicians
had not only ceased, but had fallen out of memory.

It is no exaggeration to say that the vividness of that
self-possession for a spring annihilated time. It was not a fortnight
since the blow had come of the 15th Corps breaking before Metz, and
the stunning fall of Namur. But to the mind of the People it was
already a hundred years, and conversely the days that passed did not
pass in hours, or with any progression, but stood still.

There was to come--it was already in the agony of birth--the moment, a
day and a night, in which one effort rolled the wave right back. That
effort did not release the springs of the national soul. They
remained stretched to the utmost. By a character surely peculiar to
this unexampled test of fire, no relaxation came as, month after
month, the war proceeded.

But the passage of so many days, with the gradual broadening of vision
and, in time, the aspect, though distant, of slow victory; the
creeping domination acquired over the mass of spiritually sodden
things that had all but drowned the race; the pressure of the hand
tightening upon the throat of the murderer; released a certain high
potential which those who do not know it can no more comprehend than a
savage can comprehend the lightning which civilized man regulates and
holds in the electric wire. And this potential made, and is making,
for an intense revenge.

That is the vision that should remain with those who desire to
understand the future the war must breed, and that is the white heat
of energy which will explain very terrible things, still masked by the
future, and undreamt of here.

FOOTNOTES:

[2] The ultimatum expired at midnight (August 4-5) by Greenwich time,
11 p.m. (August 4) by German, or Central European, time.

[3]