I had intended to go out later on the route Madame to watch the cavalry coming down from the hills on the other side of the Morin, but I could not face the cold.  There is nothing heroic about me.  So I contented myself with helping Amelie set the house in order.

Needless to tell you that no one knows what this unexpected big movement of troops means.

It is inevitable that we should all imagine that it concerns the coming spring offensive.  At any rate, the cavalry is being put back into its saddles, and the crack regiments are coming out of Verdun—­the famous corps which has won immortal fame there, and written the name of Verdun in letters of flame in the list of the world’s great battles, and enshrined French soldiers in the love of all who can be stirred by courage in a noble cause, or know what it means to have the heart swell at the thought of the “sacred love of home and country.”

Although I have sworn—­and more than once—­that I will not talk politics with you again, or discuss any subject which can be considered as its most distant blood relation, yet every time you reiterate “Aren’t the French wonderfully changed?  Aren’t you more and more surprised at them?” it goes against the grain.

Does it never occur to you that France held her head up wonderfully after the terrible humiliation of 1870?  Does it never occur to you what it meant to a great nation, so long a centre of civilization, and a great race, so long a leader in thought, to have found herself without a friend, and to have had to face such a defeat,—­a defeat followed by a shocking treaty which kept that disaster forever before her?  Do you never think of the hidden shame, the cankering mortification of the consciousness of that nation across the frontier, which had battened on its victory, and was so strong in brute force, that, however brave a face one might put on, there was behind that smiling front always a hidden fear of Germany—­an eternal foe, ever gaining in numbers and eternally shaking her mailed fist.

No nation so humiliated ever rose out of her humiliation as France did, but the hidden memory, the daily consciousness of it, set its outward mark on the race.  It bred that sort of bravado which was eternally accusing itself, in the consciousness that it had taken a thrashing it could never hope to avenge.  Count up the past dares that France has had to take from Germany, so strong in mere numbers and physical strength that to attempt to fight her alone, as she did in 1870, meant simply to court annihilation, and fruitlessly.  That does not mean that France was really afraid, but only that she was too wise to dare attempt to prove that she was not afraid.  So many things in the French that the world has not understood were the result of the cankering wound of 1870.  This war has healed that wound.  Germany is not invincible, and the chivalrous, loving aid that rallied to help France is none the less comforting simply because since 1914 all nations have learned that the trend of Germany’s ambition was a menace to them as well as to France.