tion, 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, not to martial music, not with any suggestion of dash, of
enthusiasm, but quietly, steadily, all with the same look upon their
faces--the look of men who have seen death and are to see it again.
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.

So many people have asked me, I had asked myself, the question before
I went to France: "Are they not weary of it? Will the French not give
up from sheer exhaustion of strength?" I do not think so, now that I
have seen the faces of these hundreds of men as they marched to the
trenches beyond Verdun. France may bleed to death, but I do not think
that while there are men there will be an end of the sacrifice. No
pen or voice can express the horror that these men, that all
Frenchmen, have of this war, of all war, the weariness. They hate it;
you cannot mistake this; but France marches to the frontier in the
spirit that men manned the walls against th