avaged
and despoiled. It was to liberate their brothers and sisters from the
outrageous tyranny of the German yoke in the captured country. It was to
seek vengeance for bloody, foul, and abominable deeds.

In the first days of the war France was struck by heavy blows which sent
her armies reeling back in retreat, but before the first battle of the
Marne, when her peril was greatest, when Paris seemed doomed, the
spirit of the French soldiers rose to a supreme act of faith--which was
fulfilled when Foch attacked in the center, when Manoury struck on
the enemy's flank and hundreds of thousands of young Frenchmen hurled
themselves, reckless of life, upon the monster which faltered and then
fled behind the shelter of the Aisne. With bloodshot eyes and parched
throats and swollen tongues, blind with sweat and blood, mad with the
heat and fury of attack, the French soldiers fought through that first
battle of the Marne and saved France from defeat and despair.

After that, year after year, they flung themselves against the German
defense and died in heaps, or held their lines, as at Verdun, against
colossal onslaught, until the dead lay in masses. But the living said,
"They shall not pass!" and kept their word.

The people of France--above all, the women of France--behind the lines,
were the equals of the fighting-men in valor. They fought with despair,
through many black months, and did not yield. They did the work of their
men in the fields, and knew that many of them--the sons or brothers or
lovers or husbands--would never return for the harvest-time, but did not
cry to have them back until the enemy should be thrust out of France.
Behind the German line, under German rule, the French people, prisoners
in their own land, suffered most in spirit, but were proud and patient
in endurance.

"Why don't your people give in?" asked a German officer of a woman in
Nesle. "France is bleeding to death."

"We shall go on for two years, or three years, or four, or five, and in
the end we shall smash you," said the woman who told me this.

The German officer stared at her and said, "You people are wonderful!"

Yes, they were wonderful, the French, and their hatred of the Germans,
their desire for vengeance, complete and terrible, at all cost of life,
even though France should bleed to death and die after victory, is to be
understood in the heights and depths of its hatred and in the passion of
its love for France and liberty. Whe