one can
understand how they were deceived. The writer of them seems to be
always enduring tensely. It is part of his French sincerity never to
accept any false consolation. He will not try to believe what he knows
to be false, even so that he may endure for the sake of France. Yet he
does endure, and all France endures, in a state of mind that would mean
weakness in us and utter collapse in the Germans. The war is to him like
an incessant noise that he tries to forget while he is writing. He does
not write as a matter of duty, and so that his mother may know that he
is still living; rather he writes to her so that he may ease a little
his desire to talk to her. We are used to French sentiment about the
mother; it is a commonplace of French eloquence, and we have often
smiled at it as mere sentimental platitude; but in these letters we see
a son's love for his mother no longer insisted upon or dressed up in
rhetoric, but naked and unconscious, a habit of the mind, a need of the
soul, a support even to the weakness of the flesh. Such affection with
us is apt to be, if not shamefaced, at least a little off-hand. Often it
exists, and is strong; but it is seldom so constant an element in all
joy and sorrow. The most loving of English sons would not often rather
talk to his mother than to any one else; but one knows that this
Frenchman would rather talk to his mother than to any one else, and that
he can talk to her more intimately than to any woman or man. One can see
that he has had the long habit of talking to her thus, so that now he
does it easily and without restraint. He tells her the deepest thoughts
of his mind, knowing that she will understand them better than any one
else. That foreboding which the mother felt about her baby in Morris's
poem has never come true about him:

'Lo, here thy body beginning, O son, and thy soul and thy life,
But how will it be if thou livest and enterest into the strife,
And in love we dwell together when the man is grown in thee,
When thy sweet speech I shall hearken, and yet 'twixt thee and me
Shall rise that wall of distance that round each one doth grow,
And maketh it hard and bitter each other's thought to know?'

This son has lived and entered into the strife indeed; but the wall of
distance has not grown round him; and, as we read these letters, we
think that no French mother would fear the natural estrangement which
that English mother in