esent." They are always in the pink for epistolary purposes,
whatever the strafing or the weather. That's England; at all costs,
she has to be a sportsman. I wonder she doesn't write on the crosses
above her dead, "_Yours in the pink:_ _a British soldier, killed in
action_." England is in the pink for the duration of the war.

The Frenchman cannot understand us, and I don't blame him. Our high
spirits impress him as untimely and indecent. War for him is not
a sport. How could it be, with his homesteads ravaged, his cities
flattened, his women violated, his populations prisoners in occupied
territories? For him war is a martyrdom which he embraces with a
fierce gladness. His spirit is well illustrated by an incident that
happened the other day in Paris. A descendant of Racine, a well-known
figure at the opera, was travelling in the Metro when he spotted a
poilu with a string of ten medals on his breast. The old aristocrat
went over to the soldier and apologised for speaking to him. "But," he
said, "I have never seen any poilu with so many decorations. You must
be of the very bravest."

"That is nothing," the man replied sombrely; "before they kill me I
shall have won many more. This I earned in revenge for my wife, who
was brutally murdered. And this and this and this for my daughters who
were ravished. And these others--they are for my sons who are now no
more."

"My friend, if you will let me, I should like to embrace you." And
there, in the sight of all the passengers, the old habitue of the
opera and the common soldier kissed each other. The one satisfaction
that the French blind have is in counting the number of Boche they
have slaughtered. "In that raid ten of us killed fifty," one will say;
"the memory makes me very happy."

Curiously enough the outrage that makes the Frenchman most revengeful
is not the murder of his family or the defilement of his women, but
the wilful killing of his land and orchards. The land gave birth to
all his flesh and blood; when his farm is laid waste wilfully, it
is as though the mother of all his generations was violated. This
accounts for the indomitable way in which the peasants insist on
staying on in their houses under shell-fire, refusing to depart till
they are forcibly turned out.

We in England, still less in America, have never approached the
loathing which is felt for the Boche in France. Men spit as they utter
his name, as though the very word was foul in the mouth.